Adam Ant · some graphics from the early years at Hornsey College of Art
ANTGRAPHICS
Handouts, badges, stickers, letterheads — the whole self-made apparatus of a band inventing itself on a photocopier. Charming.
Words · KULTUR · Artwork · Adam Ant & the Ant office
The Inventory
Track A — The archive
Before the plumes and the war paint there was a stencil, a Pentel and a college print room. Hornsey taught him that a band is a design problem: a logo, a badge, a sheet of stickers, a letterhead with an address on it that makes the whole thing real.
Read it as a discography of paper. Handouts from the Nashville, the Marquee, the 100 Club, the Music Machine. Badges numbered like singles — "What do you mean you don't like Adam and the Ants", "Whip in my Valise", "Antmusic for Sexpeople". Stickers, letterheads, an Antmanifesto in an edition of five.
In-House
Track B — The ephemera
Nothing here was outsourced. The advertisements, the record covers, the page design for a Berlin magazine and a London fanzine — all of it kept in-house, catalogued, dated, filed. That's not vanity. That's an art student who knows the archive is part of the work.
