You all know I am a very cuddly artist. I may get argumentative when there’s a discussion, but I mainly walk around with a horse’s head and I give out cake to strangers. But somehow these things sometimes attract a little hostility, even though that’s the last thing I’m looking for. So when I decided (with my trusty, very removable, neon chalk-markers specifically made for glass and windows to be removed with just water once you’re done with it and which explains why it’s so badly visible in the picture) to comment on a piece of advertising so vile it kept me fuming for 5 hours, a man walks up to me to discuss my “defacing public space”.
I tried to argue that that is how I feel about the advertisement, that it defiles the public space and peoples right to not be confronted with corporate-sponsored denigrating images. I tried to argue that the markers are specifically chosen because they are easily removable. But he wasn’t just offended by my message and method, but also by the fact that I wrote it in English (which was for your benefit, guys) so therefore I must be uneducated and not know Dutch. This, in the context of our discussion, sounded to me like a racist remark, but I’m not certain it was meant as such. He ended with that it was “just plain rude and unacceptable”. At that point I decided to stop explaining, ignore him and continue “defacing” with him still shouting a bit from a distance, but I fucked up the grammar because of my nerves. He left after I ignored him for some time. He was rather large, argumentative, very loud and he had an impressively ratty mustache, and as much as I’d have liked to not be affected by that, I was. So, enjoy my grammatically incorrect book recommendation of the week. Go read The Sexual Politics of Meat, go veg, be feminist, I will love you for it and try not to judge you anyway. Even if you are an argumentative intimidating shouty man who does not see the harm in two women fellating meat.
On a more positive note, I’ve added another piece of angry feminist “art” to this post. I saw a lovely gentleman wearing a shirt that said “reduce your CO2, grow a bush”, and this made me like him immediately. I wish that message was spread more widely. Then there was a Sherlock episode in which John shaves his moustache for Sherlock (cue awkward fan fiction). I agreed very much with John’s message and Mary’s suggestion that he should put it on a t-shirt. So I did. The stencil may or may not be a stylized representation (to scale!) of the artist’s body, and trying to take the picture on which the stencil is based might have been one of the most slapstick-hilarious things the artist has ever done with a chair and a camera. Ok, I’m off to watch some Veronica Mars now and get back to calm. In my household, there’s only one man, and he happens to be my dad and also to be very much in favor of giving the neon-colored finger to intolerant powers that be. He thought I was using permanent ink-marker and felt rather disappointed it was just chalk.
If you want to use the stencil, you can download it here. You need to stick the bellybutton on it with a tiny piece of duct tape, but the rest is stencil-proof.
PS. Do men regularly experience this thing where they go outside of their homes and see fellow men spread-eagle, or with mouths open, or licking suggestively at/strokingly holding on to phallic objects or just looking available next to a designer-item everywhere they look? It depresses me and I’m done with it. I don’t want to see the men suffering this fate either. I just want a little bit more free expression and a little bit less intrusive mass-marketed corporate shit all over the place! Then you can display as many titillating images as you’d want, as long as it is a form of expression, not the use of the human body to sell stuff or control people. If it turns out to be your deepest desire, you can stand by the traffic lights completely naked, enthusiastically licking 2 sausages at once for all I care. Come see me, I do a great french or italian sausage and know where you can get a performance license!