By: Emily Pohl-Weary

You can learn a lot about a city from the art plastered on its walls, utility poles and construction sites. It's a speedy introduction to the political issues and cultural activities that litter the urban core, and a great way to learn about concerts, movie nights, political actions and discussions. I deliberately take alleys rather than main streets and stop to examine crusty wads of paper peeling off telephone poles.


If you're exploring a new city and want to know about a neighborhood, use street art as your barometer. It's free. Nothing interferes between you and the artist - there's no curator or editor to mediate with the aim of maximizing market.

In our sales-driven society, where billboards and advertisements overwhelm us and encroach on our private space, public art plays an important function. Poster art provides a haven for consumption-weary minds, a reminder that not every source of public expression has to involve buying and selling. Some free posters might contain an overt message but the motivation behind plastering images, poems, stories and manifestos on telephone poles around a city is never as simple as selling the latest fragrance.

Why do people hit the streets of their hometowns armed with a staple gun and obscure photographs, art posters or short stories? As part of a group called the Science Friction Action Heroes, I and other local radical writers, including Jim Munroe, poster Toronto neighborhoods with fictional visions of the future.

Every poster series has a theme, and we each contribute a one-page piece of poster art. Our contributions are photocopied onto brightly colored paper.

Each of the Action Heroes wants to make explicit the correlation between science fiction (which is often highly surreal) and its (highly real) political context. According to a flier that Munroe created to accompany the poster series, our actions "bring together radical politics and science fiction to form a new breed of activism." He continues his description of the group on his Web site (nomediakings.org). "The difference between a creative visionary and a political visionary is smaller than you think. For every 1984 that shows us the horror of governmental control, there's a Mad Max that scares the straights off lawlessness."

The Action Heroes learned quickly that it's most effective to poster late at night to avoid nasty encounters with shop owners. We always work in pairs, and carry only the fliers, flour-and-water paste (for flat surfaces) and staple guns (for wooden telephone poles and construction boarding) because anything else gets heavy after postering for a few hours.

The Action Heroes are not the only poster art group. During fall 1999, a group of people who are named Bill, William or Will met in Toronto. Organizer Bill Meslin (mez@tao.ca) said of the group's motivation: "What about the little Bills? What about average Bills like me? We want to be represented in public space on an equal footing with corporate bills."

So they created the Posted Bills series. On behalf of "all repressed Bills in our society," they selected the top 25 Bills, found images of their faces, photocopied them onto 11-inch-by-17-inch fluorescent color stock and posted them where they saw signs that said Post No Bills. Meslin said: "Some of the Bills who made it into the poster series were Bill Clinton, Bill Bixby, Bill the Cat, Mr. Bill, William Shakespeare, William Penn, William Shatner, Billy Madison, Billy Idol, Bill Cosby ... and my roommate Biljana."

The Bills decided it was unfair that corporations were allowed to put up large billboards to promote their products while postering public space was illegal for most people. Meslin said: "Some of our posters were gone very quickly but some stayed up for more than a month. One in particular, a Bill Gates, was up ... near St. Michael's Hospital forever. The hospital was renovating its lobby, so they had put up Post No Bills signs everywhere."

During summer 1998, Toronto's South Asian Visual Arts Collective (SAVAC) ran a highly visible and educational poster art series called "Taking it to the Streets." SAVAC is a nonprofit organization that promotes the expression of contemporary visual arts by artists of South Asian descent.

The three posters they used confronted cuts to culture, health care and social services, the Sri Lankan civil war, and gay and lesbian rights. SAVAC plastered downtown with the posters - and the images remained in our collective memory.

Other than poster art, public art has soared, such as Toronto's alleys filled with hip-hop graffiti and fine art, Halifax's public art wall, Vancouver's "subvertisements," graffiti proclaiming "Viva Quebec Libre," and flat-paint art murals along Vancouver's Commercial Drive. In Ottawa, the English Department of Carleton University creates the Graffito Poetry Poster, posters with poems papering the city.

In the United States, for the past decade San Diego skateboarder/Rhode Island School of Design graduate Shepard Fairey has been putting up posters and stickers across the country that say "Obey Giant" and show the face of Andre the Giant Fairey said: "At the beginning, it was all just about the repetition of the stickers, so people would say, ‘What is this? Why is it everywhere?' It's amazing how much it  just freaks people out that I'm not working for somebody. When the cops bust me and want me to give them the name of my employer, they never believe that I'm actually spending my own money."

Artists who display their work for temporary public consumption reject the idea that fine art and literature are elitist creative forms, separate from our everyday experiences. At the same time, putting up transitional images and texts disassociated from the marketplace, and the sanctity of the gallery, museum, or publishing house, can be seen as purposefully obscure and disconnected - even, as Fairey repeatedly discovered, dangerous. Why are you doing this? Who is it for? Who is paying you? How does one explain that the motivation is to satisfy the postindustrial, egotistical desire to be seen and heard by strangers?

In the zinelike artists' book that SAVAC created to document its "Taking it to the Streets" series, writer Kevin D'Souza comments: "It is such a change to see posters on the street that not only speak of humanity but that shine creatively and beautifully, in a very unique way."

Until our understanding of what public space is shifts, ads - not art - will continue to dominate our social spaces. Advertisements are bright, big, in your face, and invade your mental environment. You can't walk to the store without dodging them, and often they're in your most private spaces: bathrooms, paperback novels, even shaved onto the back of people's heads. The resources of our social structure don't work to rein in advertising and encourage community discussion. The opposite is true. As a society, we are committed to keeping individuals from countering the ads, and having their say on the streets. Meslin says: "This is a double standard that should not be accepted. We didn't think it was fair that there were places where people aren't allowed to post bills. We think there are a lot of bills worth posting. As a Bill, obviously it's a very important issue for me."

Does public art really compete with the bombardment of marketing materials? As an Action Hero, I feel it's my duty to put up poster art that provides a respite for people who want to look anywhere but the ads.

"We like to think our bills compete with the corporate billboards. Of course, our bills are a lot smaller, and the amount of public space is limited. So much of it is saturated with corporate propaganda," Meslin said. "It's a war, and the booty is space. We wouldn't have to reclaim it if it weren't already taken from us. I'd hate to think that people see ads as untouchable." Public postering is an evolving medium of social dissent, community communication and grass-roots promotion. Since the Posted Bills series, Meslin has gone on to other projects, including billboard liberation (altering corporate ads), the Reclaim the Streets theater installations (which use people as an artistic medium), and sunflower installations (anonymously placing potted sunflowers on bus shelters and phone booths). He also turns off billboards by flicking their switches, which doesn't physically damage them.

The Science Friction Action Heroes' postering campaign seemed the perfect forum for me to disseminate my opinions about local political issues cheaply and effectively. Posters and public art are ways for independent artists to interact directly with people in their neighborhoods.

It changes the perception of urban space into something shaped and improved by the people who live there, and turns skyscrapers and concrete into a home that visitors quickly identify as a unique and individual community.

Is there a bit of Action Hero in all of us? One time or another, we've all dabbled in spectacle, turning the personal and private into the public and anonymous. Perhaps we're closer than we think - just a staple gun and a stack of posters away - to reinventing Main Street and, in the process, ourselves.


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