In Boston over the weekend a wave of grafitti hit nearly two dozen downtown buildings, mostly banks. "End the Fed." "Tax the Rich." "Burn the Money." A Bank of America branch got a big blue anarchist circle-A on the sign above its doorway. #OccupyBoston says its hands are clean—group members say they're into carrying signs, not spray painting buildings. The mayor of Boston gave the group his continued blessing, saying, "99 percent of those folks there don't want to cause trouble." But if a rogue 1 percent believes that walls and shop windows should be occupied with slogans, can the movement stop them? As hundreds of #occupy gatherings wrestle with the tricky logistics of physical occupation and crowd control, graffiti artists and taggers around the world are leaving marks of protest in all sort of ways. Here's a sampling.
Origin
Source: Mother Jones
- On a bank in Boston:
- "Love, the 99%"
- Mass-produced:
- A less aesthetic example:
- Tag wars have flared up:
- Local merchant's shops are being tagged with OWS prop. This is causing the local gangs to re-tag, and the neighborhood has asked that this please stop.
- Maybe the whole world is watching:
- National Transitional Council (NTC) fighters rest outside a shuttered shop along a street in the town of Sirte, Libya, on October 16.
- Rome, October 15, the "Global Day of Action":
- Hundreds of hooded, masked demonstrators rampaged in some of the worst violence seen in the Italian capital in years, setting cars ablaze, breaking bank and shop windows and destroying traffic lights and signposts.
- And in Madrid:
- A protester carrying a banner that reads "No home, no job, no pension, no fear" withdraws money from an ATM machine of a bank next to graffiti sprayed by other protesters during a demonstration in Madrid. The graffiti reads "Responsible for the crisis".
- Foiled in Portland, Oregon:
- The Portland Police Bureau (PPB) reports that two suspected taggers, an man and a juvenile, were taken into custody at approximately 1 a.m. The two suspects were reportedly painting graffiti saying "Occupy Portland" and "Wall Street loves no one", authorities say. They were seen marking a PPB patrol car and some local businesses, including the Starbucks in Pioneer Courthouse Square.
- They gotta start somewhere:
- Not sure how this works, but it's captivating.
- Cleaning up someone else's mess, in this case (look closely):
- Tools of the trade:
- Street murals are still banned in LA, but well-known street artist, Saber, contributed his spray-paint chops for #occupyLA:
- For a different kind of tagging, OccupyGeorge.com provides downloadable templates for stamping dollar bills with stats on income inequality. The unnamed activists behind the site note that they aren't out to ruin any currency--instead, they hope the tagged bills will travel far and wide, spreading knowledge one transaction at a time:
Source: Mother Jones
No comments:
Post a Comment