Preliminary thoughts about the imprints of a population on its surroundings

What people choose to leave as their trace, how they choose to annotate and personalize their environment: they carve a name into a tree, scratch it into a bathroom mirror or paint it on a wall. In Brooklyn on the subway platforms, people modify the advertisements in what I think might be the ultimate public art. How else to assert authority over the media as it surrounds us with images and commands to consume? To take a key and slice out the face of a model or an actor is to make it anonymous figure and negate the symbol of celebrity as utterly powerless. To cut out the eyes is to give it a zombie flair, reveal the trance of consumerism. To give it a bubble of text is to appropriate the image for one’s own purposes. To write one’s name and personalize it, leaving no surface exempt or elevated above the markings of society.

Each person who passes rips a piece, adds a mark, until the original advertisement has been hijacked completely, no longer presenting the product as perfect and urgently needed, but rather revealing it as impure and alien to the true cultural and aesthetic needs of the society. Replace one man’s head with another in a movie advertisement: celebrities as swappable faces. Slice out the company name, the nature of brands, we no longer want this. Why is this sort of plastering of public spaces with corporate propaganda acceptable and yet even to modify it slightly for our own purposes illegal and delinquent? Not to mention the pure generation of work known in this society as graffiti.

To truly exist in this world is to interact with it, to express a will and creativity and to share something with others. That is why even the most crude of defacement is actually art and is beautiful in some way, because it represents the smallest desire of an individual to modify his or her surroundings in a personal way, to leave his or her name or to share a small sentiment of anger or love.