Anonymous – Maine Artists in Brooklyn, with a Reflection by Véronique Plesch

Maine artists are making paintings about immigration issues, Gaza genocide, the destruction of our democracy, nuclear Armageddon, native American language, DEI, boycotts, etc. that are now hanging in public spaces in Brooklyn and Manhattan, in those six-foot tall commercial advertisement boxes on the sides of bus shelters. They are excited by the opportunity to reach a wide and diverse audience about the issues that are especially pressing at the start of this new administration. It is part of an artist/activist project inspired originally by Jordan Seiler’s PublicAdCampaign which created new avenues for public dialogues in our shared public spaces. His project intended to incite participation and question outdoor advertising.

These Maine artists consider their work a call to action, to collectively re-imagine what our cities and societies could be, taking creativity into the streets to support the struggle for social, economic and climate justice, as well as for human rights and dignity for all.

Véronique Plesch – Activist Cuckoo Nests

I am delighted to contribute a few words about what I will call the ad box project. What interest me in it are the parallels I see with graffiti, a subject I study in my scholarship and teach in a seminar titled Graffiti, Past and Present, in which we consider the history of the practice from Antiquity to today and across continents and cultures.

Defining graffiti is tricky, but scholars agree on one thing: that it consists in making marks (verbal or pictorial) on surfaces that were not meant to receive them. In that sense, the concept of appropriation is fundamental—and here we find a first point of encounter between graffiti and the ad boxes project.

Appropriation is a concept that greatly interests me and on which I have published (1). Its etymology is telling: from the Latin verb appropriare, itself derived from proprius, “own,” it means “to make one’s own.” The etymology reveals that the notion involves two very important issues: power and identity. Appropriation is an action and a declaration of agency and this is central to the ad box project: spaces, normally used for commercial purposes, are taken over to communicate with the passers-by burning issues and they do so in a manner that powerfully expresses emotions such as concern, despair, and outrage. The reader/beholder is often directly addressed, and imperatives abound (“use your rights,” “defy, resist, refuse”).

Not to belabor the point, but only something that one does not own can be appropriated. The action takes on profound significance when the appropriated entity carries specific meanings and import: the action of taking over is never a gratuitous one. This is very much in evidence here, as the bus shelter boxes are locked: only those who have the keys can access them and change their contents. Just like in the case of urban graffiti in hard-to-reach places, the result of remarkable physicality, athleticism, and daring, one is impressed by the feat of ingenuity at work here.

The boxes contain ads—of all kinds—and their access is the result of a commercial transaction: the space is not free; furthermore, they tend to advertise products and services for sale. As the team of anonymous artists places their messages, they subvert the economy at work here, challenging the implicit hierarchy and symbolism of those who hold the keys. The public location is yet another point of encounter with graffiti, which under normal circumstances is supposed to be produced outside of the channels of the art market (as we know, this has greatly changed with artists such as Jean Michel-Basquiat or Keith Haring who saw their works displayed—and thus sold—in galleries). The paintings that replace the ads are made by artists, and as they appear right in the public space of the street, they are democratic and accessible to all.

As Troy Lovata and Elizabeth Olton put it, graffiti are site specific (2) and the site they occupy is part of their message. As a result, as ad boxes are taken over by our anonymous artists, heartfelt statements advocating for important causes replace capitalist sales pitches. At its core, graffiti is dialogic: it enters in conversation—if not in competition—with a location, a spot on the wall, and other graffiti. Here too, we find an alternate discourse, one that challenges what is normally expected, and, as a result, is guaranteed to provoke surprise in the passers-by.

Although we are bombarded by texts and images and as a result, we tend to block them off (or, at least, prevent their full perception to reach our consciousness), we cannot avoid noticing the ads that appear everywhere in cities. Outfront, a company that provides advertisement space on billboards, “street furniture” (as bus shelters are referred to), and on public transportation, invites customers to “[l]everage the power of location, creative, and smart audience data to drive meaningful connections between brands and audiences in the real world with out of home advertising.” About bus shelter advertising, their website explains that it “captures the attention of both pedestrians and drivers.” Being seen by anybody who happens to pass by is also true of graffiti, which, as I have often stressed, correspond to what Italian paleographer Armando Petrucci referred to as “exposed writings” (scritture esposte): texts that are placed in public spaces and can be read from a distance by many people at once (3). What’s remarkable is that “exposed writings” demand attention—you cannot avoid reading such texts (I think of Petrucci each time I drive home and pass a church and the large bulletin board that sits in front of it and cannot not read the inspirational messages posted by the minister!).

As these artists appropriate bus shelter ad boxes, they behave like the proverbial cuckoo, who lays its eggs in another bird’s nest. Curious to find out more about cuckoos, I learned that this is a behavior known as “brood parasitism.” As it turns out, cuckoos are not alone: other birds, as well as insects and fish practice it. The complex strategies deployed by these tricksters are not limited to laying eggs in a borrowed nest. An article published in the magazine of the National Audubon Society on parasitic birds warns the reader: “These tales and pics from the nest will fill you with wonder and dread” as we learn among other things about the fate of the original inhabitants but also about the mimicry that takes place when the parasitic eggs are disguised to resemble those of the legitimate dwellers (4). This brings me back to the ad box project, for here too spaces are hijacked as it were, forced to provide a protective nest for new messages. The parasitic signs even parody some of the ads they replace as can be seen in the image reproduced below, which adopts the rhetoric of legal ads, as it asks the viewer: “Victim of fascism?”

In place of, to quote Jordan Seiler’s PublicAdCampaign website, a “corporate message [that] stands against our public interest” and that distracts “us from each other in favor of ourselves,” we find expressions of communal, societal, and global concern and of the need “for social, economic and climate justice, as well as for human rights and dignity for all.”

 

 

Notes

1. Kathleen Ashley and Véronique Plesch, ed. The Cultural Processes of “Appropriation,” special issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 32.1 (2002) and Véronique Plesch, “On Appropriations,” in Crossing Borders: Appropriations and Collaborations, special issue of Interfaces 38 (2016–17): 7–38.
2. Troy Lovata and Elizabeth Olton, ed. Understanding Graffiti (Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2015; reprinted Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2015); quote on p. 73.
3. Armando Petrucci, “Potere, spazi urbani, scritture esposte: proposte ed esempi,” in Culture et idéologie dans la genèse de l’État moderne (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1985): 85-97. In the English translation of his book La scrittura. Ideologia e rappresentazione (Torino, Einaudi, 1986), Public Lettering: Script, Power, and Culture, trans. Linda Lappin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), the notion is rendered as “display writing.”
4. Jesse Greenspan, “The Brilliant Ways Parasitic Birds Terrorize Their Victims,” Audubon 25 February 2016.