Category Archives: street art

Guerilla Warfare: New York Street Advertising Takeover

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Kenmare St. and Elizabeth St., NYC

An ambitious project took place this past weekend, and only a scattered handful of passers by took note. If you look, however, you might begin to notice it on your morning commute or across from your apartment. The Wooster Collective, a street art blog, describes the escapade thus:

“Jordan Seiler’s incredibly ambitious New York Street Advertising Takeover became a reality yesterday [April 25], when over 120 illegal billboards throughout the city were white washed by dozens of volunteers.

NYSAT was organized as a reaction to the hundreds of billboards that are not registered with the city, and therefore are illegal. While illegal, these violations are not being prosecuted by the City of New York, allowing the billboard companies to garner huge profits by cluttering our outdoor space with intrusive and ugly ads.

After the illegal spots were white washed, late in the day yesterday over eight artists transformed these spaces into personal pieces of art.”

It’s a guerilla beautification campaign! Artist Jordan Sieler’s Public Ad Campaign organizes and documents artists who work against the advertising that has spread in traditionally non-commercial spaces. Now if only all New Yorkers would get so motivated and pick up litter and work in their community gardens. While it’s a cool project with beautiful results, it raises some questions.

Is that what the public wants done on their advertising space?
Sieler states that ‘By commodifying public space, outdoor advertising has monopolized the surfaces that shape our shared space. Private property laws protect the communications made by outdoor advertising while systematically preventing public usage of that space,’ but the public isn’t deciding what to do with these artist’s buildboards, the illegal artists are.
Is there a difference between street art and advertising? Or art and advertising?
Art has literally taken the place of advertising in this case, and if anything it erases that line in the sand between the two a little bit more. Contemporary art is an inclusive practice and more street artists are crossing over to advertising (ahem, Shepard Fairy) and no end of graphic designers are also artists use a similar visual vocabulary whether they are creating art or advertising.
Why is promoting art (and one’s work) better than promoting a Coca-Cola?
Advertising serves a specific function, to sell something. Art, especially the guerrilla street art that makes up the Public Ad Campaign, often has an ideology and purpose behind it too. So is the difference really the type of thing it’s promoting, Coca-Cola or ideas? A coke might have a specific dollar value, but either way it’s propaganda.

Bowery and 4th St., NYC

That being said, I like the results. I, as an individual, find the donkey’s head on the wall more interesting and beautiful than most advertising. But this campaign makes it seem like guerilla warfare is going on against the big advertisers, and the public doesn’t get a say on either side of things, despite the fact that it is obstensibly for the benefit of the public. I guess it’s like most wars in that sense.

Not like ArtPrize, where anyone who visits the fair in Grand Rapids gets to vote on the winning artwork. But that’s another story for another day.

For more billboard pictures, see here or here.

Adorable Side of Street Art

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Street art is big, it’s all over, from satirical political spraypaint of Obama and Andre the Giant to installations of statues and bits of furniture in unlikely places. Some street art is small. It’s not often you come across the adorable, miniature side of street art, and it makes this project from Little People even more delightful. These Lilliputians would likely get stepped on if left on the streets of London for too long anyway, but I’d love to come across them in New York.

The good people at Little People are doing a charming job by minimizing the scale of street art and infusing their scenes with humor. The photos above are titled “Crappy Christmas.”

Walls and Streets of Art, Relationally-speaking

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That imperious-sounding term ‘relational aesthetics’ might have been first introduced to me at theanyspacewhatever exhibition at the Guggenheim, as I reviewed here, but like so many things one jives with, I’ve started to find it everywhere. It’s not exactly that the exhibition so sensitized me to my surroundings that every piece of litter on New York’s streets makes me want to sing hallelujahs, although relational aesthetics does strive for that effect. Rather, I see in work I have already been following the same aesthetic tools of surprise, fun, ephemerality, untraditional medium, and irreverence, and fueling their creation the hopeful belief that the experience of life is beautiful.

The Wooster Collective, whose blog I follow, is “dedicated to showcasing and celebrating ephemeral art placed on streets” thus taking relational aesthetics one step further than using the exhibition as a medium, as street art creates a medium out of bare concrete and brick. The art it showcases is submitted from all over, so like the Guggenheim’s group show it is an egalitarian effort, and shows the range of diversity, from a bum’s hut in Poland to this Election Day poster.

Had they been punnier, they would have said “Chews with your gum,” but not everybody can be as clever as me.

Street art fits into the category of relational aesthetics. An article on the founders of Wooster Collective from 2006 discusses the tenants of street art much line relational aesthetics:

1. Location…A work of street art reclaims the public space and the best street art has a context, builds a relationship with its environment, dialogs with the city…
2. Surprise and delight: the works tap into our emotions and we get that WTF ??? moment…
3. Have something to say…the best pieces do not necessarily make a strong political statement but they will make you see the city under a different light. Artists let
passersby make their own interpretation of the work…

‘Relational aesthetics’, then, is a way of taking art out of frames and putting it in different, often surprising, relations to the viewer, and how it affects one’s perception of the object, which is not necessarily an object but a wall or hole that makes you reevaluate your surroundings. The blog form is suited to street art; it constantly changes rather than being fixed, is fragmentary rather than whole, and both mediums originated outside mainstream channels of expression and are becoming more recognized.

Another blog I follow, Art is Everywhere, tries to document the beauty of everyday objects by taking things apart, rearranging them, and photographing them for the web. It tries to resensitize people to their surroundings, and thus to the beauty and charm of life. As it’s states:

Observing the surrounds from different points of view can change the perception
of the reality. Among the endless possible points of view, we can find the one
more near to the beauty: that is to make art. Why should everybody make art? To
seek for the beautiful in the daily things it undoubtedly helps us to…live
better.

And that’s a lovely sentiment to be surprised with, in anyspace anywhere.