Guerilla Marketing

In a previous post, I briefly mentioned an advertising phenomenon known as ‘Guerilla Marketing.’ It occurs to me that this concept might prove useful as this examination of graffiti continues.

In 2005, Sony hired TATS Cru to design and carry out an advertising campaign in major cities throughout the United States. Stencil graffiti and wheat-pastes featuring space cadet-looking children using the Play Station Portable (PSP) as a rocking horse or skateboard or some other toy began appearing on the walls of various ‘hip’ neighborhoods in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco.

This was not the first instance of such a ploy, but it stands in my mind as a sort of milestone or signpost in the graffiti milieu, due to the reaction the campaign received from local residents, the State and the graffiti community.

Initially, the advertisements appeared to be graffiti (or “street art”), and were thought to be an isolated incident, and there were vehement protests when it was later revealed that Sony paid for everything, including the right to place advertisements on buildings. The stencils and wheat-pastes were quickly crossed out, and some individuals began writing angry comments about TATS Cru, Sony, and the PSP on the streets and online. See here, here, and here.

Reactions from the graffiti community were equivalent to reactions to rival or inexperienced writers: stencil works and wheat-pastes were painted over, and comments expressing disgust were written nearby.

A Queens Councilman demanded that Sony take down the ads and pay $20,000 to New York City’s anti-graffiti program.[1] This same Councilman joined Mayor Bloomberg in opposing a 2005 graffiti exhibition and demonstration organized by Marc Ecko, and employed similar language to describe both events, claiming that the Sony advertisements and Mr. Ecko’s exhibition existed to encourage children to commit crimes.

From the standpoint of materials and techniques, there is no difference between the TATS Cru PSP adverts and, for example, Shepard Fairey’s OBEY posters, Banksy’s rats, or CHUNK Tags for that matter. However, insofar as the Sony/TATS Cru advertisements were legal—Sony rented advertising space from building owners—this separates the TATS Cru PSP ads from CHUNK tags and OBEY posters, but only in cases where CHUNK tagged an object without permission. (The existence of ‘permission’ walls should not be forgotten.)

But not all instances of Guerilla Marketing are legal (or sanctioned) in this same way. For example, in 2001, IBM was fined more than $120,000 for damages and clean-up costs associated with a Guerilla Marketing campaign for the Linux operating system. And the existence of illegal and unsanctioned Guerilla Marketing ploys largely erases the legal/illegal distinction between Guerilla Marketing and the various sorts of graffiti.

But there must be a difference, given the varying reactions to Guerilla Advertisements and graffiti. It’s just that I have yet to see any real, material difference between the two activities.[2] In fact, it could be argued that Shepard Fairey’s illegal OBEY works serve merely to advertise his clothing line, graphic design work, and/or gallery shows, though I am not comfortable making such an assertion at this time.

I think, however, that Guerilla Marketing is special sort of graffiti and believe I can define the phenomenon with some amount of specificity:

Guerilla Marketing – drawings, paintings, leaflets, wheat-pastes, and other materials placed on public and/or private property by individuals or groups acting as agents of a corporation or other entity for the express purpose of advertising a product or service. Advertisements may or may not be sanctioned by property owners.

[1] http://www.nypost.com/p/news/pol_get_graffiti_ads_off_the_wall_GROUpqVsiA2XHXmspywMNK accessed 22 January 2010.

[2] I would like to claim that the difference lies in the power of Corporations to influence public policy: Sony, for example, gives contributions to politicians. Politicians make laws and charge others with enforcing such laws. Therefore, Sony has direct control over what policies are enforced and what policies are ignored, and, hence, who is charged with crimes and who is allowed to go free. This is, however, completely fallacious and based in a Nouveau-Marxist Ideology that has very little relationship to everyday life. It is thus beyond the scope of this study at present.

Ephemerality and Persistence, pt. 1

Despite the persistence of paint on the walls of the caves at Altamira and Lascaux—which are over 20,000 years old—and the writing on the walls of Pompeii, graffiti is a largely ephemeral affair.

The easiest surfaces to mark (sandstone, for example) are the naturally the quickest to decay. Spraypaint fades due to sunlight, automobile exhaust, and the elements. Wheatpasted posters and stickers decay over time.

Some works, however, (and like the earlier, persistent examples) persist over time, due to conditions of its display (on the street or in an art gallery), the materials from which it was constructed (newsprint or archival paper; spraypaint or etching compound), and the attention paid to it by passersby.

Shepard Fairey’s Hope poster (made for Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential campaign) hangs in the Smithsonian institution. The Museum of Modern Art owns six works by SWOON. Residents of Bristol build protective enclosures for works by Banksy.

Simultaneously, a largely decayed Hope poster clings to a building in Chelsea; sixty wheat-pasted SWOON pieces disintegrated on the streets this week, year, month, whatever; and the city of Bristol buffed a Banksy mural just last month.

Similar sorts of claims can be made about virtually all forms of advertising that enter the public sphere: as advertising campaigns change focus, new advertisements replace the old; some people tend to write on, rip, remove, or otherwise alter poster and billboard advertisements; environmental factors also play a role.

This is one of the problems that I’m having with graffiti, and in fact points to further problems with a definition of graffiti.

In the past, I used the term ‘Street Art’ to denote graffiti that had a strong potential to become persistent or serve as advertising, including works by Shepard Fairey, SWOON, and Banksy, among others. This strategy worked well for a time, but became increasingly difficult to maintain: the concept of ‘Street Art’ is not robust enough to serve a useful purpose, especially since groups like the TATS Cru employ graffiti techniques in service of advertising campaigns for multinational corporations, and can be aligned with advertising, graffiti, and street art virtually at will.[1]

Perhaps the concept of Street Art can be recuperated, but I am not yet at a stage where I feel comfortable reinstating the term or making any claims about its content. Ephemerality might be a decent starting point for this endeavor, but I have no confidence in this tactic either, since there are highly persistent graffiti works and completely decayed examples of objects formerly referred to as ‘street art.’

The main issue here is at what point an object becomes advertising, or at what point a work stops being advertising and starts being graffiti (or vice versa). I would be tempted to claim that legality served as the dividing line except that in 2006 TATS Cru put up illegal wheat-pasted posters throughout New York City as part of a “guerilla marketing” campaign paid for by SONY, not to mention Banksy’s community accepted and protected works, or Shepard Fairey’s HOPE poster.

Can graffiti be subsumed into the advertising milieu? Is advertising merely another form of graffiti? If we wish to frame the question in this way, I vote for the latter. But I’m highly doubtful that this would lead to any meaningful resolution.

I’ll leave this hanging for today. Perhaps further exploration in other areas will allow some progress to be made here.

[1] I also had (and have) strong personal misgivings about Capitalism and mistakenly employed ‘Street Art’ to stand for the “Bourgeois” expression of graffiti, versus the resistant, “Proletarian” forms like Tagging and Piecing. This serves no useful purpose, since graffiti in the Twenty-First century has become a part of the capitalist economy and really has no compelling reason to distance itself from issues of capital.

Shepard Fairey and the API

Henry Jenkins shares an essay by Evelyn McDonnell (pt. 1, pt. 2) on Shepard Fairey and his recent and ongoing legal battles.

I’ve long had some issues with Mr. Fairey, but I believe his use of the Garcia photo to create the Obama “Hope” poster falls fully within the Fair Use exemption. However, his attempts to cover up or alter the timeline suggest that Mr. Fairey was not quite as confident. This is curious to me, since Fairey almost constantly claims himself as heir to the punk and DIY cultures, and should have some idea about fair use and appropriation. But who knows what lurks within.

Graffiti Lexicon

(Note: This Glossary will expand and contract as the project continues. Check back for updates.)

Cholo Writing – Gang-related writing, largely developed in and around Los Angeles by Latinos in the mid-Twentieth Century. Cholo writing continues today in much the same form as earlier epochs.

Guerilla Marketing – drawings, paintings, leaflets, wheat-pastes, and other materials placed on public and/or private property by individuals or groups acting as agents of a corporation or other entity for the express purpose of advertising a product or service. Advertisements may or may not be sanctioned by property owners.

Latrinalia – any writing or drawing that appears on bathroom walls. These may include lewd comments, limericks, names, or prejudicial comments, and include hand-scrawled signage (such as “Please turn lights off when thru”), but not advertisements or mass-produced signage.

Municipal Graffiti (Municipalia?) – writing and drawing made on sidewalks, walls, streets, parking lots and the like by city workers to indicate the location of underground cables, pipes, and other objects.

Toward a Graffiti Lexicon, part 1

“Can this have been quasi-intentional, a concerted effort to obliterate meaning by scrawling graffiti on one of the theater’s most profound texts?”[1]

The above quote comes from a review of Young Jean Park’s play Lear! — a sort of reworking or reimagining of the Shakespeare play — and gives a window into the common usage of graffiti (as both a term and a concept).

Here, graffiti is an obscuring force, an ugliness of sorts that blocks out or obscures beauty or importance or whatever. Graffiti is scrawled, scribbled over something that was written, printed, bound, and later performed and experienced and theorized and beloved.

Graffiti obliterates[2] meaning, distracts, takes away from, gouges. Graffiti is a destructive force, used to take away or to cover some quality of the surface on which it appears, into which it is scrawled.

Here, graffiti is deployed as negative, rather than a complex concept that consists of a wide variety of objects and activities. Indeed, there are forms of graffiti that would more properly be categorized as illuminating calligraphy, rather than obliterating scrawl. To limit graffiti to destructive acts ignores its potential to achieve beauty or serve as an enriching purpose. At the same time, to forget the destructive side of graffiti is to leave out an important facet of its character.

For example, the graffiti made by municipal workers on streets and sidewalks, which often indicate underground pipes and conduits. Such marks are important and useful, since they tell workers where and how deep to dig. They are graffiti, to be sure, but they are neither illicit nor destructive.

At this point, I believe it will be helpful to begin a glossary of sorts to name some specific forms or instances of graffiti and begin to make some sense of the graffiti milieu.

[1] Isherwood, Charles. “Blow, Winds! Deconstruct Thy Text.” New York Times, January 15, 2010. http://theater.nytimes.com/2010/01/15/theater/reviews/15lear.html?ref=arts (January 15, 2010).

[2] Additionally, as a word, ‘obliterate’ comes from the Italian obliterare, which has as its root littera, which refers to something written: to erase what is written. See http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/obliterate.