Spring 2023
Subterranean looks back
Growing Up Underground: A Memoir of Counterculture New York
By Steven Heller, Designed by Matt Smith (Louise Fili Ltd), Princeton Architectural Press, $27.50, £19.99
Before Steven Heller was the graphic design commentator, historian and educator Eye readers know well, he was a teenage wannabe hippie, looking for his place in the underground publishing world of New York City. What is so endearing about his memoir, Growing Up Underground, is that we get a window into this grassroots, sometimes raunchy, world from the perspective of a person many of us have known for so long as one of the preeminent graphic design experts. Heller gets vulnerable at times, sharing his journey, his yearning to join the publishing freaks, get political, and bare his creative soul, while also struggling with social anxiety, and meddling authority figures.
In 1965, aged fifteen, a newly politically aware Heller showed up at the offices of the storied East Village Other where he eagerly offered to volunteer. ‘Come back, kid, when you’re not jailbait’ was the response. And so began his epic career. By the time he was seventeen he was art director of the New York Free Press.
We then follow Heller as he navigates the hippie hair traumas of his generation, the love and lust traumas of every generation, and as he hops between porn publications featuring some satire to investigative journalism publications featuring some porn. Under the wing of pornographer and sensationalist publisher Al Goldstein, Heller designed Screw, Mobster Times, Gadget, Smut, Smut from the Past and Gay (great covers!) and also co-founded The New York Review of Sex & Politics and Borrowed Time. [Steven Heller wrote about some of these underground titles in Eye 36.]
We get various glimpses behind the scenes of these papers. Heller talks about his on-the-job design education, relationships with big personalities (Goldstein), gentle mentors (illustrator Brad Holland) and arguing about print registration with a printer involved in the Mob.
Each chapter reads like a discrete story within an overarching storyline of a man in love with leftist publishing. The format is nice for readers with shorter attention spans (is that most of us now?), and it allows Heller a chance to set off on tangents without having to give every detail of his path from his first underground paper job, Screw, to his first mainstream paper job (spoiler: it’s The New York Times).
Right. Cover of Screw, art directed by Heller and edited by Al Goldstein, 1974. Illustration: Ner Beck. Heller’s memoir takes the reader on a journey through the world of underground publishing, from the earnest to the downright pornographic. Top. Mobster Times, designed and art directed by Steven Heller, 1972.
The book is not treated like a laundry list of achievements. They are there, but he is more likely to share things like the awkwardness of wanting to be one of the ‘cool kids’, getting portfolio rejections, getting thrown into the deep end at his first job with just a half-hour of paste-up production training, and (not least) ending up in jail after the cops attempt to censor content.
While this is in no way a monograph, the book offers a lot of sizeable, full colour images throughout, which make the experience much more enjoyable. It includes Heller’s earnest but fairly twisted drawings from his teen years, long-hair snaps that show off his hippie bona fides, and the underground papers themselves. Heller often critiques his own work in a humorous or self-deprecating manner, which makes his stories feel relatable.
Memoirs by graphic designers are a rarity (Heller was inspired by Paul Sahre’s Two-Dimensional Man, see review in Eye 95), but I do think this is a great one to help get the ball rolling.
After all, Steven Heller has spent his 55-year career telling the stories of other people, first visually in the underground press, and then later in books and exhibitions. But all that time, he has been collecting his own stories. Between the humour, the history, and the overlapping 1970s typography, this memoir is both a lot of fun, and a useful document of time, place and person.
Briar Levit, director (Graphic Means), associate professor, Portland State University, US
First published in Eye no. 104 vol. 26, 2023
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