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Activism See other Activism Articles Title: Sign of the times: dissent on America’s highways With anger over Bush’s government and the war in Iraq, Americans have found a new way to protest. Ros Davidson in California meets the freeway bloggers It’s a new American graffiti – the art of freeway blogging. Americans driving to work or the mall are increasingly being confronted by guerrilla art, or political messages, strung across freeway bridges or staked on verges and embankments. Agitprop for the post 9/11 era, the signs are typically anti-Bush or anti-war and succinct enough to grab the attention of motorists whizzing by. Or cryptic enough to linger annoyingly, like an advertising jingle. As dissent over the war in Iraq and the Bush presidency grows, illicit “freeway blogs” are sprouting daily on major freeways from California to New Jersey. Road workers, and ordinary drivers who differ politically, tear down the cardboard signs but new ones soon appear. “The war is a lie.” “Yee-ha isn’t a foreign policy.” “Quagmire accomplished.” “When Clinton lied, nobody died.” “War president? My pet goat.” “Jesus drives an SUV. Mohammed pumps his gas.” “Osama Bin Forgotten.” “Why change horsemen mid-apocalypse?” “You have the right to remain silent but I wouldn’t recommend it.” On a Seattle bridge, alongside the Republican slogan “comp-assionate conservatism”, stands a stylised reproduction of the infamous photograph of a hooded Iraqi prisoner, arms stretched out and wires attached for electrocution. Above a busy freeway near Sacramento, the official home of California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a triptych of small but prominent cardboard posters is affixed to a bridge: “Worst.” “President.” “Ever.” And outside the First Baptist Church in upper New York State, the sign has been altered, a technique known as culture jamming, to read: “Jesus Loves You. Bush doesn’t.” American politics is famed for rude bumper stickers and big brash badges. But never before has guerrilla art, rather than official adverts for a particular candidate or party, been so common. Proponents say that the blogging is a free speech retort to corporate-run media and endless advertising billboards. The country is more divided than it has been for a generation, and millions of people spend hours daily on car-choked freeways. In many states, the blogs aren’t taken down especially quickly unless the posters obscure road signs. It’s usually “someone else’s job” to take them down, so the signs may stay up for days, weeks or even months. That is according to Patrick Randall, one of several pseudonyms of the Freeway Blogger, the best-known practitioner, who paints and installs more than a hundred protest signs a month. Indeed few know the medium better than Randall, a 43-year-old Californian whose website, http://freewayblogger.com, has become ground zero for the art form and whose signs are copied coast to coast. “One person can reach a quarter of a million people by noon tomorrow with just cardboard and a can of paint,” he said. Speaking on his mobile phone, he is gunning his truck away from an overpass east of San Francisco, where he has just left a blog attached to a metal fence with bungee cords and a couple of rocks to jam it into place. The message, high above one of the country’s busiest freeways reads: “I’m sick of hearing what rich people think.” It may only stay up a few minutes, or hours, before someone tears it down. But with 100,000 vehicles daily, on a busy California freeway with eight to 10 lanes, the exposure is massive. “Hopefully people will see the signs and make a little creative leap and do it themselves,” says Randall, who claims to have taught English to young teenagers in Los Angeles, reported from Nicaragua and Guatemala, written for Penthouse, and run truck-loads of second-hand American clothes to poor Mexican villages. He describes himself as over-educated, under-employed and, ironically enough given the day’s message, able to blog full-time because of a small inheritance. “Did I tell you this is fun?” he asks, still out of breath. Five years and 2500 signs ago, he was so infuriated by the botched presidential vote in Florida that he sprayed “1776-2000: RIP” on an old stained mattress by a freeway near Los Angeles. American democracy had ended, he was saying. A week, and thousands of cars later, the mattress was still there, propped against a tree. “I had found my voice,” he says. It now takes him just seven minutes to make a sign, using an overhead projector and tracing letters and images onto cardboard, a technique detailed on his website. Once he has scoped out a new freeway location, he takes about six seconds to install it with a climber’s hook and pole, bungees, duct tape and wearing an orange jacket, he says, so he looks official. He does not like his work to be dismantled. One of his signs, near San Francisco, was recently replaced with “Support our troops”. He returned and added a second sign: “Impeach the murdering bastards who sent them to die for a pack of lies.” The extent of freeway blogging is not clear, although Randall hopes to line up 1800 sign-posters in 315 cities in 50 states for his next big project. Probably within weeks, to coincide with American deaths in Iraq officially reaching 2000, freeway bloggers will blanket freeways with cryptic signs: “2k why?” In the last few years other forms of political public art have proliferated, from graffiti and poster art to murals and culture jamming. “That Bush can activate the street, that he can get skateboard and graffiti kids pissed off enough to make art, that’s amazing,” Robbie Conal, the godfather of America’s modern satirical poster art, told MTV online. Nowhere have the disenfranchised become more outspoken than in California, the so-called Left Coast because of the strength of the anti-Bush vote there. Californian’s cities have a potent history of “tagging” – or marking gang territory – and of street murals, inspired by Mexican cultural history … and the sunny weather. Conal, and graphic artist Shepard Fairey, plastered their posters on public spaces throughout downtown Los Angeles ahead of the 2004 presidential vote. The state also has acres of freeways where the median, to use the US term for the raised strip in the middle of a dual carriageway, can become the message. “Once you’re in this mindframe, everything around you becomes a canvas,” says Randall.
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#1. To: Eoghan (#0)
Good job, Randall.
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