About a month ago, Alex posted this piece on an idea we came up with on the road.
Like subway scratchitti and cut-out art, the idea is to take the ads you see everyday and cover the actual ad text with thick black paint, leaving only the image by itself. This takes the commercial element out the image, and leaves it to stand on its own, so it displays its own text and message, void of the advertisers message.
This is what Alex originally wrote: When I’m walking down the street and see advertising everywhere I look I often wonder what those ads would convey if there was no product name or copy on it. Some things would just be a couple laughing. Some seem to have a deep meaning. Some are of people ripping their hair out of their heads while sitting at a computer. Most you look at and think, “What could that possibly be for?”
So, here are some more blacked-out ads (can you guess what they’re for?):
Our favorite street artist, Poster Boy, was arrested last month.
If you don’t know who he is, Poster Boy is New York subway artist, who’s work appears seemingly at random in Metro stations all over the city. With a razor blade has his only tool, Poster Boy slices art out of all those awful ads that get in your face everyday on your way to work (for a quick introduction to him, take a look at the video below). We’ve mentioned subway vandalism and scratchitti a few times before, but Poster Boy is our favorite criminal/artist, and certainly the most known. He’s been written about in New York Magazine, the Guardian, and his arrest has been covered by the Times. Every time I take a train in this city, I covet a chance to see a new work in person, on the platform, where I’m forced to study the same oversized faces and beguiling slogans daily.
I learned of his arrest when I passed a box for the New York Press, a magazine I’d never seen before, and saw in red comicbook lettering, over a neon green background, the headline “Who is Poster Boy?” I grabbed the paper, the display copy since the box was empty, and opened to the article. Poster Boy, real(?) name Henry Matyjewicz, was arrested last month at a soho gallery, where they were displaying a new work he’d done with Aakash Nihalani (the guy who makes those tape-cubes on the sidewalk). It was a completely legal piece of art, but the show opening advertised a live appearance by the outlaw, and so some plainclothesman showed up and busted him (apparently he was nabbed because he was bragging to some girl that he was Poster Boy, when he probably should have kept his mouth shut; but can you blame him?).
There’s an interview with Henry Matyjewicz, not Poster Boy, in the paper. It’s pretty interesting. For possible legal reasons, but hopefully more artistic and ironic reasons, Matyjewicz separates himself from Poster Boy, referring to him as if it were a different person. He talks as if Poster Boy is more than a person, and instead a movement, that he, Matyjewiscz, sometimes agrees with, and sometimes doesn’t. He even says that sometimes he wishes he could be more like Poster Boy. It’s an interesting interview, not great, but still worth checking out. I’m not sure the writer’s intentions, and he sometimes makes Matyjewicz sound like an idiot, but you can find the article here.
As a final note, the piece Poster Boy was showing at the gallery the night we was arrested, the piece above the article, ironically features a cut-out from Medea Goes to Jail.
I love Scratchitti as you can probably tell from my Spectacle with Elvis Costello post. Scratchitti or Scribing is an art form; the only true art form in fact. It’s where someone uses a switchblade or box cutter to either make a collage or simply adjust the original message. Sometimes they’re just tagging. I love it.
The other day I saw a subway advertisement on the Manhattan-bound Clinton-Washington C Train platform for the SUDC Program. The image was of a cartoon character playing the flute in the valley of a castle. It’s text read: “In a land far, far away, there lived a handsome little prince. On his birthday his father gave him a magical flute. He told him if he played it he’d magic…” and then everything faded away with the program’s tagline being, “Some children stories never get finished.”
Well someone finished it with, “…ally warp to level 8 in Super Mario 3.”
