Street Artists Speak Up

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With the mainstream media growing more timid by the minute, artists with a conscience are going public in bold new ways

Are editorial cartoonists going the way of the dodo bird? Increasingly, yes. Newspaper mergers and subsequent downsizing have left many major dailies with no staff cartoonist. And, if the media consolidation doesn't get you, observers warn, the politically conservative post-September 11 climate just might.

Last year, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman famously resigned from The New Yorker to protest what he viewed as the magazine's political cowardice in light of 9/11.

"From the time that the Twin Towers fell, it seems as if I've been living in internal exile, or like a political dissident confined to an island," he told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. "I no longer feel in harmony with American culture, especially now that the entire media has become conservative and tremendously timid."

In a world where mainstream editorial cartooning is on the downswing, where people who exercise their right to free speech are shunted into remote "protest zones," and where the FCC's Michael Powell sees a greater threat in Janet Jackson's breast than in media monopolies, it's getting harder and harder to hear dissenting voices. To paraphrase the Doobie Brothers, perhaps it's time we take our message to the streets.

After all, how else to puncture the cacophony of images and sounds (mostly corporate) we encounter every day? As the artists profiled in this section make clear, street art -- an agitprop poster nailed to a store wall, an unexpected chalk message scraped into a sidewalk, a banner unfurled over a freeway -- can reinvigorate the political arena.

"We need to use all the arts to bring it to the streets, to the schools, on the walls," artist Eric Drooker recently told the Oakland-based zine Kitchen Sink. "It's about who's going to win the propaganda war for the hearts and minds of the masses."

Stencils, stickers, and murals are not only about claiming turf or declaring "I was here," they're about building community. Think of the first American political cartoon -- a 1754 Ben Franklin sketch titled "Join or Die" that depicted a snake severed into eight pieces, each representing a colony -- or the Wobblies' use of pro-worker stickers (a.k.a. "silent agitators") in the 1920s, and you realize the power of the visual.

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