Cauldron

Issue date: 8/28/07 Section: A & E

Media Credit: ekosystem.org YAR

They are easy to pass if you are not looking for them. Blink and you miss them. They have been surreptitiously placed in various public locations, especially in the Montrose area. They come in painted, stenciled, wheat-pasted and even knitted varieties. It is street art, and it has pervaded Houston.

Talking to the elusive characters behind the art is like attempting to contact a superhero: ordinary citizens only know them by their aliases. Telephone interviews are nearly impossible and face-to-face dialogues even more so. Once they agree to speak, however, what they have to say is fascinating.

Street art is not limited to its brightly colored and hip-hop related origins. Although many street artists apply spray paint directly to their chosen surfaces, others use stickers, posters, paste-ups, wood and even yarn to create their pieces. Knitta, Please! is a band of nationwide street artists whose fanciful, knitted street art, including variegated cozies for road signs, originated in Houston. The subject matter does not just include letters and names, either.

Meet the Players

Ack! draws rotund little blobs around town. "I just like to draw my characters-preferably in impossible situations," he said, adding that he tries to incorporate Houston-themed elements into his pieces whenever possible. Through sticker exchanges, others have taken his art nationwide, as well as in South America and Europe.

Give Up's posters are manipulations of photos he has taken. "I do large scale screen prints from photos I take, manipulating, rearranging, and enlarging them on a photocopier," he said, citing the high-contrast punk posters of yesteryear as an influence. He began writing graffiti when he was younger but graduated to different media as he grew up. "It slowly evolved from stickers to posters to bigger, more elaborate posters to full size billboards," he said.

YAR's ghostly figures adorn the buildings, fences and boarded-up windows of abandoned Houston properties. He said his art is simple, like a child "drawing pictures of the little world inside his head after reading lots of books about philosophers and philosophies and poets and poems and filmmakers and films."

Pidge is a street artist who mainly uses stencils to get her message across. She has done stencils featuring televisions and Tank Girl, the comic book character drawn by Jamie Hewlett. "I'm just kind of working my way up to a higher level right now," she said. "I'm still developing my style, but I'm really influenced by Banksy and other artists who make you rethink pop culture as we know it."

Legality and Local Color

Despite being branded as vandals, street artists generally do not feel that the whole city is up for grabs. "I don't really paint out very often, and when I do it's not like I'm using acid-etch on the windows of a business or anything," Ack! said. "I try to stick to abandoned buildings, buildings up for lease or buildings about to be torn down."

Street artists see what they do as a way to create local color. "I would hate to live in a world where all you see are corporate billboards and gentrified wheatpastes on the sides of convenience stores," YAR said. "Me and my comrades are fighting to keep the cityscape interesting through advertisements for ourselves." Ack! agreed, saying "It makes the day less boring. House...tree...car...yawn...house...stop sign... Oh cool, look at THAT!"

The fact that street art often does not last does not deter the artists. "It pushes you to do more," Pidge said. "You could just see [what you did] and be satisfied with that, but when it gets removed, it's like 'Oh, I guess I better do something somewhere else.' "

Give Up pointed out that "galleries have their place, but they limit your audience. In the street you are only limited by your own imagination." Street art has the potential to reach viewers that may never set foot in an art museum.

There is also a marked difference between gang-related graffiti and street art. While gangs use graffiti as a tool to mark which areas of town "belong" to them, street artists mainly use abandoned buildings or public property to spread their message. "I recently heard about a bill that's being looked at in Seattle that basically says law enforcement should go after gang-related or offensive graffiti," Ack! explained. "But if something is harmless or could be considered 'street art,' they will let it ride and leave it up to whoever owns the property to keep it or remove it." He believes Houston is too conservative to adopt such a measure.

Pidge said she also sees a vast difference between street art and the spray painting that gangs use. "It's like seeing the Waldos all over town," said Pidge, referring to the street artist Mr. Waldo, whose large "Where's Waldo" paste-ups adorn Houston. "If that's gang related, I want to join."

Close Calls

Though they may have had very minimal formal artistic training, these four street artists mentioned a variety of influences on their art. Pidge reads Plath and Palahniuk, and YAR mentioned Freidrich Nietzsche and Jacques Derrida as being among his favorite thinkers as well as filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard and Ingmar Bergman. "Nietzsche said to live dangerously," he said. "So I followed his words literally, like someone would the Bible."

Most street artists have had some type of run-in with authorities. YAR's principles helped him get out of a scrape one night. "I was trying to engage the police officer in an old-fashioned Socratic debate and he told me I should stop reading books because they were making me insane," he said. The officer then told him to "lay off the books" and let him go, claiming there would be too much paperwork involved in the arrest.

One of Ack!'s close calls occurred when he was preparing to paint a train with another street artist. When a security officer approached the two, they stowed their paint under a dumpster and braced for the worst. Instead, the guard warned them to watch out for "vandals" who steal the copper from train crossings to sell them for crack and wished them a good night. "Keep in mind that it's about 3 a.m. on a weeknight, and we have absolutely no business hanging out there," Ack said. "But the security guard could have cared less. We got our spray cans back from under the dumpster and called it a night."

"You Get a Tougher Time"

Pidge is a female street artist, but she does not necessarily want to be considered solely for her gender. Being a woman in a predominantly male subculture presents its own challenges on top of the threat of capture that presents itself to every street artist.

She skateboards and said she feels that, as in the skateboarding world, women have to play catch up to the guys in street art. "It's just like anything," she said. "It's almost like you have to prove yourself twice as much. If you're not as good and you're a guy, it's different, but if you're not as good and you're a girl, you get a tougher time."

However, there are benefits to being a female street artist that she does not enjoy in the skateboarding world. "It's anonymous, [so] there's no gender paired with it," Pidge said.

"I really admire Lady Pink," she said, referring to the iconic New York street artist who was a pioneer of the genre during the 1980s and one of the first street artists to openly display her gender in her work. One of the other artists Pidge said she admires is the guerilla vandal Banksy, who has proved to be completely elusive despite hanging his own work alongside some of the world's greatest artworks. "I think it's a possibility that Banksy is a woman," she added, with a twinkle in her eye.

Gut Reactions

What each artist wants their viewers to draw from their art is as varied as the pieces themselves. "I would like people to rethink their lifestyle," Pidge said, citing environmental concerns and materialism as some of the issues she includes in her art.

Ack! said he leaves the reaction up to whoever encounters his work. "I'd rather them not be mad or upset about it, but that's not up to me," he said. "I guess I'd prefer for the viewer to smile or be psyched about it or whatever, but just that fact that anyone pays attention to it is cool with me."

YAR's desire for his work is simple: he wants viewers to smile when they see his work. "I like to tell people I love them when I tag," he said.

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