Guerrilla street postering—“sniping”—is the most direct, unmediated form of public expression available to pictorial artists. It’s also narcotic. And illegal. But if you’re a pissed-off painter with a gripe against your government’s abrogation of civil rights in the name of “Homeland Security” (and color-coded national alerts, whatever they are) and you want to reach the Public, with a capital P, there’s nothing like a little late-night urban art attack to get your freak on. Consider it a form of minor civil disobedience: misdemeanors perpetrated to protest higher crimes. What really freaks me out is that John Ashcroft, our attorney general (the man responsible for justice in America, for Christ’s sake!—oops, that’s another subject), believes that surveillance is safer than civil liberties.
A few words about unmediated: this is a distribution issue, like how you do or don’t get whatever it is you do seen by a lot of people. Instead of just your mom and your friends. How to communicate your concerns about important public issues to the Public. You could show art in an art gallery—but you have to make a business deal with a gallery owner.
Mostly, they’ll show your art if it will sell. That pretty much leaves out ugly little black-and-white portraits of ugly old white men in suits and ties who’ve abused their power in the name of representative democracy.
How about illustrations in periodicals and books that have major distribution: newspapers, magazines, even free weeklies (Village Voice, LA Weekly)? You’ve got to get your art through an art director, an arts editor, an executive editor, and a publisher. (That’s true of even this book, right, Steve?) A veritable gauntlet of mediation. Forget TV (unless you make news breaking the law, getting arrested for vandalism, or worse, talking back to the police, which is another story).
Of course if you’re rich you could buy…forget that too, it don’t apply. So we have running the streets in the middle of the night with a highly irregular army of guerrilla volunteers, hanging paper.
My hot issues are democracy, global capitalism, televangelism, and the environment—so far. When I reach the boiling point, I draw or paint adversarial portraits of the perpetrators and add a couple of satirical, punning words. Colloquial American English is the most subversive form of communication on the planet, and humor helps. It’s the only way to stand (in both senses of the word) and deliver what’s going on.
Then we digitize and fiddle around in Photoshop (we, because it isn’t like I do this alone). It takes a bunch of people to make the posters. Photographer, designer, computer graphics wunderkinds, friends who work for free. Somehow we spit out a combination of image and text that could pass for “infotainment.” Funny, but not nice. Critical, but not slanderous. On the edge. Just enough to tickle people on their way to work in the morning into thinking along with us about issues that make me gag. This isn’t just art about politics, it is politics. Audience receptivity is important. As David Lynch would say, “Stick your finger into the zeitgeist.” You have to figure your angle of penetration. Then slip it to ’em.
Then I make a deal with a friendly offset litho printer: pay one hundred dollars a month for the rest of my life to get a few thousand posters now. The Wimpy and the hamburger scenario.
Time for some guerrilla wrangling. It’s surprising how many people are up for running the streets to perpetrate a little mischief in the most dangerous urban areas in the universe. It’s sexy, a great date, if you’re into mutual municipal code violation. Besides, no artist makes art for any audience without the “heh-heh” factor. As in, “Wait ’til they see this; it’s gonna look so cool.” Yeah, nasty portraits of politicians and bureaucrats up all over the streets is gonna blow their minds. Well, you have to at least think it’s gonna be a gas, because there’s almost no other reason to do it.
Trust me, it’s a total loss. Making art with the intention of changing people’s minds about issues that are important to them is hubris. Personal catharsis works for me. Participating in the national debate in a “trickle up” way figures into it—lots of people see the posters (if we do it right), whether they want to or not. But getting the guerrillas together in an all-night coffee shop—in LA we meet at Canter’s Deli on Fairfax—feeling the buzz of the multi-culti crowd, not to mention the matzo ball soup and strawberry milkshakes—wow! Then I get high driving around town, doing the deed, with downloaded CDs blaring guerrillas’ greatest hits. In walkable cities like New York, San Francisco, and Chicago, we have crews with headphones, rollerblades, whatnot. The action is addictive. We have liftoff.