So everyone has noticed the stencil art that’s been appearing on buildings in Port Outreach. It’s interesting and some of it is quite beautiful, to my eyes. But it’s also upsetting to many people, and the more of it that appears, the more upsetting it becomes. People shouldn’t have to feel afraid of art, but this method of creation is making people feel as if the things that matter to them are going to be disrespected or harmed. Painting on someone’s home without asking first is simply not neighborly.
I don’t know who the artist is, but this is addressed to na: Whoever you are, please only place artworks on buildings whose occupants have invited you to do so. Many nagara admire your works and would be delighted to have one gracing the hull of their homes.
For those of you reading who don’t live in Port Outreach, or who haven’t looked around town lately, here are some of the pictures I’ve collected of these works.
I simply love this first one, maybe because of the Tellurian influence…I remember boots like these fondly. The householder loves it too, so it’s staying up. When Atrine gets back to town she’s going to be envious. In fact if the artist was known, I’m sure Atrine would be one of the first to commission a work.
The nautical beauty below fits the house that’s hosting her, but the householder spent a lot of time creating her tiled deck, and isn’t pleased to have anyone making changes to it. It’s been cleaned off.
This next one is offensive. There’s no reason to say something so rude. Yes, most nagara speak only Zayzan and won’t be familiar with this alphabet, but some of us are fluent in the languages of the Archipelagos, including me. So I have to admit this one made me pretty angry. And this may be the only white brick building in all of Port Outreach–it should be left alone.
Last of all, I just had to get a quick image of the picture on Jik’s house, once we were halfway into the job of scrubbing it off and Jik had calmed down somewhat. The image and letters are mostly scrubbed away, but this gives you some of the feel of it. Stasia will have words for me, I know, because I promised her I would be sensitive to Jik’s feelings. But it’s such an interesting image! Sorry, Jik. I’ll treat you to a very fine meal and my best coffee to make it up to you.
What does everyone else think? Is this art, or defacement? Or both? And do you think the artist is doing it simply for attention, or is there perhaps a cultural lesson to be learned from na?
I rather like the lizard one. The artist managed to get quite a bit of detail into the body of the lizard. I’m also impressed by how high up it is; I have a small thing about heights, which is why my ceilings are all dusty.
Somehow I want a row of those feet and shoes dancing all around the roofline of my home… Or maybe different shoes, from all over the place, prancing about together!
The carrot head is a bit on the surreal side, but the image you’ve captured makes me wish I’d gone to see it before it was removed.
On the art or defacement issue, I’d say it’s art. Just because the person living in it doesn’t like it, that doesn’t negate it’s artiness. I have a friend who routinely gives me the most horrific things na made. Na claims they’re art, and therefore I should display them in my home. I say they’re horrible ugly messes, and I’d rather use them to weight crustacean traps or keep my doors from closing in a wind. Doesn’t make them any less ‘art.’ Just, art that I don’t like.
The person who has to live with it is the one who gets to decide whether to keep it or not. If you like it, keep it. If you don’t, remove it. Now, yes, that’s a lot of effort to go to to remove it, but if you kept it, the artist went to a lot of effort to create it, so…
I wonder if that artist would be willing to come put a lizard on my house?
Mags.
It’s defacement until the homeowner decides it’s art. Until then, it’s a violation of taboo/custom/law/social contract, or whatever Zayzans call it. That degree of selfishness is worrisome, even if the results are aesthetically pleasing to me (like the swimming girl). I find the script by the lizard attractive, but if it’s intended to be offensive, it’s obviously defacement. Or childishness. Hmm, I wonder if the perpetrator is a rebellious teenager.
I’d like to know what the script says.
And leaving aside the issue of what makes something art (a topic on which I have strong feelings and get quite irritated), why can’t it be both art and defacement? If defacement is an unwanted change in appearance, then it can be both.
As I said on the boards, I find tagging homes without permission to be shockingly rude, even if I can’t be bothered to clean off the graffiti on the back side of my fence (which faces an empty lot, and I don’t have to look at it except when I approach the house from a particular street). And that isn’t anything I’d count as art, just tags.
Hum. Yeah, I guess it CAN be both. Good point. The point, however, is that it’s rude. I’m sure others will disagree. Or think other things are more important. Feh.
-Splash
My first inclination was that it’s both art and defacement. And to my mind the defacement trumps the art.
.
Here in Seattle there is quite a bit of what you might call guerilla art, from the tags on the back of MG’s fence to elaborate wall-filling murals. We are fortunate (heh.) to have many relatively ugly and pointless surfaces which are improved by even the least-accomplished attempt at artistic embellishment. The back sides of street signs, trash receptacles, unadorned expanses of cement, all are frankly more pleasing with a bit of decoration, IMHO.
.
That’s all completely different from putting your work on a surface that someone else takes pride in. Rude barely begins to cover that.
This doesn’t look to me like the work of the same artist. Either there’s more than one, or someone trying to disguise na’s style.
-Splash
The inscription says, literally, “the sea is brine, but does not impregnate.” Idiomatically I’d translate it as “like the sea, this person is a lover who begets no offspring.”
.
Many Nagara would mistake that for a compliment. But among the islanders, it’s an accusation of selfishness–of turning outward as if to the sea and refusing to contribute to the growth of the community.
.
It would be as if you accused a Spelaen of breeding without regard for bloodlines, or a Nagara of impregnating someone without permission. Including a islander food animal in the image just increases the insult, although it’s possible the artist didn’t know what na was saying.
I should clarify that the expression itself is a metaphor. “Begets no offspring” doesn’t mean that a person has no literal children. It’s an idiomatic saying, like our Tellurian expressions like “my cat watches you eat” to warn of a lack of privacy, or “airplanes first, girls next” to remind ourselves to do tasks in the proper order. Or how speakers of English on Tellus say they got their information from a little bird.
Karla, it sounds to me like the individual *did* know what na was saying, and that’s why I’m not using the word “artist” to describe na. That lizard requires a little more skill than our Tellurian symbols-of-unpleasantness, but yobbos are yobbos no matter whom they’re insulting.
I don’t approve of this, but I do have to admire the spirit behind it. The feeling of demanding that we look at things in a new way, and, beyond that, of taking nothing for granted, is one that’s being stated with a force that would be hard to manage any other way.
.
To repeat, no I don’t approve of this, and I wish na would stop; but I can also understand, I think, the reason behind it.
Dak: changing people’s perspective’s doesn’t require defacing other people’s buildings. I think a much more productive way to go about it is just what Jeffy was describing that happens in my city: Ugly and boring surfaces get covered with art. If it’s insulting or badly executed, generally someone will remove or paint over it, but good art stays because it enriches, not detracts. This person is frequently stenciling surfaces their owners value, even cherish, and so is detracting from them. Insulting people generally doesn’t change minds, but closes them. I think na’s work is counterproductive to what we suppose na’s purpose to be.
And I agree with Splash, it’s rude and that’s not ok. Good art shouldn’t need to tear down or hurt others to communicate its message.
Oh, and Karla, thanks for the translation and notes. I appreciate it. And I think an insult like that reinforces my point: This person isn’t just out to shake things up a little, but to actually upset people. Bad form, I say.
Every time I look at the first picture, I wonder if those are supposed to look like fetish boots, or if they’re meant to be stylized fashion boots.
What are fetish boots? Sounds like something I need.
-Splash
They look like ’60s illos of ’60s boots to me. But at first I thought they were toe shoes. (Before you ask, Splash: shoes for a very, very specialized form of Tellurian dance called “classical ballet.” Both men and women do ballet, but only women wear toe shoes. When you come visit, we’ll watch some vids and I’ll show you all my dancing shoes.)
That sounds great.
Well, fetish boots can be a wide range of things, but basically boots that are meant to appeal to certain sexual fetishes. Fetishes are closely related to the sort of BDSM activities Mags was talking about enjoying with her intimiste over on the boards. But I was thinking of ballet boots, which are meant to hold the foot in the same position it would be in the en pointe position in the toe shoes Anne mentioned, only with heels to help the wearer maintain the position. They are, intentionally, extremely hard to walk in. I can’t even stand up in them.
Oh, and ballet boots, like toe shoes, are intended for women. Which isn’t to say that men never wear ballet boots… just that it would be unusual, and probably difficult to find a pair to fit.
They looked like ballet boots to me. I hadn’t thought about it, but does that point to a Tellurian “artist”? Would seem the lizard with script would point the other way, so maybe a Zayzan (Islander?) with a more than passing interest in Tellus?
Or more than one person. More and more, I suspect y’all have a group on your hands.
I think so, too. For one thing, there was a lot of going up very quickly. It COULD have been one person, but na’d have to have been busy.
-Splash
These designs could be original, or the artist could be using reference material from Tellus or other places. The boots are definitely fetish boots. As I said, fond memories.
.
As I recall, back on Tellus, stencil art was popular because the stencils could be prepped in advance, and then the artist would use paint with a propellant and apply several in a night.
.
Of course, on Tellus, we called these kind of artists criminals, and this kind of art was frequently a way to make a political statement, in an environment where speech and publication were severely restricted.
.
Glad I don’t live there any more.
The designs all look similar to me. They all use a limited, muted color palette, and they all appear to use the same technique of overlaying multiple stencils. The lizard design looks like it uses a photographic source, whereas the others look more hand-drawn, but otherwise they’re not so different. The artist must have wanted to make a particular point about that house, and chose the image to make a point. Maybe na had some interaction with the householder that didn’t work out?
I’m not an expert but I do follow local art trends and I used to see a lot of this kind of thing on Tellus, when I lived there. Particularly in the US, when I was in college, this kind of art would appear in the summertime on abandoned or ugly buildings (College is formal education for adults–I spent a year studying before I went traveling and met Stasia).
Anyway, with luck the artist will change na’s focus soon. A formal public show would be a more productive way of expressing naself.
That’s what I get for trying to pretend to be an art expert. I still think if it’s just one artist, na’s got to be pretty busy. Could it be several who share a similar style?
-Splash
Or one designer/stencil creator with assistants for installation. Or no assistants. How long does it take to spray through a couple of stencils? (looks like between two and five stencils per piece (the one on The Nonesuch looks like five to me. I wish there was a picture from before the cleaning began, but everyone is forgiven for not having gotten one, considering.) Do you have to wait for earlier layers to dry first or just stack them up? Anybody know? Is the paint something standard locally or did they have to make their own or import it?
Ruby: Well, we agree on a couple of points: first, that it’s only one person, and second, I’m no expert either. But it seems to me that within the similarity of the pallette are profound differences: note that gradations of the red between carrot person and the one on the tile. And the similarities that DO exist may be nothing more than the fact that there aren’t all that many colors that will respond well to those surfaces.
.
What convinces me that it is only one person is the sweep of the lines. Compare the lizard’s tail to the tile-woman’s back to the foot protruding from the window to the back edge of the carrot. That sort of arc is the particular expression of an individual.
.
To repeat, I am NOT an expert, and am more than willing to be wrong; I’m only responding to what immediately struck me when I looked at the pictures.
– Robynn of Teacher Town
So, maybe it’s one person doing the stenciling, and even picking out the colors, but a crew putting them up? I still say that if it’s one person, na’s been awfully busy.
-Splash
There may be only one person creating the images, but multiple people with creative input.