on stalking art

Oh the many miles this whorphan walked Saturday through Philadelphia. It is a good thing he wore his new leather work boots – they needed breaking in and to make his skin's acquaintance. His wanderings were neither useless nor wanton; he managed to photograph nearly ten dozen examples of street art, or graffiti, which he can now process, preserve, curate, and display.

In some cities, graffiti inhabits certain areas more frequently than others; persons seeking it can simply show up at the popular spots and gather to their hearts' content without much craning or swiveling of the head. In Philadelphia, however, street art must be stalked and searched for, culled from the backs of tall signposts and canvassed from the sides of news kiosks, utility boxes, and telephone poles. In fact, the author found entire blocks denuded of beauty, small rectangular patches of dirty glue on the backs of otherwise unused spaces such as parking-meter poles and transformer boxes the only remaining evidence of hundreds of works of art. But if the fruitful labor of the Self Directed Urban Beautification Specialist (SDUBS) were easy to find, and if his strange and colorful images required less effort and patience to obtain, the wonderful phenomenon that is street art would be as mysterious as an unadorned dumpster and as appealing as the sound of mating swine.

In the City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection, one must tease beauty from the forgotten and the under-utilized places and ignore the suspicious glances of the uninitiated as one applies one's own paltry contributions with deft slight of hand. This author thanks the disparate street artists of Philadelphia for re-applying their art as soon as the city has paid to have it destroyed. Keep fighting the good fight, you tenacious SDUBS, and mahalo.

mentiri factorem fecit © 場黑麥

some of my America 2012

on the use of eyes in street art

(reasons, questions, and motives)

Stroll through downtown Los Angeles, up New York's Broadway, or along the avenues of Philadelphia's Center City, and look in the forgotten, in the grimy, and in the underused places. With a keen glance and a bit of luck, you will witness the riotous beauty known as street art. Oh, what a profusion of style and color, of shape and size, of message and image, all blending into a whole that, if viewed from afar, resembles little more than visual clutter; but get in good and close, and follow the guidance of your peripheral vision, and your most tender of sphincters will drink invariably of the intoxicating power of street art.

But why do we look? Why are we powerless against the urge to sweep our gazes into worn and sticky places and up onto soot-covered utility poles? Eyes, my friends, we look at graffiti because it is full of eyes (and not just any type of eyes, but human eyes). Perhaps they stumbled upon the technique accidentally, perhaps they copied it from advertisers, or maybe they just plain Knew to tap into one of mankind's most primal and deep-seated fears, but, however it occurred, street artists employ one of the most basic methods for getting people to look at something – to give it eyes.

Since our time as forest-creeping, prairie-running, skull-bashing troglodytes, the species homo sapiens has developed the uncanny ability to recognize the shape of the eye even if it should be obscured by layers of seemingly random patterns. While experts may argue whether this ability is restricted merely to recognizing the human eye, or if it applies to the eyes of all of our former predators (think bear, cougar, coyote), few persons dispute the fact that our brains are really good at figuring out if someone, or something, is looking at us. Advertisers exploit this evolutionary adaptation to our status as Top Predator Of One Another by blanketing the phaltscape with pictures of pretty people who nearly all happened to have been staring directly at the camera's shutter when it opened. (Now, however, instead of our powers giving us the upper hand in a fight-or-flight situation, they allow us to be convinced that we need that new and re-formulated cucumber body scrub; woe be unto mankind.)

All quasi-scientific, pseudo-evolutionary nonsense aside (I am not a scientist, nor am I particularly intelligent or well-versed) – why do graffiti-writers use so many eyes in their designs? Why in the name of Beelzebub do they wish for people to look at their works of art, and to what purpose do they make use of our aforementioned ability to pick eyes out of the ether? As the SDUBS (self directed urban beautification specialist) is wily and suspicious by nature, and since she maintains a level of honor, decorum, and discipline so profound as to make inquiry into her personal matters a life-threatening endeavor, these questions shall likely go unanswered for many generations to come. For now, however, please enjoy the street-side galleries of free-to-the-consumer art wherever you may be, and rest easily in the knowledge that, by looking back at eyes that look at you, you are merely executing a deeply-ingrained survival reflex that is as natural to humans as is laughter. Never forget, however, to keep an eye out for your fellow man, he who has been hunting you for longer than you shall likely ever know.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

on graffiti in Philly & LA

(or, a whorphan's take on the street art scenes of two fine American cities)

At first glance, street art in Los Angeles has much in common with that in Philadelphia. In each city, the graffiti is vibrant, irreverent, daringly-placed, socially-critical, and to be found in most neighborhoods regardless of their social status or overall character. Certain designs by well-established artists appear in both cities, proving that the SDUBS (self directed urban beautification specialist) likes to travel, that he knows not to change a cunning or successful design, and that his art is relevant in any asphalt-landscape, or phaltscape. As in LA, it is nearly impossible to see anyone in Philadelphia actually applying street art – as this is done generally at night or during periods of inclement weather – a fact which points to the wily and suspicious nature of the street artist as well as to his desire to stay anonymous and to attract as little attention to himself, and as much to his work, as is possible. In both cities, SDUBS utilize such self-adhesive mailing labels as are available free-of-charge at branches of the United States Post Office; I found it far more daunting a task, however, to find such stickers on the East Coast than it is out West, where they seem to abound. In Philadelphia, I noticed a greater number of pieces stuck up by apparently classically-trained artists seeking perhaps to spread the word about their abilities by going rogue; in Los Angeles, the street art that survives not only the rigorously brutal meritocratic evaluation process as done by the street artists themselves but also removal or destruction by the city's own Artwork Desecration Teams tends to be of a more gritty and distorted nature than some of the abstract – even gallery-worthy – pieces as are found in Philly.

In LA, street art is removed or painted over continuously – sometimes daily – whereas in Philadelphia, pieces can stay up for months, even years (see the dusty, weather-beaten FRESH sticker on the rear of a ONE-WAY sign on the north side of Arch Street, near the Troubadour). This can have a stagnating effect on the street art scene, with the best spots dominated by the more aggressive, tenacious, or merely lucky SDUBS, while in Southern California the best spots are constantly painted over by roving bands of the city's own counter-vandals, people who seem to hate beauty, creativity, and any artistic expression other than that found in for-profit art galleries. The riot of different styles and slogans and symbols found in LA trumps the scene found in Philly, which, upon closer inspection, appears to be dominated by a mere handful of artists who nonetheless pursue their Happiness with youth-like vigor and obvious zeal. Furthermore, I noticed in the City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection a tendency toward cute designs with anime-style eyes and slightly distorted bodies; in Los Angeles, any and every imaginable style, color-palette, medium, and subject-matter is on display, twenty-four hours a day, in miles of street-side, no-cost-to-the-consumer art galleries.

In all, however, I must applaud Philadelphia's street artists for pursuing their Happiness with fortitude and vigor, for affixing their pieces to unconventional and hard-to-reach spots, for working tirelessly to enliven the phaltscape with bright and flashing colors, and for spending their own time and their own money on the materials needed to beautify their drab and conformist surroundings. That a city a fraction of the size of such a sprawling and surface-filled metropolis as that western behemoth can produce and maintain such a lively and compelling street art scene bodes well for the town that birthed our Independence. Mahalo, friends, and aloha.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

on slavery by capitalism

  We, the people of America who are not enslaved to watching television or participating in fabricated national shopping rituals, must somehow help the 152 million people who went out to shop on the fake ritual of "Black Friday," a non-holiday that was created to rob the People of their hard-earned greenbacks.

  How do we help these people, and free them from their self-imposed, self-bought slavery?

Ultima Ratio Regum - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp