haiku 29 January 2019

To make the best art,
Does it help to suffer from,

Um, mental illness?

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

sway the vote

“It’s an eyesore, a blight on our city, which not many of our citizens enjoy,” said an older council member who’d received a handful of complaints from his affluent neighbors. “Therefore, I propose we keep allocating funds to get rid of it.” A few of his younger colleagues knew that it drew people to the city and gave it an authentic and inimitable character. They disagreed with him, but there were too few of them to sway the vote.

And, so, New York City joined a thousand other municipalities across the United States and fitted out squads of workers with paint rollers and long-handled scrapers. They loosed the workers on up-and-coming parts of town, giving them license to paint over, deface, scrape off, and otherwise remove the vast collections of street art that had theretofore covered otherwise blank and underutilized street poles. The workers attacked ten thousand and one unique examples of cunning artistic expression deemed mere trash by a group of disconnected bureaucrats who cared not for the creative potency of Big Apple denizens.

The workers scraped and sprayed and rollered, destroying countless pieces of the city’s unique cultural heritage. Adding insult to injury, the city council had not even had the decency, poise, or foresight to at least take pictures of said priceless works of art before having them trashed. In the wake of the art desecration squads, the city lay bare, raped of its color, efficiently monetized, franchised, and sterilized for the benefit of profits-hungry corporations. New York City’s street-side art museums are dying at the hands of her elected officials, and the world is a less beautiful place for it.

americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan

approaching 7 figures

Los Angeles, CA 28 July 2015

Shirleigh Ratchthwana, former war-crimes prosecutor and current head of Public Relations for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), denounced today the destruction of priceless cultural artifacts within a stone's throw of the museum's main entrance. “We regularly watch as groups of vandals deputized to their duty by the City of Los Angles (City) strip layers of art from our town's various walls, sign-posts, and switching boxes – daily and without relent. Examples of this art include stickers en collage or solo, pasted-up paper pieces, and those that are sprayed-on. By its actions and those of its deputies, City demonstrates an alarming lack of appreciation for such art as it presides over, regardless if that art should hang in a gallery or on a street corner.” Art that happens to be located in public, or street art, is created by daring and talented individuals who risk fines and abuse if caught in the act of application. Pieces by the most famous modern graffitos can fetch sums approaching 7 figures. Fundamentally human in its chaotic and spontaneous nature, street art – graffiti – is one of mankind's oldest documented yet least hallowed forms of artistic expression. Whether in the walls of Teotihuacan and Giza or the ruins of Stonehenge and Sumer, the scratches and scribbles of a million faceless graffiti-writers bridge the gaps of time.

“We stand now witness to a great extinction,” said Dr. Horatio B. Gherrt, professor of art history at Harvard's Schoullenbarg School for Contemporary Art. “This extinction, however, this mass die-off, is not of beast but of beauty, not of aardvark or antelope but of art itself. A solitary artist working by herself would take months – even years, or never – to create such pieces of perfectly blended chaos, such though-evoking combinations of logo, typeface, cultural icon, and slogan – old and new, obscure and obvious, crude and tender. Yet such collages spring into being on otherwise unadorned and publicly-accessible spaces virtually overnight and completely free of charge to the city, which then expends resources to scrape them down or cover them in dull, gray paint.”

With municipalities across the world continuing to criminalize the application of street art and refusing to recognize its value and beauty, the future still looks bleak for artists who follow the ancient human urge to mark their passage with note or scrawl (but without a by-your-leave). “So long as there are people, there will be graffiti,” said Ms. Ratchthwana. “Instead of simply destroying things they don't understand, we hope that City leaders will soon treat street art as they would treat a Van Gogh painting or Ming-era vase – as part and parcel of mankind's cherished cultural legacy, something that deserves to be protected.” City declined to comment for this article.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥

anti-graffitos punished

In Los Angeles (LA) county court today, seventeen members of a graffiti removal team were charged with destroying and defacing public property. Armed with metal-scraper-tipped poles, the individuals had been seen poking at and otherwise leaving large and prominent scratches upon mile upon mile of utility- and traffic-signal poles throughout the greater LA area. In their defense, the accused stated that they had been hired by the city to remove stickers, wheat-paste posters, and any other adhesive street-art, and that the scratches were merely a byproduct of their lawful efforts. Judge K. D. Geisternand, presiding, allowed as evidence video footage from cameras operated by the city's Department of Transportation (LADoT), red-light-camera footage that showed eight of the seventeen accused individuals using paint-brush-tipped broom-sticks to apply to dozens of poles layer upon layer of a light-gray paint so thoroughly underwhelming as to cause passing drivers to fall asleep at the wheels of their cars. Pictures of the damage perpetrated by these Artwork Desecration Teams can be found at the LADoT's own website, under subsection Lunacy, by clicking the tab entitled Oh, My Word, What Have We Done.

When asked about the reasons why LA chooses to defile indiscriminately its very own precious and irretrievable graffiti, the honorable judge Geisternand stated from among the dark, shadowy recesses of her chambers: “How these people are allowed to deface and destroy this city's street art; how we pay them to thoroughly damage the structural integrity of pristine metal lamp poles; how they are sent out, in broad fucking daylight, to unceremoniously paint over some of the finest art the world has ever seen; these things I do not understand.” The seventeen counter-vandals were released with a severe warning, but Judge Geisternand docked the graffiti removal teams' organizer – a company owned by the company formerly known as Halliburton – a surliberty of ten whorphans, and sentenced its executive officers to life without joy.

場黑麥 ioanni elymucampus fecit

creativity supposedly ”still valid”

According to a report released recently by the office of the rear-secretary for Art-Specific Studies Among Urban American Populations (ASSAUAP), spontaneously occurring artistic creativity performed by individuals who are not paid specifically to be creative is still necessary for sustaining an upbeat, positive national consciousness. “We could not believe it, either,” said the project's lead researcher, Charong K. Charondibadi. “It did not matter how we tried to skew the numbers, or how many times we had those Bangladeshi typists re-enter the data – it turns out that uncompensated creativity matters, somehow.” The study, which bears the title, “Is creativity still valid?” furthermore indicates that works of art made and applied by individuals known as street artists enliven the General Public and enhances Its mood to such a large degree that all efforts to date to eradicate graffiti have been more detrimental to the continuing economic survival and spiritual buoyancy of the U.S.A. than the rise of the military industrial complex (which demands a state of perpetual war), the proliferation of the television (which has destroyed the art storytelling in this country), and the presidency of George W. Bush (which, via the Patriot Act, annihilated the Constitutional protections), combined.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

graffiti removal team warned in court

In county court today, seventeen members of a graffiti removal team were charged with destroying and defacing public property. Seen to be armed with metal-scraper-tipped poles, the individuals were witnessed poking at and otherwise leaving large and prominent scratches upon dozens of utility and traffic-signal poles throughout the greater Los Angeles area (LA). In their defense, the accused stated that they had been hired to remove accumulations of stickers, wheat-paste posters, and other street art, and that the scratches were merely a byproduct of their lawful efforts. Judge Geisternand, presiding, allowed as evidence tapes from cameras operated by the city's Department of Transportation (LADoT) that had filmed inadvertently at least eight of the seventeen individuals using paint-brush-tipped broom-sticks to paint a great number of poles with layer upon layer of a light-gray paint so thoroughly underwhelming as to cause passing drivers to fall asleep at the wheel. Pictures of the damage perpetrated by these Artwork Desecration Teams can be found at the LADoT's own website, under subsection Lunacy, by clicking the tab entitled Oh My What Have We Done.

When asked about the reasons why LA chooses to defile indiscriminately its very own precious and irretrievable works of art, the honorable K. D. Geisternand stated from among the darker recesses of her chambers: “How these people are allowed to deface and to destroy this city's street art; how they are paid to thoroughly scratch up previously untouched metal telephone poles; how they are sent out, in broad fucking daylight, to unceremoniously paint over some of the finest graffiti the world has ever seen; these things I do not understand.” The seventeen were released with a severe warning, but Judge Geisternand docked the graffiti removal teams' organizer, a company owned by the company formerly known as Halliburton, a surliberty of ten whorphans, and sentenced its executive officers to life without joy.

場黑麥 ioanni elymucampus fecit

encylopediamericanifesto - phaltworthiness

  The street art vagabond has sworn to preserve for Posterity the diversity of graffiti – it is her duty to capture, isolate, and upload photographs of any urban artwork she locates by bicycling or walking or skating around a city. Looking, however, does not always slake her thirst: in order to perpetuate the phenomenon of artwork that seems to appear suddenly on previously unadorned urban surfaces, and to prove her passage through the area, she leaves her unique mark, a hand-drawn image that serves as her Glyph of Personal Identification, her own meager tribute to the maddeningly prolific beautification campaign known as street art (or, alternately, as vandalism).

  The urban artist spends resources such as time and money on his efforts to fill the urban environment's many empty spaces with colorful and bizarre pictures; for his troubles he is hounded by police and harassed by them likewise. In addition to such acts of state-mandated repression, he suffers from repeated and chronic bouts of a newly classified condition known as phaltweariness (the individual suffering from this condition will commit frequent acts of frugality and self-sacrifice; his actions will reek of virtuous behavior; he will act not out of a desire to prove himself to another person, or to claim for himself glory, but because the majesty of the human spirit has rewarded his sacrifice of time and self by filling him with a transcendent vigor not seen since the dawn of humankind).

  No grasp as fleeting as that of Big Brother might contain, however, the inexorable and all-nullifying tempest that is Virtuous Action. The street art vagabond therefore who hurls without ado the bounty of her artistic labor upon the phaltscape's expectant canvasses while showcasing freely upon w³  her fellow street artists' work (where it shall be judged and ignored until all servers crash at once), she who does these things simply because they need doing, she who refuses to claim ownership over any part of the process, that street artist is phaltworthy – she acts for the good of the world by leaving well enough alone.

  Spes Mea In Ratio Est - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp

encylopediamericanifesto: phaltweariness - dehydration

  Among the many serious dangers the smog rider faces daily is the risk of dehydration. A condition easy to overlook but deadly if ignored, the body's dehydration distress call resembles closely the distress call it makes to signal hunger; additional telltale signs of dehydration are crankiness and fatigue. A few reports say that within smog rider packs it is common for the incessantly whining and inexplicably binge-eating member to be forced to hydrate by the IPM (the Instant & Perpetual Militia, i.e. the smog-packs' ubiquitous, fully meritocratic agents of enforcement), however our trust in the source for these reports is shaken.

  Multiple trustworthy sources report that when cycling in desert climates the smog rider adjusts his body to the local variances for temperature and humidity, a somewhat risky process in which he trains his body to need less water than it needs in more northern-lying areas. The first step he takes in this process is to eat of the local soil, and to pledge his fealty to the spirits of the land, and to praise the things growing in it, and to celebrate the things scampering across its face (a curious custom akin to the practices of First People tribes). Once he has ingested of the local earth, he cuts back on water gradually until he needs only a liter of it a day, and perhaps a few ounces more if he should exercise vigorously.

  An active person and avid reader alike, the smog rider learned some of the eternal lessons of the desert by reading tales about Rommel and Lawrence of Arabia, tales of Westerners surviving in the desert on minimal amounts of water using methods they learned from the Bedouin people. (In fact, he considers himself deep down an adjunct member of the hard-scrabble group of desert dwelling bad-asses know as the Fremen, from in Frank Herbert's book Dune.)

  But he is not Fremen, and he is not Bedouin – he is a smog-riding street-art vagabond, a man free of scorn and haste whose heart is pure, and in whom there is no room for death.

  Spes Mea In Ratio Est - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp