Takin' It To The Streets

By Richard Lacayo

It's 4 p.m. in Los Angeles, and the artist who calls himself Branded is getting ready for a "mission." If he were another kind of artist, he would call it a gallery opening, but today his gallery consists of a few alleys off La Brea Avenue and some threadbare bits of downtown. Once there, he will look for exhibition sites, meaning temporary construction walls, shuttered buildings and utility boxes. One thing to know about street art is that it generally plants its flag in Nowheresville.

In his car Branded has several broad brushes, a bucket of the watery adhesive called wheat paste and a stack of his trademark cartoonish bunny posters. His first target is a utility box on La Brea. With a friend stationed nearby to watch for police, Branded, 30, brushes a layer of paste on the box and slaps up the poster. Then he whips open his cell phone, snaps a picture and e-mails the shot to flickr.com a photo website on which artists post their work.

"The act of doing it is interesting," says Branded. (Street art is almost always illegal--another word for it is vandalism--so pseudonyms are an almost universal part of the culture.) "There's the adrenaline. Once it's up, then it's about getting the reactions." By that night, his images will be flying around the Internet, passed along by some of the hundreds of thousands of people who keep track of this stuff, some because they make it but most because they like to know about it and may spot it in its natural habitat. Think of it as postmodern bird watching.

Street art is the catchall term for the accelerating phenomenon of surreptitious imagery inserted by mostly young artists into the municipal gumbo of overpasses, alleys and neglected street corners. It is popping up in cities everywhere--New York, Los Angeles, London, Sao Paulo. And although it has roots in the outburst of graffiti spray painting in the 1970s and '80s, it's a different order of business. In the brief annals of street-art history, graffiti ranks as something like cave painting--a first gesture, recognized for its primal intuition that public space is up for grabs--and has, in the past four or so years, been overtaken by a host of new practices: wheat-pasted posters, adhesive stickers with oddball images on them, elaborately stenciled images and even three-dimensional objects. And like many things that start below the Establishment's radar, it has caught the eye of the mainstream and is edging into the galleries.

Ad and Droo, 33, twin brothers based in New York City, call themselves Skewville. One of their practices is to rescue discarded metal ventilator grates and carve them with such block-lettered words as FAKE or SKEW. Then they mount their creations on exterior walls where you might expect to find working ventilator grates, hiding their art in plain sight within the urban jungle. The Los Angeles artist Tiki Jay One, 32, has recently begun cementing to whatever surface will hold them 1-ft.-tall concrete sculptures of Polynesian tiki heads. "When I go out, it's a serious operation," he says. "This takes a lot of planning."

At its best, street art repositions the public space around it, making it a place where cryptic little messages are offered to those who care to see them. Even an image that might not resonate much on its own--a flower, a cartoon bunny--sends out a different frequency when it shows up on a banged-up city block. Although it sometimes appears in the suburbs, street art is mostly a city format, borrowing its images from the primordial ooze of video games, advertising, science fiction, skateboard decals, porn and politics. Masked gunmen, spacemen and George W. Bush are all major motifs.

Street art is also in part an outgrowth of earlier developments in the wider art world, among them conceptual art, performance art and even earthworks, all of which took art out of the galleries and museums and, not incidentally, validated perishable artistic gestures--the performance preserved only on video, the leaf sculpture that crumbles in the breeze. A lot of street art lasts only a few months before it succumbs to the elements, is covered over by other works or is taken away ("buffed" is the term). "I've had dogs s___ on my work," says Leon Reid, a.k.a. Darius Jones, 26, who makes tiny anthropomorphic figures out of bricks that he mostly places at ground level. "I've had people lock their bikes to pieces I've made. But I guess that's part of what this is all about."

Street artists see their imagery as a counterforce to the ubiquitous world of outdoor advertising. But with its canny repetition of images, it's not so different. A handful of street artists has even parlayed the popularity of their images into design or merchandising businesses. Fifteen years ago, pioneer Shepard Fairey, 35, hit upon what may be the best known of all street-art images, a black-and-white face of the late professional wrestler Andre the Giant with OBEY printed beneath. In a world in which we all feel subordinate to something, it was the ultimate generic image of creepy domination. It's now on T shirts, bags and a belt buckle that has been spotted on Ashton Kutcher. Today Fairey has a graphic-design firm, a gallery space and a licensing deal for Obey clothing, posters and stickers.

He's not the only one moving into galleries. Swoon, 27, makes intricate figurative images that she wheat-pastes to walls. Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art acquired six of her pieces this past summer. "We were astounded," says Deborah Wye, chief curator of MOMA's department of prints. "She was using very traditional printmaking techniques--woodcut and linoleum--that she had infused with this contemporary spirit." It's a spirit she takes from the street. And one she leaves behind there.

For more images of street art from the U.S. and Europe, visit time.com/streetart

With reporting by Reported by Carolina A. Miranda