Archive for December, 2012
Happy new year!
Published December 31, 2012 "The Process is the Product" , Let chats Leave a CommentLooked through too many image files today on my computer… and spent an hour on the phone with someone from Time Warner Cable who said, “Well, they must do things differently in New York.”
Here’s another political sticker I acquired recently, one that dates back to the Watergate scandal in Washington, D.C., during the early 1970s. Actually, this sticker is a gummed label, a format that pre-dates most of the paper and vinyl stickers we find today. It certainly makes you wonder who at the time made these little labels and where were they placed? Nice old radio headphones, bug.
Snowed in today and feeling a little squirrel-y. There must be at least 18-24 inches of flurry out in the back yard, maybe more. Don’t know where this sticker came from, but love the mystery.
I worked on the mega-sticker exhibition specs this afternoon, however, figuring out exactly how many stickerboards to include, which artists and themes to cover, text panels, etc., at least from my end. Also trying to find a good title for the show, one that will represent several different categories: i.e., the mostly German/European art, music, clothing, and skateboard stickers from Oli, and the various U.S., Canadian, Spanish, and German socio-political stickers I’m interested in.
Obama stickers from 2008
Published December 26, 2012 "The Process is the Product" , US Election 2008 Leave a Comment
In 2008, Sticker Robot commissioned ten artists to create stickers for the Obama election; the artists included Shepard Fairey, Munk One, Zoltron, Sam Flores, Morning Breath, El Mac (whose sticker is pictured above), Ron English, Felix Jackson, Jr.,Dustin Parker, and David Choe. I haven’t found too much information about the series yet, but there was an Obama art discussion group on Flickr that featured #9 and #10, and a Web site called Expresso Beans that occasionally shows packets of them for sale. At the time, Sticker Robot wrote this about the packets:
In a final effort to show our support for Barack Obama and make sure that people have a chance to collect the entire set of Sticker Robot’s silkscreened Obama stickers, we put together a limited edition of 200 “Election Collection” sticker packs. Limit of 1 sticker pack per person/household. The packs were available once and will never be recreated. Each sticker pack contains 15 large silkscreen stickers plus some bonus mini stickers.
I was lucky enough to purchase the ten stickers recently on eBay, along with the PROGRESS sticker that went with Shepard Fairey’s iconic HOPE sticker, and a bunch of others from 2008 that I’ve never seen before. In all, there are 32 different designs, which you can see on Flickr here. I wasn’t aware of the ten-packs and had only come across six of them in the past. Here is another sticker by Munk One from Sticker Robot, though it’s not part of the original series of ten.
These Obama stickers will go into the new mega-sticker show I am working on!
This image file has been sitting on my desktop for the past couple of months, an orphan from a previous conference Powerpoint presentation, I imagine. It’s a tiny little sticker, about a half-inch in diameter. With Les Misérables due to open in movie theaters tomorrow on Christmas, December 25, 2012, it seemed like a good time to add the sticker to my blog. Pictured is the young Cosette from Victor Hugo’s 1886 first edition of the book. Based on an engraving by the French illustrator Émile Bayard, the image of the girl has been used for decades in all of the major advertising campaigns and publicity for London and Broadway productions.
While Les Mis focuses on class conflict and social and economic injustice, the sticker includes “Axis of Evil,” a phrase coined by George W. Bush in 2002 in his annual State of the Union address, a few months after the 9/11 attacks on the United States. Sometimes, stickers like these can be difficult to figure out. As I began doing research, I just figured it was from New York City. Part way through, though, I checked my files and found that the sticker came from Berlin in 2006, which sort of changed everything.
Little stickers like these crack me up. They’re each less than an inch in diameter, but such personality! You find the wee ones hidden in the narrow crevices of street sign posts.
I’ve been searching through my collection to find holiday-related images for A Sticker A Day, but aside from the two anti-Christmas stickers I shared last year at this time (Ho, ho, ho!), I can only find a few angels. These two stickers are from NYC, 2008. There’s one angel with a gun and another with a human skull.
A fairly disturbing percentage of stickers I find in the United States appropriate a skull and crossbones motif, gang-style or “bad boy” imagery, and/or other militant references, such as guns, grenades, rifles, men in camouflage, etc. A Web site called Teaching Media has recently put together a set of resources called the Sports-Media-Military Nexus, and it’s the media-military nexus I find interesting in relation to U.S. stickers. The Teaching Media call-for-proposals included this:
“Since September 11, 2001 sports has become increasingly ‘complicit’ in an increasing militarization of U.S. society and popular culture. Butterworth and Moskal (2009), for example, argue that American identity is constituted in and by a culture of militarism, ‘wherein Americans are implicated in a structural relationship between government, the military, and entertainment industries to the extent that it has become functionally impossible to live outside the rhetorical production of war’ (p. 413). The ‘seizing’ of the NFL, Major League Baseball, or NASCAR by the military can be witnessed frequently through the spreading of militaristic messages from sponsors, advertisers, and broadcasters who appear eager to use these sporting events to garner support for war, especially during a time of great unpopularity among the American public, and to reassert national identity through excessive displays of patriotism.”
I’ll try to find something a little more upbeat for tomorrow!
December 20, 2012. Preparing for the beginning of the end… of the world as we know it.
A cynical kitty during the holidays.
