Gettin' a handle on my inner vandal.

I am trying to figure out how I feel about public art. More to the point, I am trying to make a stencil, and to justifyusing it. And I should stop right there. What the frig is ‘public art’? I think that most often the term is used to describe large, commissioned hulks made of brushed steel or oiled marble and snuggled into the predictable earth on stolid bases in front of libraries and University art buildings. This stuff generally leaves me cold. And what else could it leave me, being steely and marbled?

What I mean by “public art” is art more of the stuff-suddenly-on-walls variety. Painting, postering, mural and stencil. Color where color once wasn't. The placing of things where they don't belong. Art of the kind that we can all undertake (without a foundry or a moving company), put either by request or by moonlight into the “public” arena. The kind that is either illegal or somewhat begrudgingly sanctioned by cities and property owners to celebrate an alleged community spirit.

The sanctioned often falls flat: There are the occasional murals painted by neighborhood kids. In them, inevitably, there will be a strangely billowing flag, and representations of several generations of people. Sometimes one of the people is so big you can only see his head and shoulders. Like, he’s wicked in the foreground.

These seem like a pretty good idea… big paintings by locals. I wish there were more of them (as well I should since I work on mural projects with kids as one of my JOBS), but they often feel pretty impotent to me. And not surprisingly. Almost everything about art feels pretty impotent to me. I’ve never been able to figure out how art “makes a difference”, empowers, or improves lives. I get paint on my face sometimes and it has heavy metals in it.

That is almost all I know. But I also know that I absolutely love sudden, unexpected art, the kind that pops up on the street or in our infrastructure and changes our whole experience of the environment. It seems to me that this could DO something. Change a day or an intention. Invert a perspective, alter a route. Give a kid something to think about. I am a sucker for the thick, bizarre rooftop graf of brooklyn, train markings and murals, well-done guerilla alterations to billboard advertisements. Wheatpasted figures posing on city walls. Stencil art.

Frankly, it doesn’t have to be illegal. It’s not the thrill of a conquered wall that affects me but the surprise… the transformation of the mundane into something inspiring. Back when more signage and advertising was hand-painted this kind of inspiring public stuff was more ubiquitous I’d guess, and I am thrilled beyond words whenever I come across an old advertising mural; these seem to have a real power in them, even more so as they decay. There are certain public art adventures that are just so spontaneously perfect that it feels to me as if the site has demanded them… that one person or team just had the balls and the ladders to create what we all, in some unspoken understanding, knew needed to be there. My friend Brian told me about an artist in Baltimore who re-arranged the gigantic, half-story tell letters in a sign atop an abandoned hotel to read “HE FORGOT ONE”. This blows my mind.

An aside on spontenaeity, or tacit agreement: When I work with my friends J and J at the design studio, we sing. This tradition has developed organically and we do not mention it, but when one of a very few, specific songs come on our iTunes shuffle while we’ve been sitting, silently mousing and clacking and rasterizing, we sing loud in trio. “… I hope the fences we’ve mended down beneath their own weight. I hope we hang on past the last exit- I hope it’s already too late..!”. We do not look at each other as we sing but we do belt it out … these specific songs we sing are particularly melodic and require heart and occasional harmonizing: this is no half-assed or ironic mumbling. There is a collective something that we three respond to in these few songs and we have decided to celebrate it. When a sung song ends, we return to work. It doesn’t happen every day or even every week and this has, I suppose, almost nothing at all to do with public art or stencil graffiti but it seems to me that if I were as talented or intelligent as I once fancied myself to be I could make a connection here. That if it is possible to intuitively know exactly when to sing out loud then it ought to be possible to know when to make one’s big, public art-mark.

(Anyone remember rTMark? They certainly engage in some damn ambitious public projects. Here is a pretty good and relevant one that's up right now, though the comments are pretty rough.)

Anyway. I often feel dismayed and irrellevant to be making “gallery” art. I’ve broken outside of the traditional gallery somewhat by organizing the Project Digs shows, but the fact remains that I’d like to be making work that is out in the world, startling passersby or changing how someone thinks of the world around them. I have purchased some acetate but this in itself does not a guerilla artist make.

And I always pause at this point because the fact of the matter is, despite my own love of “good” grafiti and interesting installations, I believe that laws against the same exist for a damn good reason. There are few things that bother me more than disrespect—of people, of nature, even of space—and I find the presumption of most vandals that their right to mark whatever they want supercedes the law really disrespectful. It engenders self-centeredness and a trampling of others’ centers, and that’s nothing I want to be a part of.

Banksy, who does utterly amazing stencil work in the UK that makes me want to punch myself in the eyeball, suggests we “imagine a world in which graffiti wasn’t illegal”, and in which each city wall and curb was fair game for someone’s self expression.

I imagine it, and I don’t like it a bit. It sounds like a mess.
I’m all for the democratizing of expression, yet if you wrote your name on the front of my house I’d probably try to get your ass arrested.

So if I decided to do some unsactioned work would I essentially be saying that because I’m an “artist” I am above even the laws that I support? Maybe. Maybe I should lobby for a tightening of graffiti laws even as I begin stencilling, making myself a gigantic, inevitable contradition and eventually landing myself in a pawn shop trying to trade my road bike for bail money.

I find myself coming up with a set of customized rules that I’m comfortable with. Suppose I only made work on abandoned space? Or tighter- only on the signage of abandoned space (that appeals to me aesthetically). Only on marketing space… only on billboards? But who’s to say that my arbitrary rules are more valid than someone elses? I suppose no one. I suppose the point is that each defines the rules for himself. So everyone has something to say and has to find his own way to say it. For me, I think I’ve settled on the idea of creating work in the studio (sheets of thin ply or scrap metal, like old signs) and then HANGING it on abandoned space or signage. So, like, maybe I’m only littering.

But I would like input from as many people as possible on this whole dillemma. Is there a way to make public, surprising, effective work without either encouraging senseless vandalism or drawing rules so tight that the work become innocuous and dull again?

There’s this quote that I love by Mayakovski (okay, if you went to the Digs site then you’ve already read this): “…We do not need a dead mausoleum of art where dead works are worshiped, but a living factory of the human spirit –in the streets, in the tramways, in the factories, workshops and workers’ homes.”

I would love to say that I am living and working in the spirit of this quote. But for now I return to working on a bird painting in the other room and looking forward to the time in the afternoon when I get to eat hummus and drink a Corona. Help.