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Hacking the Highways
cindy writes "LA artist Richard Ankrom got fed up with the terrible signage on the Harbor Freeway. Rather than wait for CalTrans to do something about it, he decided to take matters into his own hands. He carefully made additional signage and added it to an existing freeway sign. The results were so good that no one, including CalTrans, noticed for months! The LA Times has an article including some of the video shot by the artist to document his "crime.""
Just saw this stury on the News tonight. Pretty funny story. The guy is glad no charges are being pressed( for trespassing and impersonation, he dressed up as a construction worker ). Of course this is hollywood, so he made a documentary about his crusade to do CalTrans job for them. He encourages others to go fix things that are wrong, sounds like someone who would fit in OS.
Spencer Ogden
This story reminds me of a somewhat similar occurrence that is currently going on at MIT. When I was taking a tour at the campus we walked past a rather large bridge. The tour guide informed us that a local fraternity used the bridge for hazing purposes, and labeled distances on the street in some unit (it started with a Q, quibs maybe?).
To this day police officers record the spot of accidents in the same unit ("Ahh, yeah, we've got a fender bender at 24 quibs").
Can anyone more familiar with the area fill in my holes?
Kinda like the guy that 'draws' $20 bills and trades them to people in exchange for goods & services, or the urban ledgend about the illustration artist who send a postcard resume to a prospective employer that simply stated, "Examine the stamp" (which was, of course, hand drawn). It's not high art in the classic sense, but it requires more skill than Madonna's last twelve albums and a hell of a lot more creativity.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
The highlights aren't vandalism of the spray paint and broken windows variety, but vandalism of a more artistic or pointed sort that often leaves the target looking better than before.
The really destructive vandalism, alas, is usually bought and paid-for, and protected by the powers-that-be. One way to reclaim private advertising in public places is to Convert Billboards to Chalkboards. This is one you can do in your spare time - hop to it!
The folks at Baby Smasher Industries will sell you some amended "instructions for use" stickers that show how restroom baby-changing stations are really meant to be population control devices.
The folks at Fortean Times have kept their fingers on the pulse of curious vandalism: Authorities in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, were called to the scene to investigate when fifteen trees in a city park were fitted with doorknobs and locks. Residents of a Rio de Janeiro slum painted all of the buildings in their neighborhood a uniform pale green, perhaps to confuse police.
In 1982, during the USSR-supported anti-Solidarity crackdown by the government in Poland, someone changed all of the signs at the “Stalingrad” metro station in Paris to read, instead, “Gdansk” (the city where the Solidarity movement was founded).
What would you do, given the inclination?
Quiquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
The egg in the face aspect comes from the fact that nobody noticed the fact that the sign had been added. You'd think that the people in charge of the signs would notice that there was an addition that hadn't been authorized. Instead, Caltrans is apparently a big enough beaurocracy that nobody noticed the change, or if they did they assumed that somebody else had authorized it. Of course part of that is simply that he was right; there should have been a sign there all along, so people who saw it tended to view it as the bozos getting their act together rather than an obvious hack.
It seemed to work for Andy Warhol with the soup cans and other copies of ordinary household products. It may not be super-duper, ivory tower elite art, but it qualifies as art. FWIW, I've seen some of the guy's other artwork- the artists' colony where he lives has periodic open houses where anyone can come in and see the work of artists who want to show it off- and he does some interesting stuff. It isn't brilliant, but he's certainly a very competent artist.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Ever since the double hammer blow of postmodernism and deconstructionism, art has been mostly defined as "whatever people who think they are artists call art". Being an Artist is now mainly an ego-boost, and is used to raise themselves in quality above the riff-raff, like us.
If I did it, it would not be art, because I'm not a artiste.
I pity the modern artist; adrift in a sub-culture that actively works to undermine everything, even itself; they live in a solipsistic nightmare.
Here's a page about a guy who has done several of these, although he doesn't them more from a prankster point-of-view. They aren't vandalism as you might think, but just fun stuff that he makes to see how long his art goes by unnoticed.
Most of them are funny, like the one where he finds a sign at a cafe explaining "How to put the lid on your coffee," (duh!) and changes it to a version which contains many sexual overtones that even fools the employees.
The idea that "art is what I say it is" is reasonably valid; the only thing is that it may be art, but it can very easily be BAD art. I look at it this way: art has to reach its audience. If it doesn't, it's bad art, though still art. For the record, I do think dadaism is mostly pretentious silliness for people not quite smart enough to out-Magritte Magritte. I will say, however, that every once in a while a statement of that sort impresses me. Hacking a road sign is certainly in that category; if anything it is more akin to MIT hacks, which I would consider art in a sense as well.
There's good art, which reaches its audience, often (but not always) tells a story, and works on levels as simple as "look what I can do with a couple of lines and blocks of color" (Mondrian) and "pretty Italian girl with strange expression" (the Mona Lisa) to something as complex and/or controversial as "Sex is fun, get comfy with it" (Annie Sprinkle) and "Remember those caught in the middle" (Guernica by Picasso) to something unusual along the lines of "enjoy your food" (Thomas Keller's restaurant, the French Laundry) or "remember the nameless" (the New England Holocaust Memorial, with its etched rows of numbers).
Some artists do have solipsistic tendencies; endless reams of teen angst poetry are only the beginning of that. IMHO deconstructionism has been a disaster for the humanities, occasionally a useful tool but generally bypassing intent and message to focus solely on motivation. Marshall McLuhan said "the medium is the message". While I don't think this was precisely what he was talking about, art is still a form of mass communications. If the artist can't communicate with the audience, that doesn't make it not art. If the artist chooses to use a nontraditional medium to make his point, that doesn't make it not art. The idea of modern art is to push the frontiers. Honestly, to me a Mondrian is indistinguishable from the pattern of a set of drapes that might have been sitting around since 1970. That's fine. But the fact is that you can't dismiss the idea that "art is what I say it is" out of hand.
This guy chose to use a BGS (Big Green Sign) as his medium. I would personally consider calling it art to be a stretch, but it's an incredible hack, and if you consider hacks to be artistry it is an excellent example of it.
/Brian
If the artist chooses to use a nontraditional medium to make his point, that doesn't make it art, either. Too much of modern art -- to my admittedly untrained eye -- is the form of "Look at how clever I am to do something to this medium." That's not enough to qualify.
Modern art seems to be a collection of people screaming "Look at me! Look at me!" I disagree that this is really art. Art is a transcendant statement about the human condition. This is a road sign. I don't think they overlap.
I don't think this is an incredible hack. Its invisibility depended only on its utter reasonableness. He crafted a good sign but essentially he was just an unpaid independent contractor for CalTrans. True hacks, the really good ones, fade into the background by taking advantage of your preconceptions, but then get you to scratch your head and wonder, how did I ever think that was normal. A true hack, in the same vein as this alleged one, was when MIT students replaced the engraving(!) in one of their halls. They changed the motto of the school to something more, well, offbeat, and did it by carving the letters into foam, then placing them in front of the actual letters. Thus, people saw engraved letters and just filed it away, not noticing till much later that the mottom was wrong.
That was a great hack. This, this is just roadwork.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
You're thinking of JSG Boggs. He makes his own money and spends it (to anyone who will accept it) at face value. He doesn't sell them as art, however. He just buys stuff with them.
Apparently the value as a work of art is actually higher than the face value. If you run across a Boggs bill, you definately want to look for an interested art collector. (or keep it in circulation, which is more fun)
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Exactly. I would also commend you to read the this article by Noam Chomsky that points out a number of facts (the documented, independent, uncontested variety, not political "facts") that back this up.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
OK this is art about the same as that idiot pipe-bombing art student's "smiley face" project was art. I've attended one of the US's highest ranked art colleges and lemme tell you something, art is crap. Most of what I have seen in the art world is a waste of energy. This isn't art, it _IS_ a cool hack (which frankly I place more value on) but it's not art and shouldn't be construed as such.