This has been a grim week. First John Nova Lomax (who has been taken off life support, but is still alive as far as I know), Rita Lee, and now I have received word that Frank Kozik has died. Rita Lee was 75 when she died of lung cancer—illogically that seems much older than my own age (I turned 60 on May 8th, the same day that Rita Lee died). I don’t know how old Lomax is, but he described himself as middle aged. Kozik was almost exactly one year older than me. There is something unnerving when people you know, who are near your age, die within days of your birthday. I guess it is going to happen more frequently as I age.
I first became aware of Kozik when I was working for Cosmic Comics. We had hired a helper named Robert Weiss who was a local art collector. He was a very young lawyer who had become aware of Kozik when Kozik was a young poster artist in Austin. He decided to help Kozik pay for some printing projects. Weiss definitely viewed his relationship with Kozik as an investment in Kozik’s art. Given where Kozik ended up, it was a good investment, but Weiss never got the payout—he died in a car wreck in 1996.
Poster art had a rebirth in the 60s when artists like Victor Moscoso and Rick Griffith started producing intensely colored psychedelic posters for West Coast rock bands. Then as the music world became more corporate, the psychedelic poster mostly died out. But as punk arose in the late ‘70s, a new kind of poster art was created—cheap, nasty art produced with repurposed images on xerox machines. These hand-made objetcs brought the DIY spirit of punk and hardcore into the visual realm.
It makes sense that someone would combine the intense psychedelic feel of 60s rock posters with the nasty appropriation art of 70s and 80s punk posters. The someone was Frank Kozik. Après, Kozik, le déluge.
Here is an early Kozik poster from 1990.
This was printed on an offset litho printer. Kozik became well-known for his silkscreens later.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Great God Pan Is Dead to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.