Be Gay, Do Crimes ✌️
This Is A Manifesto…Of Sorts…About Graffiti…
Last week, I was advertised a tiny thermal printer on Instagram, and because it was cute and pink and my Christmas bonus at work is coming up, I pretty much ordered it immediately. When I ordered it, I also accidentally ordered 198 FEET of sticker paper for it. So I thought to myself, what the fuck am I actually gonna do with 198 FEET of 2″ wide, thermal sticker paper? I have a good label maker that’s better for organizational purposes, and thermal printers only print in an almost greyscale dot-matrix, so it’s not even like it makes nice stickers. I have better stickers in my shop and can design & order anything if I want professional stickers. Plus, thermal paper is non-archival, not by a long shot, so I wouldn’t want to put any of these on anything I’m gonna have for a long time.
Eventually, due to heat, I’m sure these stickers will turn black, and due to the low-tack adhesive, I think if put on certain surfaces or left to the elements, they may even fall off. They seem easy to remove. I think this makes them the perfect vehicle for graffiti.
Modern Graffiti
When I realized that I could use my iPad to draw or write anything I want, and use this printer to make a semi-permanent greyscale sticker, on the spot, I was immediately reminded of wheatpasting, which I only recently learned about because Molly Crabapple has done it in recent years with her beautiful political posters. Wheatpasting is literally ancient and biodegradable. It seemed like an ideal form of graffiti or street art to me, because a wheatpasted poster, left to the elements, only lasts 3-6 months, doesn’t hurt the environment, and is easily removed should anyone object. I can’t see myself ever doing it due to the mess, risk of getting caught, and overall boldness of doing something so large, but I admire artists with the balls and conviction to do it.
Wheatpasting is just one form of street art though, and in recent decades, sticker art has become another tool in a street artists’ toolbox, which is another thing I learned shortly after I discovered wheatpasting.
Everyone loves sticking stickers on things. As children, many of us had entire sticker collections in special books. My personal favourites were the Sandy Lion fuzzy stickers, which I would kill for today. Everyone’s stuck a sticker somewhere, maybe even somewhere public or somewhere they weren’t supposed to, like on their wall or inside their closets when they were kids, or they’ve peeled a price sticker off something they just bought and stuck it to the nearest surface for simple lack of a want to throw it out for whatever reason. How many banana stickers have you stuck to random things in your lifetime? Were any of them not your property? If so, that is vandalism! Or is it graffiti? And is graffiti even art?
Art or Vandalism?
If you google “is graffiti art or vandalism?”, you get 3,440,000 links, which are all mostly essays from people in universities writing their academic thoughts about it. I didn’t read any of them though, because I’ve thought about that question on my own for long enough that I’ve formed a pretty solid reasoning behind what I think about that question myself, that I’m willing to have a two-way dialogue with folks about if I know them in some way, but reading the thoughts of a million so-called “qualified” strangers, who are the internet equivalent of “talking heads” to me, is boring, so I don’t wanna do it. But if someone is a fellow artist, or a friend, and someone who wants to have the dialogue or debate in person, in a fair energy exchange, I am down for that. But I am not going to put the emotional labour of reading academic dissertations full of strangers opinions into forming my opinion. That’s not my style. Especially because I am an artist, and a muse, so it’s a very personal question for me, that I feel I should try to answer personally, before it becomes tainted by anyone else’s input (except my former therapist, Jae, who was an art therapist and fantastic artist herself; I gave her Wall And Piece by Banksy and she loved it). And in typical Sunny style, I’m gonna do it “out loud”, for better or for worse, no matter how stupid or ignorant or uninformed as some people think these kinds of things make me look. 🤷🏼♀️😊✌️
Graffiti vs vandalism really boils down to what your definition of art in general is, and admittedly, being an artist and a muse, my definition what art is and can be, is an exceptionally broad spectrum. I legitimately love all non-commercial, and some commercial, artistic expression. For whatever reason I’m wired that way and creativity is my biggest kink. My own, yours, theirs, everyone’s. From toddlers to mediocre adults, to Shakespeare and Vincent Van Gogh, to cave paintings and ancient “goddess” statues, to urinals posing as statues, to messy beds posing as performance art, from artists, actors, musicians, writers and artisans, I love and can get behind all of it. I also have a background in advertising, so while this has made me try to avoid being influenced by all advertising possible since college and profiting from my gift with it due to superstition, I still appreciate a very clever ad, particularly in traditional media. My definition of art is so broad, that I can even justify someone eating literal dog shit as art. Lowbrow outsider art for sure, but also possibly one of the first true examples of what some might call “trash art” today. See? I can justify anything. 😂🤷🏼♀️
Hypocriticism
So that’s what art is to me, and the best art is subjective for its time. Street art is still very much subjective in that society has accepted some parts of it, like the aesthetics, and what has come from it, like the money and fame, while condemning others as “it’s destruction/vandalism/has no place being on X/in Y place and/or medium”, making them seem pretty hypocritical in my view. I also think that kind of hypocriticism can still sometimes be valid criticism, and art critics and influencers are “critical” byproducts of art and consumerism, so I can’t be mad or even disagree too hard with all the negative connotations associated with street art. I get it, some people think no one has any right to put their tag or message or mark on another thing – or human being for that matter – without their consent, and fundamentally, especially with people, I agree. If someone marked up my house, that I, as a little female person in this society worked hard for and owns, I’d probably be pissed. Someone putting a reflective heart on a traffic sign, owned by the all knowing, tax-payer funded government, for someone to find as a surprise on their late night drive home is a different story, however.
We come across this sign on the way home from a certain party we get invited to, so much that it’s part of the ritual of going to this party and seeing these friends, and I love it so much. It’s so simple and clever. It’s only visible at night, when you’re stopped at a specific stop sign and your headlights are shining on it because it’s a hand-cut heart on some kind of reflective adhesive. The person who put it there didn’t ask permission, and they don’t own the sign, any more than anyone else. But it’s permissible by the people who live there, the local society (even, I’m sure, some government workers or officials), because it’s clever, universal, and cute. It serve no purpose other than to delight and to spread a universal feeling of love. The artist is anonymous. It’s not for commercial purposes and it makes people smile. That’s why it’s acceptable and has been there at least 2 years.
But have no doubt, it is the literal definition of street art, or graffiti. Or even sticker art itself, if you wanna be technical. Yet I’m sure some, even “a lot”, or “most” of the people where this sign is, wouldn’t agree with someone spray painting even a small heart on the same sign, that was visible all the time, or signing/tagging the heart, unless Banksy himself put it there. That would be vandalism and would have no place in the same society that permits this one. It would be reported and cleaned up pretty quickly, even if it meant replacing the sign. Both the reflective sticker and the hypothetical spray painted heart of the same size and shape are art AND vandalism, but the nuances between the two make one permissible and the other not so much. One has the aesthetic connotation of “trash”, while the other is a delightful local secret.
Another example of delightful, secret, guerrilla street art is Elizabeth Litton’s 2014 “Leave Only Loveliness” project. She handcrafted and painted 9500, 1cm x 1cm, clay ladybugs, put them in tiny envelopes, mailed them around the world to anyone who wanted some, and encouraged people to carry around tiny glue bottles, to glue them in public places for people to find.
Make no mistake, this idea is just as much vandalism as a can of spray paint, as Elizabeth herself acknowledges, but the project relies on the sheer cuteness of the ladybugs and the fact that a group of them is called a “loveliness” to get a pass. Which I’m sure it does/did for most people who encountered them. Who’s really going to object to finding a tiny clay ladybug hidden in an unexpected place? Who doesn’t love ladybugs?
Like the reflective heart sticker on the traffic sign, the motives for the “Leave Only Loveliness” project were largely altruistic. The artist’s name or tag is nowhere on the tiny sculptures and thus, nowhere in the art. They’re not selling a product, sending a specific message, or pointing you to a website. They are simply there to delight.
My Sticker Art
So that’s what I hope to do: to make exceptionally cute stickers with my new itty bitty thermal printer, and to stick them in surprising places during our travels all over Ontario. The printer is only 3x3x2″ so I can carry it around in my bag to make 2″ wide stickers during downtime when we’re on the road. I already carry my iPad and MacBook in my backpack everywhere I go, what’s one more tiny device?
These sticker designs will be under Creative Commons licence, meaning that anyone is free to download and reprint them, even for commercial purposes, with attribution, so if other people with thermal printers or regular printers wanted to make their own, they’re free to, but if people just want stickers, I’ll also make them available for sale in my shop. This way no one will ever know if I personally stuck a sticker somewhere or if someone else did. I’m not responsible for what other people do! I mean, if they want to download and print this image to do whatever they want with, including graffiti, I can’t stop them…🤷🏼♀️
I’ve been making stickers since I was a kid, when I would draw tiny pictures with pencil crayons, then rub a glue stick on the back and stick it to Saran Wrap, then once it dried, I would peel it off, and then you had a sticker where all you had to do was lick the back to re-activate the adhesive. The UHU glue sticks I was using said they were non-toxic, so I didn’t see the problem with this, and felt confident selling them to the kids I got babysat with for 25 cents a piece! So, making cheap, temporary stickers is right up my alley!
I figure Harry and I end up so many places around Ontario, that it would be interesting to leave a bit of a whimsy everywhere I go, if the situation calls for it, whether it be by leaving a sticker behind for someone else to find and use, or by actually physically sticking them to things myself. The fact that the stickers are temporary really appeals to me, as Snapchat has become one of my favourite mediums in recent years due to its temporary, “disposable” nature.
So that’s my plan! Let’s be gay and do crimes, as my son Wes would say! 😊✌️
