DIRK ROWNTREE
Art: unknown, unapproachable, and Graphic Design: sub-industrial, persuasive, strategic, social. The two slid together with erotic friction in New York City, the capital of the world. The concept of practice comes bearing purpose and identity. The sub-industry emerged to monetize archives. It was a time of deep consumerism, the public extension of the subconscious, and the building of archives. Let’s allow graphic designers to be communication specialists, promoting awareness and instruction and welcome artists as unexpected citizens of the unaccountable, using up designers technology, including language, until it’s useless.
An experience among many that prompted Dirk Rowntree to leave Oklahoma, the state of his birth and formative years, involved the confluence of four objects.
His friend, James, is a Vietnam veteran. He owns a Pontiac GTO (1), and in its trunk is stored his M16 assault rifle (2). Late one clear night on a two-lane blacktop as we speed toward Norman, the university town, James looks up over the steering wheel and declares his sighting of a UFO (3). He stops the car, swings open the door, and races to the trunk. After a bit of assemblage and clicking he is now on the side of the road firing away at distant lights in the sky. The enormously concussive blasts wake up my fellow passenger who jumps out of the front passenger door. Her copy of Artforum (4) falls to the gravel. “There it is.” Dirk says to her, and himself, “the next step”.