Artist Spotlight: David King
Earlier this year we were invited to the home of David King, the British-born graphic designer and musician who lived in San Francisco for four decades. There we were met by his wife Dione, who guided us through the creative force that is David's work. David, who died in 2019, produced an enormous body of print ephemera, as well as photography, film, radio plays, and sculpture, that is just now being archived, sorted, and arranged into something resembling a narrative. If there is any connective thread, it might be David’s anarchist spirit, reflecting the times and places he variously called home: Dial House farm, where he met Crass, whose symbol became David's most well known creation; downtown New York during the no wave scene; and San Francisco.
Dione is lovely and filled with stories, and we were happy to interview her a few months after our meet up to talk about David's legacy.
Studio AHEAD: I want to start with something that you said to us, “after David passed in 2019, we had to sort of reconstruct his past from what was left in the studio. There was no CV.” I like this idea about telling someone's history, especially an artist’s, through objects. Could you give us a short history of you and David through some objects?
Dione King: I would start with the house because, although it's not the beginning of the relationship, it is a fixed location that to some degree depicted our relationship, what we liked, what we wanted to inhabit. And what was unique to our vision.
I live surrounded by David’s objects and his arrangements. And every single day I see objects that I've looked at over the years, and they give me suggestions and joy and remind me that even the sort of homeliest rock if seen in a particular light can suggest something greater. And that arranged with something else or collaged with something else things that might be singularly banal become wonderful and magical and inspirational just by the nature of their relationships.
SA: Absolutely. Collage feels particularly relevant at this moment: media coming from all directions, which we DIY into something legible.
DK: Collage was so important to David. You can see it in so much of what he did—the way he assembled objects in place. He was always visually putting objects together to make a different reality, putting paper together to make a different reality, composing a photograph so that it became a different reality. The house itself is a kind of collage, I would say. Everything was about assembling and creating a new context.
SA: David was a prolific artist working across multiple media, so I imagine sorting through the archive is helping establish a narrative about his career. Have there been any surprises about his work, even for you in this ongoing archival process?
DK: I was amazed at how much work he had done. I mean, I knew he was working all the time, but there’s this immense cross-referencing in terms of his output. Scrapbooks, wood sculptures, photography, drawings, posters, zines, stencils, and so much more. And all of these feed into each other to form a very singular aesthetic. Somehow in the day to day of our lives together I had forgotten about how relentlessly he had pursued his personal vision and just how much he had created.
The organizing of the archive has also really unearthed so much that I had never really looked at before. His collections, his cell phone photographs, his eBay purchases. At one point when opening a letter to his mother a little newspaper clipping fell out, and it was an illustration that David had done for the New York Times in 1977. Turns out it was the first illustration work he had done after moving to New York from England. I had never seen this before. It’s small things like that that really helped build a better picture of his life as an artist, and helped flesh out a timeline. That kind of small discovery and making of connections really drove the work of the archive in the early years. It was like a puzzle to be solved. And even though it has lessened somewhat, there are still new things turning up all the time.
SA: “David King Publications 1977 to 2019” (Colpa Press, 2024) received quite a bit of press as a needed guide through some of his print work.
DK: Oh, I think it's very important in that it highlights the range of his publication work. David was very intense about printed media and immensely skilled at creating images. His engagement with print as an artist and a designer was continuous and prolific. The book is mostly visual—images reproducing zines and books and flyers—but it does also include two short texts. There’s an introduction which gives a brief biographical sketch of his life and work, and then there’s a wonderful essay by the Amsterdam based graphic design studio Experimental Jetset called “Transferware,” which eloquently contextualizes David and his work within the larger world of art and graphic design.
And even though the book is ostensibly about his print work, it’s also a chronological overview of his work in general. It begins with his late 1970s New York commercial illustration work and flyers for our band Arsenal, and then follows our move from NY to San Francisco in 1980. It covers our later bands Sleeping Dogs and Brain Rust, and all of the zines that David made around these music projects, alone and in collaboration with others. Lastly it covers his self-published books from the early 2000s and everything he made with small publishers like Colpa Press and Kill Yr Idols. And all of that print work provides a platform for David’s photography, drawing, writing, collage, scrapbooks. The book really serves as an entry point into David’s work for people who don’t know anything more about him other than that he designed the Crass symbol.
SA: For better or for worse, did David feel that the Crass symbol overshadowed the rest of his work?
DK: Of course, the Crass symbol was, and still is, the most recognized work that David created. However, the more one becomes familiar with his entire body of work, the more the Crass symbol diminishes slightly in importance. There is a lot of diversity and humor in David’s vision that may not be apparent in the Crass symbol alone.
It’s important to remember that for a very long time most people did not know that David designed the Crass symbol. I mean it was a given that those who knew knew and those who didn’t know didn't know. We were a punk band. We were aggressive and outspoken politically and socially, and that was the main point of doing the work, not necessarily promoting the symbol that he had done.
Finally, in the end, rather than have the symbol overshadow him, he sort of took it back by creating endless variations and putting them out into the world through exhibitions and publications in the 2000s. These versions, or riffs, were David’s way of injecting his humor and his aesthetic back into something he had created decades earlier. They added color—which was so hugely important to David—into the graphic language of anarcho-punk that had almost always been black and white. And surprisingly the humor of the “smiley face” Crass symbol, or the “Superman” Crass symbol, or the “Make Tea Not War” Crass symbol that he designed only added to the depth of meaning of the original.
Really, I think David always wanted to be seen for the work he was doing at the actual time he was doing it. The work of the moment was what he was most concerned with. He didn’t really deal with his own history as something more important than the present. The present was real. The present was what mattered.
SA: What do you hope his legacy will be?
DK: I hope that he is seen for his joy and his humor… maybe even the recognition of a certain sadness that stemmed from growing up in post-World War II England. And then his coming to America and finding some sort of space for personal growth. He did that here, and he found community support. I’m hoping that all of these qualities will be seen and appreciated by those who see his work.
Photos: Ekaterina Izmestieva