I don’t know why I’d never attempted it sooner, but not too long back, I was struck by the idea of a line of stickers.
Given my affinity for street art (and I’ll concede, at this early point in the narrative, that not everyone considers stickers “street art” in that they arguably don’t really require the same amount of risk, dedication, longevity and genuine artistry as more conventional graffiti), I first considered it as a viable avenue of would-be guerilla marketing for a book project I was working on. I realize that sounds like a heroically incongruous leap, but trust me, it made a bit of sense.
The project, as some might remember, was a large-sized book about Cop Shoot Cop, a New York City band who initially spread their name around the Lower East Side via a cryptic flyer campaign. I figured that a similarly executed sticker initiative when the book became available might be fun and suitable. That was the idea, at least.
Well, as detailed in this weepy post, that project unfortunately ran aground way before there was any need for celebratory promotional stickers. Then I thought of doing some anyway, just as a lark, but wisely figured that the band’s artwork, imagery and name were just not mine to appropriate and/or mess with. So, I scrapped that idea.
But, again, given my fascination with the whole clandestine sticker scene, I figured it might be fun to give it a shot using one of my own images. So that's what I did. I put together a simple design based on a photo you’ve possibly noticed on this blog before, if you’ve spent any time here, appended with a suitable legend in red, block-capital letters. With that, I had a bunch of them printed up, and was off to the races.
I should probably take another moment, here, to acknowledge that serious, die-hard sticker artists will probably read this post and either laugh derisively or cough up a wad of phlegm. I wasn’t really trying to “bite their steez,” so much as merely follow their examples. At no point during this very silly endeavor did I harbor any designs to become the next Shepard Fairey, or feel in competition with current hotshots like Posterboy 2000, FCKING BNGRZ and the seemingly ubiquitous Cheer-Up. I got nothin' on those guys.
That does, however, beg the question: What, if anything, was I looking to achieve by doing this?
That answer is more elusive, but I suppose I was conceiving it as a fun experiment. It'd be interesting to see if I could manage to disseminate my silly stickers and actually have some of them stay put. I guess the ideal end result would be to be walking along one likely byway or another, five or six years from now, and still be able to spot one or two of my stickers in the places I stuck them, however far-fetched that might seem.
When I first got started, I immediately understood why people do it. Each sticker I furtively smacked onto a light pole, utility box or crumbling derelict façade came with a small rush – a juvenile jolt of energy rendered all the more ridiculous by the fact that I’m not a lingo-slinging hip-hopper, b-boy, tagger or youthful skaterboi, but rather a grumpy, silver-haired dad.
Regardless, that minuscule thrill of “leaving my mark,” however ultimately meaningless, did heighten the experience, but it also required some guidelines. As such, I came up with some best practices, for want of a better term. Once again, these are based only on my own observations, and by no means come with any semblance of authority. Here are a few of them.
Show Respect: I realize this sounds entirely counterintuitive, given the very nature of the practice, but hear me out. If you see a virginal piece of civic property that looks freshly painted, scrubbed and well-maintained, don’t put a sticker on it. Its pristine presentation should let you know that it’s obviously being lovingly looked after, so why bother sullying it with a sticker that will invariably just be stripped off? City finery has earned your recognition.
Respect should also be given to your fellow sticker-slappers. Don't be a jerk and cover up someone else's sticker. Take a moment, and -- just like on a crowded dance floor -- try to find a space of your own. Covering up someone else's stuff will only breed contempt.
Be Discriminating: Beyond recognizing where not to put your stickers, don't just put them anywhere. Study your environment. See what's worked -- and not worked -- for others. Again, if you see a surface that's had stickers peeled off of it, take that hint. Yours will be, too.
Be Strategic: Use your head. Putting stickers at eye-level seems like the way to go, but eye-level is also easy pull-down level. If you place them higher or lower than eye level, they'll stand a better chance of staying up.
Conserve Your Resources: Sometimes less is more. A single, well-positioned sticker will suffice. Unless you're trying to make some kind of point, there's no need for multiple stickers in a single spot. If you over-saturate in a single area, that's only going to annoy people.
Be Cognizant of What's Going On Around You: Know who's watching. Most people invariably don't give a rolling rat fuck what you're doing, but if you put up a sticker in front of certain folks, you may be asking for a confrontation, or worse.
Don't Take It Personally When Your Stickers Go Missing: The probability of most-if-not-all of your stickers being removed from these New York City streets is unfathomably high. Your stuff is going to come down for myriad reasons. Remember, you're the one being out of line, here.
Don’t Put Your Stickers on Scaffolding: Why? Because scaffolding -- ostensibly, at least -- will eventually come down. Thus, too, will your stickers.
But even that last point is laughably ambitious. Regardless of the perceived quality of your sticker, the artfulness of its application or the time of day you affixed it to whatever surface, there is -- once again -- the massive likelihood that it’s not going to remain where you slapped it. Be they disinterested sanitation workers, rightly wrathful local residents or self-styled arbiters of street-art-sticker standards (like this guy), people WILL be pulling your stuff down. To borrow from the unfortunate parlance of erectile dysfunction – the problem isn’t just “getting up,” the problem is also “staying up.”
After a couple of weeks of this nonsense, I started to feel something of an overwhelming sense of futility. The whole effort seemed tantamount to building an ornately over-thought sand castle too close to the waves. Eventually, the tide was going to come in and lay it all to waste. No matter how hard I’d “hit” a certain strip, street, significant spot or whole neighborhood, I could still just walk a block in any direction and find my paltry attempts woefully unrepresented.
In the end, somewhat unsurprisingly, no one really batted an eyelash. I’m not sure what I’d been expecting, but even after practically carpet-bombing my various routes to and from the office by early morning and early evening with my stupid stickers and blanketing certain patches of likely real estate in the East Village, Lower East Side, SoHo, Greenwich Village and bits of Chelsea, still no friend of mine reached out of the blue to note that they’d spotted one. None of my stickers were ever immortalized -- to my knowledge, at least -- in any sticker-centric Instagram round-up. None were defaced. They would just dematerialize. No great impression was seemingly made one way or another. In certain neighborhoods -- specifically certain areas of SoHo -- stickers I put up over the course of one evening would seemingly vanish by the next day.
Several weeks later, there are still many of my original 300 stickers affixed to points on the map both meticulously pinpointed and haplessly random. Why some remain and some don't is a total mystery. At this stage, this part of the experiment is over, and I am disinclined to have more made up. But ... that could change. For the moment, I'm still spotting them out there.
We'll see how long they last.
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