January 14–21, 1999
cover story|futurartists
Stick It
For sticker artists, the whole city's a gallery. Now the ICA is bringing this renegade public art indoors.
by Jen Darr
|
When Stuart Netsky found out that the guy he was dating had cheated on him with an art history professor, he went to his computer and began creating stickers.
"Beware of art history professors who drive Ford Probes," read one sticker. Another: "That relationship wasn't all bad—at least I learned how to dust with a sock."
He stuck them around the city on telephone poles, often when he would walk his dog.
"It was my way of venting," he surmises.
In addition to venting, Netsky, 44, makes stickers as commentary.
A Pew Fellow in sculpture who teaches at Drexel, Textiles and the University of the Arts, he cites "My kid is an honor roll student" bumper stickers as an influence.
"There are conversations going on between bumper stickers," he says. "A parent feels the need to tell everyone that his kid is an honor roll student, like it would give them status or pride. I found it very strange."
So he made a bumper sticker: "I [heart] black Styrofoam," because the corn on the cob that he buys at his market comes on black Styrofoam.
Netsky admits that he, too, has that need—"even if my responses are absurd and inane."
Netsky is one of more than 30 artists featured in Sticker Shock: Artists' Stickers, an exhibit of self-adhesive decal images opening this Friday at the Institute of Contemporary Art.
Assistant curator Alex Baker organized the show—the first of its kind at the ICA—not as a qualitative exhibition about a certain art form, but as a sociological study of stickers.
When you walk through the city, you'll likely overlook small details—black dots on the pavement that were once bright pink wads of chewing gum, crumpled-up potato chip bags, discarded Marlboro butts wedged in sidewalk cracks. Maybe you'll also miss the things that were put there on purpose—posters glued to poles by impoverished indie rockers, or stickers stuck to stop signs that don't seem to be advertising anything.
Then again, you might stop and think. Maybe you'll see Netsky's stickers, or one of Shepard Fairey's Andre the Giant stickers that have become a part of the blacktop in many Philadelphia crosswalks, and wonder why they're there.
Are they political statements? Vandalism? Art? Advertising?
|
Untitled from Shepard Fairey's Andre the Giant series (1998).
|
Depends on your point of view.
For Clare Rojas, 22, and Andrew Jeffrey Wright, 28, peppering the city with stickers is a way to show their work without having to go through traditional galleries.
Rojas, a printmaking graduate of Rhode Island School of Design, and Wright, who studied animation at the University of the Arts, create works that use magazine advertisements to comment on consumer culture. Mostly they show their work in their co-op gallery, Space 1026, but often you can see their works on surfaces around Philadelphia.
Artists lacking in money and connections can use stickers to reach a big, diverse audience, says Wright. But there is also that element of mischief. When you place a sticker in a well-traveled area where you might get caught and even arrested, Rojas explains, then you've made it in the sticker art world. It's comparable to the prestige an artist gets with his first gallery or museum show, she says.
And it's also a way artists can reclaim the urban environment—most of which is privately owned—as their own. To create their own maverick public art.
For Jim Winters, a 33-year-old San Francisco artist whose brightly colored sticker portraits of famous and not-so-famous people are included in Sticker Shock, it's not so political.
"It's all about me," he admits. "I'm a little more lighthearted about it. I see it as decorating the city."
Like many of the artists in the show, Winters' fascination with stickers stems from his childhood. He was crazy about Wacky Pack stickers, the parodies on household products that were big in the late '60s through the '70s. But his father, an Army man, wouldn't allow him to stick them anywhere. The only sticker allowed on the bumper of the family car was his father's "Trout Unlimited" fishing club decal.
"I guess I'm still getting over that," he muses.
He studied sculpture at Tyler, but soon after graduation learned silk-screening and found his niche. As an only child, he says, he never wanted to give things away. With stickers, he could give some away and keep some for himself.
He's also intrigued by the response he gets. Some stickers last years in one spot; others, only a few days.
"Either people want them or they are cleaning up what they think is vandalism."
|
Philly artist Astrid Bowlby concedes that she gets annoyed when people take her stickers down. "I'm not putting them on your vehicle, or on your front door," she says.
But she accepts it as part of the deal and just puts more out there.
For the ICA exhibit, Bowlby has drawn images on 2,000 Avery office labels, which make up one large landscape, Seeing is re-membering. In addition, she inserted drawings into 2,000 clear adhesive sleeves (the kind usually used for packing labels) and asked friends to stick them up in different cities, including Japan.
Though Bowlby, 37, is a member of a gallery, Nexus, she says both venues are important. Making work on stickers is "accessible, inexpensive, and I get what I want to say to a different kind of people, people I couldn't get in a gallery."
So how do you take this very democratic form of art, one that has no real controls or rules, and put it in a museum without altering its impact?
That was one of the challenges curator Baker faced.
Stickers are "transgressive and challenging, co-optive and commercialized at the same time," says Baker. "Like punk rock, you can challenge with it, but you can also end up on MTV."
His solution: Curate as little as possible. Almost everyone who submitted work for the show was accepted. Even those who missed the deadline were counted in. Their work will be shown in a smaller side room, says Baker. (Baker compares it to the democracy in high school art shows—everyone gets a space on the wall.)
But in presenting the work Baker didn't want to mimic the environment in which stickers are usually found. "I'm bringing you the stickers minus their context. I guess I'm still guilty of decontextualizing the art, but it shows viewers a different perspective. It opens their eyes to the city."
Sticker Shock, Institute of Contemporary Art, 118 S. 36th St. at Sansom, Jan. 16-March 7, opening reception Friday, Jan. 15, 5:30-7:30 p.m., 215-898-7108.
