Guerilla Box Dropping in the Concrete Jungle
This past Sunday, the [Showpaper] gallery space near Grand Central Station was filled with a group of thrashers and Black Label Bike Crew members, tattooed weirdoes and demure dressed-down guys and girls. They had all assembled to check out the newspaper boxes that had been painted by a collective of artists and graffitimakers before the boxes would be dropped throughout the city the following morning. Tod Seelie [took photos](http://todseelie.com/showpaperboxes/) of each box. Tony Bones did $20 tattoos near a few homemade arcade games. Parakeets, the Brooklyn psychedelic two-piece, played a heavy, strange set.
Showpaper, the single-page, full-color newspaper founded by Todd P in 2007, has a piece of original art printed on one side and a listing of all-ages shows in Connecticut, New Jersey and New York on the reverse. The newspaper boxesmodified for free use, painted by the artists and filled with the paperwould be used to expand the distribution of Showpaper and to exist as public artworks.
Joe Ahearn, Showpapers managing director, commissioned Andrew H. Shirley to curate the project. And when the boxes were lined up in the galleryfive each facing outward, two each at the endthey formed an intense, thematic collage of colors and language, sculpture and art, with themes ranging from the macabre to the mechanical to the messianic to the purely salacious. They traced the roots of scribbled graffiti art and examined visual interpretations from the political to the cartoonish to the abstract.
Charlie Ahearn, Joes father, was among the crowd. As the director of the documentary Wild Style, the magna-cumgrace of New York City graffiti, he was an appropriate patron for the event.
Ive always thought of graffiti as a tattoo on the skin of the city, Charlie Ahearn said. But these, these are something more important. When you think about newspaper boxes, they are things that dont belong on the street to begin with. These ones in particular are specialmore like artistic barnacles on the surface of the city. ------
The Market Hotel, a residence and currently defunct performance space, is littered with bike frames, musical instruments, cans of paint, beer and liquor bottles, cameras, stereos and speakers. Although its difficult to breathe, people talk while they work, joking about getting lit on the fumes.
Shirley walks from box to box. The puff of spray cans punctuates the drone of Sunn0))) through a single battery-powered loudspeaker. About 30 or so people are gathered at the DIY venue located under the JMZ, many with their faces covered with bandannas and scarves to sift out the paint fumes thick in the air.
As Shirley explains it, this project got him out of a bind: Instead of picking up trash or de-ticking kittens, he organized the artists to serve his debt to society. I was already doing some state-mandated community service with Joe not too long ago, Shirley explains. Its two weeks before the exhibition, and were on the creaking wooden landing of The Market Hotel. I needed 40 more hours. This took much longer than that. But I just got the state letter today; everythings wrapped up. The community service is finished.
Shirley checks in with all the artists he drew together. On the most part they were partnered: WOLFTITS paired with CAHBASM; NET with DROID; Oliva Katz with Keith Pavia; DARKCLOUDS partnered with SADUE; GEN 2 with OZE 108. The brothers Peter and Andrew Sutherland work together. The GOYA and NSK pairing is unusual since the two had beefed for years over one truck on The Bowery, doing cover-ups until Shirley brought them together. Amy Smalls works with Dennis Franklin; Maggie Lee with Jennifer Shear; FARO, GROSER and COOLCAT all split a box. VUDU and INFINITY made a box that sat on the steps of MoMAs PS1 during the NY Art Book Fair. It was a towering metal monument to misconceptions in media, welded together using a tac welder one of the artists brought to the site on his back, on his bike.
Graffiti legend ADAM COST was the only artist to get his own. Im a megalomaniac; I wouldnt have had room to share with another artist, COST says. I used to work on such a large scale and the box is so tiny that to have done the box with another artist would have been horrible.
It seems like a throwback to the 90s, when COST and REVS helped to reshape the landscape gallery of the street. They were some of the first to use wheatpasting as a guerilla art tactic, posting simple 8.5-inchby-11-inch banners all over New York City.
Today, its a technique used by everyone from Shepard Fairey to Swoon, from Brooklyn to Barcelona, by just about everyone who has ever written her name somewhere it wasnt supposed to be. According to COST, he hasnt written graffiti since his spray-can takeover of New York in 2005, but this project drew his attention for want of politics.
I liked this for the illicit nature of it, COST says. So often in the art world, artistsand these days street artists in particularare exploited for someone else just to make a quick buck. Messages get twisted, and the true purpose of the art becomes distorted. But here, I felt like the degree of freedom was high enough for me to get involved.
Todd P, who is also the executive director of Showpaper, was part of the crew that drove a truck down to Washington, D.C., to retrieve the discarded boxes. When we found them, they were just all sitting next to a Dumpster, he says.
Todd admits that hes not always a fan of street artists. However, there are some really visionary artists involved Since we are doing this in the street of New York City, why not give them a valid spot to do this in the streets. This is a gallery, if you will, a museum, to get their work out to folks without universal access to art.
Three of the boxes were previously placed around the city: one at North 7th Street and Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg; another at Broadway and Myrtle in Bushwick; and a third at First Avenue and First Street in the East Village. They each sat for a month, stuffed and wheatpasted with Showpapers, just to test the project. Later, they were picked up and taken to The Market Hotel to be reimagined by Shirleys cohort of artists.
This is kind of a co-op, isnt it? The paper is ideological, trying to get the word out about shows that dont discriminate by age, Todd says. We also want to put high-concept quality visual art in the hands of people the art community has marginalized. Until now, weve done all the distribution by hand and this gives us a chance to have a much more visible way to distribute the paper. ------
Around 10:30 p.m. on Sunday, the assembled artists and gallery visitors loaded the trucks into the back of a 9-foot U-Haul, along with a stack of the most recent Showpaper printing. In a 24hour period, they would be taken from The Market Hotel, displayed in the gallery and dropped throughout the city.
The following day is overcast and gloomy at the corner of Second Avenue and East Houston Street. Despite the passing of police cars and pedestrians and the general din of the city and sirens, Shirley and Ahearn appear calm and collected.
Whenever theres a siren, thats a good time to do something bad, Shirley says.
The COST box is unloaded from the back of the U-Haul parked up Second Avenue and hauled down to the corner to be lodged next to a streetlamp near the F train subway stop.
Its important for us to offer the people an alternative to all the ad-ridden crap that is the modern press, Ahearn explains. And these boxes are not just artistic, they are functional. They allow the distribution of the paper to open up to a much wider audiencewere getting them out to people at Pratt and Columbia and Hunter and NYU.
The boxes are dropped across the city near subway stops with heavy use. The box engineered by the Sutherland brothers, a towering camouflage assemblage, is planned for NYUs Kimmel Center, the only one not on the streets.
Ryan Levine, a member of the Brooklynbased band The So So Glos, drove the U-Haul.
Ive known Joey for years, he says, referring to Ahearn. We used to use my car for distribution of the Showpaper. I sold that, though. Hopefully now things will get a little easier to get the paper out.
We used to borrow somebodys car once a week and drive around to drop these bad boys off, Ahearn says. Now, these boxes act as the distribution points. Someone from Shea Stadium, referring to the Brooklyn DIY venue, can go down to the Morgan or Bedford stops and grab a stack of them to place wherever they want. But more importantly, this puts the paper in the hands of people who previously may not have even had a knowledge of it.
A bald man in a salmon-colored buttondown stops his walk to lean against the green rail to eat a bun. When the boxs installation is completed, he wipes his hands on his pants and examines the box a little more closely. He seems wary. Without opening the flashy black-and-orange-and-white machine, he ducks down into the subway.
Levine gets behind the wheel. The crew gets in the truck. They take off to Union Square, the site of the next drop.
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Photos also by [Dale W. Eisinger](Articles.php?ak_sM1=B&ak_CB=author_id&ak_PB=846)