Autoterrorist

You might have noticed that I recently changed the title of my blog from my name (boring boring boring) to “Autoterrorist.” The word is related to a concept from the Lettrist International, attributed to Eliane Brau, but Aaron thinks it might have been Michele Bernstein’s. We can’t find the article where it was mentioned but the name and concept has stuck in our heads, evolving to suit our own uses. Recently the word has been used to describe car bomb terrorism, but as a practice we might insist that it relate to terrorizing traffic in the slavery of their commutes, or terrorizing oneself to heighten consciousness, coming close to death to feel truly alive. Read more on my new About Me page, which was very much in need of updating (old one here).

Click on the headphones for podcast part 2: 1:05:18’

Here is part two of the roundtable discussion at Arspace (part 1 here). In it you can hear us opening yet more cans of Pabst, ordering pizza, and talking about graffiti and art. Topics include the Splasher, who Chili calls “a really hip buffer” and likens to a “greatest hits soft rock album;” we talk about street art and commodification, Big Brother and public surveillance, signs and meaning in graffiti, and where Plantrees has been and why we care. Highlights include this quote from Andy—”Somebody practicing their art on my garage is like George Bush practicing democracy in Iraq,” which really had absolutely nothing to do with the discussion and didn’t make any sense but was pretty funny anyway.

Sorry that this isn’t edited. It is way too long and has a bunch of stuff in it that is probably pretty boring to listen to… like us munching on pizza and stuff…

Oh well, thank to those who participated in the second round: Helen, Michael, Brandon, Andy, Chili, and Aaron.

Photo by GypsyRock, who has a ton of sick photos of Bay Area graffiti. Here’s an interview, too.
Music at the beginning is from Call and Response:

Download “Tiger Teeth” (mp3)
from “Tiger Teeth”
by Call And Response
Badman Recording Co

• Buy at Napster


• Stream from RealNetworks / Rhapsody


• Buy at RealNetworks / Rhapsody


• Buy at Karma Download


• Buy at GroupieTunes


• Buy at DownloadPunk

More On This Album

Podcast: 51 minutes 46 seconds
Click on the headphones to listen to the first part of last night’s roundtable discussion on graffiti and street art at Arspace in San Francisco.

We didn’t stick much to the questions, but it was a lively discussion. We spoke about advertising in public space, graffiti and art galleries, commercialism, encoded dialogues and communication, and the phenomenon of “country graffiti.”
Big up to those who came out: Michael, Helen, Brandon, Chili and Dizzy!

I’ll post the second part soon. I’m sorry these are unedited, but who’s got the time?

The music at the beginning and end of the podcast is by Dosh:

Download “Naoise” (mp3)
from “Pure Trash”
by Dosh
anticon

• Buy at eMusic


• Buy at RealNetworks / Rhapsody


• Stream from RealNetworks / Rhapsody


• Buy at Napster


• Buy at Karma Download


• Buy at GroupieTunes


• Buy at DownloadPunk


• Buy at Insound

More On This Album

Pingmag’s Leslie Kuo posted an interview with artist Leo Fitzmaurice that is really interesting. They get into a revealing discussion on the nature of public space:

You’ve said you are interested in public spaces and that they are “disappearing”. Do you mean it as physically disappearing or rather being overwhelmed by visual, commercial intrusions?

In England many public spaces are disappearing to developers – as parks and football fields being sold – but this isn’t really what I mean. I guess that as we spend more time in front of a screen or with our heads in magazines and listening to MP3 players, we spend less time when and where we actually are.

I realized after reading Michel de Certeau’s Practice of Everyday Life that one thing I am doing (and we all do in some way) is to consume public space and by consuming it in some way we make it our own thus privatizing it to some extent. But instead we spend our time consuming other stuff…

To describe this positive thing you do, and hope others will do, with public space, you’ve used verbs that are often used critically to describe corporations and consumer culture, e.g. privatize, or consume. Is this conscious – are you trying to reclaim the words or reclaim the activities?

I think I am more interested in reclaiming the activities in some way – it is more fun.

What do you want to do with public space through your work? How do you wish for your interventions to affect passers-by?

I would like people to become more aware of the potential around them and encourage ways we can consume material and space that is not prescribed.

I want to make something my own in some way but also for this to become a dialogue with other people. I would like people to think of A to B as a destination. The side of the road or a car park is a public space. I like to feel my feet on surfaces – I like to stop where people are normally going. I want to create space for myself – and others.

One question I have, why does he call his art intervention project “Detourist”? Is this a play on the word “detourne” mashed with “tourist”?

Tonight I will be hosting an informal roundtable discussion and pizza and beer consuming session at Arspace. I’ve invited artists and graffiti writers to come and discuss a few topics about art, public space and what it means to be putting art in the public realm. I’m looking forward to it and if all goes well we might want to do this on a more regular basis. I might be able to post some of the discussion in a podcast format, if all goes well on the technical side, but for now here are some of the questions I’ve devised for the evening. Anyone is welcome to give their two cents on the blog!

1. What is the difference between graffiti and “street art”? or “post-graffiti”? In many cases there is a tension, even a rivalry, between traditional graffiti writers and street artists. How do the tactics differ and is that the cause of the tension? Or does it have more to do with class? How do we overcome these differences?

2. In New York there has been a recent spate of destruction of street art pieces, attacked by someone identified as “the splasher.” According to his manifesto, “revolutionary creativity does not shock or entertain the bourgeoisie, it destroys them.” His argument is that street art has become a fad, therefore fetishized as an object of art, separated from the creative act, the performative act. Destroying street art as a statement is questionable as revolutionary activity, yet his program does bring up questions about the sanctity of street art, and its future. Is the creative act of putting art in the street worth more than the product? Is street art worth preserving? Does it attain more value when made by celebrities like Banksy? Will we ever see a time when portions of walls are saved from demolition because of the street art on them and then sold? Is this a disturbing proposition or a hopeful one?

3. In 1974 Norman Mailer wrote one of the first books on graffiti, the Faith of Graffiti. In it he pinpointed a theory regarding the rise of graffiti as an outcome of “slum populations chilled on one side by the bleakness of modern design, and brain-cooked on the other by comic strips and TV ads with zooming letters.” He claims that the assault on the senses perpetrated by media and advertising and the numbness generated by concrete modernist architecture produced this unique phenomenon and hastened its rise. Media saturation and the architecture of isolation are symptomatic of a loss of public space and graffiti is a manifestation of this loss and the alienation it promotes. Graffiti and street art are often touted as methods to “reclaim” public space from advertisers and the forces of gentrification, for example. Is it even possible to reclaim public urban space? What about anti-graffiti task forces whose self-proclaimed mission is to “reclaim” space from the “blight” of graffiti? Whose space is it anyway?

4. In 1976, French philosopher and intellectual Jean Baudrillard wrote about the emergent trend of graffiti art in New York City as “the insurrection of signs.” According to him these signs are powerful precisely because they are not invested with content or message: they are “empty signifiers” which have the power to “dismantle the order of signs” upon which our society is built. In this case, graffiti is a revolutionary tactic, “a savage cultural process with neither goal, ideology, nor content, at the level of signs”—where, he asserts, the system is most vulnerable. In the essay he claims that the graffiti movement was ephemeral and already over, or “at least [was] no longer so extraordinarily violent.” Thirty years later we can see that graffiti never “died” and became instead a truly worldwide phenomenon. It was also subsumed and co-opted by the media, becoming, in effect, one of the order of signs. In light of these developments, do you believe graffiti can be revolutionary? Was it ever? Do you agree with Baudrillard that graffiti has no content or message?

5. Old school wildstyle graffiti artist Rammellzee has written about this revolutionary aspect of graffiti as well, as a tactic of war. For him, the arrows a letter has and the harder it is to read is representative of weapons and armor with which tags can symbolically attack the city. For the average person confronted with an indecipherable tag or wildstyle piece, the effect is frustrating and for many, threatening. It is essentially harmless—paint on a wall—and yet it provokes intense feelings. Why do you think graffiti has this power? Does it only have to do with private property rights or is there something else there? Or, as Jeff Ferrell, author of the book Crimes of Style, would suggest, is this reaction blown out of proportion by authorities who benefit from anti-graffiti campaigns?

A few weeks ago John Fekner was kind enough to respond to some email interview questions of mine concerning my thesis topic (now that i look back on it, it has been nearly a year since I started out on this thesis!! damn, it better be good…). Here’s a few tidbits from the interview:

Your piece in the 11 Spring project was “Beauty is only street deep.” What role does the city and the street play in relationship to your art?

I was born in NYC and grew up in Queens during the 50s & 60s. While playing in the Sunnyside Railroad Yards, the NYC city skyline was the backdrop to my childhood. The city was a major influence as I grew up, and eventually made a lasting impression, so much so that it affected my art making years later. I spray painted statements, observations, warnings, poems, etc., on walls, overpasses, cars, buildings and bridges. The stencils functioned and were interpreted by outdoor audiences on a number of different levels, appropriate to the site. My text and icons were a direct comment on what was in view, sometimes a conceptual message or a global issue, sometimes a vague expression that would trigger a memory in the viewer’s mind.

With your project Industria, what prompted you to initially bring your art out into the public realm—to, in effect, stamp your art on industrial remains, bridges, et cetera?

A few years after college, I became more involved with examining a larger space than within the picture plane of a canvas or any artwork for that matter that might be hanging in a museum or gallery. I wanted to express myself to a wider audience. I was very influenced by the Arte Povera movement, Robert Smithson and Gordon-Matta Clark in the early 70s, which led to the period of 77-79 while I had a studio at PS 1 in Long Island City.

Did you encounter any problems in realizing that particular project?

In regard to my outdoor work, I consider myself extremely lucky in those days…projects were executed 99.9% without a hitch and photographed the next day.

The first encounter I had with your work was when I was researching low-income housing projects and came across the piece “Falsas Promesas,” which resonated deeply with me. What was the social climate at the time you created that piece?

Basically, everything was broken, corrupted and impoverished in NYC and to some extent, other northeastern cities during the 70s.

Do you believe that the city, via urban planners and developers, is still delivering false promises?

To live in this city, you either have to be rich or poor. The middle class on the NYC Titanic has been swamped overboard and is desperately clutching at straws in the ocean.