Endustryblog
Tuesday, May 09, 2006
LINKAGE...
CLICK HERE for the Endustry site. Unfortunately the domain and server are confusing me so its running on some other webspace for now. ¶ 12:48 AM 0 comments
CLICK HERE for the Endustry site. Unfortunately the domain and server are confusing me so its running on some other webspace for now. ¶ 12:48 AM 0 comments
Foundation Studies Essay (2005).
THIS IS NOT INTENDED AS NEW WORK. I have simply included it as it forms a good exploration into the areas this project explores and was helpful to go back to in reappraising my approach. The ape link was coincidental (or perhaps subliminal).
The Great Ape: Street Art vs Advertising by Sam Gieben
It could be said that today’s urban landscape, be it the streets of London, New York, Tokyo or anywhere inbetween, is universally characterised by the proliferation of two things: advertising and graffiti, or ‘street art’. It may seem obvious that these two spheres would be diametrically opposed; indeed, a large proportion of street art is a reaction to the modern commercial environment, where space is sold and communication is largely limited to that between people and advertisements. However, the two are anything but mutually exclusive. In 2005, companies are running ad campaigns masquerading as street art, and street artists are turning themselves into marketable brands. In this essay I intend to explore the work of street artists and other creatives who use the mechanics of advertising to communicate their ideas, and the way commercial interests have aped the methods of street artists for the purpose of advertising.
To understand the contemporary practice of street art it is important firstly to trace its origins and define what is meant or perceived as ‘street art’, for its progression has been so radical as to be today “unrecognisable from that of previous de
cades” (Manco 2004, 7). It could be argued that essentially, graffiti dates back to the earliest days of man scrawling pictographic images on cave walls. However, most recognise graffiti as emerging from New York towards the end of the 1960s, a style of writing that takes its place alongside deejaying, emceeing and breakdancing as one of “the four elements of hip-hop” (Caz 2004). The term ‘street art’ emerged in the 1980s to describe “any art in the urban environment not in the predominant hip-hop style” (Manco 2004, 7), in order to differentiate it from the personal tags and pieces that were born from what some now call ‘classic’ graffiti. The important progression was in street artists’ development of a new visual language for the streets, employing a vast range of new media, approaches and purposes, moving away from the tags of old and “converting to more graphic approaches” (Manco 2004, 43).
The blurring lines between advertising and street art are perhaps rooted in their coexistence within the urban environment, as they “share the same space and speak to the same audience” (Manco 2004, 11). In every town and city, billboards, buses and shop windows compete for attention with posters, stickers and stencils. Part of the reason for this is the ethos of reclaiming public space, challenging “the ownership of space by councils and corporations” (Manco 2004, 11). Another part of it is many street artists’ disdain for the traditional art system and its use as an important form of personal expression. London graffiti artist Banksy describes graffiti as “one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing” (2001, 11). Indeed, in reviewing his book Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall, a Guardian journalist observed that of the images featured, “each and every one of them [is] a pathetic cry for help”.
“You do not paint graffiti in the vain hope that one day some big fat tory will discover you and put your pictures on his wall. If you draw on walls in public you are already operating on a higher level. It takes no money to do it, you don’t need an education to understand it, there’s no admission fee and bus stops are far more interesting and useful places to have pictures than in museums.” (Banksy 2001, 3)
As could perhaps be expected, this vision is not shared universally. In 1994, then-Mayor of New York City Rudolph Giuliani created the NYC Police Department’s Transit Anti-Graffiti Vandal Squad, a new department designed to fight the “war on graffiti” (Murray & Murray, 2002). Giuliani described graffiti as “one of the visible signs of a city out of control, a city that cannot protect its space or its children” (Murray & Murray, 2002). This view is of course distinctly at odds with the idea of the “reclaiming of public space for public art” (Manco 2004, 7). Indeed, what Giuliani fails to recognise is that graffiti and street art are a reaction to a city’s control of space, a space reserved almost exclusively for the interests of advertising. Even more significantly, it illustrates the difference in perception of “public space” between authorities and street artists. Where street artists see their canvas as public space, Giuliani regards it as an inherently private, owned and controlled arena, that is in some way under attack. It is a difference in ideology between those who accept governmental ownership of the public domain, and those who feel that it is owned – by the public.
While this is a battle that looks sure to continue, if never to be won, street art continues to push its boundaries the world over. Today, the term ‘street art’ can encompass anything from environmental interventions to sticker outbreaks and absurd campaigns, as artists and designers fluent in contemporary visual language take their skills to the surfaces of our cities.
Within this context, street artists and other creatives have begun actively employing the mechanics of advertising to communicate their ideas. In a practical sense, this has seen the appropriation of traditional advertising channels such as flyposters, billboards, leaflets, magazines, and television spots. Faile are one such group whose work is very much about the interplay between advertising and art:
“We have all grown up in the advertising age… everything has a campaign, an image, a lifestyle to sell – so many artists today communicate using the same methods of advertising and placement to command attention.” (Faile, quoted in Manco 2004, 31)
Their bold and iconic images subvert “mainstream advertising methods and common branding practices” (Graphotism, issue 33). Amongst other things, Faile use flyposters to communicate their ideas, stencilling onto textured backgrounds, old-fashioned advertisements and sometimes directly onto existing posters, playing with peoples’ perceptions of advertising. On their website (1), visitors are greeted by a page of mock advertisements; a Faile Burlesque show, a Faile escort service. These are complimented by other adverts for similar services; even the layout of the adverts is repeated several times upon the page, much as flyposters are repeatedly plastered over walls.
Argentinian design group Doma are another practitioner of this appropriation of advertising channels. Doma “tries to interfere in all the information channels available, working with the same elements as them with a bit of irony” (2). One of their most notable projects was the ‘Roni’ campaign; an intervention in Argentina’s 2003 presidential bid. Doma constructed an election campaign touting Roni – a sinister character based on fast-food giants McDonalds’ icon, Ronald McDonald – for public office. They hijacked a universally known brand and corporate identity to make a significant comment on the politics of Argentina’s economy and its slide to American-style commerce and culture. Their posters ran alongside those of the real presidential candidates, in a move of integrated subversion. They also coded their sinister message in bright colours, clever branding and feel-good slogans, both borrowing from and making a mockery of modern advertising techniques.
There has also developed a more brash use of the mechanics of advertising known as ‘subvertising’: the act of turning existing advertising on its head to attack itself, via modification and redissemination. A practice that actually pre-dates hip-hop graffiti, this began primarily as spraycan attacks on billboards, often to make political statements (Manco 2004, 11). This can be seen as doubly successful as at once it harnesses the power of the commercial methods and simultaneously destroys them, altering their message and meaning to that of the artists’ choice. Subvertising has taken on a new significance and power in today’s globalised economy where there is a tangible sense of corporate distrust and an increasingly mobilised anti-consumerism movement. This manifests itself in independent street actions the world over and by groups and organisations such as The Billboard Liberation Front, which describes itself as “a privately-held, worker-controlled shadow entity with no phone number and no permanent address” (3). Their campaigns, for fictional self-created ‘clients’, use humourous billboard modifications and an accompanying website to make social and political statements, such as their altered messages from a Californian campaign group to Governer Schwarzenegger; in this case the client becomes ‘Citizens Against Killer Robots’, the message: ‘1,200,000 cyborgs in California in 2002 alone… HELP!’. They use the very mechanics of an advertising agency for their own subversive agenda, proclaiming they possess “both the technical skills and the creative vision to execute world-class media campaigns” (4).
Perhaps the foremost proponent of subvertising is the Adbusters Media Foundation, publishers of Adbusters magazine with a global circulation of 120,000 (Adbusters vol 12, no 4), and producers of several television spots and adverts in papers such as the New York Times. Adbusters is a non-profit organisation that relies on funding from donations and grants and is formed of a “global network of artists, writers, environmentalists and entrepreneurs” (Adbusters vol 12, no 4). What is exceptional is their hijacking and redissemination of advertising, and their use of advertising methods and channels to promote their agenda of “cultural revolution”. Magazines are a medium which traditionally can only function with the revenue generated from advertisements, and largely exist to promote consumerist interests. Adbusters flies in the face of these norms by containing no advertising, instead featuring ‘subvertisements’ which challenge the original messages of the ads. One such piece is an alteration of an advert for Jennifer Lopez’s clothing line for young girls. The addition of a dialogue, which illustrates the instillation of consumer values in children, both highlights the real effects of such advertising and frames them as the pathetic exercises in emotional and economic exploitation that they are. Besides the ads, its content is both visual and literary comment on consumer culture and social, political and environmental issues; there are no product placements, reviews of the latest blockbusters or fashion spreads. As such it is both a subversion of advertising and consumerism, and a two-fingered salute to the very market and system in which it exists.
At the opposite end of this spectrum, the crossover between art and advertising now sees commercial companies employing the mechanics of street art to advertise their products. The adoption of the graffiti aesthetic in design is nothing new; industries have grown up around the hijacking of graffiti’s street-cred in what has become an “uneasy relationship” between “the graffiti world… and with those advertisers adopting the graffiti style” (Manco 2004, 9). Indeed, this relationship has inspired its own creative backlash, such as Eko’s 2002 ‘Don’t Copy Me’ campaign, which was a “humorous protest against… the copying of the graffiti movement for commercial gain” (Manco 2004, 123). However, the actual adoption of street-art tactics in ad campaigns is a more recent development. In 2004, Designers Republic’s campaign for Mylo’s ‘Destroy Rock & Roll’ album incorporated both traditional paper-based media advertisements and the use of stencils to emblazon Britain’s streets with the tagline of the album. These stencils sit side by side with genuine street art on surfaces around the country in a cleverly integrated move designed to draw on the underground status that street art enjoys. With no mention of Mylo and its rebellious ‘Destroy…’ tagline, many observers may not recognise the stencils as advertisements, while the message is absorbed regardless. While some may rightfully see such advertising as a cheapening of street art’s integrity, in a sense it is but another product of the reciprocal relationship that the two worlds maintain; a cultural exchange of media and methods.
This commercial crossover cannot be entirely attributed to the desires of market capitalism, however, as a number of street artists are implicit in this appropriation of their work. Regular Product is one such artist who “actually enjoys advertising” (Manco 2004, 100), having taken commissions from multinationals such as Nike. In the same manner as the ‘Destroy Rock & Roll’ stencils, his commercial pieces are subtle about the company that commissioned them. His curry monster for Nike only references the company with a relatively small tagline and the most miniscule of swooshes, quietly contributing street-cool to the company’s reputation and cleverly communicating to a highly sought after urban demographic. Clearly, with such works, the line between art and advertising is significantly blurred, if not crossed entirely. It is also a perversion of the idea of “reclaiming public space for public art” (Manco 2004, 7), as artists begin to claim public space not for art but for advertising, for both their own economic gain and their clients’.
Perhaps one of the most interesting developments of graffiti and the most remarkable characteristic of its relationship with advertising is the rise of the artist as a brand in their own right. This is a product of graffiti’s developing graphical quality. Where tags were once the identifying calling-card of the street artist, the emergence of iconic street art has signalled a change:
“The logo as signature has become a growing trend in graffiti and at the root of this has been the graphic shift towards pictograms, symbols and icons.” (Manco 2004, 17)
The idea of the logo – “an emblematic design adopted by an organisation to identify its products” (Oxford 1999, 835) – as a branding technique has been adopted by street artists the world over. Many artists’ work - such as The London Police’s Lads and Pixel Phil’s computer icons - have become less about individual pieces and more about bodies of work that have a cohesive quality and are identifiable as the work of a particular artist or group. It is, in a sense, a subversion of branding for these brands have no product to sell, functioning instead as both art for art’s sake and as an advertisement for the artist – “a logo for the ego” (Manco 2004, 43) – more concerned with recognition than any commercial interest. Artists such as Banksy, who goes so far as to label himself a “brandal” (Manco 2004, 7) have become such well-known figures through their self-branding that they are able to exploit their semi-celebrity status via commissions, specialist boutiques and the publishing of their works in books; less with the intention of making money but more as a means of financial survival, in the way any other working artist operates. What is exceptional in the case of street artists is their relentless self-promotion. For Banksy, each time he stencils his name - a repetitious logo in itself - next to a new piece he is both signing his work in the tradition of the artist and branding his ‘product’ for recognition. Banksy even goes so far as to stencil his logo on cars, animals and splashes of paint on the road; any medium to promote the Banksy brand. It is a technique that, intentionally or not, has paid off for him, resulting in a number of commissions including installations in clubs such as Brighton’s Ocean Rooms and illustrations for record sleeves such as the BadMeaningGood series. These are usually adaptations of works that can be found in the street, serving a double function of promoting Banksy through their commercial dissemination and promoting and authenticating the client in their original form.
However, some artists have begun to use this platform as a way to develop their art into marketable products. Shepard Fairey is one such artist who developed the ‘Obey’ brand as a series of iconic street actions, which over time gained notoriety and “unwittingly became a global brand itself” (Manco 2004, 43). Today the Obey giant stares out at the public not only from the streets but also from the surface of expensive t-shirts, which calls into question the intentions of its creator and the possibility, or perhaps inevitability, of such increased commercialisation of public art. If one artist can do such a thing “unwittingly”, then how long will it be until other artists or companies catch on?
It is evident that the spheres of art and advertising enjoy an extremely complex relationship. Today our streets are awash with both, even if it may not always be entirely evident which is which. The uniting factor in this debate must be that essentially, art and advertising have at their heart the same single objective: communication. The industries of marketing and advertising have been relentlessly pursuing the most effective methods and vehicles for that objective ever since their inception, driven by perhaps the ultimate inspiration: the pursuit of money. With a completely different, yet equally passionate raison d’etre, artists have in a sense recognised the work of these industries in terms of their power and ability to communicate to global audiences, by their appropriation of the industries’ tools and techniques. As these techniques are employed by a growing number of people for vastly different purposes, the grey area between the two spheres widens. Perhaps the only conclusion that can be drawn is that there is an increasingly diminished unification or common purpose amongst those artists employing the mechanics of advertising: some are committed to the idea of free public art, some are involved in social and political activism, some are using the street as their public portfolio and business card, and some are working for Nike. Critics may see this as a diversion, others as an exciting development full of opportunity for artists and advertisers alike; although, the most significant proportion of public thought would probably settle with NYC Anti-Graffiti Squad Lieutenant Steve Mona’s assessment: “… vandalism, pure and simple.” (Murray & Murray 2002) ¶ 12:41 AM 0 comments
THIS IS NOT INTENDED AS NEW WORK. I have simply included it as it forms a good exploration into the areas this project explores and was helpful to go back to in reappraising my approach. The ape link was coincidental (or perhaps subliminal).
The Great Ape: Street Art vs Advertising by Sam Gieben
It could be said that today’s urban landscape, be it the streets of London, New York, Tokyo or anywhere inbetween, is universally characterised by the proliferation of two things: advertising and graffiti, or ‘street art’. It may seem obvious that these two spheres would be diametrically opposed; indeed, a large proportion of street art is a reaction to the modern commercial environment, where space is sold and communication is largely limited to that between people and advertisements. However, the two are anything but mutually exclusive. In 2005, companies are running ad campaigns masquerading as street art, and street artists are turning themselves into marketable brands. In this essay I intend to explore the work of street artists and other creatives who use the mechanics of advertising to communicate their ideas, and the way commercial interests have aped the methods of street artists for the purpose of advertising.
To understand the contemporary practice of street art it is important firstly to trace its origins and define what is meant or perceived as ‘street art’, for its progression has been so radical as to be today “unrecognisable from that of previous de
cades” (Manco 2004, 7). It could be argued that essentially, graffiti dates back to the earliest days of man scrawling pictographic images on cave walls. However, most recognise graffiti as emerging from New York towards the end of the 1960s, a style of writing that takes its place alongside deejaying, emceeing and breakdancing as one of “the four elements of hip-hop” (Caz 2004). The term ‘street art’ emerged in the 1980s to describe “any art in the urban environment not in the predominant hip-hop style” (Manco 2004, 7), in order to differentiate it from the personal tags and pieces that were born from what some now call ‘classic’ graffiti. The important progression was in street artists’ development of a new visual language for the streets, employing a vast range of new media, approaches and purposes, moving away from the tags of old and “converting to more graphic approaches” (Manco 2004, 43).
The blurring lines between advertising and street art are perhaps rooted in their coexistence within the urban environment, as they “share the same space and speak to the same audience” (Manco 2004, 11). In every town and city, billboards, buses and shop windows compete for attention with posters, stickers and stencils. Part of the reason for this is the ethos of reclaiming public space, challenging “the ownership of space by councils and corporations” (Manco 2004, 11). Another part of it is many street artists’ disdain for the traditional art system and its use as an important form of personal expression. London graffiti artist Banksy describes graffiti as “one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing” (2001, 11). Indeed, in reviewing his book Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall, a Guardian journalist observed that of the images featured, “each and every one of them [is] a pathetic cry for help”.
“You do not paint graffiti in the vain hope that one day some big fat tory will discover you and put your pictures on his wall. If you draw on walls in public you are already operating on a higher level. It takes no money to do it, you don’t need an education to understand it, there’s no admission fee and bus stops are far more interesting and useful places to have pictures than in museums.” (Banksy 2001, 3)
As could perhaps be expected, this vision is not shared universally. In 1994, then-Mayor of New York City Rudolph Giuliani created the NYC Police Department’s Transit Anti-Graffiti Vandal Squad, a new department designed to fight the “war on graffiti” (Murray & Murray, 2002). Giuliani described graffiti as “one of the visible signs of a city out of control, a city that cannot protect its space or its children” (Murray & Murray, 2002). This view is of course distinctly at odds with the idea of the “reclaiming of public space for public art” (Manco 2004, 7). Indeed, what Giuliani fails to recognise is that graffiti and street art are a reaction to a city’s control of space, a space reserved almost exclusively for the interests of advertising. Even more significantly, it illustrates the difference in perception of “public space” between authorities and street artists. Where street artists see their canvas as public space, Giuliani regards it as an inherently private, owned and controlled arena, that is in some way under attack. It is a difference in ideology between those who accept governmental ownership of the public domain, and those who feel that it is owned – by the public.
While this is a battle that looks sure to continue, if never to be won, street art continues to push its boundaries the world over. Today, the term ‘street art’ can encompass anything from environmental interventions to sticker outbreaks and absurd campaigns, as artists and designers fluent in contemporary visual language take their skills to the surfaces of our cities.
Within this context, street artists and other creatives have begun actively employing the mechanics of advertising to communicate their ideas. In a practical sense, this has seen the appropriation of traditional advertising channels such as flyposters, billboards, leaflets, magazines, and television spots. Faile are one such group whose work is very much about the interplay between advertising and art:
“We have all grown up in the advertising age… everything has a campaign, an image, a lifestyle to sell – so many artists today communicate using the same methods of advertising and placement to command attention.” (Faile, quoted in Manco 2004, 31)
Their bold and iconic images subvert “mainstream advertising methods and common branding practices” (Graphotism, issue 33). Amongst other things, Faile use flyposters to communicate their ideas, stencilling onto textured backgrounds, old-fashioned advertisements and sometimes directly onto existing posters, playing with peoples’ perceptions of advertising. On their website (1), visitors are greeted by a page of mock advertisements; a Faile Burlesque show, a Faile escort service. These are complimented by other adverts for similar services; even the layout of the adverts is repeated several times upon the page, much as flyposters are repeatedly plastered over walls.
Argentinian design group Doma are another practitioner of this appropriation of advertising channels. Doma “tries to interfere in all the information channels available, working with the same elements as them with a bit of irony” (2). One of their most notable projects was the ‘Roni’ campaign; an intervention in Argentina’s 2003 presidential bid. Doma constructed an election campaign touting Roni – a sinister character based on fast-food giants McDonalds’ icon, Ronald McDonald – for public office. They hijacked a universally known brand and corporate identity to make a significant comment on the politics of Argentina’s economy and its slide to American-style commerce and culture. Their posters ran alongside those of the real presidential candidates, in a move of integrated subversion. They also coded their sinister message in bright colours, clever branding and feel-good slogans, both borrowing from and making a mockery of modern advertising techniques.
There has also developed a more brash use of the mechanics of advertising known as ‘subvertising’: the act of turning existing advertising on its head to attack itself, via modification and redissemination. A practice that actually pre-dates hip-hop graffiti, this began primarily as spraycan attacks on billboards, often to make political statements (Manco 2004, 11). This can be seen as doubly successful as at once it harnesses the power of the commercial methods and simultaneously destroys them, altering their message and meaning to that of the artists’ choice. Subvertising has taken on a new significance and power in today’s globalised economy where there is a tangible sense of corporate distrust and an increasingly mobilised anti-consumerism movement. This manifests itself in independent street actions the world over and by groups and organisations such as The Billboard Liberation Front, which describes itself as “a privately-held, worker-controlled shadow entity with no phone number and no permanent address” (3). Their campaigns, for fictional self-created ‘clients’, use humourous billboard modifications and an accompanying website to make social and political statements, such as their altered messages from a Californian campaign group to Governer Schwarzenegger; in this case the client becomes ‘Citizens Against Killer Robots’, the message: ‘1,200,000 cyborgs in California in 2002 alone… HELP!’. They use the very mechanics of an advertising agency for their own subversive agenda, proclaiming they possess “both the technical skills and the creative vision to execute world-class media campaigns” (4).
Perhaps the foremost proponent of subvertising is the Adbusters Media Foundation, publishers of Adbusters magazine with a global circulation of 120,000 (Adbusters vol 12, no 4), and producers of several television spots and adverts in papers such as the New York Times. Adbusters is a non-profit organisation that relies on funding from donations and grants and is formed of a “global network of artists, writers, environmentalists and entrepreneurs” (Adbusters vol 12, no 4). What is exceptional is their hijacking and redissemination of advertising, and their use of advertising methods and channels to promote their agenda of “cultural revolution”. Magazines are a medium which traditionally can only function with the revenue generated from advertisements, and largely exist to promote consumerist interests. Adbusters flies in the face of these norms by containing no advertising, instead featuring ‘subvertisements’ which challenge the original messages of the ads. One such piece is an alteration of an advert for Jennifer Lopez’s clothing line for young girls. The addition of a dialogue, which illustrates the instillation of consumer values in children, both highlights the real effects of such advertising and frames them as the pathetic exercises in emotional and economic exploitation that they are. Besides the ads, its content is both visual and literary comment on consumer culture and social, political and environmental issues; there are no product placements, reviews of the latest blockbusters or fashion spreads. As such it is both a subversion of advertising and consumerism, and a two-fingered salute to the very market and system in which it exists.
At the opposite end of this spectrum, the crossover between art and advertising now sees commercial companies employing the mechanics of street art to advertise their products. The adoption of the graffiti aesthetic in design is nothing new; industries have grown up around the hijacking of graffiti’s street-cred in what has become an “uneasy relationship” between “the graffiti world… and with those advertisers adopting the graffiti style” (Manco 2004, 9). Indeed, this relationship has inspired its own creative backlash, such as Eko’s 2002 ‘Don’t Copy Me’ campaign, which was a “humorous protest against… the copying of the graffiti movement for commercial gain” (Manco 2004, 123). However, the actual adoption of street-art tactics in ad campaigns is a more recent development. In 2004, Designers Republic’s campaign for Mylo’s ‘Destroy Rock & Roll’ album incorporated both traditional paper-based media advertisements and the use of stencils to emblazon Britain’s streets with the tagline of the album. These stencils sit side by side with genuine street art on surfaces around the country in a cleverly integrated move designed to draw on the underground status that street art enjoys. With no mention of Mylo and its rebellious ‘Destroy…’ tagline, many observers may not recognise the stencils as advertisements, while the message is absorbed regardless. While some may rightfully see such advertising as a cheapening of street art’s integrity, in a sense it is but another product of the reciprocal relationship that the two worlds maintain; a cultural exchange of media and methods.
This commercial crossover cannot be entirely attributed to the desires of market capitalism, however, as a number of street artists are implicit in this appropriation of their work. Regular Product is one such artist who “actually enjoys advertising” (Manco 2004, 100), having taken commissions from multinationals such as Nike. In the same manner as the ‘Destroy Rock & Roll’ stencils, his commercial pieces are subtle about the company that commissioned them. His curry monster for Nike only references the company with a relatively small tagline and the most miniscule of swooshes, quietly contributing street-cool to the company’s reputation and cleverly communicating to a highly sought after urban demographic. Clearly, with such works, the line between art and advertising is significantly blurred, if not crossed entirely. It is also a perversion of the idea of “reclaiming public space for public art” (Manco 2004, 7), as artists begin to claim public space not for art but for advertising, for both their own economic gain and their clients’.
Perhaps one of the most interesting developments of graffiti and the most remarkable characteristic of its relationship with advertising is the rise of the artist as a brand in their own right. This is a product of graffiti’s developing graphical quality. Where tags were once the identifying calling-card of the street artist, the emergence of iconic street art has signalled a change:
“The logo as signature has become a growing trend in graffiti and at the root of this has been the graphic shift towards pictograms, symbols and icons.” (Manco 2004, 17)
The idea of the logo – “an emblematic design adopted by an organisation to identify its products” (Oxford 1999, 835) – as a branding technique has been adopted by street artists the world over. Many artists’ work - such as The London Police’s Lads and Pixel Phil’s computer icons - have become less about individual pieces and more about bodies of work that have a cohesive quality and are identifiable as the work of a particular artist or group. It is, in a sense, a subversion of branding for these brands have no product to sell, functioning instead as both art for art’s sake and as an advertisement for the artist – “a logo for the ego” (Manco 2004, 43) – more concerned with recognition than any commercial interest. Artists such as Banksy, who goes so far as to label himself a “brandal” (Manco 2004, 7) have become such well-known figures through their self-branding that they are able to exploit their semi-celebrity status via commissions, specialist boutiques and the publishing of their works in books; less with the intention of making money but more as a means of financial survival, in the way any other working artist operates. What is exceptional in the case of street artists is their relentless self-promotion. For Banksy, each time he stencils his name - a repetitious logo in itself - next to a new piece he is both signing his work in the tradition of the artist and branding his ‘product’ for recognition. Banksy even goes so far as to stencil his logo on cars, animals and splashes of paint on the road; any medium to promote the Banksy brand. It is a technique that, intentionally or not, has paid off for him, resulting in a number of commissions including installations in clubs such as Brighton’s Ocean Rooms and illustrations for record sleeves such as the BadMeaningGood series. These are usually adaptations of works that can be found in the street, serving a double function of promoting Banksy through their commercial dissemination and promoting and authenticating the client in their original form.
However, some artists have begun to use this platform as a way to develop their art into marketable products. Shepard Fairey is one such artist who developed the ‘Obey’ brand as a series of iconic street actions, which over time gained notoriety and “unwittingly became a global brand itself” (Manco 2004, 43). Today the Obey giant stares out at the public not only from the streets but also from the surface of expensive t-shirts, which calls into question the intentions of its creator and the possibility, or perhaps inevitability, of such increased commercialisation of public art. If one artist can do such a thing “unwittingly”, then how long will it be until other artists or companies catch on?
It is evident that the spheres of art and advertising enjoy an extremely complex relationship. Today our streets are awash with both, even if it may not always be entirely evident which is which. The uniting factor in this debate must be that essentially, art and advertising have at their heart the same single objective: communication. The industries of marketing and advertising have been relentlessly pursuing the most effective methods and vehicles for that objective ever since their inception, driven by perhaps the ultimate inspiration: the pursuit of money. With a completely different, yet equally passionate raison d’etre, artists have in a sense recognised the work of these industries in terms of their power and ability to communicate to global audiences, by their appropriation of the industries’ tools and techniques. As these techniques are employed by a growing number of people for vastly different purposes, the grey area between the two spheres widens. Perhaps the only conclusion that can be drawn is that there is an increasingly diminished unification or common purpose amongst those artists employing the mechanics of advertising: some are committed to the idea of free public art, some are involved in social and political activism, some are using the street as their public portfolio and business card, and some are working for Nike. Critics may see this as a diversion, others as an exciting development full of opportunity for artists and advertisers alike; although, the most significant proportion of public thought would probably settle with NYC Anti-Graffiti Squad Lieutenant Steve Mona’s assessment: “… vandalism, pure and simple.” (Murray & Murray 2002) ¶ 12:41 AM 0 comments
Some alternative layouts for the front page. I ended up going black instead of white and keeping it minimal rather than shouty. ¶ 12:10 AM 0 comments
Monday, May 08, 2006
