On Wednesday, authorities targeted members of the OCP tagging crew, also known as Out Causing Panic, said Lt. Erik Ruble of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department's special problems unit, ... [posted Dennis Claxton}
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Of course there were no pictures, so I looked up OCP. Here is a webpage, which is exactly what I was talking about in terms of difficulty of design:
http://www.flickriver.com/photos/31546554@N03/popular-interesting/
Go down to the sketch book where they are working out abstract compositional elements. This was the same method that de Kooning, Gorky and Kline used to work up their paintings. Here's another link:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/31546554@N03/4481468533/in/photostream/
Tech note. Felt markers are a great solution to the problem of working on paper because they leave the paper flat. This is a cool medium to work design. The down side is you get high off the flumes---probably cooks your brain. The materials are expensive. They make a special paper that doesn't bleed through. I never got very far, because all this costs plenty
The corner store owner hired some local taggers to do a mural on one of his blank walls. It only has a few small re-hits. By contrast the place across the street got massive tagging on its brick work. The building was cleaned up and turned over to some high tech engineering company, designing eco-cars.
I don't know what to say about vandalism. It gets out of hand and really fucks up public spaces. I tried to think through how to politically develop this whole scene---to channel its obvious discontent. It would be another ideal topic for art class. Show them the history, the little I know. It's mainly a Mexican art history. Start with Jose Posada where he turned day of the dead cartoons into political commentary. Here:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_jeSuLa5ZscU/SY7dLN1DUkI/AAAAAAAAKcc/Eq1bsjADNr8/s1600-h/carlos_cortez.jpg
The basic line is you develop a popular art into political weapon using the means people already understand immediately whatever language they speak. We've already got a whole gallery full of issues. Border patrol, drones, high tec survillance, school boards burning books, teachers getting fired, students hauled out of school, identity cards, twenty foot steel walls, razor wire fences, vigillantes, private contractors, etc. etc.
We keep talking about how to reach `the people'. You do it mainly through the arts---rallies with good speakers, and bomb proof information---the usual propaganda systems, except our stuff is ... empirically verifiable. The arts are not. But their verification systems depend on the moral-emotive realm where grievance and outrage function together---which is sort of the heart of committment and content.
For example the grafitti-artist in southern Lebonan used the human face of the martyred dead as their iconic protest. The funerals often have a photos. The guys in Lebonan were hand air brushing faces on t-shirts to sell. Their building graffiti were giant portraits. So these are similar cultural systems.
CG
