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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.""
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?
Congratulations for reading the article.
He made a perfect replica of a highway sign, which probably isn't all that easy to do on your own. He did it in broad daylight. He got away with it for months. Besides, art imitates life (or in this case, makes life a little easier for everyone else.)
http://web.mit.edu/museum/fun/smoots.html
He added something to a highway sign. Something that appears on thousands of highways signs in the country. What point is he trying to make here? The article made numerous references to an almost heroic face-egging of the elite pork-barrelists in their ivory towers, but why? Kind of funny how the transit authority agreed with him...kind of cheapens the whole thing. Maybe they understand it.
Does the fact that he was very careful in making this sign make it art? Can I lovingly craft a standard school issue room number placard and label an unlabled room in the name of art? The faceless school gestapo will never notice, and my sign may be seen by dozens of unwary students shuffling to and from class in that way they tend to. I'll be a hero. Take THAT, facilities and maintanance!
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
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
but just imagine if we allowed your average person on the street to dictate how a tcp/ip stack should be implemented, or what have you.
You have just described open-source software development.
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