Josh MacPhee’s art straddles a number of cultural mediums. He is a street artist, designer, curator, and activist. A street stenciler and poster maker for over a decade, he also runs a radical art distribution project called justseeds as a way to develop and distribute t-shirts, posters, and stickers with revolutionary content. He puts together the Celebrate People’s History Poster Project, an ongoing poster series in which different artists create posters to document and remember moments in radical history, as well as collectively organizes agit-prop cultural actions with ad-hoc groups of artists under various organizational names such as "Department of Space and Land Reclamation" and “Street.Rec.” 

contact: P.O.Box 476971, Chicago, IL 60647 USA or email: josh@justseeds.org

Josh Macphee was interviewed by Nicolas Lampert in a two part session via email in April, 2003

Much of your artwork - stencils, wheat pasting is displayed on the streets, for all to see. To generalize, the majority of artists choose to display their work in the confines of an art gallery. What are your feelings about showing political art in these types of spaces, both established and underground?

Unfortunately, I think a lot of artists don’t really think much about the context of their work. A lot of "political" artists spend so much time developing critical content but then spend little or no time thinking about form or context. The impact of any piece of art is ultimately determined by its audience, and a viewer of art is effected by where and how they see the art as much as by the political content of it. I believe that the gallery space is almost fully absorbed and controlled by art world economic forces. The clean white walls with discreet and unique objects hanging on them is designed and built to seamlessly blend capitalist economics and "high culture." Even though I don’t find galleries libratory spaces, they are completely embedded in even progressive art scenes and are one of the many things in life I compromise on. In my mind some good reasons to work with galleries are to develop relationships with other artists/cultural, in all honesty, to build an exhibition history that might make it easier to make a living as an artist, and also because galleries do cater to an audience that you might not reach from the street.

I don’t want to sound like I think that the street is some sort of art utopia. Our society is so fucked up and segregated by race and class, when artists say they "put their art up on the street for all to see," it is a bit of an overstatement. What we think of as public space potentially has as many boundaries as a gallery would, I just believe that those boundaries aren’t as fixed. Creating a dialogue in the larger world, even with all its problems, is far more interesting than creating one in a museum or gallery.

I’m not sure when exactly the city ordinance was passed banning spray paint, but I’ve been living in Chicago for six years and spray paint has never been sold within city limits since I’ve been here. Also, being caught with spray paint in your car is immediate grounds for impoundment. Mainly the laws are symbolic, it’s only a quick train ride to the suburbs where kids can rack paint, so access isn’t the real issue.

The main thing that impacts street art here is the buffing. "Mayor Daley’s Graffiti Blasters" is a multi million dollar program that includes dozens of paint-filled tanker trucks that buff graffiti all day, everyday, and free brown paint is handed out to any citizen that wants to paint over graffiti on their property. A year ago the city decided that no graffiti should be visible from the El trains (in Chicago the subway is elevated so there is a good view of rooftops and the sides and backs of buildings) so not only were all rooftops buffed, but all permission walls that could be seen from the train were buffed as well, some of these were over 10 years old and some of the last remaining living history of Chicago graffiti.

There are still a ton of kids painting and also some wheatpasting that goes on, but because nothing stays up, most of the art has become lowest common denominator, very few pieces, some throwups, mostly tags, scratches, etching, stickers, stuff that is quick and easy. Buffing ensures that artists can’t build on each other or create a complex visual public culture, because you are always painting on a clean (brown!) slate.

Speaking of wheat pasting. I remember passing through Chicago a number of years back and seeing Shepard Fairey’s "GIANT" posters plastered though out the city. I was torn over my reaction to his work. Part of me responded to the images, being a proponent of wheat pasting. Yet, I also felt that his wheat pasting campaign was closer aligned to product advertisement and reminded me more of the movie and music industry posters that encourage you to buy a product. What is your reaction to Fairey’s work?

Like you, I have a fairly complex response to Fairey’s work. I fully respect the amount of work he has spent getting his stickers, posters, and stencils up around the world, he really never seems to stop working and getting up. I also originally liked the "obey giant" campaign for what it claimed to be, an exercise in semiotics and a solid attempt to make transparent the process of how branding and advertising works. By creating a brand that advertised nothing but itself, and one that had no meaning or connection to anything but itself, Fairey was able to expose how advertisers use their trade to create a buzz and demand for a product, irregardless of what the product is, its quality, utility, or anything else. Unfortunately Fairey has quickly turned his experiment in the marketing of nothing into a comfortable and slickly designed advertising campaign for his "giant" skateboards, t-shirts, hats, posters, and for Fairey himself as a designer, illustrator, and arbitrator of hip and cool. This totally undermines any power in his original project, and at this point most of Fairey’s work is about as interesting as an ad for Preparation H (or Levi’s or whoever he’s working for these days).

Do the music and movie industry posters that are wheat pasted throughout urban cities face the same legal challenges and short life spans in the streets that often is the case with political messages and graffiti?

I can only speak from observation and what bits of knowledge I’ve picked up here and there, but as far as I know all corporate ads of the type your talking about are put up by "street teams." These teams are groups of people hired by ad agencies to do the dirty aspects of promotion, whether it’s wheat pasting, stenciling, or passing out flyers at clubs. Depending on the city, these teams may be made up of kids that do their own street art and it is just a way to make extra money or by non-artists just looking for work that are hired by the agencies. Supposedly some places that corporate pasting is done are by permission, but I think most of it is as illegal as any other street art, it’s just that cops assume that it’s legal because it says "Coke" or "Universal Pictures." In Chicago corporate ads tend to stay up longer than independent stuff, but sometimes they get buffed just as fast as anything else. Wheat pasting in general is much easier to do than anything with paint. If it involves spraypaint it’s cracked down on, corporate or not. The IBM linux stencil campaign that was done in many cities a couple years back caused a controversy in Chicago when someone was busted painting IBM stencils. IBM ended up having to pay some big fine, but at the same time the story ended up on the front page of the Chicago Sun-Times, which is exposure and advertising space that is better than any that IBM could have ever paid for. If only the mainstream media did stories on my "advertising" campaigns!

The Department of Space and Land Reclamation was originally a weekend long project in Chicago in April of 2001. We organized a weekend dedicated to reclaiming public space for those that live, work, and play in it. About 60 artists and groups planned public space reclamation actions for that weekend, and we set up a hub, or central space, were people could plan and prep there activities, hang out, meet other folks, take part in discussions and panels, and party at night. The space was open 24 hours for 3 days and helped facilitate the planned projects as well as dozens of impromptu forays into the city with paint, buckets of paste, stickers, giant puppet constructions, etc. It turned out to be a great weekend and really energized people about new ways to connect art, activism, community, and fun.

There are very few laws I feel shouldn’t be broken. For artists in particular, I think we need to attack all laws that continue to enclose our "commons" and privatize everything and anything, be it space, economy, intellectual property, plants or human DNA. It is becoming increasingly difficult to do any sort of art in what we used to call public space. More and more the spaces that exist between home, work and commerce are shrinking and being absorbed into this new holy trinity. These "interspaces" now only exist to transport you from home to work to shopping and back and are intensely policed. Policed by actual physical cops, but also by the proliferation of fences and walls, guard dogs, corporate advertisements to shape our imagination, cars to bring us door to door without human interaction, and even time itself, turned against us so that survival appears to depend on the swift movement between the points of the trinity.

This collapse of space in on itself opens up room for artists. The blurring of public and private means that everything becomes a potential canvas or location for a performance, as long as you can get away with it. When you are forced to break the law to express yourself it gives additional weight to your _expression. Not only are you saying something, but you are also clearly transgressing the set boundaries for _expression in order to say it. An audience response can quickly move from the simple "what is that saying to me?" to the more complicated "why was the law broken in order to say this?"



Another aspect of art and "law" is the issue of copy right infringements. What are your reactions to visual artists who "sample" from other artists or use corporate logo’s or characters in their work. Are their limits to appropriation and who do you see benefiting from these laws?

I have mixed reactions to copyright art. Most artists seem to blindly use and manipulate corporate logos with no understanding or concern about the actual power of the symbols. Logos and brands have very powerful meanings that corporations spend millions of dollars building and grooming. The golden arches mean a million different things, but for most people they mean exactly what McDonalds intends them to mean: quick, tasty food for cheap, a place to make your kids happy, the place that has the french fries you love so much, oh my god I really want an egg mcmuffin, or all of these combined. Television ads, print ads, giant glowing yellow M’s dotting the landscape, the image of Ronald McDonald, all of these things are used to reinforce these meanings. I think it is extremely naive for an artist to think they can co-opt the McDonalds logo for their poster, t-shirt, or whatever and successfully combat all the meaning(s) McDonalds has invested in it.

At the same time I really love art like Andy Singer’s piece in the Drawing Resistance show. I think it uses stylized versions of Disney characters and humor to make the viewer think about how corporations and our government are in cohouts to colonize the rest of the world. It’s not trying to fully take on Disney or reinscribe Mickey Mouse with a permanent new meaning. Pre-teen girls are not going walk away from the piece convinced that "Donald Duck equals Empire" and throw away their Little Mermaid video tapes, and they don’t need to for it to be successful. It’s just a simple and satirical use of powerful logos to get another idea across, it speaks to those who are already critical of Disney and helps confirm our convictions about its negative effect on the world.

In my work I’ll often critique corporate rule but rarely use specific names or logos so the legality of it is not something I’ve put a ton of thinking time into. I generally believe that artists should use whatever they want in their work, especially if the goal is to create critically engaging work instead of making money. I really hate it when artists steal other artists work, especially successful artists borrowing from smaller or lesser known artists. At the same time I feel that artists need to break out of the individual genius mold and really experiment more, try new styles, work collectively with other artists, use as broad a range of materials as possible. I think this happens really successfully in mostly non-commercial art forms like graffiti or political posters where younger artists borrow from the styles of the more experienced in order to build their own artistic identities.

The problem is when someone bites other artists in order to boost their careers and put themselves above the advancement of the art form. I know that I, and thousands of other poster artists, have been influenced by the posters Chicano artist Rupert Garcia was making in the 70's and 80's. Influence and historical continuity in an art form are valuable and important. The problem is when an artist like Shepard Fairey directly steals one of Garcia’s designs, doesn’t attribute it to Garcia, and then sells it as a silk screened poster at $50 a pop or whatever. This sucks on a lot of levels. First off, Garcia has never gotten full credit or acknowledgement for being the graphic trailblazer he was. Second, Fairey climbs up the ladder of graphic knowledge then cuts the rungs off beneath him, i.e. he uses Garcia but then by not acknowledging it, he doesn’t let anyone else have access to the images he’s stealing. And third, a white boy RISD graduate is straight out stealing work, and in effect money, from a Chicano activist/artist. The race and class dynamics of this are fucked to say the least.

In the same interview, you stated "I have a personal fascination with trying to kill DSLR.. We don’t want to brand ourselves as the next franchise activist group that everyone wants to align themselves with."

Could you expand upon this idea. Is this a desire to encourage people to start their own projects? Or is it the fear of a group like DSLR losing it’s vitality and direction once it becomes too large and established?

My urge to "kill DSLR" is complicated. It’s not directly about encouraging others to start their own projects or fear of DSLR losing vitality because of size and establishment, but those are both part of it. On a very basic level I see killing names as a way of de-centering authorship in the world of art and politics. Commerce is so dependant on branding at this point it is hard to imagine how capitalism would absorb or co-opt something that refuses to be named. I’m sure capital can and will, but it would be an interesting experiment to see how that would happen.

On another level it was really about experimenting with organization. It’s extremely difficult to get a group of political activists to really experiment with organizational structure and group dynamics. Consensus, affinity groups, federations and confederations are used, but with this project it seemed possible to completely decentralize structure. I think some of us envisioned a large loose group of cultural activists that would have an overarching ideological frame but would be extremely flexible and would evolve through changes in membership, work, projects, etc. There would be no fixed name, leadership, membership or work program. A small group would come forth out of the mass with a project idea, become coordinators, and organize to make it happen. Then they would melt back into the larger organization/organism to be replaced by another grouping with an initiative.

Of course this isn’t really what happened. Instead we had the same kinds of problems most groups have with falling membership, internal power struggles, alienation of the people that didn’t have strong personal connections to others in the group. But I don’t think that means it couldn’t happen! A group as utopianly described as above would be near impossible to repress or co-opt, it would be a thousand-headed hydra with millions of names and potentially infinite membership.


The idea of the thousand-headed hydra reminds me of the success that large Critical Mass bike rides have and even the multi-faceted organizing methods of the massive anti-Globalization demonstrations that took place over the last 4 years. I am drawn to the idea of the lack of a spokesperson or leader which runs counter to the thought process of how societies run under capitalism or socialism.

What I still find troubling though is the reactionary level of protests and protest art for that matter. The idea that progressive movements are always responding to a crisis, whether it is a war, a trade meeting, or the next draconian law. The left reacts to the agenda set by the right. I think it important to voice opposition to these attacks from the right, but I also believe it is important at the same time to build alternatives that are motivated by new ideas and visions on how the world might look. What are your thoughts on this broad topic and do examples by artists/ activists come to mind?

I agree with you, I think most left organizing is reactive. It is hard not to be when you always feel like you’re under attack and defending yourself. Seeing and living how fucked up the world is creates this burning feeling to do something, and to make it effective. This imperative leads to sense that everything you do has to have some sort of utility, culture included. Our art becomes just another tool to fight the man, and the more direct it attacks our enemies, the better.

Even though I fully understand this, it is still hard to escape from it, because I do want my art to be immediately useful and I do want to help fight (react to) capitalist globalization, state repression, etc. It’s hard to think of political artists that do less reacting and more dreaming, or future envisioning, because once you do that, people tend to stop considering you a "political" artist. I think a lot of the graffiti and posters from Paris in ’68 were extremely utopian, for example the famous scrawled line, "Under the paving stones, the beach." In general I feel that street art is pretty utopian. No matter what the content of the art is, just the act of placing it on the street calls for a world where public space is used for discussion, dialogue, and the expression of ideas, not simply an advertising gauntlet to take you from home to work. In terms of content, I think the British anarchist artist Clifford Harper has done a lot of complex images of cooperatives and farms that try to envision a more free society that can grow parallel to our own and hopefully eventually compete with it. In our political landscape it is anarchists that spend the most time envisioning and trying to build more libratory institutions such as living and eating cooperatives, squats, pirate radio stations, radical libraries, farming experiments, free and alternative schools, etc. When I was in high school I was really turned on to radical art by the magazine World War 3 Illustrated, and though I’m not as into comics as I used to be, I still think that as a whole the artwork in it does a great job of both attacking the current system and envisioning a radical future.

You don’t have to travel very far to see the differences in stencil culture. There are also similarities. As far as I can tell New York City’s Soho/Lower East Side and San Francisco’s Mission District historically have the most vibrant stencil scenes in the U.S. In both cases they are areas that have extremely diverse cultures, large anarchist or squatter scenes, and huge battles over housing and gentrification. In New York, the official government’s abandonment of the LES/SOHO area by the 70’s meant that artists were able to layer the walls with street art for years without any fear of buffing. So that part of the city’s walls, lightposts, doorways and loading docks are still covered with stencils. In San Francisco the warm weather and lack of lots of snow and street cleaning means that a stencil painted on a sidewalk can often still be read 2 or 3 years later, leading to an almost entirely ground-based stencil culture.

I haven’t really been to most of Europe but it seems like there has been a shift in stenciling culture recently. Once stenciling was primarily a political tool used by leftist groups in places like Germany and Italy, with some art stenciling, particularly in France. But recently British stencil artist Banksy has really brought a stencil renaissance to Europe and Australia. His work balances on the edge of straight aesthetics, graffiti, and politics, encouraging stencilers interested in all three subjects to hit the streets.

I am intrigued by a stencil project that you created of spray painted leaves that were stenciled onto the concrete sidewalks of Chicago. Many stencils that I view hit you over the head with the message (similar to a John Yate’s graphic) and do not allow the viewer to come to their own conclusion. The "leaves" stencil seems very open to interpretation. Could you comment on the motivation behind the work and the reactions received.

When I was in high school I was extremely influenced by Yates’ Punchline magazine, and I think that a lot of my work, for better or for worse, still operates in ways similar to Yates’, it’s pretty straight forward and didactic. I think I tend to want to send a clear message which simplifies my work, and I also think it is just plain easier if you are a political artist to hit people over the head, to try to tell them what to think rather than get them to ask questions. I try to be pretty aware of this and have really started trying to do more work that isn’t so concrete and gives the audience some breathing room. The leaves project was one of my first attempts to really do this. The basic idea was to paint really large scale stencils of leaves all over Chicago. The leaves could be interpreted in a lot of ways, simply as beautiful graphic works, as a jarring contrast between the imagery of a natural leaf and the industrial spraypaint used to paint them, or as a comment on Chicago’s lack of trees and wild greenspace. Part of me just really liked the idea of some yuppie calling the city to have them sandblast away a leaf from in front of their condo. As for reactions, like any street art it’s hard to tell. Of the dozens and dozens I painted, I’m sure most of them were buffed within days. Most of my artist friends really liked the idea, and people respond well to the photos I have, but I’ll never really know how the random stranger felt when they stumbled upon a 3 foot long painting of a leaf on a wall behind their apartment. Hopefully it got them thinking about something.

I actually think that for better or for worse, artists are becoming an increasingly irrelevant part of the gentrification process. The economy and real estate market in many cities seems to have developed in such a way that it can completely skip over the artist/bohemian as a softening step in gentrification. There are areas in Chicago now where public or Section 8 housing (scheduled for demolition) is rubbing shoulder to shoulder with pre-fab condos, townhouses and Starbucks without an artist in sight. Instant affluent neighborhoods, no artists’ necessary. Even in cases where artists are still part of "development," it is important to remember that they/we are part of a process that we had no part in initially creating and is much larger than us. I’m not saying this so that artists can reject responsibility for the havoc they create in neighborhoods, but I think it is really important to try to fully understand a phenomenon if you are going to confront it.

There is a lot of fairly complicated economics involved in all of this, and I’m definitely no economist. What I do know is that artists don’t individually decide the land use values of the buildings they rent. In fact, most artists move into areas because the rents are cheap, or already well below market rate. In a city with a growing population and expanding economy, by definition these buildings have a higher potential land use value then what they are being used for now. Because there is this potential, the landlord could make more money with the land if they rehabbed or if a commercial strip develops in the area or any number of other factors.

I don’t think there is room in this interview to go into the full system of how gentrification works, but regardless I think it is important for artists to understand the economics of the places they live and their involvement and relationship to those economics. Artists should be part of organizing against gentrification not only because they are part of the process, but because it destroys complex and diverse neighborhoods, places that many different types of people can afford and be comfortable living in. Artists need to confront capitalist real estate development and state control of neighborhood land usage. When we did DSLR part of our basis and foundation was that an area should be controlled by the people that live, work and play in it. This is an extremely simple and almost common sense idea, but it goes completely against how space and geography is managed in our society.

CPH started in 1999 with a discussion with my friend Liz. She is a schoolteacher and felt there should be more visual materials discussing and/or celebrating people, groups, and events that had been part of radical and revolutionary history. At the same time I had been feeling that there needed to be more material up in the street that wasn’t directly advertising or selling something, whether it was a corporate movie or an anti-war meeting. I had been thinking more and more about context and visual framing and how our visual landscape is almost entirely created, maintained, and controlled by the state and corporations. By generating a poster demarcating Malcolm X’s birth, life, and death and pasting it up all over the city, the hope was not to get people to read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, or rent the video, but to set a tone in public, to create a psycho-social space where radical thought is encouraged and allowed, to give the audience/public a rest from consumerism and to directly show that public space can be a place for critical thought and inquiry into our culture’s history, not just a wasteland checkered with billboards offering up endless consumption choices.

The first poster, Malcolm X, was printed up in a batch of about 1200 and was extremely popular. We pasted it up all around Chicago and so many people were familiar with Malcolm X that a lot of people came up to us and asked for posters to take home and a few even offered to help us paste them up. It was so successful that I decided to continue the project and expand its purpose. I was feeling isolated in Chicago and it seemed like this would be a great platform to use to develop working relationships with other radical graphic artists. I also thought this would be a way to help other younger or "non-official" artists that normally wouldn’t be able to produce an offset printed poster. I have also been increasingly trying to find and support women artists and artist of color, artists that tend to get little showing amongst the radical/anarchist worlds.

Since there is little in the way of a distribution network for selling posters (unlike for books, shirts, or music) and at the time I was working at Kinko’s for near minimum wage, I had to find a way to pay for the printing. My friend Liz again (she is clearly a genius!) came up with the idea of selling subscriptions for the poster series, like subscriptions to a magazine. Although a pain in the ass in a lot of ways, this has the giant benefit of collecting cash in bigger chunks so there is money to print posters and also creates an additional audience to the one on the street.

I have no plans to stop this project, 15 posters have been produced so far and I hope to continue producing five to ten posters a year.

Wow, this is an extremely difficult question to answer! I guess it depends on how you define "political?" On one level it’s sort of like asking whether all politics should have aesthetics? It’s not a question, it’s just simply true, all political action does have aesthetics, even if they aren’t very well thought out or articulated. So, in some ways all art is political because we can’t escape politics, like economics and aesthetics, it is fused with everything in life.

In terms of whether all art should be didactic, or be an attempt to politically educate, that’s a different question. I definitely don’t feel that all art should be immediately functional, useful to the left, to activists, etc. That may be where my interests lie or what my eye is drawn to, but I wouldn’t expect my interests to be the same as everyone else’s. My guess is that there will always be art that attempts to speak to "universal values" like love or beauty or whatever, and that’s fine.

What interests me more is what happens when art becomes functional? When art is supposed to comment on a very specific political situation, can it be "wrong." What happens when art argues for bad politics? There is a general assumption that since art is some sort of self-__expression, it has some level of inherent value, that art is above the fray of politics, economics, and oppression. But if an artist uses their art to push for a political position that is not libratory, should they be held accountable? How? By who? These questions can easily raise specters of Hitler’s degenerate art show and state censorship. But I’m more interested in looking at a situation like John Heartfield. In discussions with my comrade J, he raised the issue of how Heartfield was clearly an amazing photomontage artist and he generated some of the most memorable graphics in opposition to Hitler yet at the same time he structured the content of his art along Stalinist "united front" political lines and published it in Stalinist magazines. These politics were a failure in effectively organizing the working class of Germany against fascism, so no matter how moving they are, he was helping organize people into the wrong political position. I think this shows that we need to develop a radical culture where artists are forced to debate and discuss the impact of their work, who it reaches, what it says, and what political positions it motivates people towards.