Peter Maybury

‘Throw Away’ essay by Peter Maybury from Throw Away (2022, 22)

 There’s nothing precious about these flyers. As examples of design for print the quality of the work is varied – we were all learning on the go. Each flyer was a release, before moving on in search of the next idea. This was a testbed, trying to become the designer you knew you already were. I spent a disproportionate amount of time (like others I’m sure) designing these supposedly short lived items. As is the case throughout my practice, I was trying to compact multiple meanings, references and influences into, in this case, each small square, circle or triangle. I was exploring how form carries meaning; the borrowed baggage of appropriated imagery; and oblique socio-political commentary; all under the radar and under the umbrella of nightlife. I had high expectations of myself and of these small offerings. Sometimes they came easy and sometimes they were a struggle, but always painstakingly designed, everything aligning at maximum zoom. 

Flyers were strongly time-based – they felt urgent. They were made for right now, and you made them like your life depended on it. Sometimes they were hand-made, finished only on the day they went out. There was a thrill in heading down town to see your latest offering. Once in circulation they were never seen in isolation – a collision of ideas and energies vied for attention, rubbing up against each other in untidy piles and tidy perspex display racks. Designers and promoters exploited and appropriated imagery freely. With these ‘releases’ you relinquished control as the message was altered by context, and meaning was completed by those who received it. Over time, this meaning will change. 

Often when something – a moment, a movement – is happening, it does so with no apparent logic, one thing simply follows the next. While you’re immersed in it, you just keep moving, pushing, or, even, doing the same thing. It seems obvious, natural. We don’t know the end is coming until it arrives, or perhaps, even some time after that. Ends and beginnings are difficult to tell apart. Meanwhile, you just keep going, until some time later you find yourself immersed again. When we look back though, it seems obvious that a set of conditions made this possible – a mix of social, cultural and economic parameters which aligned, allowing something new to be made. 

Now that these artifacts are separated by time the material has acquired unintended significance. Any nostalgia they evoke is their least interesting charm. Although necessarily fragmentary and incomplete, these flyers stand in for a record of what went on during a period where circumstances aligned to generate intense activity, resistance and innovation, until the market economy would no longer allow it. What bursts from these pages is the energy and charge of people inventing a culture, propelled by the thrill of the next thing. 

For Underground (2008), the book and exhibition that I edited and curated with Dennis McNulty, we asked David Lacey to photograph city centre venues, many of which had closed down or changed hands. The venue photographs I made (and are shown here) are a continuation of that idea. Recording the location on a given date, they offer a visual record of a landscape now, where almost everything has been erased – the ephemera is what we have left. Demolished and rebuilt, this is a new place in which sub-cultural energies lose their foothold. 

There’s nothing precious about this book. Although a lot of care (and a disproportionate amount of time) went into its research and appearance, it does not provide a comprehensive account, with each item evenly represented and faithfully reproduced. It is faithful though in its approach – now the flyers are the raw material of (re)appropriation. Images and ideas clash and collide noisily with one another across the pages, as they overlap and intersect with the ideas, memories and meaning that you bring to them. Not just the flyers, but the book design too, is vying for your attention. In designing it I was reacting to what was around me. It seemed important to make something new with these flyers, with this book. Maybe it’s an end. Maybe it’s a beginning. Either way this is just one possible outcome, throw away.