By Erin Blasko
South Bend Tribune Staff Writer8:13 PM EDT, June 19, 2011 Looking like a bandit - black ball cap, sunglasses, mouth and nose concealed behind a black bandanna - the lean young man walks purposefully across Beutter Park in Mishawaka, removes his backpack and sets to work, uncommonly calm beneath the bright afternoon sun.
He removes a large but thin sheet of craft paper imprinted with an inspirational quotation and a colorful image of children dancing in the shade, and begins pasting it to a utility box next to the river, his only tools a small brush and something called wheatpaste.
Despite the fact that, technically, he is defacing public property, he does not seem concerned about getting caught. His brushstrokes are quick but calm, and, when finished, he steps back to wipe his hands and admire his work.
“The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives,” the aforementioned quotation, by the physicist Albert Einstein, reads.
“I really enjoy exploration,” the man says of the meaning of the piece, “like the childlike exploration of going out and exploring and not have any boundaries, and I really enjoy Einstein quotes. He’s a very smart guy.”
Finished, he moves on, pasting a number of small wooden blocks stamped with motivational phrases - “Be an Explorer” or “Keep Learning” - to various objects around the park - anything with a flat surface.
A small girl and her mother pass, and the girl glances in his direction. He pauses and waves. It is a kind but firm gesture. Hello. Nothing to see here. Move on.
“I don’t do a whole lot of work in the day,” he says later. “Just the fact that these people probably get scared ... seeing a kid walking around with a bandanna around his face.”
The man describes his work, considered vandalism by some, as “art,” placing him among the growing number of people who consider “street art” a legitimate form of artistic expression, equal in many respects to the more traditional and accepted forms of painting or sculpture.
He has asked that The Tribune not use his name because what he does is technically illegal. His signature, which appears in all of his works, is the acronym “CAD,” which stands for the computer command control-alt-delete.
“I guess it is vandalism in the eyes of the public, but I don’t look at it as vandalism, I look at it more like art,” the 35-year-old food service industry worker says. “And from people, I haven’t had any vandalism responses so far. People tend to like it.”
“I think what CAD does is art,” says Jeremy Zerby, 27, a Mishawaka resident and an admirer of CAD’s work. “Vandalism, in my mind, is damaging to property and the general morale of the place it is happening, like when kids write bad words on playground equipment or a gang paints symbols and colors all over buildings to mark territory. It strikes fear, which inevitably leads to bad vibes and often dangerous consequences.
“What CAD does simply makes you think in a way that is non-confrontational but at the same time bold enough to actually express clearly the message that he or she is trying to convey, if someone is willing to look for that message.”
Also referred to as “post-graffiti,” street art includes traditional graffiti artwork but also stencil graffiti, sticker art, wheatpasting, street poster art, video projection, guerrilla art and street installations, among other forms.
Prominent practitioners include Shepard Fairy, a Los Angeles artist best known as the person behind the Barack Obama “Hope” poster, and “Banksy,” a shadowy London artist whose work ranges from the cheeky to the overtly political.
In one well-publicized case, Banksy traveled to the Palestinian territories in 2005, leaving behind several images on the Palestinian side of the controversial West Bank barrier. In one, the silhouetted image of a young girl floats upward on a bouquet of round helium balloons.
Given the nature of the form, the critical response to street art has been understandably mixed. Fairy has been referred to as both a visionary and a fraud, and though a breath of fresh air to some in the art world, the British art critic Matthew Collings has said of Banksy: “(His) ideas only have the value of a joke.”
Nonetheless, collectors have paid big bucks for Banksy pieces - a polyptych portraying a monkey escaping from a laboratory sold for more than $500,000 in 2008 - and versions of Fairy’s “Hope” poster now hang in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.
Even more remarkable, in some of the towns targeted by Banksy, elected boards and councils have actually decided to preserve his work as public art.
“I think it’s great,” CAD says of the growing acceptance of the form among critics and collectors, not to mention the general public, “because I feel like regular art has gotten kind of stagnant ... whereas street art is open to endless possibilities.”
Like many street artists, CAD got his start “tagging.” The most common form of graffiti, tagging involves the repetition of a personalized signature. It is typically done with spray paint, and targets include public and private buildings and walls.
“I got into tagging basically because I was a kid and had a buck-authority-type attitude,” he says, “and I wanted to see how much trouble I could get into.
“I did it a couple of years and then moved on.”
He later attended Indiana University South Bend. He studied graphic design but soon dropped out, he says, because the program focused too much on traditional methods and not enough on computer-aided design.
His work now, which appears around South Bend and Mishawaka, is image-based. He creates it on a personal computer and then prints it off in sections. The stencil pieces he applies with spray paint, and the craft paper images with wheatpaste, an adhesive similar to the kind used in kindergarten classrooms.
He views street art as a progression of tagging. The difference, he says, is that, whereas tagging represents a juvenile reaction to authority, street art represents a thoughtful attempt to provoke thought and discourse in the public domain.
“Name tagging and stuff, I appreciate that, I just wish they would do something more with it,” he said, adding, “Basically I’m just trying to get people to be more active and speak their voice. If you have a voice, it’s gotta be heard.”
One of his pieces actually includes the word “Speak!” It appears below a stenciled portrait of a Slavic-looking man. The man wears a crown, and the word “CAD” appears in place of his mouth.
Other pieces are less direct, including an image of a gnome holding a flower pot, or the Star Wars character Boba Fett, a notorious bounty hunter, aiming a rifle, a “CAD” flag draped from the barrel.
In an article published in the Journal of Consumer Research, John F. Sherry, a marketing professor at the University of Notre Dame, and co-authors Luca M. Visconti, Stefania Borghini and Laurel Anderson, talk about the stimulative power of street art.
“Wherever we look, we observe a recurrent emptiness and disenchantment in the way citizens negotiate urban spaces,” the article, titled “Street Art, Sweet Art? Reclaiming the ‘Public’ in Public Place,” reads. “An ambivalent and multi-faceted phenomenon, street art stimulates lively discussion about public space and its ties to the market.”
The article also draws a direct line between current forms of street art and the “signs, adornments, and writings ... revealed at the archeological sites of Pompei and Ercolano,” stating: “Nowadays, by conceiving urban landscapes as screens, street artists update the heritage of the Renaissance and stimulate dwellers to establish a critical relationship with” the urban environment.
But not everyone appreciates CAD’s contributions to the urban landscape.
“I don’t consider it art,” says Lynn Coleman, assistant to South Bend Mayor Stephen Luecke. “And even if it is art, how could I do art on your building without your permission? If you’re not giving me permission to put stuff on a building, it’s not art, it’s vandalism.
“There’s a place for art,” he continues, “and the city encourages and supports artistic stuff in community. So we support art, but there’s a difference: When you do art, you get permission from folks .... you don’t just go out and arbitrarily make pictures or paint on buildings you don’t have permission to use.”
Graffiti also brings down property values, Coleman says, and it costs property owners - including the city, in many cases - real money to remove it.
Sherry and his co-authors recognize the complicated nature of street art. “Dwellers, art experts, and government officials may actually look at street interventions as acts of beautification or even public art,” they write, “but also as the ultimate defacement of urban order.”
And based on his actions and statements, CAD seems to recognize it, too. He was nervous, he says, when The Tribune contacted him about this story via an e-mail address listed on his blog. And he tries to avoid occupied buildings and places of worship when scouting locations for his works.
“I’m not necessarily trying to remain anonymous,” he says, “but I don’t want the city to link everything back to me and knock on my door.”
In addition, he is trying to get away from stenciling, he says, recognizing the permanent nature of such work and its potential to aggravate property owners and city officials. Instead, he is doing more wheatpasting. Not only is the paste itself eco-friendly, he says, but the kraft paper used in conjunction with it is biodegradable.
“I’m not trying to upset the authorities,” he says. “The point is to have fun and pass art onto other people, and inspire kids to get out there and be more active and creative.”
That said, in at least one of his pieces, he appears to acknowledge the controversial nature of his work, if only ironically. The piece consists of a well-dressed man with a spray-paint canister for a head and, off to the side, a speech bubble.
“People like this,” it says, “are a menace to decent society.”
Staff writer Erin Blasko:
eblasko@sbtinfo.com
574-235-6187
Copyright © 2011, South Bend Tribune
