'late post' OR 'my computer hates Bar Guiliani's wireless'

My stencil ended up pretty far from the social commentary we've been seeing in class. In fact, it's mostly a very nerdy joke. The project is also wordless, to make it so it wasn't 'too easy'. Looking back, incorporating text may have actually been a good idea - the final result turned out much less recognizable than I had first thought. It will probably be lost on most people, and I'm pretty sure that would be considered a failure in the street art world.


I started out with this picture, with the idea of doing something to the tip jar at work in the vein of a sign that was there a few years ago: "Support Counter Intelligence". However, I am not that clever and quickly abandoned that. Sticking with the same picture, I decided to make a contextual joke - Jack Kerouac's face! On the road! Haha, get it?! Yeah, my roommates gave me the same blank stare. Ah well, va bene.

In some way I guess I wanted to not only make a joke but maybe get people to wonder about this person on the pavement - another reason that excluding text was probably a poor choice after all. The social movement he inspired seems to have died out in all but a few circles; it was never too widespread, but so much great art came out of it, so much discussion of alternate viewpoints (Ginsberg and his young men made quite a splash, I must say). The liberalization of published media comes out of the efforts of this man and his friends, so why are they so rarely recognized outside of literary circles?
Granted, beat has always been an undercurrent rather than part of the society - indeed, it is a rejection of the mainstream - but maybe we should take their advice and seek out and question the things we take for granted in everyday structures and lifestyles. Finding the symbolic in the everyday was a large part of their philosophy, and Kerouac's image on the blacktop becomes self-referencing in that cheeky post-modern way and hopefully leads to a consideration of the ideas behind that road. Why do we obey the signs that tell us that only buses are allowed on that section of road? What does that imply? What authority do these signs have over other types?
I also saw several people actually stepping out into the middle of the road on the terminal after I was finished, and that made me consider why we are so intrigued by images and text being present in an unusual space. That is, of course, part of graffiti in the first place. A graffito draws attention to itself by virtue of being an invasive signifier. Whereas we walk past road signs we've seen a billion times assuming we know their message, street art attempts to jolt us out of that passive observation. Very beat in nature, no?

After a series of what would be euphemistically called 'technical difficulties' but what most people would call 'rain and sidewalk chalk don't mix,' I was finally able to both post my stencil and acquire halfway decent pictures of it. I did several around the quad area, including near the Wright St. bus terminal, which made me a little nervous if I'm honest. I'm not quite prepared to die for the sake of a visual pun. It did give me more appreciation for what street artists do, though; I never realized how time consuming it is, or how much one has to take both the picture and environment into consideration in order to get the message across.