Once again I have the joy of participating in Gallery 1988's Crazy 4 Cult art show (opening December 12th) in which nearly a hundred artists pay tribute to cult films. This year I tried a new format, and created a set of decorative mirrors like the ones that were offered as carnival game prizes throughout the 1970s, '80s, and '90s that featured the cultural icons of the moment.
Before we take a closer look at my stuff, let us review the enthralling history of prize mirrors. The concept seems to have emerged in the '70s, and the mirrors were quickly rumored to double as a handy surface to cut n' sniff cocaine. When they first showed up in the carnys' trailers most were nearly as large as record album covers, and contained in semi-sturdy wooden frames, with the images screen-printed onto the glass...
Over the years their quality devolved dramatically.
Some of the earlier mirrors were marbled with decorative colored veins, but this feature was soon discontinued for the most part...
(photos came from ebay)Multiple sizes were available to accommodate the "Small" and "Large" prize categories, but as the '80s progressed the big ones were mostly phased out in favor of the six by six universal standard...
The wooden (and sometimes metallic plastic) frames were downgraded to cardboard.
The next degradation was replacing the mirrors with regular clear glass, and printing the image on back.
In their chintziest form the prizes consisted of a piece of glass slipped in front of a cardstock printout in a cardstock frame.
However, in recent years the spirit of the carnival prize mirror lives on in its descendent, the framed poster.
All that said, my mirror creations are meant to emulate those middle years when real mirrors were still in use, but the frames were low-end.
One wonders if any of the imagery was ever officially authorized, but bootlegging was certainly rampant, and some fascinating "off-guide" artwork could be found...
While the format changed dramatically, the visual themes remained constant. The subjects revolved around the sex, drugs, & rock formula, and in my neck of the woods there was also an (un)healthy dose of pro-gun and confederate pride propaganda.
This was the inspiration for my tribute to John Carpenter's 1982 version of The Thing...
Naturally, Kurt Russell's character is all-American, but as you may recall, the Thing is first unleashed in a Norwegian research camp in the Arctic, thus the Norwegian flag that gives the design its confederate flavor. Since carnival mirrors are rife with misguided typography I happily took the opportunity to use the font Hobo. It's a typeface I try to work into as many projects as possible, yet sadly my efforts are almost always shot down.
(In case you can't tell, the images are placed on real mirrors. They just look a bit weird because I blurred the reflections in Photoshop. )
I've always enjoyed the way that traveling fairs embraced '80s Heavy Metal music and then refused to let go long after its heyday. Just last year I heard a Gravitron proudly blaring Poison and Cinderella. Since the majority of prize mirrors are rock related I aimed high by mashing up Evil Dead 2 (1987), a quintessential horror flick, with Iron Maiden, the embodiment of carnival life.
My mirrors will be for sale as a set once Crazy 4 Cult begins on December 12th. (EDIT: They sold!!) Here's the link to all the art.
13 comments:
I was never the biggest fan of the prize mirrors because, since they were usually screened from lifted art, they were on-model.
Carnivals were best when every prize, every decoration, every wall painting had sightly off-model characters in it. You could tell what character the artist was trying to do, but it just wasn't right in proportions or some other hard to grasp reason.
Other than rant, nice job on theses, the Eddie/Evil Dead mash-up is inspired!
Thanks Brian!
I love how all the off art (including the stuff on the dark rides) makes the carnival world even more surreal.
Love your blog, keep up the good work!
God blessa youse -Fr. Sarducci, ol SNL
Nice Love Them
I've been wanting to make these for years, but I can't figure out a good way of going about it.
Any tips?
Actual screen printing would be the ultimate way. But my way involved...
buying some vintage carnival mirrors for their frames
getting new "blank" mirrors cut at my local glass place
printing my original designs on some printable vinyl sticker sheets I got off Amazon. I cut my art out with an exacto blade and stuck it on there. That last part was pretty tough actually. I wasted a lot of printouts.
It might be worth trying to print an image on a transparent sticker because then you wouldn't have to cut the image out.
good luck!
This is a great post and great collection!
You say that the mirrors were "rumored" to be coke mirrors. Well that is incorrect. It was blatantly known and accepted that they were coke mirrors. In the seventies, when I was a teen, drug use had gone mainstream and was pretty out there in the culture.
There was much more money in the economy then( the ruling elite was only taking about 40% of the country's income, not like the 99% it is taking today), so most people were doing fairly well and not struggling too bad, even the poor. And with a better economy people are less conservative and more free. And the 70's was really the first decade of wide spread drug use and people were pretty lackadaisical about it.
Within a few years, though people started to see both the ravages of drug addiction and the worse ravages of the Republican party and Reagan who closed all the mental institutions and also pushed forth Supply Side Economics which enabled the ruling elite very richest to start taking 70% of the country's income rather than the 40% they were taking in the 70's.
So with both the rise in drug problems and the rise in money being taken by the ruling elite in the 80's in addition to the AIDS epidemic and decreased wealth of the masses due to the widespread theft of the ruling elite, people became over all more conservative (as they do when money is scarce) and people the widespread use and acceptance of recreational drugs such as marijuana and cocaine went back in hiding.
But in the 70's, it was very well known that the purpose of these rock and roll motif mirrors was for doing lines of cocaine, and then just like the Pennsylvania Dutch Shakers who would hang their chairs up on the wall when they were done using them, you would hang your cocaine mirror back on the wall when you were done using it.
Love them. How do you go about doing it? How do you get the image on the mirror?
It's digital art printed on vinyl sticker, cut with an xacto blade, and stuck on the mirros
See, the big one I had was a Motley Crue Doctor Feelgood album cover, and it seemed like it was "behind" the glass. Like on the bottom.
This is like the only resource on the entire internet about the mirrors. Most people don't even know what I'm talking about when I ask.
I have a glass shop a few doors down from my work that looks like they make things like these in a VERY large scale, but they won't let trade secrets out.
Hello would you be interested in selling your Chicago band mirror? Thank you
I always loved these mirrors-fond memories of the annual county fair being this very metal experience when I was a little girl, from the twirling rides with Metallica ripping loudly through beat up PA’s as the ride’s swarthy “MC” asked emphatically, “Who wants to go fast?!?”, the flea-market-rockabillia-esque bazaar (which I assume now was likely a bootleg shop, though I did get a very well done “Dr. Feelgood” pewter pin that makes me wonder) that had all the band shirts I couldn’t get at the local music store, silk flags, pewter jewelry, patches, bandanas, giant buttons that had frame stand backs, and anything else that existed as band merch in the 80’s and very early 90’s, and of course, the prize wall art, featuring metal and hard rock bands that you could win hitting balloons with darts, knocking over bottles with balls, or ringing rubber duckies on a current with a tossed hoop. The front of the fair, with its agricultural exhibition, 4H competitions, and washed up one hit country artists playing the main stage, may have painted a twangy facade, but the midway was a headbanger’s paradise.
I came across one of the old mirrors a few years ago and decided I’d use it for its intended purpose when and if an occasion called for it. I think it’s one of the cheaper 80’s ones (Def Leppard), as it seems to just be glass and has the paper frame. The image appeared to be under the glass, but printed onto it somehow, and then covered by some sort of grayish coating, which makes more sense, as the print being on top wouldn’t hold up very well to the chopping of a razor and the abrasive, sometimes corrosive, nature of certain substances if used more than a couple of times (it’s sturdy, too; it’s been dropped more than once in its intended capacity during drunken after parties, merely with one corner almost unnoticeably chipped and some of the back coating chipped away).
My life long best friend and childhood midway traversing partner, who also holds our pre-concert days’ rock n roll fair experiences dear, has been searching for a Guns N’ Roses prize mirror that can withstand its intended purpose at a reasonable cost for sometime.
As a pretty good graphic designer, I’ve been putting together the idea of making her a custom piece recently. I print primarily to DTF and water-slide transfer. I thought about just transferring a backward image water-slide to a 6x6 piece of glass and then maybe attaching felt to the back, but upon my own having some of its back coating chipped off, I examined the artwork more scrupulously and rather than appearing printed or transferred somehow to the back of the pane, it instead seems to be printed inside of the very thin glass. I would like to make this as authentic feeling as possible. Yours look amazing, though I believe you said you put the graphics on the front. If you were going to put them in the back, what do you think would be the most resilient and authentic way to do it?
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