A new post on the Wooster Collective site talks about the upcoming opening of the film cousin of the Beautiful Losers exhibition and book. They note that Beautiful Losers isn't focused on street art specifically, but praise the DIY ethic of the artists in the show--"Probably no better articulation of the DIY mindset in contemporary art is Beautiful Losers." Cool! Except for the Nike endorsement visible in the lower-right-hand corner of one of the film's promotional images on the site.
That's interesting. Do it whoseself, now?
05 August, 2008
31 July, 2008
Rackin'
Racking: stealing materials. Maybe you rip off your hardware store for some paint, maybe you snag that big marker from the corner shop. I've heard that some people think it's not legitimate graffiti if you pay for your stuff. I disagree--to me, it's the act and the art itself that make it graff, not the preparation--but I do think racking supplies can be justified under one circumstance. First off, though, I'll get into times when I think it's not okay.
How about stealing from huge chain stores? Does the hardware section in the closest Wal-Mart have spray? That should be okay, right, giving such a horribly flawed corporation the finger? Sort of. You should fuck with Wal-Mart in any way you can. They underpay and mistreat their workers; they labor to weaken standards for organic food which leads to environmental abuse; they're currently in litigation for several accusations of sexism in their business practices; they encourage cultural homogeneity; and they use the property they buy irresponsibly, vacating one enormous, unsustainable concrete box and leaving it empty because it's cheaper to build a bigger one next door when they decide to expand. However, their despicable practices go further than that. Theft from their stores does not pull pennies from the pockets of their board of directors. The damage you do only goes so high--local managers are about as far as you'll get, and that's not too cool. I suppose if the local manager is a wealthy tool, you might be more or less in the clear, but that's a doubtful possibility. Stealing from big-box chains isn't as good as it sounds. Tear 'em down, yes--it's basically our responsibility as human beings to strike them from the face of the earth. But stealing paint isn't the way.
So you know, Wal-Mart is called Seiyu in Japan, Walmex in Mexico, and ASDA in the UK. Damage them there, too.
How about 'cause it's more intense, more dangerous, more exciting? Come on. You're about to go sneak through the city, dodging society's various manifestations of so-called security to create subversive art and fight the battle against the wrongful miscalling of this artform "crime." I think the extra potential thrill is unnecessary and unkind. Graffiti offers a (largely) singular opportunity to express yourself without mediation by a corporation, a government, a school system or a repressive family. Legitimizing this deeply important form is, I feel, better helped by acting with kindness and respect, and robbing people who aren't rich is neither kind nor respectful in my book. And to those who might argue that graffiti is vandalism, and that's also unkind or disrespectful, I direct you to my first entry here, where I explain my thoughts on the nature of public space. I'll elaborate on those ideas in future writing.
The one acceptable reason: you're broke. Not "Man, if I pay for these markers I won't be able to get that hoodie I've been looking at!" Not "Shit, the cans to go out piecing are gonna cost me like fifty bucks--I was gonna go dancing on Saturday, drinks'll be expensive, I'm not paying for these!" No, I mean "Wow. I can buy this paint and show everyone who walks down my street what I think and feel, or I can pay utilities this month." Or "God, I really want to get my name up--they've been buffing everything lately, this neighborhood looks like it died. But my kid needs new shoes. No way can I afford new mops this month." In cases like this, where it really is a one-or-the-other choice, and the price for writing is dire, rack what you need.
But do it responsibly.
Like I explained, hitting up big chain stores isn't as sweet as it might seem; it's sure better than doing your local corner store, though, and they might have a bigger selection, besides. If you can avoid hitting small shops, do it--this is graffiti, for and by individuals. It's not a corporate artform, and corporations don't need artists helping them crush out their brave competition.
What if there's no alternative? If I can't pay bus fare to make it out to Wal-Mart, I have a desperately important political insight that will be most effective conveyed in fat marker on bus stops, and I just spent my last five bucks on groceries? Then what?
Well, in that case you've gotta do some hard thinking. Is the store you'd steal from struggling? Might your theft be the last straw, the final insult that makes the owner close up shop? On the other side, will the piece you make with what you've stolen be so good, so full of meaning, so important to your neighborhood or your city, so affecting of change that it will outweigh the wrongs done to the shopkeeper? What if you're going to create something that will make "Crack is Wack" look like some old academic allegorical painting, very pretty but very shallow? Well, that's hard. It's an ambiguous area, and there's sadly no standard. Compare the options, listen to your heart, act with excellence, and learn from the results, whatever they are. Choose well!
Input would be appreciated. I've never racked, so I don't speak from a position of experience on this issue. Thoughts are most welcome. Until next time, keep it indelible.
How about stealing from huge chain stores? Does the hardware section in the closest Wal-Mart have spray? That should be okay, right, giving such a horribly flawed corporation the finger? Sort of. You should fuck with Wal-Mart in any way you can. They underpay and mistreat their workers; they labor to weaken standards for organic food which leads to environmental abuse; they're currently in litigation for several accusations of sexism in their business practices; they encourage cultural homogeneity; and they use the property they buy irresponsibly, vacating one enormous, unsustainable concrete box and leaving it empty because it's cheaper to build a bigger one next door when they decide to expand. However, their despicable practices go further than that. Theft from their stores does not pull pennies from the pockets of their board of directors. The damage you do only goes so high--local managers are about as far as you'll get, and that's not too cool. I suppose if the local manager is a wealthy tool, you might be more or less in the clear, but that's a doubtful possibility. Stealing from big-box chains isn't as good as it sounds. Tear 'em down, yes--it's basically our responsibility as human beings to strike them from the face of the earth. But stealing paint isn't the way.
So you know, Wal-Mart is called Seiyu in Japan, Walmex in Mexico, and ASDA in the UK. Damage them there, too.
How about 'cause it's more intense, more dangerous, more exciting? Come on. You're about to go sneak through the city, dodging society's various manifestations of so-called security to create subversive art and fight the battle against the wrongful miscalling of this artform "crime." I think the extra potential thrill is unnecessary and unkind. Graffiti offers a (largely) singular opportunity to express yourself without mediation by a corporation, a government, a school system or a repressive family. Legitimizing this deeply important form is, I feel, better helped by acting with kindness and respect, and robbing people who aren't rich is neither kind nor respectful in my book. And to those who might argue that graffiti is vandalism, and that's also unkind or disrespectful, I direct you to my first entry here, where I explain my thoughts on the nature of public space. I'll elaborate on those ideas in future writing.
The one acceptable reason: you're broke. Not "Man, if I pay for these markers I won't be able to get that hoodie I've been looking at!" Not "Shit, the cans to go out piecing are gonna cost me like fifty bucks--I was gonna go dancing on Saturday, drinks'll be expensive, I'm not paying for these!" No, I mean "Wow. I can buy this paint and show everyone who walks down my street what I think and feel, or I can pay utilities this month." Or "God, I really want to get my name up--they've been buffing everything lately, this neighborhood looks like it died. But my kid needs new shoes. No way can I afford new mops this month." In cases like this, where it really is a one-or-the-other choice, and the price for writing is dire, rack what you need.
But do it responsibly.
Like I explained, hitting up big chain stores isn't as sweet as it might seem; it's sure better than doing your local corner store, though, and they might have a bigger selection, besides. If you can avoid hitting small shops, do it--this is graffiti, for and by individuals. It's not a corporate artform, and corporations don't need artists helping them crush out their brave competition.
What if there's no alternative? If I can't pay bus fare to make it out to Wal-Mart, I have a desperately important political insight that will be most effective conveyed in fat marker on bus stops, and I just spent my last five bucks on groceries? Then what?
Well, in that case you've gotta do some hard thinking. Is the store you'd steal from struggling? Might your theft be the last straw, the final insult that makes the owner close up shop? On the other side, will the piece you make with what you've stolen be so good, so full of meaning, so important to your neighborhood or your city, so affecting of change that it will outweigh the wrongs done to the shopkeeper? What if you're going to create something that will make "Crack is Wack" look like some old academic allegorical painting, very pretty but very shallow? Well, that's hard. It's an ambiguous area, and there's sadly no standard. Compare the options, listen to your heart, act with excellence, and learn from the results, whatever they are. Choose well!
Input would be appreciated. I've never racked, so I don't speak from a position of experience on this issue. Thoughts are most welcome. Until next time, keep it indelible.
13 July, 2008
Should we be doing this?
Is it okay to create illegal public art at all? Can you be acting ethically if you're altering someone else's stuff without their permission? From drippy marker tags on New York trains to Brazilian pichação to "okupa y resiste" on a Spanish streetcorner to wildstyle burners in South Africa to Banksy's "One Nation Under CCTV" piece in London, no one asked the property owners for permission. Nobody asked the people passing by if they wanted to look at something new. Acting so rashly--how could it be right?
The new McDonalds in your city, the one running on factory farms that keep animals drugged in minuscule cages for their entire lives--were you asked if they could decorate your skyline with their golden arches? And Coca-Cola--the same Coca-Cola that has employed paramilitary groups to murder and torture Colombian workers to break up their union--did they ask you before taking up a patch of your commute bigger than your front yard with one of their advertisements?
"But they paid for those ads!"
Is legitimacy something you can get by paying for it? Does a clothing ad, encouraging us towards wildly unhealthy ideals of beauty, have more right to exist than an insightful political commentary sprayed on a wall, simply because it cost more to put there? How many people do you know who have something to say? And how many of them can afford renting a 12' by 24' billboard? Or printing costs for a national poster campaign? Perhaps they could afford ad space in some magazines? They can't? Oh. So should they just hold it until they're advertising executives? Keep hoping that book deal works out? Wait to make their point until they're in the year's best-selling band? Hope their rich relatives die soon? This is an important idea they want to get across, you know.
"Come on now, there are plenty of societally accepted ways to make your point. You can write letters to the editor, you can play music at open-mic nights--hey, you can blog about it!"
All those things are important--I wouldn't be writing this if I believed differently--but there are two caveats. First, the number of people who might hear you sing a song at a coffee shop is significantly smaller than the number of people who might see it if you stenciled a reproduction of the news frame of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein at twice-life-size on the side of a building downtown. Second, you grant legitimacy to the system in conforming to its (double) standard. So if you've got something you feel should be said, I honestly and heartily urge you to write letters to the editors of every newspaper you can find, and start a blog! It's free, and so long as you don't say the wrong thing, it's legal. But if you really want people to hear you, you might also look into a roller and some paint.
We live in deeply flawed societies, all around the world. Our governments are often unjust and their laws unfair. Each person is not accorded the same respect and power as every other. And that being the case, I believe that if the poor and the otherwise disenfranchised (and disenfranchisement doesn't take much) have a message to communicate, they should freely take that communication into their own hands. Should Banksy, deeply dissatisfied with the surveillance state the government of England is creating, limit himself to the channels that same government provides its citizens to communicate his statements of anger?
What if they're just tagging, hitting up streetsigns and the backs of trucks with a broad-tip marker, leaving a name and nothing else? I still say it's valid--I'm much more comfortable with a statement of one's own presence, one's own sense of style, and one's dissatisfaction with a poorly-functioning society than I am with a manipulative bid to get someone to buy something they don't need, further filling the pockets of the rich. And I do feel that tagging does indeed serve to critique the social codes we live with, even if the writer doesn't intend it to, as breaking those codes implicitly argues against them.
"But it's on someone else's property."
This is true. There are priority mail stickers with the names of local writers up on lightposts in the city where I live. Those lightposts probably belong to the city, as a legal entity. There are spray pieces in alleyways throughout much of the downtown. The buildings whose backs and sides make up the alley walls are owned by people. Probably not people who run any of the several businesses in each building, and certainly not people who actually spend time in the alley, but people. There are tags in bus shelters around my city. Those bus shelters are probably owned by the transit authority. I hold that none of these people, be they individuals or corporations, are having any of their truly personal property altered when people create street art. If someone were to come paint a burner on your house, it would be different--your home is definitely yours, it is not public. But these other places--the vast majority of the places graffiti is found--are not held personally precious by their owners. Often, they are owned not by individuals at all, but by large groups. They are spaces occupied by the public--by all of us. And as you personally should have control over what your own home looks like, shouldn't we all have a say in what our public environments look like? I return to an earlier style of question: did the transit authority ask me what I wanted bus shelters to look like? If they had, things would look a lot different.
There are gray areas--When does property become too personal to create art on? What about public buildings that were constructed to be art in and of themselves?--and I'll get into those things in the future. But there are also other situations, situations where no individual person has any of their personal property damaged at all, and where no aesthetic effort whatsoever went into creating major elements of the built environments we occupy every day. That's the majority of what we live in. And in those situations, I say the walls are ours.
When we live in an equal society--when women do not make up just 2% of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, when affirmative action is no longer necessary because we have eliminated institutionalized racism and classism, when poor youth are not deceived into joining militaries that will abuse their ill-gained trust and kill them, and when Jesse Average can communicate as freely and easily as the richest of the rich--then I may be more open to arguments for a system that bars people from expressing themselves on other people's property without asking. But not until.
More to come.
The new McDonalds in your city, the one running on factory farms that keep animals drugged in minuscule cages for their entire lives--were you asked if they could decorate your skyline with their golden arches? And Coca-Cola--the same Coca-Cola that has employed paramilitary groups to murder and torture Colombian workers to break up their union--did they ask you before taking up a patch of your commute bigger than your front yard with one of their advertisements?
"But they paid for those ads!"
Is legitimacy something you can get by paying for it? Does a clothing ad, encouraging us towards wildly unhealthy ideals of beauty, have more right to exist than an insightful political commentary sprayed on a wall, simply because it cost more to put there? How many people do you know who have something to say? And how many of them can afford renting a 12' by 24' billboard? Or printing costs for a national poster campaign? Perhaps they could afford ad space in some magazines? They can't? Oh. So should they just hold it until they're advertising executives? Keep hoping that book deal works out? Wait to make their point until they're in the year's best-selling band? Hope their rich relatives die soon? This is an important idea they want to get across, you know.
"Come on now, there are plenty of societally accepted ways to make your point. You can write letters to the editor, you can play music at open-mic nights--hey, you can blog about it!"
All those things are important--I wouldn't be writing this if I believed differently--but there are two caveats. First, the number of people who might hear you sing a song at a coffee shop is significantly smaller than the number of people who might see it if you stenciled a reproduction of the news frame of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein at twice-life-size on the side of a building downtown. Second, you grant legitimacy to the system in conforming to its (double) standard. So if you've got something you feel should be said, I honestly and heartily urge you to write letters to the editors of every newspaper you can find, and start a blog! It's free, and so long as you don't say the wrong thing, it's legal. But if you really want people to hear you, you might also look into a roller and some paint.
We live in deeply flawed societies, all around the world. Our governments are often unjust and their laws unfair. Each person is not accorded the same respect and power as every other. And that being the case, I believe that if the poor and the otherwise disenfranchised (and disenfranchisement doesn't take much) have a message to communicate, they should freely take that communication into their own hands. Should Banksy, deeply dissatisfied with the surveillance state the government of England is creating, limit himself to the channels that same government provides its citizens to communicate his statements of anger?
What if they're just tagging, hitting up streetsigns and the backs of trucks with a broad-tip marker, leaving a name and nothing else? I still say it's valid--I'm much more comfortable with a statement of one's own presence, one's own sense of style, and one's dissatisfaction with a poorly-functioning society than I am with a manipulative bid to get someone to buy something they don't need, further filling the pockets of the rich. And I do feel that tagging does indeed serve to critique the social codes we live with, even if the writer doesn't intend it to, as breaking those codes implicitly argues against them.
"But it's on someone else's property."
This is true. There are priority mail stickers with the names of local writers up on lightposts in the city where I live. Those lightposts probably belong to the city, as a legal entity. There are spray pieces in alleyways throughout much of the downtown. The buildings whose backs and sides make up the alley walls are owned by people. Probably not people who run any of the several businesses in each building, and certainly not people who actually spend time in the alley, but people. There are tags in bus shelters around my city. Those bus shelters are probably owned by the transit authority. I hold that none of these people, be they individuals or corporations, are having any of their truly personal property altered when people create street art. If someone were to come paint a burner on your house, it would be different--your home is definitely yours, it is not public. But these other places--the vast majority of the places graffiti is found--are not held personally precious by their owners. Often, they are owned not by individuals at all, but by large groups. They are spaces occupied by the public--by all of us. And as you personally should have control over what your own home looks like, shouldn't we all have a say in what our public environments look like? I return to an earlier style of question: did the transit authority ask me what I wanted bus shelters to look like? If they had, things would look a lot different.
There are gray areas--When does property become too personal to create art on? What about public buildings that were constructed to be art in and of themselves?--and I'll get into those things in the future. But there are also other situations, situations where no individual person has any of their personal property damaged at all, and where no aesthetic effort whatsoever went into creating major elements of the built environments we occupy every day. That's the majority of what we live in. And in those situations, I say the walls are ours.
When we live in an equal society--when women do not make up just 2% of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, when affirmative action is no longer necessary because we have eliminated institutionalized racism and classism, when poor youth are not deceived into joining militaries that will abuse their ill-gained trust and kill them, and when Jesse Average can communicate as freely and easily as the richest of the rich--then I may be more open to arguments for a system that bars people from expressing themselves on other people's property without asking. But not until.
More to come.
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