Here’s the last follow-up until another 100 updates.

She’s lost her hair, parts of her body, most of her legs, but not her composure.

So she wins.

But it’s easy for her- her plucky smile is stencilled on.

Have you ever meet a three-legged dog? They’re amazing. Inspirational!

Basically, they are just like any other dog!

They can do everything most dogs do and they show no embarrassment or shame over their condition. They play with other dogs and everything almost like they don’t know they’ve lost a limb. Of course, they do, and of course, there is a physical limit to what they can manage, but they seem to have trouble finding it!

You can’t cripple a dog like you can a person.

I know I would be devastated if I lost either an arm or a leg. As an artist, it would be absolutely crushing to lose my good arm, or even my good hand. As a street artist, losing a leg would be incredibly heartbreaking. Being able-bodied allows me to climb ladders, buildings, jump fences, and just effectively get up and around the city.

If I lost a limb, and like a dog, used all my remaining abilities to the maximum, without shame or depression, I would probably be just fine. I’m sure I’d manage.

But, of course, our physical limits aren’t really what handicap most of us.

And sadly, some of us blessed with excellent physical health are as handicapped, as crippled, as lacking ???????? as if we were quadriplegics.

Original work here.

This hair was actually braided several times, but it kept coming out until someone added the hair elastic. How sweet!
The last pic is much later, and now she is all torn up and bald. Interestingly, someone has torn off her fingers, and taped them back up to resemble a penis. A wonky penis- but a recognizable penis nonetheless.
Non-Transgendered girl here.
Unrelatedly,
The UX are my new heroes! Amazing, inspiring stuff here! (Also from The Guardian! Link goes to online version, quoted below):
Undercover restorers fix Paris landmark’s clock
‘Cultural guerrillas’ cleared of lawbreaking over secret workshop in Pantheon

Emilie Boyer King in Paris

Monday November 26, 2007

The Guardian

It is one of Paris’s most celebrated monuments, a neoclassical masterpiece that has cast its shadow across the city for more than two centuries.
But it is unlikely that the Panthéon, or any other building in France’s capital, will have played host to a more bizarre sequence of events than those revealed in a court last week.
Four members of an underground “cultural guerrilla” movement known as the Untergunther, whose purpose is to restore France’s cultural heritage, were cleared on Friday of breaking into the 18th-century monument in a plot worthy of Dan Brown or Umberto Eco.
For a year from September 2005, under the nose of the Panthéon’s unsuspecting security officials, a group of intrepid “illegal restorers” set up a secret workshop and lounge in a cavity under the building’s famous dome. Under the supervision of group member Jean-Baptiste Viot, a professional clockmaker, they pieced apart and repaired the antique clock that had been left to rust in the building since the 1960s. Only when their clandestine revamp of the elaborate timepiece had been completed did they reveal themselves.
“When we had finished the repairs, we had a big debate on whether we should let the Panthéon’s officials know or not,” said Lazar Klausmann, a spokesperson for the Untergunther. “We decided to tell them in the end so that they would know to wind the clock up so it would still work.
“The Panthéon’s administrator thought it was a hoax at first, but when we showed him the clock, and then took him up to our workshop, he had to take a deep breath and sit down.”
The Centre of National Monuments, embarrassed by the way the group entered the building so easily, did not take to the news kindly, taking legal action and replacing the administrator.
Getting into the building was the easiest part, according to Klausmann. The squad allowed themselves to be locked into the Panthéon one night, and then identified a side entrance near some stairs leading up to their future hiding place. “Opening a lock is the easiest thing for a clockmaker,” said Klausmann. From then on, they sneaked in day or night under the unsuspecting noses of the Panthéon’s officials.
“I’ve been working here for years,” said a ticket officer at the Panthéon who wished to remain anonymous. “I know every corner of the building. And I never noticed anything.”
The hardest part of the scheme was carrying up the planks used to make chairs and tables to furnish the Untergunther’s cosy squat cum workshop, which has sweeping views over Paris.
The group managed to connect the hideaway to the electricity grid and install a computer connected to the net.
Klausmann and his crew are connaisseurs of the Parisian underworld. Since the 1990s they have restored crypts, staged readings and plays in monuments at night, and organised rock concerts in quarries. The network was unknown to the authorities until 2004, when the police discovered an underground cinema, complete with bar and restaurant, under the Seine. They have tried to track them down ever since.
But the UX, the name of Untergunther’s parent organisation, is a finely tuned organisation. It has around 150 members and is divided into separate groups, which specialise in different activities ranging from getting into buildings after dark to setting up cultural events. Untergunther is the restoration cell of the network.
Members know Paris intimately. Many of them were students in the Latin Quarter in the 80s and 90s, when it was popular to have secret parties in Paris’s network of tunnels. They have now grown up and become nurses or lawyers, but still have a taste for the capital’s underworld, and they now have more than just partying on their mind.
“We would like to be able to replace the state in the areas it is incompetent,” said Klausmann. “But our means are limited and we can only do a fraction of what needs to be done. There’s so much to do in Paris that we won’t manage in our lifetime.”

The Untergunther are already busy working on another restoration mission Paris. The location is top secret, of course. But the Panthéon clock remains one of its proudest feats.
“The Latin Quarter is where the concept of human rights came from, it’s the centre of everything. The Panthéon clock is in the middle of it. So it’s a bit like the clock at the centre of the world.”

Today we’re going to look at the history and end of the Dead Astro Lady, (Does your hair really keep growing after you die?) but we’re going to go one step further and place that history into a brief continuum- we’ll look at what came shortly before, and what happened a little while after.

As I mentioned previously, I’ve used this building several times before. All of that work, the stuff that was still up anyway, was pooched by a buffing. We’ll pick up the thread right after the buff. Everything was painted brown. The taggers came back, and PHAIS was subjected to some audience critism before he even had a chance to finish! Notice it reads “ Please no more boring Graffiti”, not “ Please no more Graffiti”. Then I put up the Dead Astro Lady. As you can see, someone gave her drippy eyes before the mega-buff happened!

What a buff. A buff like I had never seen. They sprayed the whole front and side of the building, top to bottom, with white paint. The buffers ripped the Dead Astro Lady’s face off, tore her hair to the ground, and then just sprayed over the rest.

Taped on the front of the building was the above notice. This notice accompanied the mega buff, so I have to believe that they are related- however, the language of the notice is strange enough to be confusing. Is Graff really “an immediate danger to the health and/or safety of any person”? Is my piece? I didn’t think it was that spooky.

This language smells like BS to me. In anycase, the owner of this property was slapped with 469 dollar bill, courtesy of the city.

Next up, we have what appears to be the work of Toronto group, Style in Progress. They are a group that does legal murals for citizens tired of shelling out to the city for buffing. This works because murals have been found to kill graff much more effectively than buffing does. ( Taggers generally respect the mural and move on- I choose to rise above the mural with the flags. The advertisers, interestingly, were not so respectful. They must have been reluctant to give up their spot at the front of the building because they plastered their ads right over the mural! ) Style in Progress also does paid guerrilla advertising for companies (Like rock star games, and here for red bull, where they go over some graff just to put up their ad, even though they are supposed to be a graff-representing, not-for-profit organization.)

To me, Style in Progress are collaborators. I find it hard to understand why Toronto graff artists support it so much. I thought Graff artists got in it to get up, they didn’t get in it to see more butterfly murals. So how does this make them happy? The mural just closes off the spot and pushes taggers elsewhere.

I wish we had a system where the building owner could of just made it (kept it, really) a free wall without being financially punished by the city. As I wrote in my rant (which I recommend reading, it’s very much related):


“…if the landlord, absentee or not, doesn’t care about the Graffiti, isn’t that his right? Under these laws, an owner couldn’t make his property open to any artist that wanted to paint it, even if he wanted to. He could have a mural painted, or sell it to advertisers, but absolutely no graffiti allowed! If a landowner insisted on making his wall a free wall, he would be charged as a criminal, but if he installed an ad, even an illegal ad, no one would care.”

And sure enough, have a look at what’s up now? An ad for lofts. What else in Toronto? Perhaps the owner is trying to recover the cost of removing “an immediate danger to the health and/or safety of any person”. I know I feel safer.

Thanks Toronto, for making the city a safer place for condo developers.

Here’s another pretty lady who has had her hair torn out.
But other things have happened to her too- she has moulded up nicely, someone wrote “Fresh 2 Death” on her hip, (aw shucks, thanks!) and, for whatever reason, people have stuck their used gum onto her crotch?
Non-gummy bikini bottoms here.
Unrelatedly,
Here is a video with a really clever idea for cleaning and unclogging caps!

The video comes from The Bomb Shelter, a graff shop here in Toronto. It’s where I go to buy my caps. (It’s cute, the caps are kept in a gumball machine.)
You know, for years and years I just used the factory caps. This was primarily because I didn’t have access to special caps, but it also didn’t really matter to me, because the factory caps are totally fine for stencilling. But after being in Toronto for awhile, I thought I would pick myself up some caps and try them out, why not?
Hot Damn! Why did it take me so long? A fat cap is all you need. There is nothing like a fatcap on a fresh can. Full, wide spray, with a nice thick coat. On the streets, it will cut the time it takes you to spray your stencil in half. More than half, really.
They’re nice to use while making my posters too- but I’ll still use a standard cap when I got lots of time, and want a bit finer control. They’re free with the can, after all.
Here’s another vid, this one is of a new “universal fat cap” in action. I’m going to have to pick up a few of these :

Today is the first of four hair follow-ups. The hair begged to be played with- it was braided, like the pasteups were big dolls- but it was also pulled on, like the pasteups encountered their bratty little sisters. Or maybe they were subjected to the flirting techniques of the playground.
Regardless of the reasons, this poor beauty had most of her hair pulled out, and for some reason, put into a box at her feet.
Whatever, she still looks good!
Before the hair-pulling.
ALSO,
Last Monday I was quoted in the London newspaper, The Guardian. (Link goes to online version, quoted below)
Who invoked the ghost of Gustav Mahler?

Katrina Onstad

Monday November 19, 2007

The Guardian

If you live in the east end of downtown Toronto, Gustav Mahler has been hard to avoid lately. His name is scrawled in black or red spray paint across the kind of neighbourhoods where cafes selling spelt muffins are edging out the drug dealers. Mahler has appeared on walls and alleys, at a community centre, across a piece of public art and over a bridge.
“I see it everywhere,” says Joanna, a 21-year-old standing in the cold rain near the intersection of Queen East and Parliament. Behind her, a boarded-up corner store features a 6ft tall GUSTAV MAHLER. “What does it mean?” He was a 19th-century composer. “Oh. How embarrassing.”
Toronto is a notoriously clean city (many Mahlers have been wiped away), but has a lively graffiti scene. Two years ago, the name Val Kilmer started popping up everywhere, followed by Kilmer’s head. Kilmer told a local paper: “I’m bewildered.” The “tags” were eventually revealed as a prank by students at the Ontario College of Art and Design. “That was west side. Those kids couldn’t find their way over here to do Mahler,” scoffs Dennis O’Connor, a large, mustachioed man who runs an art gallery. Like many bloggers, O’Connor jokes that the Toronto Symphony Orchestra may be guerrilla-marketing their upcoming Mahler programme (the TSO denies this).
Oddly, only a few months ago, Toronto graffiti watchers were obsessing online over a ubiquitous stencil of Mahler’s face. The artist goes by the handle Poster Child, and he denies accusations that he’s the Mahler-scrawler, though he understands the composer’s appeal. In an email, he wrote: “It’s an erudite gang sign. If you’re culturally informed enough, you see it, get it, and maybe laugh that someone from your highbrow group is also a dirty tagger.”
In his gallery, O’Connor is hanging photographs for a show. “I love the graffiti. I love being reminded of Death in Venice,” he says. Soon, Mahler comes piping through the sound system. O’Connor sighs. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

If you’re interested, here is some more of the email interview. Only a small slice made the final cut:
Did you see it?

Only online. Not on the street. That doesn’t surprise me though. The
fact is, there were only a handful of these tags, and only in one area
of a big city, and that makes it hard to notice. The larger audience
for this sort of nerd graffiti is online. You might even say it is the
intended audience. The same is true of my work. The majority of people
who will see it, see it online, even though the primary audience may
be intended to be the audience on the street. To put it in London
terms, A Banksy may get seen by thousands on the street, but it’s seen
by billions on the web.
This new phenomenon has created an interesting issue within graffiti
culture. Before, a graffiti artist became famous by saturation and
dedication- they had to put up hundreds, thousands of tags. Now
someone can put up 6 or 7 “Gustav Mahler” tags, and presto, create an
internet impact, make the city blogs, and hell, even make the London
Guardian, in far away England!
This is upsetting, as you can imagine, to the old guard. But the
potential for instant fame is also attractive to other like-minded
people on the internet! So now we have people graffiting the real
world to get up online!
What did you think?

I thought it was interesting, but I did have my reservations.
According to the online comments,
(http://torontoist.com/2007/10/who_is_the_myst.php#comments)
among the targeted surfaces were a community mural and a public
sculpture project. This is definitely poor form, and it is upsetting
for me personally because whoever’s doing it is being a poor diplomat
for graffiti. We are vandals, but within the culture is an unwritten
respect for certain surfaces.
This lack of respect (and handstyle) are reasons why I suspect that
this was someone coming from an internet background rather than a
graffiti background.
Is it stealing your thunder?

Not at all. I have no thunder to steal!
Do you have any theories about what it means?

I think it just means what it means. It’s an inside joke. A erudite
gang sign, if you will. If you’re culturally informed enough, you see
it, get it, and maybe laugh that someone from your high brow group is
also a dirty tagger, repping the dead composers, yo. Mourn ya till I
join ya.
Why were you putting up Mahler images earlier in the year?

Same sort of reasons, I guess.
What’s compelling about him?

I don’t really know. I’m surprised that two people would work with him
in the same city.
Is this new Mahler graffitti adding anything to the cityscape, or is
it just mess?

Both. It adds something, and it is a mess.
How is Toronto in terms of graffitti and street art? Is it a creative
city, a boring city — thoughts on the state of the art?

Pretty good! Not bad! We have a nicely entrenched graffiti culture,
and on the street art side, we have some exciting artists like Specter
(http://www.specterart.com/) and Faux Reel (http://www.fauxreel.ca/)
working in the city. We also have the draconian rules
http://www.bladediary.com/?p=212
But we don’t have ASBO’s or CCTV cameras everywhere!
Bansky, if you’re reading this, Come on over for a visit, the waters fine!
How long have you been putting your work out there in the city?

Since I moved here about 2 years ago.

Here is the last poster of the Hair Theme Week- a girl in a post-themed bikini.

Did you know that the bikini was named after the Bikini Atoll?

It was. The sexy impact of the skimpy swimwear was compared to the non-sexy impact of the Hydrogen bomb upon the Bikini Atoll, and the name stuck.

Presumably though, with the testing of the bikini, unwilling participants weren’t resettled onto a touristy resort beach, highly contaminated with radiation sexy swimwear to learn how humans ingested and absorbed radiation sexy swimwear in their environments.

Humans are great, eh?

“Hey, here’s an island paradise! Lets explode several of the most powerful kinds of bombs ever conceived here!”

“Swell idea Sam! But we’ll have to kick the natives off first. To blow up the bombs while they’re still here would be immoral.”

As the Onion wrote in “Our Dumb Century“: “America finds last place on earth untouched by war, Blows it to hell.”

By the way, “Our Dumb Century” is very very good, but it is the only good Onion book. Actually, I mentioned it once before.

Not too shabby.

Also not too shabby-


Here is a video that uses a stencil aesthetic!

Alfonso Cuarón, director of “Children of Men”, and Naomi Klein, author of “No Logo”, present a short film from Klein’s book “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.”

This one was torn at right away.

I wonder why? If it was the placement, then I’d expect the other posters to be torn too. If it was the sexy content, then I’d expect the other sexy posters to be torn.

]]> http://www.bladediary.com/hair-theme-week-black-curls/feed/ 0 http://www.bladediary.com/hair-theme-week-redhead-astro-lady/ http://www.bladediary.com/hair-theme-week-redhead-astro-lady/#comments Tue, 25 Sep 2007 05:00:00 +0000 post hair-theme-week-redhead-astro-lady

Redhead
Uploaded by posterchild

This is maybe the best one of this series.

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I thought that the first hair experiment worked out pretty well!

So, this week, you’ll be seeing some more hairy posters.

I love the texture of the hair, and the odd way it pairs a 3d element with a 2d work, but what really excites me about the hair is two things:


One: That it adds a kinetic element. I love how the hair blows in the wind!


Two: That it adds an interactive element. The hair begs to be braided and played with like a big, paper doll. The first one has had it’s hair braided more than once, and has also had a hair elastic thing put into it.

Although, that really isn’t too surprising, since I put it on the side of a hair salon.

I managed to get some pics of the braided and decorated hair, but you’ll have to wait for the next follow-up theme week to see them! (Which is coming up pretty soon, following the 312th update.)