Stickers 2 by björn platz

2 Intro

Theorizing

Submissions I

Submissions II

Outtakes

Impressum

Editorial by Andreas Ullrich

Dear StickerArtists, Dear Users, We are excited to announce our second book on graphic interventions in the public arena to now complement our first 2005/2006 ‘Stickers. From the first international sticker awards’ book – an overview and documentation compiled from the many entries we received for our annual Sticker Awards. Unlike that publication, which was primarily focused on photographic and graphic images from different countries and continents, we’re now also emphasizing a basic theoretical analysis and a thematic order. This became inevitable mainly due to the exuberant proliferation of the ‘sticker phenomenon’ not only becoming a subsuming of diverse forms and strategies in Western cities after more than 15 years, but also calling for a critical examination of the accompanying collateral effects. The ‘sticker scene’ has long since left its infancy behind and meanwhile provides the glutted art market, in desperate need of new ideas and would-be revolutionary approaches, as well as the anesthetized advertising market, bewailing the loss of its youth target group to the new online media, with a welcome pool of bold, unconventional and above all cost-effective ideas and techniques to invigorate the economics of attention, proving its effectiveness even beyond the ‘norm’ – out on the street and thus public and open to analysis by all. As such, these endeavors intrigue a substantially larger group than just the young sticker activists themselves – and also become inextricably linked with repercussions for the artists’ self-image and how they view their interventions. The stickers and the activists behind them are thus no longer simply one piece of a creative experiment attempting to challenge the long consummated privatization of urban space and its surfaces from a graphic, social or decorative standpoint, or to fleetingly and physically change them. Instead, we have a great diversity of themes and interests blending into what turns out to be a very indistinct picture of this medium. In order to bring the essential into focus, we asked different commentators from the fields of philosophy, the art market and art history to give us their take on the developments of recent years; our goal being a deeper understanding of the motivations and risks beyond just a fascination with the images themselves. But of course stickers remain a visual medium. That’s why we still continue to have our major focus on selecting the most interesting international works in order to present an account of the latest in sticker production and usage around the world. We decided to formulate a number of thematic chapters incorporating the distinctly stronger aspects plus naturally also featuring some of the per-continent entries as a large part of the collection of images. As always, all these photos come from the entries submitted for our annual sticker award (www. stickeraward.net). As our source, this means only those pictures sent to us from 2005 to 2009. The winners of our past awards, who naturally receive their own feature in the newly-available book, are chosen each year by an international jury and presented in an annual exhibition. With this compilation of images and text, we aim to provide a brief overview of the medium’s possibilities and frontiers and encourage your own acts of urban embellishment and intervention, because reflecting on the images and strategies presented here turns out to be highly inspiring – especially for one’s own actions and contributions! Of course, you can – and should – submit your interventions for the next sticker award at www. stickeraward.net, because after all, it’s your participation which makes this documentation possible in the first place. That’s why all of you out there have earned our highest respect and gratitude. Because you’ve mastered the open space, our long-suffering urban reality in the face of relentless over-commercialization, and developed an art directly reflecting the realities of life, far removed from museums and galleries, far removed from the influence, distortion and profit motives of gallery owners, curators and sponsors. Keep up the good work,

Andreas Ullrich Editor and co-founder of the International Sticker Awards Madmar, Germany

2 Intro

Theorizing

Submissions I

Submissions II

Outtakes

Impressum

Editorial by Andreas Ullrich

Andreas Ullrich Editor and co-founder of the International Sticker Awards Madmar, Germany

4 Intro Welcome Opener XX Crew, Germany

Theorizing

Submissions I

Submissions II

Outtakes

Impressum

4 Intro Welcome Opener XX Crew, Germany

Theorizing

Submissions I

Submissions II

Outtakes

Impressum

6 Intro

Theorizing

Submissions I

Submissions II

Outtakes

Impressum

Essay M. Dietzens, Germany Rebellion of signs? On the relationship between street art and avant-garde.

Rebellion of signs? On the relationship between street art and avant-garde. by M. Dietzens “[the task of developing a theory, M. Dietzens]... is not to resolve issues so as to make them disappear but rather to bring forth conceptual articulations which allow certain questions to be posed accurately from the start.” Peter Bürger, p.16 The question is thus on the relationship between so-called “street art” and the intentions, effects and implications of avant-garde, thus the recognized and articulated discrepancies in historical avant-garde movements of art as they relate to modern times. In this manuscript, I refer to the avant-garde term as Peter Bürger developed in his book,“The Theory of the Avant-Garde”. Taking up the issue of “progress” in art, the question lingers as to what extent street art, as the latest and most revolutionary thrust in the tide of modern art, is able to articulate the extent of the issues that have confronted historical avant-garde movements in contemplating the possibility of the abolishment of art in general. With the failure of historical avant-garde, the most radical bourgeois attempts to break through the autonomy and isolation of art, and thus the attempt to infuse art into everyday life, also fails. What according to Adorno holds true for philosophy, that it is still necessary “because the moment to realize it was missed” (Negative Dialectics, p.15), no doubt also holds true for art. Art according to the historical avant-garde, and more than ever after Auschwitz, perpetuates its ruination, bungles and muddles along further, wherever it neglects to reflect on its social function and circumstances, whenever it doesn’t accept the moments of its own inadequacy, its failure and its entanglement in the misleading whole. Art after the failure

of the historical avant-garde movements is itself in a sense confronted by a “dialectic stalemate,” a movement revolving every tighter around itself. What once was avant-garde and revolutionary has been assimilated; what was to have transcended has cemented a context of immanence which would not appear to offer art any outlet. Art thereby becomes a deception, contributes to “Enlightenment as Mass Deception” (Horkheimer / Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment). What it retains is only that which the art itself preserves but not realizes; in the same breath it breaks its own promise because in order to hold onto the possibility of redemption, it needs to be more than art. The modernistic threatens its backslide into design, into advertisement; it threatens to fully embellish and obscure the barbaric circumstances as “proof” of the fact that it thrives in this world.

Hope is tied to Benjamin’s concept that in order to break the spell, circumstances only need to be shifted slightly, to orchestrate everything in such a way so as to be meaningful. The idea is that street art to some degree breaks with the conventional isolation of art in museums and galleries, perhaps even the relationship between art and society, if not turning it on its head then at least upending it enough for avenues out of the ruins to become obvious. If the main intention of the historical avant-garde movements can be regarded as “destruction of art as an institution detached from the realities of life” (Bürger, p.117), the societal organization manifest in the art in contrast to the instrumentally-ordered action of the capitalistic system, the question arises as to what extent street art is at least partly able to transcend the segregation of art in bourgeois society, since it so utterly obviously breaks through the spatial isolation at least occasionally by its ignoring of the fundamental principle of presentation and reception of art in the bourgeois society. A further question would be to what extent street art has a “critical or affirmative function” (Bürger, p.17), that criticism of street art directed “toward the institution of art as developed in the bourgeois society” (Bürger, p.29) is self-critical, that it is therefore able to reflect objective societal tendencies through the medium of the institution of art and thereby articulate that it possesses a consciousness of its own. Also to question would be to what extent the artistic machinery, the generally-available techniques utilized, perhaps allows street art to be able to transcend the objective limits set by society and its own terms, even if not actually intended by those who produce it. Based on Peter Bürger’s “The Theory of the Avant-Garde”, in which he interprets and analyzes the historical avant-garde movements at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the issue is thus how street art comes across to avant-garde, whether it thus assimilates the failure of avantgarde and moves beyond the art or whether it perhaps loses ground against the historical avant-garde movements.

Positioning the institution of art Likely the most salient characteristic of all variations of street art is its being exhibited right in the streets, in public spaces. Which is what at the same time differentiates it most clearly from other contemporary art and what its players, the “artists”, pride themselves most on. At least most of the street artists have transcended the separation of the art sphere from society – in a flight of fancy: street art, and right there its name misleads, counts speciously and “genuinely” as communication with and in the public arena and the people

therein. An occurrence of “illicit, artistic intervention in the urban area. Directed against the hegemonic code of the city and speaking dialogically – at times subtly and provocatively – to a public audience” (Gabbert, p.17). And there is something partly true in that. Precisely because the people are directly confronted with artistic works of street art in unbidden fashion makes it perhaps one crucial step from art presented in galleries: because it doesn’t communicate from a vacuum, from the isolated world of art and exhibits, from a self-contained artistic atmosphere, it can actually have far more of a direct effect. Street art is spared of the pigeonholing as art right from the beginning, and as such perceived and received as disenfranchisement and not even taken completely on its own. Content and political commitment can sometimes be easier to convey. If, according to Peter Bürger, in the modern trend of the institution of art “the work is first and foremost defined by social function”, street art sidesteps this institution and this relationship up to a point. Different rules would seem to apply in the street, anyone can slap on a sticker or a poster or some such piece, there’s ostensibly no added appreciation or depreciation to the work, the idea is a democratic equality to the art: “Street art at its most ideal would be an artistic form of expression accessible to all on the street without any commercial undertones.” (Reinecke, p.10) Yet the non-integration into the mechanisms of the art world does not mean that street art has transcended the institution of art, exists independently of it, it nevertheless still needs “the conceptions prevailing about art in any respective age [paraphrased, M. Dietzns] which essentially determines the spirit in which works will be received” (Bürger, p.29). The historical avant-garde movements first and foremost passed criticism on the institution of art and thus on itself as autonomous works of art. In the interest of realizing art, they radically questioned its function. The criticism of the institution of art necessarily includes a criticism of society, without which it would only be immanent remonstrance. The insight into basal social context and one’s own position within it are necessary components of forming a consciousness of the art of oneself. Without wanting to detract from the analysis, street art and those who practice it probably would need to attest to complete failure here. That which is seen as “political” in the statements of the artists and the works is, in the best case, affirmative ignorance and in the worst, anti-Semitism. In between the two, with sights set on consumerism, war and the police, the modern capitalistic patriarchy is only very briefly criticized or not even at all: “Banksy or Grim […] want their political messages to make people aware of the grievances of today’s time [sic], like excessive consumption or war.” (Reinecke. p.170); there’s also a “general sentiment and animosity

6 Intro

Theorizing

Submissions I

Submissions II

Outtakes

Impressum

Essay M. Dietzens, Germany Rebellion of signs? On the relationship between street art and avant-garde.

8 Intro

Theorizing

Submissions I

Submissions II

Outtakes

Impressum

Essay M. Dietzens, Germany Rebellion of signs? On the relationship between street art and avant-garde.

toward corporations and brands” (Gabbert, p.48). The majority of street art would thereby take the “viewpoint of criticizing consumerism and capitalism” (Gabbert, p.48). Consumer criticism plus company criticism equals capitalism criticism. That it doesn’t pay off is something which Banksy nevertheless realizes by adding the following at the end of one of his publications: “This is not a resource manual for a fucking advertising agency” (Banksy 2002, inside back cover). Almost pitiful is the helplessness which with he professedly tries to abruptly get a grip on the conditions closing in on him, turning to incantation. Since his work does not afford, for example due to intolerance, the impossibility of advertising agency interpretation, he has to live with the accusation of essentially understanding something under false pretenses or not even at all.

of art with their art, transcending it, revamping the social conditions according to the principles manifest in the art, street art concerns itself with immanence, to succeed in the institution of art and only then be taken seriously. It thereby fosters its own inconsistency, which is perhaps an expression of a general ignorance: artists belittle each other if they, like Banksy, sell their works at high prices or team up with “industry” as did Solo One, who gets paid to have his stickers exhibited on a fashion label. Street art wants on the one hand to be art, serious and noticed, and on the other, there appears to be a fetish for authenticity which constrains the artists from working with the hated “brands and companies” within the institution of art, or at least getting paid for their work. Perhaps it is social envy on the part of most of the artists unable to sell their products that leads to the disdaining of possible financial success. The abbreviated criticism of the institution of art, which is after all only directed at distribution and consumption, loses all sight of the full attaining of being received artistically and being a force to be reckoned with in society, and thus the social dimension of the institution of art, the ideal of street art boiling down to selfexploited recognition in the production of “positive” works (Reinecke, p.106). And yet at the same time, the artists have no inhibitions when it comes to hauling in their art from the street to the gallery. In cities like New York, street art, which truly is in the public arena, appears to only be an intermediate stage on the way to exhibiting in galleries, however without losing any of the rebellious disposition or making any conceptual changes in the work.

Autonomy / Immediacy The display of refreshing spontaneity and simplicity to street art arouses suspicion of false immediacy. In Gabbert’s words, street art also means “rebellion against the established business of art and exhibits” (Gabbert, p.89). This ostensibly critical attitude of the institution of art actually itself sounds like a call for recognition of: one not criticizing the art and exhibit business because conditions prevail there which obstruct and limit art or because art should in fact be freed from the isolation of the business of art, but rather because there is no place in business for artists; and the word “established” also needs to be specially emphasized: what can be established instead is an art business which also exhibits street art and appreciates it as art. This is not a transcending of circumstances but rather their reformation. Where the historical avant-garde movements had the goal of breaking out

The autonomy of the art in bourgeois society is not solely in its spatial isolation. What modern art does when detached from society rests with itself: it preserves that for which society has no place: it is an expression of suffering and thus a sanctuary for utopia and truth. In conveying that which it preserves, it would appear that people have missed the connection: that which is considered to be “genuine” and “good” art in the average consciousness historically still lies pre-Impressionism, at the latest perhaps with Kaspar David Friedrich. Everything which endangers the work’s harmony, the direct “recognition” of that which is presented and its beauty: the “unrealistic” colors, the abstraction, the intentional “ugliness”, the disassociation from artistic talents (“A three-year-old could do that!”), encounters a lack of understanding or even incurs the wrath of hatred from others. It seems to express itself in general resentment against the autonomy of the art. Peter Bürger stated that art, which in the modernistic becomes autonomous

and forms its own reference system with the institution of art, can basically no longer be “understood” in the sense of the work, if anything only a literal one-to-one “statement” can be inferred. The principle of the symbolic character of the work, which codes and decodes the work within a given reference system of symbols and meanings, can no longer apply to truly “sterile” autonomous art, produced neither for sacral nor courtly purposes, but rather as just a sub-segment of society. It is completely obvious that it is only possible with great difficulty for modern bourgeois consciousness to internalize, let alone comprehend, the expressive moment in modern art. It might also be a contradiction between the means of production and the circumstances of production: the conscious is not adequately able to deal with the modernistic works, it clings to objectively long-gone realities beyond the art. This contradiction certainly also defines the relationship to street art. There is certainly no question that most see graffiti as just scrawls at best or, in the worst case, as a criminal act of destruction (perhaps there is a declared objective in the art without the artists even being aware of it: the drive to destroy what still is, but which should be no longer). Even when street art occasionally escapes being categorized as a criminal offense by virtue of other techniques (cut-outs, stickers, posters, mini-installations), its reception is hardly any better. Usually it is the insiders who discover the “artistic interventions in the urban area” (Gabbert, p.17) while those who are not directly connected to the phenomenon simply overlook it. ( Reinecke, p.110, Note: “It can be noted from talking to outsiders who are not familiar with street art that much of the work is not even noticed.”) It’s also debatable whether street art should draw the attention of an outsider, whether he or she would even have the tools to approach it. That must rile the “artists” because their intention is to “amuse and enliven but also to inspire and chide reflection” (Gabbert, p.54). Those active in street art do not want to resign themselves to the isolation and ineffectiveness of modernistic art. But art which would be understood and not remain without effect, would thus be taken seriously, would no longer be that, but would instead be its abolishment, its “thrusting aside and fruition” (Debord, Thesis 191). What remains is the attempt to establish a rapport with the possible recipient, to deliver them what they understand, and those are “positive motives” (Reinecke, p.106): “the colorful mostly positive motives and words which the street activities disseminate are very popular” (Reinecke, p.106).

Projects / Design / Art (With this “positivism” and good – mood – force, the artists then take their leave toward design.) According to Reinecke, what has lured many graffiti artists to street art, and still does, is their transformation from outlaw sprayers to a more socially acceptable form of artistic self-expression in the public arena in order to lessen the risk of possible prosecution. The sprayers also strive for social recognition and legalization (“Graffiti is not a crime!”). This seems to parallel the “socio-critical” position in the yearning to find a niche in society, to muddle through in peace. Remaining a thorn in the artists’ side is obviously not so much the matter of dissidence and resistance (“Street art is directed against the hegemonic codes of the city“ Gabbert, p.17) but rather the fact that the self-empowered introducing of art into public spaces somehow does not meet with approval. Instead of thrusting the potential of street art right into the midst of this area of conflict: make something, create something, something to contrast the drabness and monotony of so many urban areas through which people wend their way and the social conditions expressed, it seems that the artists simply want to create their works, their art, and want praise for it. The art that the artists want to create is not the kind which can be directly realized in this society in this form. Instead of becoming cognizant of this, however, and operating and articulating right at the very core of this area of conflict, the tendency prevails to adapt the street art to the conditions, to yield to the tensions: street art should be recognized and graffiti legal. At the same time, interpretations of the effect of street art and the artists themselves speak of dissidence and subversion, of appropriation and reinterpretation of the public arena: “The wall in its function as a demarcating, protecting, structuring and ordering measure within the city is accorded a new function and a new sense” (Gabbert, p.47). However, the wall does not, as suggested, come by its function as a space for exhibiting art, a public gallery, as an usurping of its “function as a demarcating, protecting, structuring and ordering measure” but at the most additionally thereto; the wall is beautified, is given an appearance which distracts from its function. Street art has to put up with the question of whether it is not masking the would-be segregating, suppressing functions of the wall and whether promoting art on these walls does not instead tear them down as a consequence – or it at least make them so ugly that it becomes intolerable. Here a parallel could be drawn to graffiti, which most people find intolerable. Yet the will of the majority only calls for the walls to be cleared of graffiti, and not the city from the walls. In addition, in that the sprayers themselves defy the illegality, graffiti poisons its own well. Not because the graffiti makes reality

8 Intro

Theorizing

Submissions I

Submissions II

Outtakes

Impressum

Essay M. Dietzens, Germany Rebellion of signs? On the relationship between street art and avant-garde.

10 Intro

Theorizing

Submissions I

Submissions II

Outtakes

Impressum

Essay M. Dietzens, Germany Rebellion of signs? On the relationship between street art and avant-garde.

dance to its own tune or because it is emancipating, but only because it is illegal does graffiti even possess any potential at all. Legally, graffiti would only be its own destructiveness and would be about as far removed from wall painting as possible. Furthermore comes the question of whether the expression of the superficial fixation on the direct “criticism” of urban infrastructure, on gray walls, loses sight of the realities: “Street art frees the architecture of the urban area from its functional and institutional markings to redefine them as social fabric” (Gabbert, p.88). Which is untrue; rather, the architecture thereby loses its visible coldness and barrenness, affects a condition in which the actual urban infrastructure and buildings are “social fabric”. The deception of street art is not in its lavishing colors on walls and establishing street art installations in a public area, which is actually the result of the decisions and needs of the people who live therein, it would still have to be much more than simply self-expressed creations on the surface if it erroneously believes to be at most, like any art, providing a realization of intuitiveness. At the same time, street art also wants to “[…] surprise and entertain“ (quote from D*Face, Reinecke, p.112), and “[…] be understood and […] serve to amuse” (Reinecke, p.106). It is thus also a matter of directly “beautifying” the city, necessarily superficially. In this respect, street art approaches design because it is not striving to be anything else than what it is; perhaps coming to the defense of the sweeping judgment that it is thereby crap is Adorno’s thesis that it is “Not […] to be a summary judgment whether all one’s expressions are a Tabula Rasa, a mouthpiece of reified consciousness or the expressionless concept of denunciating.” (Aesthetic Theory, p.179). That would also inversely mean that it is not to be a summary judgment whether the “positive motive”, the smiling character, the colorful sprayed walls are ideology and deception or the anticipation of an unfettered mankind and the guardian of their potential. Whether street art thus thereby acts in such a way as if art could be directly realized in its here and now, perhaps through its lightheartedness and occasionally gaiety, its created caricatures, it creates tension, feasibly also the drive to appreciate the recognition that “the world is really not such a nice place at all, although it should be”. Or whether street art is not thereby being cynical, particularly since in a world in which Auschwitz could happen, that it acts in such a way as if it could rectify anything at all.

Form / Content Peter Bürger fixes the historical avant-garde movements at the beginning of the twentieth century at the position at which art arrives at self-confidence not solely in view of its stance to society, but also the availability of the artistic machinery in terms of technique. In the historical avant-garde movements the “artistic machinery […] available are at the detriment to diminishing content” (Bürger, p.25). It could thus be posed as to what extent the general availability of artistic machinery is recognizable in the products of street art. This juncture at the latest would call for individual differentiation and analysis from artist to artist, from work to work, which I can only touch on here at most. Many products of street art inherently tend toward a classifiable technology: stickers and posters are carriers of content leaving the form unaffected. These are thereby reliable and “established” techniques which also reinforce the creative character of street art in their interchangeability. Cut-outs pick up this tendency at least in the regard that the form is oriented somewhat further to the content; not being the stereotypical format to which just any content can be applied. Yet it is nevertheless a technology of “plastering on the wall”. The template which graffiti still holds close to, the pasted frames, are likewise artistic machinery employed for the most diverse content. Observable is a certain breaking away from the already successfully tested techniques versus the content which has been adapted to them. It can often work, as if a work would actually not be an independent product and result of decisions, but an agent of a genre, an exemplar. Perhaps there is a parallel between the superficial criticism of the prevailing circumstances and the superficial technology of street art. Although it must be considered that street art cannot completely unabashedly decide on techniques and then use them. Its strong pragmatic leaning toward hard and fast realization, forced on it by its nebulous status of legality, leaves little room for projects which go beyond a mere change and composition of urban surfaces. It is precisely its position detached from the institution of art which prevents the “artistic freedom” here, an autonomy not needing to defer to anything. Street art is thus simultaneously liberated and imprisoned: because it gains immediacy, it lacks the essential possibility of developing freely to the greatest extent possible. All which is conceivable in self-expressed artistic encroachments in the basic urban fabric and infrastructure is usually in the realm of the illegal and therefore must remain unrealized; not because one can’t do anything which is prohibited but rather because the risk of being apprehended during or after the realization is much too high.

The wholesale imposition of an “outcome” or result or conclusion is probably out of the question and would probably be wrong. The question to clarify of whether street art has an affirmative or critical function is dependent on individual analyses but not in order to gauge or determine whether the majority of the work is now critical or affirmative and generally attributed to the result of street art, but rather to sense a generalism in the distinctiveness of the individual works. Thus exactly that which this work does not afford. In the mainstream, as the discourse frivolously and unduly deflects inconsistencies, and thereby denies a deeper view of the dynamics and dilemma of the conditions, it certainly tries at least speculatively to capture that which gets stuck when reflecting on the problem, the question of whether contending with street art is even worth it. It’s the attempt to rattle the concept to see whether something of importance thereby falls out, something which is of importance today in the realization and understanding of art and its relationship to society and to utopia.

Morn, Germany

10 Intro

Theorizing

Submissions I

Submissions II

Outtakes

Impressum

Essay M. Dietzens, Germany Rebellion of signs? On the relationship between street art and avant-garde.

Morn, Germany

12 Intro

Theorizing

Submissions I

Submissions II

Outtakes

Impressum

Essay Andreas Ullrich, Germany From the Situationist International to the Sticker Activists of the 90‘s and 00‘s - A Comparison of Strategies

From the Situationist International to the Sticker Activists of the 90’s and 00’s - A Comparison of Strategies by Andreas Ullrich “When contemporary art is the approval of social parameters, then artists, artwork, and exhibition organizers are dispensable. Art, which finds its place in the public sphere, acts per se tangibly in social contexts, it intervenes already on the basis of its localization into social contexts which contain the respective conflict potentials. Outside the largely protected museum and gallery halls, the artworks expose themselves demonstratively to a public, yet at least a directly affected neighborhood. They are trouble makers within an economic, political, and social system that ostensibly pursues order, calm, and security. Wherever there is an already existing broad unanimity regarding the realization of an art project, it usually involves the approval of already existing aesthetic and contentual conventions.” Martin Koettering, Trouble Makers in the Public Interest, 1997 This short reflection shall illuminate a relatively recent phenomenon occupying our urban sphere which is reflected on walls, phone booths, rain drains, poster walls, mail boxes etc: stickers with graphic and textual motifs that have developed a remarkable collective symbolic language and can be found in each civilized city all over the world, from Singapore to Rio de Janeiro, Harare and Moscow. The movement which leaves these traces of graphical existence has grown within the past ten years and shows an astonishingly broad and intensive interconnectedness that is not last to be ascribed to similar living conditions in the post-industrial juggernaut that the mega-cities without doubt depict with their strict separation into living, working, and recreation spheres. Above this, another graphic global system of symbols has developed in just these times of the development of this new graphic form of intervention in the public sphere: that of logos and brands. This form depicts the actual model of sticker activities and chalks out the mechanisms of action of the economy of attention. I will, thus, show the necessity of the development of this form which depicts a rather obvious reaction to the modern urban context but which, consciously or subconsciously, in terms of form relates to the strategies of the European avantgarde of the 1950s, connecting those with the practice of a rarely theorizing, definitely design-keen, juvenile, and activist movement.

left: Jul 33, France, 2nd winner 2005

Especially remarkable is here that these references aren’t purposely chosen ones, but the state of the artistic avantgarde – in this context mainly the movements of the Lettristic International around I. Isou and the Situationist International around Guy Debord – and that of the modern-day interventionists which emanate from a similar mental state. The clear-cut strategies of the Situationists, the “Detournement,” the “Derive,” and the development of the psycho-geography are ways of being able to exhibit solicitousness regarding the world and its evolvement. Furthermore, they are attempts to return sovereignty and self-determination of one’s own environment back to the individual person. In order to illustrate today’s proportions of power and sovereignty, Guy Debord introduces the phrase “Society of the Spectacle,” meaning that the modern person loses ground through the “spectalization” of each social act and, consequently, degenerates into a spectator of his own existence. (“For the first time in history they said (the SI), human beings were no longer participants in but rather spectator of their own lives.”) This holds true for nearly all social realms like culture, trade, communication, arts, politics etc. in which strong aspirations and a concentration of power result in the individual as such feeling helpless and left out and backs away from his or her societal right to alter a legal relationship through the oppressive dominance of the self-proclaimed authority and flees into passivity. This essay is expressly not about criticizing power from a socio-romantic “Robin Hood” perspective but it is about the detection of the driving forces of the activists, as much as in the 50’s as now. As the phenomenon of defamiliarization and deindividualization had already gone hand in hand with the introduction of the mechanical production of wares and the reduction of the participating worker to a “legworker” of machines – thus not stating new facts, as we have learned from Karl Marx – the totality of this mechanical production and the automated administration and surveillance of all areas of life which was only recognized in the post-industrial society after all social switch points had been occupied by the lobby of mass production. The spreading automation can now be detected in visual communication as well, so completely that nobody can escape: on a normal stroll through a western town, one can see hundreds of graphic messages which compete for the attention of the observer. They are stuck to walls, ingested into the pavement, attached to all kinds of transportation, placed on clothing etc. Hardly any cultural event can do without them. One could almost say that it has always been this way when, as a matter of

12 Intro

Theorizing

Submissions I

Submissions II

Outtakes

Impressum

Essay Andreas Ullrich, Germany From the Situationist International to the Sticker Activists of the 90‘s and 00‘s - A Comparison of Strategies

left: Jul 33, France, 2nd winner 2005

14 Intro

Theorizing

Submissions I

Submissions II

Outtakes

Impressum

Essay Andreas Ullrich, Germany From the Situationist International to the Sticker Activists of the 90‘s and 00‘s - A Comparison of Strategies

fact, this kind of massive picture distribution to win over attention only became necessary with the massive overproduction resulting from a seeming need for the purchase of goods not necessarily of vital importance and needed to be created first. As the pictorial targeting system angles for an inflationary use so that an increasing number of messages need to be placed to gain the same effect, and this, additionally, is supposed to be used by an increasing number of producers, so that it results in the complete replenishment of our urban interface (the space which is not captured by travel ways or, respectively, living or work architecture in the urban space). It is interesting to notice that the town administration (the elected representation of its citizens) leases the space to have marketing messages attached by so-called town-furnishers which themselves, in turn, as an economically efficient corporation rent this out to companies with a visual sense of mission to increase their sales. Thus, the representation of the citizens itself reserves public space for the commercial use so that this space is withdrawn from the public. Worse yet, the town administration sells the attention of its citizens, therefore, the possibility of ingesting and – at a later point in time to influence or in the worst instance manipulate because the advertising space is ineffective when it is not noticed by a maximum number of passersby. The advertising space is not subject to any control of content so that companies command against which citizens cannot take a stand but have to bear them stoically. This uneven trade in which the citizen with the desire for movement is cheated out of his or her parts of its attention without receiving any consideration is presumably the activists’ main drive who are dealing with the public sphere with the help of graphic interventions. These interventionists, especially when undertaken with permanently adherent spray lacquers are of course persecute and harshly penalized by that same town administration which manages the leasing of the public space, as these are impermissible, without mercantile authorization, infractions on the optically commercialized town sphere. The graffiti are, for the most part, rather rude, optically little appealing as in extremely short amounts of time created infraction is less relevant. The means used for the pursuit of these unauthorized creations are much more interesting: means of law enforcement formed for just this single purpose, supported by helicopters, K-9 units, and measures of identification intelligence which leave one to conclude that this is, in fact, a great danger to the constitutional state rather than an optical, unauthorized infraction. So, it seems that the sovereignty over the attachment and production of signs in the public space is very important to state control, otherwise it wouldn’t be defended so vehemently. In fact, there are global signs pertaining to the relevance of functioning control of private propaganda. For instance, in New York with a pro-

hibi-tion of stickers and cuts outs in general or, for example, in Chicago where it amounts to pre-fascist mopping-up, where posters, stickers, graffiti etc. are covered in brown paint even where permitted on private properties like houses or cars, so that it creates a completely brown appearance and withdraws the important right to alter a legal relationship at one’s own property. However, let’s return to the subversive infraction that is not state authorized: it is a fairly idle endeavor to move about the streets at night, unseen, especially since the traces left behind are unique creations and, therefore, the amount is limited from the get go. In order to oppose the inflationary picture spectacle with a similarly forceful strategy, it is necessary to adapt the operating principles of the town-furnishers and to serially produce tools of intervention that are spread about by several distributors. For this purpose stickers of all sizes are suitable. Here, it is not important to differentiate into industrial serial production (foil stickers) or manual serial production (especially large-sized paper cutouts which are copied and attached with wallpaper paste as both directions do without the notion of the unicum which was meant to help some graffiti gain its arts status.

Zemogleba, Spain, “Hombre de Stracciatella”

The mass production and distribution in the urban space means a lively creative and anonymous exchange with a public basis. Because of low costs it is now possible for everyone to participate in the illustration of one’s environment and to not leave this to the only authorized entity (see above) – a consequent reversal of a previously established magic bullet model. The own message or own graphic code can now be synchronized, through which a conscience for the changeability of the environment develops in the first place even though the infraction admittedly seems very small and playful. But exactly in this playful youthfully disrespectful dealing with one’s environment it forms another parallel to the Situationists’ view on the defamiliarization and ways out of it. It might even be a counter position to the logical structure of environment and the advancement through systematic division of labor and specialization – even to a technology-devoted “Homo Faber.” Through infractions on the familiar order, the changeability of the surface of human environments and housing becomes apparent. Technology and controllability are confronted with the playful recreation as the principle of the world (as a constant, chaotic reorganization). Homo Ludens embodies, thus, the ideal form of the creative mind. In Situationist theory of the creation of the avant-garde as the highest purpose of art and as the pronounced goal of the avant-garde, a classical essay by John Huizinga from 1938 (“Homo Ludens”) has become an argumentative pillar (Guy Debord had discovered this text for himself in 1952 through Ralph Rumney) because he described how in the name of progress and the development of society, the principle of play was substantially more important than that of work and, thus, it is a strong plea against rationalism which is surely popular in the circles of the surrealists around Andre Breton. In the environment of the sticker activists, one can most dominantly feel the researching playful spirit that explores the effect of the infractions on the public spheres and changes them continuously. Therefore, it is a processual job with constant interim results and without the goal of the creation of a final, “perfect” work. Thus, few activists see themselves as artists since there is no need for a distinct work repertoire. Instead, the activity is more likely to be understood as a socio-cultural engineering in which they react to the demands of their own environment. Hence, undertaking an individualization of the living sphere which, however, is constantly subject to negotiation and can be altered or advanced by other activists so that, at best, a graphic communication and a discussion of the code may emerge. Here, they mostly forego distinct, clearly readable messages and have perfected the means of exaggeration, cynicism or the recuperation. Note that the activist always remains in the dark regarding the effect his or her traces will have. The activist understands himself more as an external observer and comments his environment in public (but not unambiguous) form

but without revealing himself. In the process, it is significant to correctly conceive meanings and effects of installations in the public space and to search the surroundings for possible interventions (see above), so to analyze the architectonic space for discrepancies and to find possible connections. This analysis of the urban space usually happens during nightly rambles – without a clearly planned destination – because an especially successful intervention only emerges with the conformance of surroundings and motif, with the initiation of a reciprocal effect between the met situation and its annotation or, respectively, alteration. This doesn’t happen in rational analysis but in rackety association, in the atmosphere of free combination of the foreign with the own. The process of this vagrancy is comparable to the Situationist strategy of the “Derive.” Frequently, Debord and his group left stickers and textual interventions behind during such vagrancies. Often, they possessed a poetic character, which could definitely come across as vulgar and didn’t know the boundaries of private property on building and decoration surface. As stickers have a short life and intervention span of 1-2 years until they deteriorated (bleached, effloresced) anyway, the activists’ level of inhibition is certainly vastly lowered to “play with” other people’s property. The infraction isn’t permanent and, thus, not harmful to the substance and realized easily and without prosecution. The consequence is the production of enormous sticker formats of up to 2x3 m, cut out of paper and attached with wallpaper paste which usually adorn abandoned industrial and residential buildings, in the sense of individual town furnishing which deserves its name too and doesn’t steer toward the global assonance of target marketing. Note that the size and frequency of interventions is proportionate to the size of the surrounding urban space. Consequently, the density and artistry of evens for instance in Berlin and New York are the largest. This allows for the conclusion that there is a direct reaction to the symbol systems established by merchandise management whose influence is the largest in just those urban spaces. Notwithstanding a few exceptions, the sticker activities forego a clear association of authorship for a certain motif, they merely use the same medium as that of the graphic advertising but without establishing their own value (to their benefit) which might be readable or obvious by means of logos and feed back to a readymade product systems. But how could it be that the motifs of stickers are similar all over the world and are mostly produced with the same technique of similar stylistics and even content-wise are very close? This isn’t too surprising when it is explained with the reaction to the globally established logo system of the merchandising management as this forms the basis for the verbalization of a consistently comprehensible code and graphically communicated value systems (e.g. the “Lacoste

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Impressum

Essay Andreas Ullrich, Germany From the Situationist International to the Sticker Activists of the 90‘s and 00‘s - A Comparison of Strategies

Zemogleba, Spain, “Hombre de Stracciatella”

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Essay Andreas Ullrich, Germany From the Situationist International to the Sticker Activists of the 90‘s and 00‘s - A Comparison of Strategies

Crocodile”). It merely represents the prototype for a new local and non-local communication and comprises the possibility to globalize the criticism of the logo’ization of the world (the dominance of a few global players over offers and prices which predicated not on quality but continuous presence and quantity). This mostly happens with the help of the internet and the opportunity of global exchange in forums and groups of similar interests, as is the case with sticker activists. Special user forums or archives, like www.ekosystems.org or www.stickeraward.net, are host to and regularly organize several thousand sticker creators to communicate and exchange ideas, motifs, strategies, and motivations for urban intervention. These platforms are, moreover, online archives with several ten thousand photographic depictions of successful infractions and creative interventions of ever new inspirations and readable reference of these symbols or code language.

right: Renald, Russia, 3rd winner 2008

Summary With the sticker movement emerged a trend that is often consolidated under the terms “Street Art” or “Public Art”, thus, defining a certain place of activity. However, in this classification it also assumes an artistic claim which can only be applied in a limited manner, especially if one aims at the individual character of a piece of work. Since stickers, as a direct reaction to the criticized expansion of a commercial picture machinery (and along with it a value definition machinery), are produced just as copiously, and they aim at the sensitization of the observer for medial mechanisms of effectivity with the means of the demonstration of same, the motives of the activists need to be searched in the philosophical (enlightening), sociological, and political fields as much as in the artistic. A distinctly discernible authorship is thus unnecessary. The fact that the effectiveness of this form of intervention remains very restricted as it bears a dialectic relation to the criticized world of logos and its forms of representation and for this reason is somehow dependent, is not a disadvantage. Rather, it documents the inherent political position and establishes a necessary opposition in the struggle for urban space. Similar to the Situationist International (if one were to call the linked up sticker activists a group), there ensues a playful, nugatory liability to observation and to the exposure to the environment without being able to deliver a more positive alternative draft. Several aspects of the SI criticism, particularly urban living conditions can be found with the sticker activists, even the techniques of observation and the exercise of influence are similar in many regards. The instrument of “Detournement” (the modification of the encountered pictorial or graphic motifs, e.g. large - sized poster surfaces) is realized specially efficiently with broad impact, the cynical - sarcastic tone of the SI stills seems to be the “godfather“.

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Impressum

Essay Andreas Ullrich, Germany From the Situationist International to the Sticker Activists of the 90‘s and 00‘s - A Comparison of Strategies

right: Renald, Russia, 3rd winner 2008

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Essay Christian Hartard, Germany The Subversion Eats its Children - Notes during a walk through the city of symbols

The Subversion Eats its Children - Notes during a walk through the city of symbols by Christian Hartard “Laugh now, but one day we’ll be in charge” Banksy

I Street Artists seem to believe in revolution. Hardly any publication, at any rate, which takes on board the basis-aesthetic illustration of the city sphere, can do without the mobilization of its vocabulary: Rebellion! Subversion! Civil disobedience! Resistance! Guerilla! Shouted from every nook and corner. Are the barricades burning yet? Can you see the beach underneath the cobble? Well, not quite yet. For now, they make do with attaching colorful stickers to lamp posts. But just you wait… By the way, my father is also a believer in revolution. Somewhere in the far left of the chest of this retired town counselor beats a revolutionary’s heart which makes him say comical things every once in a while: it is about time (for instance) the bigwigs be tied to lamp poles already. My father, however, also believes in the revolutionary potential of his private orthography whose main characteristic consists of the consequential lower case writing style. The sticker sedimentations, on the other hand, proliferating over the lighting facilities and illumination mediums of the city are deemed to be concrete evidence for a rapidly spreading vandalism. Consequently, it is hard to reach an accord on the definition of revolution – or the adequate use of lamp poles, for that matter.

II The fact that accord is so hard to come by is a signature of present times. One might call this pluralization, one might take pleasure in the stimulating polymorphism of society or regret its puzzling complexity. Most of all, however, one can attest a gain in freedom, a freedom which street art, among others, owes its existence to: one my deviate, contradict, rub oneself raw over. And one can even hope for sympathy in terms of one not legal form or another – at least with that part of the audience which believes its own (actual or desired) difference to the normal, every-day, conventional depicted and justified, Red Ink, Germany

whilst whoever draws meaning from their own otherness, need not moan about the fact that others are different too, that old terms of consensus may remain intact but that behind the façade that which they were once supposed to denote and keep together has dissolved into individual into individual fragments. Society, morals, truth reality, the entire arsenal of former indivisibilities has since frayed under the centrifugal forces of modernism into disparate milieus and functional spheres of conflicting interests and world views, moral discrepancies and two-faced truths which were patched together after a fashion with the silken thread of a consistent terminology. Nevertheless, there is discomfort about this dissipation; there is a desire for unifying moments, for a connection of that which is falling apart, for an Archimedean point from which this fragmented world may be comprehensible as a whole and ideal. The notion that such a place must remain utopia, a non-place, does not hinder one in the search for the concrete thing: in the public sphere of our cities we hope to find it. Because this is at the core of all death songs and resurrection hymns which conjure the urban free zone: that this is a place, or has been, or really should be, in which society can glimpse into their own faces as if in front of a mirror. Yes, better yet: a place in which, ideally, it can experience a cooperation of all its heterogeneous elements. Such a harmony-drunk conception of the public sphere is, however, not only naïve but, more than that, dangerously totalitarian as it offers the dream of a cleansed social interface free of aberrations and cleansed of contradiction as medicine against social disavowals. Somewhat more sober, albeit not without starry-eyed optimism, is the hope that the public sphere were to at lest offer a truthful effigy of these disavowals: a kaleidoscope in which the sundries might appear juxtaposed but still jointly visible, in which the conflicts aren’t hidden, but remain solvable through their evidence alone. Nevertheless, the idea of a public space which collects the dispersed in one place and visualizes it plainly, it presupposes that, indeed, all access to this stage. Nothing would be peculated, not the beautiful nor the dingy, not the loud nor the quiet, the well-liked nor the cranky. But what if even the minimal demand of a coexistent presence of the diverging is an illusion? If in the reality of the drifting-apart town society by no means encounters itself, not different on different, but only same on same because the public space has long been cut up into function zones and separated into social monoculture because the unpresentable, the objectio-

18 Intro

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Impressum

Essay Christian Hartard, Germany The Subversion Eats its Children - Notes during a walk through the city of symbols

The Subversion Eats its Children - Notes during a walk through the city of symbols by Christian Hartard “Laugh now, but one day we’ll be in charge” Banksy

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Essay Christian Hartard, Germany The Subversion Eats its Children - Notes during a walk through the city of symbols

nable, has been marginalized and left to fend for its own? Architecture an interior decoration are symbolic representations of the dynamics of power and impotence, imprints of social structures, orders, norms which are branded into the inmates of the symbolically over - formed town in a highly effective manner and, thus, as a reality perceived to be true. Whatever is not represented doesn’t exist in their reality. So, when graffiti drawers, stencil sprayers, sticker attachers, cut-our gluers, open-air installers, guerilla gardeners, ad shredders, over-poster painters, and other street artists are driven by the mission to lodge themselves into the cracks of the city and to re-conquer dissident recesses of attention in the public space against the blind spots of consciousness – then, all their legacy as representatives could stand for everything that is discarded as urban throw-out. They can raise the assumption that there is a life beyond the functional gearing, beyond the architectonic cosmetics and economic battery of the urban space. The products of Street Art themselves would become symbols: hinting at that which is absent or, more precisely: the absence of that which is absent. They would be, if you like, abstract symbols in their purest form: placeholders, namely, for that which was made invisible in the public space.

III Each town is a book. As across the lines of a text does our glance wander or do our feet walk. The houses and walls of the city, its streets and squares, the wide expanses, the hidden backyards, the ornament of lamps, advertisement columns, traffic signs, neon signs: all of these are letters, words, sentences, which want to be read. Among them are exclamation marks like the glass palaces of the banks and insurance companies which have outstripped the churches and town halls of old. Question marks mix among them: a construction trench, fallow land, housing estates of the satellite towns – what was there in the past, where does it continue, where will it cross to? Between dashes – a bench in the park, spacing greens, a bridge from here to there. Forward, backward, sideways, one stutters along main clauses and auxiliary clauses, stumbles over omissions and insertions. One protocols the laconic announcements of a red light or the whine of billboards, the gruffly No of a fence as much as the friendly summons of the shopping malls (that, because of the gentle force of their glittering squeaky clean interior keeps the unwanted away as it is, can very well do without fences). To move about town means: being part of a story which is assembled from a myriad of symbols; from mediums of social reality which, depending on the critical distance of the reader, manifests itself either openly behind its symbolic copy or remains concealed illegibly. But who tells the story? And would we write our own stories into the text of the town, those insignificant episodes, meaningful only to us, those small private adventures? We have to arrange ourselves in this city of symbols in order to make it habitable. Every day, we seek to make this space meaningful to us by using it according to our needs (or to evade it), to dress it with subjective memories (or to forget), to perceive its symbols as important (or to ignore as unimportant). Maybe we even succeed in discovering those spots in which the finished product of the urban design can be outsmarted: the beaten track one draws off that path, the skateboard which glides over handrails and concrete ramps. Such a personalization of the urban world of symbols is, admittedly, constricted to close boundaries through a rigid definition of function and factual practicability of the constructed environment. Is the alternative interpretation of already existing signs still possible in principle, does the alternative production of new signs fail throughout in the light of administrative, legal, and not last financial barriers. Therefore, Street Art is left to search for the crazes in the symbolically sealed armors, to settle in the footnotes and between the lines of the urban text. Their self-authorization strategy is, thus: parasitic:

if the potential of an own production of symbols is limited, one can still plunder the armory of one’s opponent, with just that “splintered, tactile and tinkering creativity,” which Michel de Certeaus recommends in his “The Practice of Everyday Life”, Street Art poaches in the already existing mediums: the house fronts, firewalls, transformer boxes, phone booths, garbage cans, billboards, traffic furnishings. It perceives itself as a blind passenger who uses the commercialized and functionalized city surface and audaciously for its semiotic freeloading which, ”with the ingenuity of the weak benefits from the strong,” (de Certeaus) who scents those loopholes everywhere in this thicket of meaning trough which one can smuggle in unorthodox, alienating, unexpected variants of the social. And not without Schadenfreude do the gatecrashers annotate that their spoofed host will have to pay the bill for his own subversion. The promise of this is a school of seeing: an instigation of the self-determined contact with the space and its codes, a waiting for moments in which behind the power to discipline of alleged necessities flares up another reality as something possible. Is this revolution already? Maybe we should rather speak of romanticism.

IV “When I use a word,” says Humpty Dumpty, the egg on the wall, to little Alice, “then it means exactly what I let it mean – no more and no less.” – “But the question is,” interjects Alice, “if you can give the words as many different meanings just like that.” – “The question is,” says Humpty Dumpty, “who has the power – that is all.” Even in Wonderland behind the mirror do the questions of meaning turn out to be questions of power. That this is different in the real world, one may doubt with good reason; and perhaps one then has to admit that, despite all friendly attempts in foisting a poetic counter-communication on the one-way communication of the public sphere, the symbolic language of the cities has essentially remained the same that Jean Baudrillard called the “speech without reply.” The weights might be distributed too unevenly as that the urban display may, indeed, be re-coded by the homeopathic infiltrations of Street Art. One can wallpaper the dreariness of reality as one wants: a wall remains a wall. Neither sordid shopping malls nor vulgar billboards change their meaning through the subversive bicrolage, and the gesture of intimidation of the investor architecture become no more inviting as the dismal satellite towns become bearable or the freeway shamrocks become green. Yes, not even the anger over all this can necessarily find their outlet; because the masses hurry past the Street Art products with the ever same baffled-apathetic lack

Knudzich, Norway, 3rd winner 2007

of interest with which they put with the ugliness of the daily routine (insofar as they don’t count the scribbles and sticking to belong to the ugliness). That the well-intentioned countersigns threaten to drift into a subcultural self-gratification event is not only to be attributed to their marginality, it also has to do with the hardly terminable inanity of each self-authorized symbolism in the public sphere, an alleged privatization of the urbane can only be countered with the privatization with other measures. What is meant to be a critical externalization is elsewhere perceived as a visual expropriation: that which claims to be a contribution to emancipation, is understood as an act of patronization. And one notes that the feigned signs for the excluded itself inheres an excluding mechanism of distinction: namely a narcissistic marking of territory which is meant to draw the boundary between the elitist network of the hepcats and the army of uncomprehending Philistines. The credibility trap snaps automatically. In the end, it is surprisingly not the functional-economic corsets of the city which become the aim of general scorn; it is rather the semiotic maneuver of misappropriation against which the audience reflexively comes to the defense of the normal proportions which the aesthetic activists stepped up the damask.

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Essay Christian Hartard, Germany The Subversion Eats its Children - Notes during a walk through the city of symbols

Knudzich, Norway, 3rd winner 2007

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Essay Christian Hartard, Germany The Subversion Eats its Children - Notes during a walk through the city of symbols

But what, actually, if observed in light, do the symbolic occupations of Street Art expose? Possibly to start with: themselves. What becomes immediately apparent is their undoubtedly good sense for fresh design, for the catchy phrase, the surprising wit, the clever idea. These are inestimable qualities, but only such that one might expect from forever young creative directors who equip their offices with football tables and cappuccino makers and suffer from their first heart attack at 35. Especially stylistic proximity of the elaborate Post-Graffiti to the picture-worlds of lifestyle magazines and advertisement agencies is rather irritating. Is this not a tad too stylish, smooth, cool, or cheerful – as if there was something to laugh about? Is this still authentic dissidence – or is it already countercultural wellness? Of all things it is maybe those jaded, awkward products of the scene that neither display a reasonably decent visual effect nor get a passable slogan on which the righteous scorn toward the urban census apparatuses can be felt. And maybe it should be about just that: leaving symbols, that aren’t accepted and aren’t meant to be sensible; traces that cannot be consumed as a smart layout without further ado or can be dissolved into a message; hackwork which in their intolerability of their form balk at the sublimating annexation; symbols which, because they so ostensibly do not denote anything, are open enough to indeed absorb new meanings and are recognizable as indicators of racist exclusion. This, namely, is the dilemma of an urban and social criticism with the spray tin: that each attempt in filling archaic, free of reference befouling of one’s own nest aesthetically and content-wise, to turn resistant out-of-office messages into devoted office holders. The Work on the Message, thus, leads to easily digestible phrase-mongering which merely adds more paroles to the information explosion of the public sphere: one is against war and for peace, against deportation and for the release of Mumia Abu-Jamal, against nuclear power and for the right to a cultivated purple haze – and promptly informs mankind of this. The Work on the Form, on the other hand, leads to the establishment of the arts: a star like Banksy is then no longer required to (as he was only a few years ago) secretively smuggle his works into museums; instead, the originals go – after a short quarantine in the subversive flow heater – over the counters at Christie’s or Bonham’s for five or six figure of British Pound sums, while the less moneyed fans are peddled with reproductions in the form of coffee table books. After all, this is still more honest than, say, the selfextraction of Street Art gurus like Zevs or Blu, who coated the town sphere of Wuppertal in the summer of 2006 with their works in a cloak-and-dagger operation – invited, financed and planned with military precision and lead on a safety line by the PR people of an Austrian caffeinated soda corporation.

right: 247, Germany

Nonconformism is venal and sells well. But how does one escape a system that can imbibe even dissent as radical chic? You might run and sidestep by inventing a new kind of urban decoration every year: one tiles open-air mosaics, one uses pressure washers to till dazzlingly white logos into the dirt of the facades, one builds miniature dioramas of toy figures into the corners of the city. But this quickly turns into a Race between Hare and Hedgehog¹ , in which the unruliness of Street Art plays itself out and their commercial ancillary executors await a beautiful corpse. Just because the aesthetic means of the “semiological guerilla” (Umberto Eco) are, at times, very close to the design, there is hardly an instrument in the alternative toolbox anymore that itself could be misappropriated economically and mixed under the symbols of the public sphere with borrowed Street Credibility. Thus, the dissident gesture turns into a sales-promoting flavor enhancer and the artist then becomes the useful idiot of an advertising industry which he provides with ideas, free of charge. The victims of this theft, on the other side, must not lament this hostile takeover, as the reinstallment of foreign elements of their own discourses is exactly their tactics. Their subversion, meanwhile, ends tragically: as an affirmative vermicular appendix of just that reality which, at one time, they had wanted to undermine. All the sadder, all the more beautiful, all the more useless and all the more important, that everywhere, day in and day out, so many diehard hopefuls try to prove the possibility of the contrary. It is a pretty damn fine line on which they balance – like Humpty Dumpty, the Egg on the Wall. But even that, as is well-known, falls down.

¹ A German tale, similar to the Hare and the Tortoise, in which the hedgehog outsmarts the hare by having his wife wait on the other side of the field – giving the impression the hedgehog is faster than the hare.

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Essay Christian Hartard, Germany The Subversion Eats its Children - Notes during a walk through the city of symbols

right: 247, Germany

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Essay Wiebke Gronemyer, Germany The Art of Failure

scent and was right on track straight to an interview with him. Pulling the strings of my newly discovered network I tried to contact Fairey through my friend’s brother, then through my friend’s friend who coincidentally happened to be his gallerist in New York, who then passed me on to his graphic studio in Los Angeles…and so on and so forth. Easygoing, I thought. I’ll get it. Already I had all these questions in mind that I wanted to ask him: the ones on hipster mainstream culture, the ones on street art and its commercialisation, very obviously the ones on his Obama portrait, and the ones on art and politics. At first instance Shepard seemed like a great community organizer, just like Obama, who he pictured in his iconic portrait in a manner that articulated the feelings and passions of millions of Americans for a new kind of leader. With his red-white-andblue portrait published in early 2008 when Obama was still just a presidential candidate, Fairey hit the Obamania moment to become both the Americans’ and the President’s darling. This clearly also opened him the doors into the institutional art world. Days after the inauguration of President Obama in January 2009 he celebrated his own inauguration as the underground-made-institutionalized artists with a retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Boston. At the same time, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington acquired the Obama portrait for their presidential walk of fame, adding some colour to their mostly boring paintings.

Shepard Fairey Obama Poster in Denver Colorado, Photo by David Shankbone, 2009

The Art of Failure by Wiebke Gronemeyer

It all started quiet colloquially. In November 2008 a friend of mine came over from New York to visit London for a couple of days. We had been working together at the Guggenheim in New York and ever since she comes to town we go on a casual art trip. Although our mind was clearly set on art while strolling around the streets of London, it happened that accidentally we had popped into one of these cute little clothing stores, which offered everything from second-hand to upand-coming design – and Shepard Fairey.

This seemed like the perfect symbiosis of art lover and shop addict, street culture and posh sophistication. Add some revolutionary attitude and rebel hairstyle to it and you have the perfect recipe for a pretentious art hipster on a rainy Saturday afternoon: never too dark to be cool. I guess the problem was just that me and my friend had first of all forgotten our sunglasses, but more importantly an actual interest in art and a quite critical approach towards it. We started wondering what was to be done with this peculiar encounter. (Also, we didn’t have our sunglasses with us). We spent time talking about Fairey’s practice, his development from cool to hip to hot to Mr. President, from sub-culture to mainstream to all-American to all over London. A little while later my friend told me that she actually knows him through her brother, who back in the nice and innocent early days had been friends with him. Here it was that I catched the

I bow humbly before Creation – and must clearly admit that having made it to a level of importance where the President is your best buddy, there is just no time for an interview, which Fairey’s lovely assistant cancelled three minutes prior to it, and ever since prefers rather not to answer my questions and e-mails. However, this failure in communication worked to my advantage. I figured that with the loss of communication between us came a loss of my interest in his work, and not just for me, but for most of the community that share a profound interest in street art and urban culture, which he failed to inspire any longer. Street art is a culture whose mission is to profile a name and stake out a territory – but not in Washington’s National Portrait Gallery. Yet Fairey seems to resist any typical categorization as ‘fine’ artist, graphic designer, political organizer, or businessman, a common ground is to be found in the commercialisation of all his works, extensively so in the gallery world. Thereby he has not only broken many of the written rules in the art system, but more so violated the unwritten rules of street art ethos. Unless a work in Washington’s National Portrait Gallery could be considered as truly aspiring and engendering upheaval, Fairey seems to have lost the

revolt-fostering and revolutionary means of communication that once were so essential for him in the early days of his André the Giant Has a Posse sticker campaign. I doubt it. And I started asking myself: At what point does the walk from street to gallery turn the art into a commercially driven product that no longer belongs on the street? Trapped in his own homemade struggle, his art has mutated from street to gallery, from culture to concept, from medium to style. The status of Shepard Fairey as a street artist is questionable and doubtful at best, despicable at worst. His work is marketable, sellable, and stretchable to the extend that it doesn’t have much in common with the anarchic character that it was once founded on, and which now seems to fade into structures of establishment. Everything that some (long) time ago made for the radical character of Fairey’s work – values like revolt, renewal, revival and innovation – have now become no more than a symbolistic and also simplistic heritage on which his commercial success heavily relies on. More drastically, what his work is all about seems to be recognition and identification, which he clearly demonstrated with his Pop-art-style politician portraits’, of which Obama was only the last in a series that also featured Lenin and Mao. But isn’t it striking that exactly identification and recognition are elements that street art would not hesitate to negate and even undermine when it comes to the persona behind the work? Shepard Fairey has long given up the aim to free himself or his stuff from the thoroughly commercialised cultural production and stands in sharp contrast to other recent tendencies in which urban artists refuse to integrate long-lasting, recognizable approaches in their own work. When Fairey explained his driving motivation on the occasion of his 2009 solo exhibition at the ICA in Boston, he claimed: “The real message behind most of my work is ‘question everything’”. As I took this offer quite literally, I met a square refusal. This failure, however, turned out to be rather productive for both of us: I didn’t have to deal with him, but only with his work in which he doesn’t occupy himself anymore with critical values, but only with capital. We both failed respectively to our own and individual missions. This leaves me to say: next time I either stick to the clothes, or I better get my sunglasses going with me.

24 Intro

Theorizing

Submissions I

Submissions II

Outtakes

Impressum

Essay Wiebke Gronemyer, Germany The Art of Failure

Shepard Fairey Obama Poster in Denver Colorado, Photo by David Shankbone, 2009

The Art of Failure by Wiebke Gronemeyer

26 Intro

Theorizing

Submissions I

Submissions II

Outtakes

Impressum

Interview The autonomous A.F.R.I.K.A. group, Germany

Interview: The Autonomous A.F.R.I.K.A. Group WASTE YOUR YOUTH! Question: In your book ‘Guidebook of the Communication Guerrillas’ you cover graffti among other things. How has the scene changed over past ten years?

Q: No subcultural practice has ever been so trendy as Street art. Today, the art market celebrates the ‘New Wild Youth’ and the advertisement industry imitates this style. A tragedy?

Answer: The first graffiti were probably the paroles the working class movement painted on the walls. Insofar is a time period of ten years for the observation of larger trends rather short-sighted. In any case, the form of the graffiti has become more diversified. Generally, the enormous quantity is remarkable. There are two main trends, one of them being tags which have no aesthetic aspirations but which are more scentmarks of those who otherwise have no opportunity to leave their traces in the public sphere. On the other hand, forms of graffiti have diversified even further: an added art context in which graffiti artists assert claims beyond political paroles and struggle for the recognition of graffiti as an art form. This doesn’t really surprise: all subcultures and forms of protests see themselves confronted with the problem of appropriation. It is virtually the function of the art scene to play a pioneering role. Nevertheless, there will always be subversive graffiti, and equally ‘in-between worlds’ – as for example in the case of the ‘sprayer of Zurich,’ Harald Naegli, who realised, because of his role as pioneer and at the same time his aesthetic adeptness, both aspirations to a high degree.

A: Each subculture and each lifestyle gets exploited. The success of graffiti is no defeat but, on the contrary, shows that particular forms of piping up are popular and that this is something we can build on. It is an expression of the strength of subcultures to have their forms of articulation picked up by completely different people than the ones who actually started it and to have it used in different contexts. The other side too, the Faschos (the Nazis), try to imitate these forms. In their conformist rebellion and their alleged uprising, they adapt forms of protest and, thus, attempt to articulate a pseudo opposition. The fact that aesthetics can be ‘abducted’, be it by means of their commercial exploitation or by their adaptation through the Nazis – the Autonomist Nationalists have, for example, adapted the entire autonomous aestheticism and rhetoric of the street fighting – should raise our suspicions: the form of political articulation alone (like the use of graffiti, stickers, or particular clothing codes) does not account for a political statement. Conversely, this does not mean that the invention and advancement of political forms of expression counted for nothing. There is no safe place, we do not find ourselves permanent conflict and struggle for hegemony. For this reason, content, context, and form of expression always need to be considered together. The rest is craft. But this is exactly what it takes too: we need people who are brave enough to spray and to apply their stickers in the middle of the night. However, we shouldn’t delude ourselves: the advertising industry will always try and appropriate youth cultures – and profit from them. This is not too tragic. Tragic is only the misunderstanding there could be cultural forms which are ‘per se’ antagonistic, critical, or subversive. Whoever believes they are subversive just by belonging to a particular subculture which uses the respective symbolic language, complete with the corresponding rituals of communication, they are caught in a pubertal perspective of rebellion which will be finished at some point. Then, at the latest, all their insignias, signs, and symbols will have become part of capitalist exploitation.

Q: When is a sticker subversive? A: The form itself is not subversive; it comes – as usual – down to the context. Even a CDU sticker can be subversive when it is placed correspondingly. The southern German town of Marbach a.N. once saw CDU stickers advertising the visit of the then Federal President Herzog. They got stuck on numerous cars which brought on storms of outrage. And naturally, nobody believed the CDU that the stickers weren’t theirs. According to situation, it is, thus, the unfamiliar combination of content, place, and form which provokes irritation and, therefore, shapes criticism and contributes to subversion. But there is no assurance on subversion. This does not only hold true for the applied arts but also for the politically motivated practices of the communication guerrillas – subversive moments emerge in concrete situations and can neither be guaranteed, nor can they be brewed up from according to the books.

images: I Moose, Germany II Credit 00, Germany next page: SNDRV, Netherlands

Q: But through its omnipresence, doesn’t Street art lose its power and possibilities? A: To say it in the words of Jean Baudrillard: the attempt of a public sticker pasting, thus, an acquisition of the public sphere through Street art, is a struggle to designate what the

public space has to look like. This, too, is a political act and everyone, and not just the powerful and the advertisers, can participate. To us, this argumentation is too formal. We know the example for Hamburg’s trendy district of Wilhelmsburg in which the parole went around to better not spray because graffiti produces certain flair and trendy character and can, this way, advocate gentrification. Conversely, street artists are commissioned by the municipal authorities to decorate public bogs in order to prevent tagging. The world is sometimes this complicated. You really need to watch closely when the practices of Street art and graffiti can make a difference. Q: Is the new generation lacking political consciousness and comprehension? A: The narrative of generations that do not possess a political consciousness is not something we do. Allegedly, each successive generation is more non-political and/or dumber than the preceding one. This ever recurring myth attests to the lacking intellectual penetration of social conditions. Maybe it is the other way around: maybe the vigilantes of the younger generation know much better when particular things are political nowadays, perhaps they even have a different concept of the political and, maybe political mobilisation works differently nowadays too. Heiligendamm is one such example – who would have thought that that so many politically active people would show up, successfully realise counteractions on a symbolic level and steal the show from the G8 Summit. We strongly suggest being very careful before making such assertions. Because we are under the impression that political movements form differently today. They become increasingly project-like, networking-like, and don’t function as much in the classical modus of the new social movement with plenum and action group. In fact, there is an increasing individualisation, and people often organise on call. But they are, by all means, ready to get involved and the projects and mobilisations emerging ad hoc can be surprisingly effective. The classical activist is certainly unhappy but he always has been. He has always belonged to a minority and has understood himself to be at the forefront of movements which had to tell the others the ins and outs. Sometimes, stickers and graffiti might just serve an aesthetical self-discovery project. And that is okay too. We are no Leninists who want to patronise others and tell them what and how they can communicate. We accept when individuals get themselves an aerosol can and do their thing with it. And then you just have to bank on not always having the precisely fitting phrasings. You can then criticise the content but first of all it is a positive thing that contributes to empowerment.

Q: What would be your advice to the coming generation? A: Waste your youth! You shouldn’t try to be part of a youth movement – no matter what age. It is not about being a ‘communication guerrilla’ either. You see the question is: whom do I actually want to unnerve and what do I want to be in its stead? How can I conceive social change to be? How can I try to undermine the capitalist permeation of society? In terms of an emancipatory practice this will always be its aspiration – also regarding good stickers and good graffiti.

26 Intro

Theorizing

Submissions I

Submissions II

Outtakes

Impressum

Interview The autonomous A.F.R.I.K.A. group, Germany

Q: No subcultural practice has ever been so trendy as Street art. Today, the art market celebrates the ‘New Wild Youth’ and the advertisement industry imitates this style. A tragedy?

images: I Moose, Germany II Credit 00, Germany next page: SNDRV, Netherlands

30 Intro

Theorizing

Submissions I

Submissions II

Outtakes

Impressum

Interview A1one, Iran

Interview: A1one WHO CAN SAY SOMETHING WHEN IS NOT INTO THE SYSTEM? Question: Where are you from, what is your age and what are you doing in real life?

of them beside main roads get removed so quickly. I can say there is no real every day or every week active street artist in Iran yet, except of myself and it so hurts very bad.

Answer: Born in 1981 Tehran, Iran. Painting, design and things about image.

Q: How would you categorize the work you are creating: is it art, passion, hobby, graphical discussion, mission, pure fun or something very else?

Q: Why have you decided to do stickers, when it‘s possible to do grafitti or paint on canvas, too? A: I was not so comfortable tagging, especially in my country where people more tend to get to a ‘clean-city’ state of civilization, and as I didn‘t want to take the opposite way round messing the urban space up. On the other hand I could not think of walking without making my marks and stickers are something you just walk and take out of pocket and... so I decided to do stickers instead of tagging.

Q: Do you have a message to the youths out there? A: No matter what to name it really, all of them in any time can happen but I feel more passion. But at last I feel painting to be an escape for me, like a drug which seems not to hurt me in the future physically or mentally. Q: Are you embedded in some kind of network? he will quit doing this again. Finally it can be too dangerous or so simple and easy with no danger lurking around by chance and location, becasue there are no laws on such things.

Q: Is it easy for you to work in public space or do you have to fear police or political persecution? A: In many other countries if police or security guards catch a 27-year-old adult artist on street painting something complete and artistic they understand the person may be in charge of hurting public properties. And has its law or rule, but still they (officers) understand that the work on wall is meant to be art work or art as vandalism. But if they catch a 27-year-old adult artist in Tehran streets, then they wonder how an artist can be such a fool, then they presume him as political activist who may have taken or takes money or support from The West and has a mission to change something in Iran‘s governmental organizations. So in Iran if you are a teenager or in younger ages you will be more secure that they think ok he is young and he has seen some movies. Let charge him or tell him some things and

A: Who cares... Q: What is the intention of your work?

Q: Which medium (material and tools) do you prefer? A: With low quality spray cans we have in Iran I still enjoy spray cans. Besides they are knife and markers and acrylic colors which I enjoy. Water!

A: To communicate. I see that my work had some impact on the rest of youth and maybe for many people who see the images in streets. The ones who have never seen such things in the urban area before the day I started... so it has many jobs going on but I have my own concentration on visual experience avoiding to be a leader or dealer.

Q: How about the political freedom for artists like you in your country? Are you able to work freely in public or do you have to work in protected spaces like underground galleries? A: Simple. If I make friends with Islamic Associations, mainstream reporters and city council officers, which is so easy for people who like to, it would be easy to do murals on every wall and stadium and get paid for it. But as a radical desperate young artist who is more getting down than up, there is no escape to be alone. And no underground galleries exist in Iran. For example for our shows until the last one we were renting a gallery which the owner was politely laughing at us in her heart and was just ok for the money. Then the mainstream newspaper came to gallery and interviewed us but they never named us or my studio which had curated the show but they just named the gallery and kept us hidden because they knew if they had represented us we would have gone out of control. They even copied my translations and writings and pasted them in their magazine layouts with another author‘s name and who can say something when is not into the system?! We still have the lack of freedom to invite many people to one place with no permission, and of course the hood is always curious to know what is happening in a basement like Kolahstudio. Q: How present is street art in Teheran nowerdays? Who are the people who are interested in it? A: How present... for people who are not interested it can be dead like, they see it so often. If they live in it can be seen in far places, ruins, back of bridges and end of some alleys, not like in western capitals at all. There are some spots which have more painted walls but not more than 5 in the whole city, many

left: I “I hide Atom bomb“ II “The Old and the New King a.k.a. You Are Here“ right: example of Tehran Metro announcements, editing city transfer signs to make people smile

A: I just have an opinion about things: some media shows rebel side of human in such a simple way which is the easiest way like being an MTV oriented Jackass, or showing off skaters with many fashion brands in mind and teens around. But to be a real one we need to claim it with hard work, with originality and with having it kept every minute of our life. Just speaking about some names and calling our first tag like ‘Wildstyle’ when it has not even any true line in it. Gallery and magazine is not important if it is made available with money or friends in the system or media. It is worthy when you know what you do and you focus on keeping yourself away from the dirt which is almost every where.

30 Intro

Theorizing

Submissions I

Submissions II

Outtakes

Impressum

Interview A1one, Iran

Interview: A1one WHO CAN SAY SOMETHING WHEN IS NOT INTO THE SYSTEM? Question: Where are you from, what is your age and what are you doing in real life?

of them beside main roads get removed so quickly. I can say there is no real every day or every week active street artist in Iran yet, except of myself and it so hurts very bad.

Answer: Born in 1981 Tehran, Iran. Painting, design and things about image.

Q: How would you categorize the work you are creating: is it art, passion, hobby, graphical discussion, mission, pure fun or something very else?

A: Who cares... Q: What is the intention of your work?

left: I “I hide Atom bomb“ II “The Old and the New King a.k.a. You Are Here“ right: example of Tehran Metro announcements, editing city transfer signs to make people smile

BAUDRILLARD IN DISNEYLAND 3D Trend: Illegal sculptures in the public arena – The latest coup of the post-graffiti generation. by Alain Bieber

Utilitarian city furnishings become alienated from their original intent. Each bus stop, bench, cobblestone is the next potential work of art. The new generation has freed itself from the medium of the wall: rudimentary scrawls developed into artistic calligraphy and three-dimensional pictures. Then came the wall wit – succinct points on stickers or sprayed on with templates. Today’s most popular works are illegal sculptures and short-lived intrusions. The artists thereby play with the urban space, the populace and the traditional avant-garde. Take a shot of situationist spontaneity, a few choreographed Fluxus elements, a measure of folk art, a pinch of Dada absurdity, add in Ready-Mades and minimalism – and there you have street art sculpture. clockwise: Slinkachu, “Graffiti, Inner City Snail Project”, London, 2008 Filthy Luker, “Trees are People too”, Maubeuge, 2008 Mark Jenkins, “Symmetry Series #1”, Fuerteventura, 2008 Mark Jenkins, “The last Graffiti Artist”, Malmö, 2008

BAUDRILLARD IN DISNEYLAND 3D Trend: Illegal sculptures in the public arena – The latest coup of the post-graffiti generation. by Alain Bieber

36 Intro

Theorizing

Submissions I

Submissions II

Outtakes

Impressum

Essay Alain Bieber, Germany Baudrillard in Disneyland

Londoner Slinkachu uses toy figures usually only found in model railway vignettes to create his surreal mini-worlds. The Polish artist Krystian Czaplicki loves geometrical abstractions – and propagates the urban landscape with his styrofoam and cardboard creations. Mark Jenkins from Washington disorients passers-by with life-size figures made of packing tape, England’s Filthy Luker devotes himself to inflatable sculptures, and U.S. artist Brad Downey distorts the public infrastructure – using a box cutter to transform a marked bike lane into a work of art or create a house of cards from construction barriers.

left: Brad Downey: “Broken Bike Lane”, Berlin, 2008 right: Brad Downey: “House of Cards I“, Berlin, 2007

36 Intro

Theorizing

Submissions I

Submissions II

Outtakes

Impressum

Essay Alain Bieber, Germany Baudrillard in Disneyland

left: Brad Downey: “Broken Bike Lane”, Berlin, 2008 right: Brad Downey: “House of Cards I“, Berlin, 2007

38 Intro

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Submissions I

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Outtakes

Impressum

Essay Alain Bieber, Germany Baudrillard in Disneyland

These sculptures are a play for attention – for the attentive – and a symbolic assault on urban functionality. But the best thing about these interventions: they are not as elitist as graffiti, the urban codes by and for insiders, and onlookers don’t need a degree in art to understand them. People don’t even need to realize they’re looking at a work of art in order to enjoy them. “This street art is not hidden away in museums. It performs in our own daily living space, it’s art for the masses, and can nevertheless still be intellectual and conceptional,” says Brad Downey. “Street art is like Baudrillard in Disneyland.”

left: Filthy Luker, “Mud-life Crisis”, Glastonbury Festival, 2007 right: I Krystian Czaplicki/Truth, “Untitled”, Breslau, 2008 II “Untitled”, London, 2008

“To me, the city is a huge three-dimensional canvas. I want to transform constructionalistic and minimalistic art into urban mushrooms, strange objects and sculptural accidents.” Krystian Czaplicki/Truth

38 Intro

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Submissions II

Outtakes

Impressum

Essay Alain Bieber, Germany Baudrillard in Disneyland

left: Filthy Luker, “Mud-life Crisis”, Glastonbury Festival, 2007 right: I Krystian Czaplicki/Truth, “Untitled”, Breslau, 2008 II “Untitled”, London, 2008

40 Intro

Theorizing

Submissions I

Submissions II

Outtakes

Impressum

Essay Alain Bieber, Germany Baudrillard in Disneyland

“My figures reflect the isolation and loneliness of the big cities. And I really like the idea that almost no one sees my work. Because intentionally or unintentionally, we all ignore so much around us in the city.” Slinkachu

Slinkachu, “They’re not Pets, Susan”, London, 2007

40 Intro

Theorizing

Submissions I

Submissions II

Outtakes

Impressum

Essay Alain Bieber, Germany Baudrillard in Disneyland

Slinkachu, “They’re not Pets, Susan”, London, 2007

42 Intro

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Impressum

Interview Rik Reinking, Germany curator and collector

it into the museal context again. But, many of the young, contemporary street artists’ positions are similar to David Hammons, Alan Kaprow and many Fluxus artists – and that is what fascinates me. Q: You were one of the first collectors of Street Art. Meanwhile, there are many collectors in this filed. Do those colleagues that now jump on this trend get on your nerves? A: The only thing that is a pity is that many works become more expensive. But I find this pretty amusing. A few years ago, there were many that laughed at me for exactly this part of my collection. And they are now the ones that come running to me for advice as to where to buy Street Art. But I really don’t care because I’m not interested in trends. I had this dialogue with the artists 10 years ago and I still have it today. And with some, it becomes easier, with others it becomes more difficult. It all depends on how the artist positions himself and how much he lets himself be monopolized. Some, though, do let the fame and money get to their heads. Q: The prices of which artists have gone up a lot? A: Banksy, Os Gemeos, Swoon, Zevs, and Daim have become incredibly expensive. Q: All artists which you collect yourself. A: Yes…

Interview: Rik Reinking THIS ART SURE COMES ACROSS LUSCIOUSLY Question: Collecting is a mix of a demonstration of power, purchasing power exhibitionism and consumerism lecherousness – claims art historian Wolfgang Ulrich. What applies to you? Answer: That is too narrowly defined in my eyes. You don’t become powerful by collecting art. Art is always worth that which you are ready to pay for it at a certain point in time. There are conditions and you either agree on them or not. Of course, there are collectors who want to indicate what they are able to afford. But that only goes for extremely expensive artists that were artificially catapulted into an expensive price segment. I’m not at all interested in that. Otherwise, I would deal with different artists. Collecting to me is an addiction, but no lechery. And you always have to consume – economically as well as content-wise.

Q: But why do you collect? Why do you have to own art? A: I could, of course, always work as a curator. I wouldn’t have to pay for storage and would spend way less money. But I want to work with art long term. I want to show it in ever new contexts. And live with it. But I also want to feel this strain. That’s what keeps you awake and going. However, I don’t suffer from art market bulimia – I don’t have to buy to sell.

Q: Why is that? Did you make your own artists big through exhibitions? A: No. Swoon and Os Gemeos, for example, are now also represented by Deitch, a powerful New York gallery owner. But they are also artists who deal responsibly with their work. And I collect these artists because I have been watching them the longest and have the most to do with. It would be weird if I collected only art that is a hot topic at the time. It all evolved very naturally. Street Art has determined my everyday life for years and I have many friends in this field. Q: But why has the interest on the part of the market, the museums, and the media grown so much?

Q: What is it that fascinates you about Street Art? A: I feel understood by this art form and I can feel myself in this art. It is commensurate with my generation – and similarly as with Fluxus, this art form leaves the museum and exhibition room. Now, there is a generation that grew up in the public sphere and has produced art in the public sphere and puts

left: Banksy, “Girls with Gasmask”, 2000 | Banksy, “Fly with Gasmask”, 2000 right: Os Gemeos, No Title, 2007 | Banksy, “Bomb Hugger”, 2002 Exhibition: Call it what you like! COLLECTION RIK REINKING Courtesy: KunstCentret Silkeborg Bad / Rik Reinking | Photo: MRpro

A: Because everybody can see that Street Art is authentic. In the art market, on the other hand, I can hardly see anything authentic. At fairs, there is so much rubbish which was produced especially for the art market – often in small format so that you can stick it under your arm. Of course, the art market takes notice when they see there is something that is economically successful. And, with increased demand, the price increases as well. And the museums have realized that Street Art is contemporary history and document.

When we look back 10 years then this time period will be historic and also the artists that lived in it. Many museums have, of course, jumped on the bandwagon because in 10 years’ time, they want to be the first to have realized this. These are vanities. And the reason for the media being ecstatic is clear: This art comes across very lusciously. It is accessible because it wants to reach as many people as possible. This isn’t a kind of Donald-Judd thing which 90% of the visitors get into a fuss about, thinking: ‘what’s up with this shit’ and park their beer on it. Apart from this, Street Art is a global movement. As with Fluxus, there have been artists all over the world who shared a pictorial world and language. With different accents and each with their own signature, but there was still one group and one movement. Then, there was nothing for a long time – and today there is Street Art.

42 Intro

Theorizing

Submissions I

Submissions II

Outtakes

Impressum

Interview Rik Reinking, Germany curator and collector

44 Intro

Theorizing Interview Rik Reinking, Germany curator and collector

Q: Many people say that Street Art is a trend – and trends usually end after 5 years. Will people soon cease to speak about Street Art? A: Well, this is a game. And it’s the same with the entire art market: prices are pumped up artificially and then you let the prices drop again. From auction to auction the works are raised with the estimates. You can just about forget contemporary auction houses because they don’t exhibit any sense of responsibility whatsoever. Q: Which artists will prevail?

left: Brad Downey, “Ashtrays for Constantine”, 2008 Richard Prince, “Joke - Oedipus Schmedipus”, 1994 Cady Noland, “Not yet titled” right: Mirko Reisser/DAIM, “DAIM - coming out”, Spraypaint on wall, 363 x 1143 cm, 2008 Exhibition: Call it what you like! COLLECTION RIK REINKING Courtesy: KunstCentret Silkeborg Bad / Rik Reinking Photo: MRpro

A: A sense of responsibility towards one’s own work is the most important thing. If the artist wants to be taken seriously, if he wants to reach a higher price level, then he needs to act responsibly toward the price, the buyer, and the market. There are artists who have a relaxed way of dealing with their work and they don’t care. And others are interested in high prices. But expensive doesn’t say much about the quality of a work. I know fantastic artists who have been around since the beginning. And you can still buy their originals for a hundred Euros. And then there are artists who are auctioned for incredibly expensive prices. But a market only grows over time – it’s always a question of supply and demand. And that you can’t really predict just yet. Some will break away, some will maybe take on an office job – many are still very young. But others will probably carry on because they can’t do anything else, they have such incredible motivation and energy.

44 Intro

Theorizing Interview Rik Reinking, Germany curator and collector

46 Intro

Theorizing

Submissions I

Submissions II

Outtakes

Impressum

Interview Rik Reinking, Germany curator and collector

Q: What criteria do you apply in the selection of the artists you collect? A: I go for sobriety and quality. And works that engage me. A collection is always a business card, a portrait that you can take apart completely and analyze it. I like combining Fluxus, Minimal Art, and Urban Art. Because then I see that Jochen Gerz has done stuff that JR does today. And Klaus Staeck dealt with political topics that you can see on serigraphs of really young artists today. All of a sudden, there emerges a new graphics market which had long been written off. Art historically, this is absolutely relevant and interesting what is happening at the moment. That is why I find it ignorant and arrogant to say something like: Street Art is only a trend and will be over and done with in 5 years time. Q: Why do certain themes go on repeating themselves?

Q: Won’t Street Art lose its allure when it’s being museumized and institutionalized?

A: A good artist deals critically with himself out his time, with social and political grievances. It’s the same as with literature. You can read a 200 year old literary work and think it is set in today’s times. Social problems go repeating themselves over and over again and it’s the same with art. Q: Street Art is, in principle, temporary. Theoretically, there should only be a few pieces on the art market.

Boxi, “In the Beginning”, 2008 Exhibition: Call it what you like! COLLECTION RIK REINKING, Courtesy: KunstCentret Silkeborg Bad / Rik Reinking | Photo: MRpro

A: Yes, there is little that is authentic. Artists like Blu don’t do anything commercial. If you’re lucky, he’ll sell you a drawing from his sketchbook, and then they are really very expensive. And that is good and consequent. He lives for the cause. And then, there are other artists that publish a new print or canvas in edition every week – and that’s being played through on end. You really should make yourself a little scarce with your work. You can’t flood mercilessly and think this will continue like that forever.

A: No. Because it is about completely different works. There are those pieces that only work indoors, while others only work in the streets, and even others work everywhere. And some artists deal with exactly that point of intersection. But it doesn’t lose its allure. Some works lose a bit and others gain. But then you have to free yourself – and an illegal work in the public sphere will, of course, always remain something altogether different.

next page, left: Doblecerouno 3+, Mexico right: Mirco, Poland

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Interview Rik Reinking, Germany curator and collector

Q: Won’t Street Art lose its allure when it’s being museumized and institutionalized?

Boxi, “In the Beginning”, 2008 Exhibition: Call it what you like! COLLECTION RIK REINKING, Courtesy: KunstCentret Silkeborg Bad / Rik Reinking | Photo: MRpro

next page, left: Doblecerouno 3+, Mexico right: Mirco, Poland

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Interview 1st winner 2005 Carla Ly, Brazil / Venezuela / Spain

Interview: Carla Ly THE CURE TO THE STRUCK ONE BY THE STRUCK ONES Q: Where are you from and where are you working now? A: I was born in São Paulo, Brazil and then I moved to Caracas, Venezuela for over 20 years. Since 3 years I am living and working in Valencia, Spain.

not exist anymore… However; politically and socially it generates an answer to a malaise that can be cured. According to then, it‘s a symbol that tells more than thousand words. Q: Why did you join the Sticker Awards? Did you know that you are a winner? Does it mean something for you?

Q: What are you doing in real life? A: I work for a charity organization which goal is the social, professional reinsertion of people with mental disorders. It is a very social job, which in turn share with my personal work as an artist on the street. Q: Can you explain the concept of your winning contribution in 2005? How did you come up with this idea?

A: It was a moment of my life rather complex, a friend passed me the link of this competition and I thought of doing something that will be suited to public space, to be identified, it must direct and subtle... Then knowing that I had won the first prize, I was surprised, therefore, I decided to travel to Berlin... It changed my perspective toward a social poetics of what the ‘street.’ Q: Whats your intention for your work?

A: It was a contagious idea that I caught, and I still can‘t get rid of, it started in Caracas city, as a reflection of us who inhabit the city, the cure to the struck one by the struck ones. The format of the band aid turns into a mirror, adapting to the public scale, because it’s easy to recognize, anonymous, it can be understood without any explanations, and its value is determined according to where they penetrate our mind in terms of recognition and memory of what is felt. Q: Did you encounter any public reaction to this action? A: Yes, the feedback of the public is amazing. The recognition of this icon made me think more about its value. Many are delighted; others tell me that they need it at home or for their hearts. Places where I did the interventions do

A: To show in a visual way the sense of humor behind the reflective irony, always subtle and open to the public, aspiring to convince them to risk to be less literal. Q: What do you think about street art today? A: Today it is an art that is still consolidating, and begins to be understood by many people... However, there are some artists who are aware of the place where the social and the political take part of it, they are creating an extension of the frontiers where street art goes far beyond the immediate environment (street, wall, square, neighborhood...) it converts into a thought that gives meaning to a dialogue and some conflicts.

Q: What are you doing now?

A: Now I investigate the variables of the painting and the public installations on found objects or abandoned walls… always with an interest to express the movement, the ephemeral, the passing of time which evoke the fluid, the fragility, the mental, the darkness and its silence...

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Interview 1st winner 2005 Carla Ly, Brazil / Venezuela / Spain

Q: What are you doing now?

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54 Intro

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Interview 1st winner 2006 Happy GFX, Germany

Interview: Happy GFX SICK IDEAS TO MAKE THE WORLD A MORE INTERESTING PLACE Question: Where are you from and where are you working now? Answer: We are both from the southwest of Germany. Currently we live in Barcelona and Berlin. Q: What are you doing in real life? A: We are students of communication design. At the same time we work for different design agencies and do own projects in different collaborations. Q: Can you explain the concept for your winning contribution in 2006? How did you come up with this idea? A: Our idea was to make the public space more comforta-ble and to use the ugly surfaces of electrical panels for our stickers. Thereby we changed the electrical panels to wardrobes, commodes, ovens and washing machines. We wanted to give the people an other impression of the city. Streets are not only a place to pass by - it‘s kind of your apartment.

Q: Did you encounter any public reactions to this action? A: Our project attracted huge attention in the city. In the meantime each of the 30 electrical panels is rid of our stickers - but almost every person in the city still remembers our project. We only had good reactions, the people really enjoyed it. We were also glad about the reactions of other streetartists who put their characters into our drawers. We were glad about this exciting way of streetart communication. Q: Why did you join the Sticker Awards? Did you know you are a winner? Does it mean something for you? A: We heard about the sticker awards by coincidence and thought that our work could be a exceptional sticker- contribution. We would have never thought, we would become the winner. It was a great honour! Q: Whats your intention for your work? / Why do you work outside in public space? A: The main idea is always how to get into contact with normal pedestrians, who only pass by and aren‘t interested into art or design. Its great to get in touch with people without talking to them or even see them. You only use the communicational ways of posters, streetart objects, installations, and so on. With these mediums you can set off a lot. Q: What do you think about streetart today? A: Streetart is important for us, it gives you a good impression what is going on in the city. We always keep looking after nice, surprising stuff in the streets. Its our source of inspiration and amusement at the same time. Q: What are you doing now? A: We still have sick ideas to make the world a more interesting place. Actually we’re operating from Barcelona and Berlin. www.sabinakeric.de www.urbancamouflage.de

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Interview 1st winner 2006 Happy GFX, Germany

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Interview 1st winner 2007 Joseph Ernst, UK

Interview: Joseph Ernst BEWILDERMENT, TO LOTS OF LAUGHTER Question: Where are you from and where are you working now? Answer: I was born in the UK, but grew up in Portugal. I currently live and work in London. Q: What are you doing in real life? A: I work at 4creative, part of Channel 4. Most of the rest of my time is spent doing other stuff like this, or making films. I have a very, very understanding girlfriend! Q: Can you explain the concept for your winning contribution in 2007? How did you come up with this idea? A: At the time, I was working with the photographer Tom Craig on a project about homelessness for the charity Crisis and the V+A museum. All over London underground stations, I noticed these signs that said „No begging. Penalty £200“.

This seemed pretty stupid to me - how can someone caught begging for change, afford to pay a £200 fine? So I decided to make some equally stupid signs for everyone else. In the process of writing different lines for the stickers, I realised that some of them were less stupid than I had thought. They made me (and my friends) laugh - and that‘s always a good reason to do a project, if ever there was! Q: Did you encounter any public reactions to this action? A: Yes. Many times. When I first started, I would only put them up only in empty carriages, and then sit and wait for people to get on and gage how they reacted - rangeing from complaints about senseless vandalism, to complete bewilderment, to lots of laughter. As I put more up I got more confident, and would stick them with people around, under cctv cameras, etc. A lot of people asked questions and wanted some stickers. I was pretty amazed when I saw an entire set stuck on the wall inside the ticket office on display for all to see. But then I got caught. One night a London Underground employee caught me red handed. My heart was racing. But he just congratulated me on my stickers, and asked if he could keep a set.

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Interview 1st winner 2007 Joseph Ernst, UK

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Interview 1st winner 2007 Joseph Ernst, UK right: Thomas Judisch, Germany, 1st winner 2007

Q: Why did you join the sticker awards? Did you know you are a winner? Does it mean something for you? A: I‘ve collected and photographed street art and stickers for years, and had already heard of the international sticker awards via the web, and loved the book. I had entered the competition quite a long time before I received your email telling me I‘d won. I was living in Amsterdam at the time, and the project seemed like a million miles away. It was a complete surprise! Q: What do you think about streetart today? A: I still love it. But its rarer that I see something that completely blows me away. Bring on the recession - I think this new era will breed some great new work. Q: What are you doing now? A: I moved back to London in August. I have just finished my first short film called Feeder. It is shot entirely from inside the mouth, and has taken five years to make. Currently building a new camera for another short film, and have about 10 other projects on the go, all in various states of disarray! Here are some links to some of my recent projects: http://www.bottleofwine.org/ http://www.onepagemagazine.com/ http://www.cafepress.com/cowboy_style http://www.josephernst.com/facebook.htm?page= + coming soon : www.feeder-feeder.com Q: Anything else? A: I hate design. Everything is designed nowerdays. It’s really really really boring. Please stop it now.

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Interview 1st winner 2007 Joseph Ernst, UK right: Thomas Judisch, Germany, 1st winner 2007

Interview: Thomas Judisch TO CLEAN UP A LITTLE BIT The stickeraward team celebrates the new winner of the 1st stickeraward 2008. Furthermore we are proud to have Rose Sélavy talking with the winner about his life and work. Early in the morning Rose Sélavy meets Thomas Judisch in a friendly park close to the Wildsmile Studios in Dresden. Sun is shining, and both of them are looking quite good. They sit on a park bench observing some kids playing with their toys. Question: Good morning, Thomas, how was your sleep? Answer: Good morning, Rose, thanks, I’m always sleeping well in this area. Often I dreamed a mixture of experiences and fictions, like action-films. My dreams are like movies made of my own experiences.

In the best way they understand the work and the space where the work exists and after they reflect theirself. Self reflection is a really difficult part of life. (He laughs again!!!) Q: Why did you join the Sticker Awards? Did you know you are a winner? Does it mean something for you?

Q: Do you include your dreams in your work? A: Precisely! It is necessary to deal with the own experience concerning the unconscious. For example, it is important that you go out instead of being in the studio the whole time. You have to go out and see what happened! Communication! (He laughs.) Q: So it is important always to be active? A: NO! Everybody needs silence for a while. Finally, a silent work could have more concentration instead of a loud one, which screams at you, so that no other interpretations can not exist. Q: You prefer “Silent Art”? A: No, furthermore what is “Silent Art”? You got me wrong. Loudness can be positive for a work. And it is possible, that a silent work could be invisible and nobody recognices it. I wish that people shall to go through the world with open eyes. That is the reason why I create things like my work. Sometimes they are silent and invisible like a chameleon, and sometimes they have to be loud. It depends.

A: I like the thing that the whole world participates and that the Sticker Awards Archive becomes the biggest archive on stickers worldwide. I’m proud to be the winner. Yeah! Q: What do you think about streetart today? A: We have to know what happened before us. The public art has a tradition. Many young “Urban Artistes” should learn more about the public space from artists like Daniel Buren or Norbert Rademacher. Anyway I like the movement! Q: How did you get your ideas? A: I’m at the beginning of my “Empire Of The Fast Ideas” (a book about my ideas, which I plan for the future). I have to have many ideas. But finally the real work is developing these ideas. Everybody could have great ideas, but it is your choice to make it real. Q: Do you have a special goal? A: Yes, the aim to clean up a little bit. Q: Do you want a special reaction?

Q: Whats your focus? A: The strength and the weakness of life. The success and the failure during the working process. Q: What is your intention? A: I’m interested in the train of thoughts and the individual experiences of the visitors. The people who look at my work are important for my work. They activate them. The nonentity is filled with something: with experiences, memories or acts. I give people an offer to think about situations and spaces.

A: The reaction is part of the work. It is funny to watch the people are looking at my work. In fact kids, and people who don’t relate to the artscene, are the best critics. Since one year my father knows the word “performances”, isn’t that funny. It is a little success for me. Q: I think this is good end, isnt it? A: Yes, we should go and eat something. A: Good idea!

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What can we do? Alterego Bombing I Color, Romania II TvBoy, Italy III Lombriz Afro, Mexico IV Sinboy, Romania

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What can we do? Alterego Bombing left: I Chupacabra, Germany II SR, USA III Fear The Ripper, Russia IV Esm-Artificial, Canada Geo, V Germany, 3rd winner 2005 right: Rrrobot, Germany

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What can we do? Alterego Bombing left: I Chupacabra, Germany II SR, USA III Fear The Ripper, Russia IV Esm-Artificial, Canada Geo, V Germany, 3rd winner 2005 right: Rrrobot, Germany

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What can we do? Alterego Bombing I Rak, UK II Full, Spain III Eduardo Sanchez, Mexico IV Daniel Duran, Mexico V Ring, Spain VI Mjar, UK VII Lintpelusa, Venezuela VIII Sinboy, Romania

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What can we do? Adbusting previous+left: Fritz Heckert, Germany right: I Nichtnachdenken, Germany II Saner, Mexico

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What can we do? Adbusting previous+left: Fritz Heckert, Germany right: I Nichtnachdenken, Germany II Saner, Mexico

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ee r f e r a s e i z a r c d children an stickeraward.net is a project by rebelart.net and stickma.de Edited by Matthias Müller and Andreas Ullrich Layout and design by Matthias Müller Cover design by Matthias Müller vs. Matthias Marx Cover print by Lars Frohberg, www.diesiebdrucker.de Layout and design assistance by Stefan Hähnel, Daniel Lange, Dirk Sandbaumhüter, Manja Schönerstedt Font Design “Ideal Eilert” by Matthias Marx, "Submissions I" Teasers by Max Rademann English Translations by Jeanette Zuleeg, Danny Mellenthin and Sternkopf Communications, www.sternkopf.biz Proof Reading by Michael Madden Research and Communication by Rene Rogge, Stefan Hähnel, Bertram Richter stickeraward.net website by Rico Thierbach, Uwe Kunzemann Production management by Wildsmile Studios, Dresden, Germany www.wildsmile.de Distributed and produced by Die Gestalten Verlag GmbH & Co.KG Mariannenstrasse 9-10 D-10999 Berlin Germany Tel +49 30 726 13 2244 Fax +49 30 726 13 2222 Email: sales@gestalten.com www.gestalten.com Published by Wildsmile Studios Rudolf-Leonhard-Str.54 D-01097 Dresden Germany Tel +49 351 802 4600 Fax +49 351 899 60 080 Email: info@wildsmile.de © Wildsmile Studios, Dresden 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy or any storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. ISBN 978-3-89955-262-1 Respect copyrights, encourage creativity! Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de Printed by Druckerei Grammlich, Pliezhausen Made in Germany This book was printed according to the internationally accepted FSC standards for environmental protection, which specify requirements for an environmental management system. Gestalten is a climate neutral company and so are our products. We collaborate with the non-profit carbon offset provider myclimate (www.myclimate.org) to neutralize the company’s carbon footprint produced through our worldwide business activities by investing in projects that reduce CO² emissions (www.gestalten.com/myclimate). image: Paulö, Brazil

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stickeraward.net is a project by rebelart.net and stickma.de Edited by Matthias Müller and Andreas Ullrich Layout and design by Matthias Müller Cover design by Matthias Müller vs. Matthias Marx Cover print by Lars Frohberg, www.diesiebdrucker.de Layout and design assistance by Stefan Hähnel, Daniel Lange, Dirk Sandbaumhüter, Manja Schönerstedt Font Design “Ideal Eilert” by Matthias Marx "Submissions I" Teasers by Max Rademann English Translations by Jeanette Zuleeg, Danny Mellenthin and Sternkopf Communications, www.sternkopf.biz Proof Reading by Michael Madden Research and Communication by Rene Rogge, Stefan Hähnel, Bertram Richter stickeraward.net website by Rico Thierbach, Uwe Kunzemann Production management by Wildsmile Studios, Dresden, Germany Distributed and produced by

Die Gestalten Verlag GmbH & Co.KG Mariannenstrasse 9-10, D-10999 Berlin, Germany Tel+49 30 726 13 2244 Fax+49 30 726 13 2222 Email: sales@gestalten.com www.gestalten.com Published by Wildsmile Studios Rudolf-Leonhard-Str.54, D-01097, Dresden Germany Tel+49 351 802 4600 Fax+49 351 899 60 080 Email: info@wildsmile.de www.wildsmile.de © Wildsmile Studios, Dresden 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy or any storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

ISBN 978-3-89955-262-1 Respect copyrights, encourage creativity! Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de

Printed by Druckerei Grammlich, Pliezhausen Made in Germany

This book was printed according to the internationally accepted FSC standards for environmental protection, which specify requirements for an environmental management system.

Gestalten is a climate neutral company and so are our products. We collaborate with the non-profit carbon offset provider myclimate (www.myclimate.org) to neutralize the company’s carbon footprint produced through our worldwide business activities by investing in projects that reduce CO² emissions (www.gestalten.com/myclimate).