john t. unger studio

Guernica Stencil Designs

Inspired by Visual Resistance and the American Guernica Project, John Emerson is offering .pdf downloads of stencils he created based on Picasso's Guernica. Click the thumbs below to dowload print-ready files you can use or adapt to voice your opinion on war.

 

 

You can also dowload large .jpg files of stencil designs created by Visual Resistance by clicking the following thumbnails.

 

Want to create your own? Send me a link to where you've posted the files, and I'll include them here.

Whitney Biennial

Here's yet another example of how blogs can make cool stuff happen in the real world, and foster collaboration between people who may not even be in close contact:

It appears that I sort of have a piece of art in this year's Whitney Biennial!

The "sort of" part requires a bit of explanation, I think. A while back, I posted a call for action: an attempt to get people to post Picasso's mural Guernica on billboards across the country as a war protest. It was part of a larger concept of large scale public art using open source techniques of collaboration. Well:

 

Last weekend, members of Visual Resistance installed a mural at the Whitney Museum.  Our friends at Deep Dish TV had been invited to show their Shocking and Awful series at the Whitney Biennial. They were assigned a 20-inch TV mounted on a 20-foot wall, which they wanted to spice up a little bit. They called us about 10 days ago and asked us to come up with a mural based on Picasso’s Guernica.

So the Biennial catalog of the exhibit only lists Deep Dish Television, not even Visual Resistance, but I think that since the Guernica project was designed as open source, in a way I can claim that the installation was an example of my American Guernica Project. And VR was kind enough to mention me in their account of the installation, so I know they were thinking about it:

 

Several months back, John Unger proposed an open-source art project called American Guernica. The idea was to put Picasso’s painting on billboards throught the US as a protest against the current wars being waged by the US. While billboard space is probably out of our range, working on this Whitney installation has gotten VR folks talking about using Guernica images on the street in New York.

The Biennial is widely regarded as one of the most prestigious art shows in the world, so, hey, I'd love to be able to claim some partial credit on this if it's applicable. I'm going to see if I can do some further projects with VR as the anniversary of the war comes up this week. They mention in their post that they're looking for someone to do Guernica stencils in Illustrator and oddly enough, I've been thinking of doing just that for the last few weeks. Funny, that.

So, do I have too much on my plate right now? Uh, yeah. Am I loving it? Oh yeah.

Tags: billboard, Picasso, Guernica, antiwar, war, peace, politics, News and politics, culture jamming, free culture, activism, iraq, art, culture, collaboration, street art, tagging, graffiti, design, opensource

Making Art Work's Guernica Billboard in LA

The picture at left is detail image of the billboard at Sunset & Hollywood in LA, installed in 2003 by Making Art Work, an organization dedicated to stimulating interaction between people and art. In the middle of the piece, the symbol of the United Nations is painted in UV-sensitive ink, as are two heavy blue curtains tied back by ropes on either side of the work.

Making Art Work's project was more strongly influenced by the censorship issues of the covering of Guenica during the UN press release than protesting war.

A longer discussion of this work is in an earlier post here. I'm reprising it so that it can be seen alongside the other Guernica projects I've discovered.

Guernica Billboard Tours Massachusetts

There's not a great deal of info at his website on Roberto Chao's touring version of Guernica. I do think it's a nice example of one way that the painting can be publicly displayed without having to rent or co-opt a billboard. Done in four easily transported rigid panels, this project was intended to tour throughout different locations in Massachusetts. Acrylic on canvas, 18' by 8' in four 4.5' x 8' panels.

For those who would like to cover a wider area, or work on a smaller budget, this seems like a great solution. Another simple and (relatively) inexpensive option would be to paint a traveling Guernica on hinged sheets of plywood, which could easily fold for transportation and would be easy to set up quickly.

Note that Chao's version does not include explanatory (or inflammatory) text, allowing the work to stand on its own and inviting the audience to make their own interpretation.

Ron English Does Guernica

 

Here's another use of Guernica on billboards that predates my idea, found via Blur Magazine.

The article linked above is well worth a read… well-written, to the point, interesting, etc. Check it out. Ron English does some interesting work, although I have to say I'm not a big fan of art that beats you to death with its message. I think that the Guernica image would be stronger on it's own, without commentary, than it is with huge slogans pasted over it. I do kind of like some of the other billboard work he's done that uses text without images. The Blur article has several examples, or you can visit English's site, popaganda.com.

Guernica also appears in some of his paintings, shown below. Again the painting is used as to critique western culture, but in what I feel is a somewhat heavy-handed fashion.

 

       

On the other hand, Arte Vista has this to say about the above work:

In his painting “Guernica, Red Air Raid”, he explores Picasso’s painting from an aerial perspective, from the point of view of the bombers. Using Mickey Mouse as the pilot adds the dimension of American pop-culture carpet bombing of other societies. The painting “Cartoon Guernica” explores a similar concept; however, this time the Picasso masterpiece is “Disneyized” into a more palatable image. The figures retain the exact poses of the original terrified Spanish citizens in the midst of slaughter, but here their little cartoon faces are just so darned cute. And the painting “Starry McNite” addresses the concept of a branded and franchised culture by infiltrating a beloved painting wit America’s two favorite franchises, McDonalds and the Church of Christ. It’s a powerful exploration of the corporate branding of history and cultural identity. Nice brush strokes too.

Fidel Scooped Me on the Guernica Billboard idea

I suppose there's no better acid test of whether your political commentary is on the radical side, than being scooped by Castro. It's almost a little bit scary, eh?

As a protest against EU sanctions, the Cuban government erected a billboard of Guernica in front of the Spanish embassy. The text at the top reads: "Right here a monument to Spanish culture will be erected," while below the painting is the word "antifascist." More info here. Another account can be found here.

A larger photo of the billboard can be found here.

American Guernica Hits The News Stands

Doree Shafrir's kick-ass article on the American Guernica Project went out on the Columbia News Service wire recently. It was picked up by a small handful of papers nationally. These are the ones I've found so far…

The Orlando Sentinel

The Naples Daily News

The Arizona Republic

Note: The Arizona Republic requires users to submit some personal info, including an email address, on their first visit. I used info@azcentral.com. Points to the Republic for making their articles available online for free, but I still don't want them to have my email address. The other papers are willing to let you read it without registering.

It's sort of interesting to see how the story runs… The Sentinel cut the parts about Eric S. Raymond and open source, and wrote their own headline. The News and the Republic carried the full text with the original headline.

The timing was good, anyway. I was just in the middle of updating my CV so I could send in an RFQ for the CTA Arts in Transit Program. Amazingly, with all the cash and effort that has gone into developing a great public art program, there does not seem to be a website documenting Arts in Transit. There's a somewhat half-hearted collection of off-site documentation here at chicago-l.org. (I say half-hearted because of a prominent disclaimer which reads "Note: This section has been established on an experimental basis and will be reevaluated after six months. All information in this section will remain on the site, however, even if it is disbanded.") The City of Chicago website has some info on the overall public art program for Chicago, but I'm not going to link to it because they change their URLs all the time. I've never been able to bookmark a page on the city's site and expect to be able to load it later… just do a google search and hope, I guess.

If you are looking for a good resource documenting Chicago public art, I can recommend Chicago Public Art Group. Not only do they have a great deal of photos, there's a wealth of really good advice and info on public art in general.

Eric S. Raymond Called Me A Thief!

And a leading Picasso specialist questions the American Guernica Project's effectiveness. Wow, it's almost like being controversial! But I think it's probably just a misunderstanding…

I'm pulling this from an article on the American Guernica Project by Doree Shafrir in The Columbia Journalist. It's a great article. You should go read it. If it were a painting, I'd call it "painterly"… I'm not quite sure what the equivalent term is for kick-ass journalism?

The bit with Eric Raymond reads as follows:

…as Open-Source Initiative co-founder Eric Raymond pointed out, open-source work is predicated upon the originator of the work giving permission for it to be used. “If he [Unger] wants to take someone else’s art and claim that’s open source, that’s not what we’re about,” Raymond said when told about the Guernica project. “What he’s doing is theft.”

Unger rebutted the idea that the Guernica billboards wouldn’t qualify as an open-source project. “The Guernica project, I think, falls well within the definition of open-source,” he said. “ Guernica the painting obviously does not. They’re separate things, really.”

Basically the objection is based on whether or not copyright permission is sought for the use of Guernica. In a way, Raymond is probably right as far as the Guernica Project goes… but I don't think that his objection applies to the overall concept of open source art as I've described it here.

I sort of wish that I'd come to Eric's attention for the broader concept, rather than a specific instance. On the other hand, it's always fun when they call in the big guns to shoot you down.

A Figleaf of the Imagination?

In a few of the comments on American Guernica, It's been pointed out that the covering of the Guernica tapestry at the UN was done for the benefit of the TV cameras, and not as a suppression or censorship of the work itself. I'm entirely willing to concede that point… The fact that it was covered holds a lot of deep ironic truth and symbolism, but I don't think it was intentional censorship. In fact, really, it was semantic suicide, something no one would have done so publicly had they been thinking. I'm guessing it was a damn stressful day for everyone, and someone just goofed. All the same, I'm amused by the last line quoted in J. Hoberman's text below:

You may recall the to-do occasioned two winters past by a certain shift in the mise-en-scène at the United Nations. New blue drapes appeared to conceal the grisaille tapestry hung in the corridor outside the Security Council chamber in which then-Secretary of State Colin Powell had come to make the case for war against Iraq, and where the secretary was scheduled to hold a press conference. Some newspapers reported that Powell's staff demanded that the offending artwork be concealed. The Internet was aflame; some weeks later The Weekly Standard attempted damage control by explaining that TV crews had only requested that a distractingly busy backdrop be simplified.

The latter was closer to the truth. Powell would have shared the screen with a horse's rear.

From J. Hoberman's Pop and Circumstance, a review of Guernica: The Biography of a 20th Century Icon by Gijs van Hensbergen, published in The Nation. I highly recommend reading the entire review for an overview of the history and controversy surrounding Guernica.

The quote below is from the article in The Weekly Standard, by Claudia Winkler debunking the "intentional suppression" of Guernica at the UN:

The usual press stakeout, where ambassadors routinely take reporters' questions outside the Security Council, simply couldn't hold the numbers--expected to reach 800 for Powell's address on February 5. So the Secretariat moved the stakeout down the hallway.

As over 200 cameramen were setting up, they complained that the background at the new location didn't work for them. Powell would be speaking in front of the tapestry, of which only indecipherable shapes would be visible. Couldn't a plain background be provided, like the white wall the cameramen were used to outside the Security Council chamber, which is ornamented only by the words Security Council / Conseil de Securite in brass letters?

The temporary solution, provided by the Secretariat, was a U.N.-blue backdrop. Said the British diplomat, "The Secretariat did it, to meet the visual requirements of the TV guys."

It was only afterwards that comments were heard about the unfortunate symbolism of blocking out "Guernica." As a result of these, the Secretariat moved the press stakeout to a third location halfway between the first two. Now cameras could take their choice: They could pan across "Guernica" and some flags to the speaker, standing in front of the blue backdrop against the plain white wall, or they could content themselves with the usual head shot.

Read the whole article here. Towards the end it mentions the Guernica billboard installed in LA by Making Art Work, though it does not mention them by name.

For me, the American Guernica Project is not so much about censorship issues, as protesting war. I included a long quote about the UN incident in the first post on American Guernica because I came across an article which reminded me of it while researching the history of the painting and that made me feel more strongly about promoting the idea. I think the beauty of something this simple is that people can interpret it in multiple ways. I'll have more to say on that as I post some of the other Guernica related protest art I've found.

American Guernica Used as A Class Project

The following entry and comments are excerpted (a little bit) from a post at Oedipa's blog. You can read the whole thing here. I'm reproducing it below because it just totally made my day to read about how American Guernica had been used in the classroom, especially the student's and observer's positive reactions to the idea. Oedipa has also posted her lesson plan for the exercise for those who might want to use or modify it for their own lesson plans.

So today I had another observer come in to take notes and evaluate my skills.  This went really, really well.  After the sting of yesterday's news (that I'm too nice to my students), I went for broke. I crafted a lesson plan around "Reading Images as Text" and brought in several books.  A few of them were Paul Klee, some Giacometti, some photos of New Orleans spiritual communities, and so forth. If anyone of them even so much as whispered out of turn during class, I stopped everything and let my narrow eyes settle on them until they really got the message.  I'm mean.  Cut the shit. Watch the hell out.

Then I had them split up into groups of three and each group had to work with the images in the bookthey had to find one that they would put on a billboard on a highway to send a message about something.  I got this idea from John T. Unger who is proposing a simple open-source street art project, American Guernica. He wants people all over the country to put up billboard-sized reproductions of Picasso's famous painting of the carpet bombing of Guernica. He says, "[I]f the painting is all that's seen, it forces the viewer to make an interpretation instead of being told what to think. Being told what to think is exactly what got Americans in trouble in the first place, no?"

Anyway, I was impressed with this and I hope it catches on.  In the meantime, it made for a GREAT excercise for the class.  Each one got up and gave a presentation on the painting or photo they selected and went into great detail about how they thought it supported a theme or a message in a similar vein to the above project.

The observer approached me after class and told me how impressed he was.  This made me feel much, much better after my slight tailspin yesterday.

Comments from Oedipa's entry:

I totally understand the stress of observation days...I hate them. But this exercise sounds wonderful--I may have to try it myself soon!

Posted by: vague | December 02, 2005 at 02:49 PM

Oedipa,

Wow, this sort of story always makes my day. I *love* teaching, but rarely get to do it in a classroom situation (something to do with not finishing college and refusing to play by the rules. sigh). Anyway, glad to have been of service.

You might be interested in a little write-up I had to do of one of my teaching projects. It discusses some of my basic strategies for getting students involved way over their heads, which I've found to bring good results. Check it out here, if you like: http://www.johntunger.com/nlreport.html

Anyway, thanks for the post. It's been interesting to see how many different interpretations the Guernica idea has brought forth. Keeps me honest. heh.

Posted by: johntunger | December 02, 2005 at 06:58 PM

Hey. So glad this post brought you to my website. One of my students proclaimed about your endeavor, "oh my god! that's brilliant!!!". It takes a lot to get him interested in learning something new. Bringing your project in did it for him. So thanks!!!!

Posted by: Oedipa | December 02, 2005 at 11:11 PM

Actually, if any of you are morbidly curious, my class blog/website is http://writers.typepad.com

By going there, you can actually see or download the class excercise I had the students do around John's project. Also, if any of you have any other interesting suggestions for class projects where it helps them interpret images as text, well, lemme know. I'm open!

Posted by: Oedipa | December 02, 2005 at 11:20 PM

Nice one. i might use that myself, with a little modification.

Posted by: King Of the Hill | December 03, 2005 at 06:25 PM

Stefan Werning on American Guernica

Here is the post from arrey baba! which compared covering the Guernica tapestry at the UN to an act of shock art:

I recently went to see the modern art section of the MFA in Boston with Peter, a friend and fellow MIT visiting scholar and himself an aspiring media artist producing 'art without quotes', i.e. art in contested public spaces where you never know whether it's meant to be provocative or where the potential provocation comes from.

All the MFA exhibits, including Zhang Huan covering himself with birdseed and posing nude in a giant bird cage (sic!), didn't do much for me, though...

And then I read this story about Picasso's Guernica being covered at the request of Bush Administration officials for a broadcasted press conference, in which Colin Powell made his case for the invasion of Iraq! I'm not sure if all those explicitly provocative artists like Huang, Bruce Naumann & Co. will have such an impact, even 68 years from now. Maybe that has to do with the fact that those artists are more concerned with themselves than with what they criticize? (try to read over the sarcastic undertone...).

Maybe, instead of asking people to put Guernica replicas on public billboards, Unger should ask people to put it on the front pages of their websites. Well, he has my website for a start... ;-)

I left the following comment at the original post:

Hey, thanks for posting about the Guernica project. A lot of people have picked this up and run with it, and it's very interesting to me how many different thoughts they have about it.

I agree with you about "explicitly provocative" art... it's so very easy to make work that annoys, angers or threatens people. Sure it's a way to get a lot of coverage, and draw a lot of emotion from the audience. But it's also just too easy: we all learned how to piss people off when we were toddlers. The buttons are *so* easy to find. Finding ways to delight people, or better yet, to make them think without trying to control the outcome... that's more interesting to me. A better challenge, if you will.

Anyway, if I read your post right, you were saying that Powell's action was better shock art than what you saw at the MFA. Wow. What an awesome take on that! (or maybe you meant my project, but I like the other idea better).

American Guernica: Great Minds Think (Sort Of) Alike

Ever since Clive Thompson posted about American Guernica on his excellent blog collision detection, the idea has really taken off. Quite a few people have chosen to participate in spreading the idea.

The coolest aspect of this is the discussions that have ensued in the comments of some of the blogs. It seems the Guernica project has really lived up to my goal of "making people think without attempting to control the outcome of that thought." A wide variety of interpretations have come forward, from using the project in a classroom exercise on interpreting images as text, to viewing the covering of the Guernica tapestry at the UN as a more successful instance of "shock art" than most intentionally provocative artworks. Heh. I really like that notion, even though I'm not sure that I didn't misinterpret it.

I'll be posting some of the discussions I find in other blog's comments here, but I'd also like to encourage readers to check out the other blogs who have posted on AG. Many of them have a ton of interesting content on other topics as well.

I'm also going to start posting about other projects which use Guernica as the starting point for discussion. In the course of looking to see who was linking to AG, I've found a bunch of other artists and groups who are thinking along similar lines. In fact, it turns out that Guernica has already been installed on a billboard, before it had even occurred to me!

 

 

The picture above is a billboard at Sunset & Hollywood in LA, installed in 2003 by Making Art Work, an organization dedicated to stimulating interaction between people and art. I was unaware of their work when I proposed my own American Guernica project. Matthew D'Abate wrote a great article on the MAW billboard project for the Daily Titan. I've reproduced it in the extended entry, just to make sure it remains available in the future.

Making Art Work's project was more strongly influenced by the censorship issues of the covering of Guenica during the UN press release than protesting war. On their site, they write:

In defiance of the U.N.’s censorship, a billboard of Guernica at the corner of Hollywood and Sunset Boulevards in Hollywood will be covered with a curtain each night from March 7 until March 17. The curtain, made of UV sensitive ink, is visible only under black light.

This is a slightly different mission or outlook than the American Guernica project. Although I was influenced by the UN incident, my motivation for suggestion Guernica billboards is more about protesting war… specifically the war in Iraq, but also war in general. I love the irony in the idea of erecting Guernica billboards along major highways, for instance, where, during traffic gridlock the project would take on the additional context of the role which gas and oil play in this war.

Anyway, now that I've found so many projects using similar themes and imagery, for similar yet different goals, I feel like it really confirms some of my ideas about collaboration, open source art, and so forth. Rather than feeling that overlapping projects devalue each other, I feel that the variety of interpretations and actions really reinforce a broader community of artists and politics. In my view, that's a good thing!

American Guernica Makes the Rounds

My call for entries, American Guernica, earned me a brief stint in the spotlight at one of my favorite blogs: We Make Money Not Art last week. I wish I'd posted about it earlier, because the moment has passed already, but I still highly recommend checking out Régine's blog. WMMNA is one of the first blogs I subscribed to and is still one of the first I check every morning.

American Guernica also got picked up on Visual Resistance, a very cool blog that "features political art and innovative projects aimed at raising awareness of urgent social issues through visual media." Eliot expanded nicely on the ideas behind the project and provides some great links to other Guernica-inspired protest art, including a picture of his first stencil, based on a portion of the painting.

 

 

Tags: billboard, Picasso, Guernica, antiwar, war, peace, politics, News and politics, culture jamming, free culture, activism, iraq, art, culture, collaboration, street art, tagging, graffiti, design, opensource

American Guernica: A Call for Guerilla Public Art

Update: American Guernica has been picking up steam. I'll be posting regular updates on the project under it's own category.

I've written here before about the idea of open-sourcing art projects to involve as many participants as possible. American Guernica is a perfect test case for that notion.

In a nutshell, I'd like to invite any interested groups or individuals to help plaster the USA with billboard size reproductions of Picasso's Guernica. Ideally, the work would stand without any text or headlines or additional commentary: if the painting is all that's seen, it forces the viewer to make an interpretation instead of being told what to think. Being told what to think is exactly what got Americans in trouble in the first place, no?

The following paragraph is not what inspired the idea, but I think it explains relatively well what one might hope to accomplish in this project:

A tapestry copy of Picasso's Guernica is displayed on the wall of the United Nations building in New York City, at the entrance to the Security Council room. It was placed there as a reminder of the horrors of war. Commissioned and donated by Nelson Rockefeller, it is not quite as monochromatic as the original, using several shades of brown. On February 5, 2003, a large blue curtain was placed to cover this work, so that it would not be visible in the background when Colin Powell and John Negroponte gave press conferences at the United Nations. On the following day, it was claimed that the curtain was placed there at the request of television news crews, who had complained that the wild lines and screaming figures made for a bad backdrop, and that a horse's hindquarters appeared just above the faces of any speakers. Diplomats, however, told journalists that the Bush Administration leaned on UN officials to cover the tapestry, rather than have it in the background while Powell or other U.S. diplomats argued for war on Iraq.  -- quoted from wikipedia

If the painting intimidates warmongers into covering it, then why not make sure that it goes up in as many public spaces as possible?

In terms of how the project is carried out, I don't really think it matters whether billboards are rented, plastered over in dark of night (see: BLF, the Billboard Liberation Front) or created just for this purpose. Obviously not everyone has the budget to actually rent billboard space, though it seems like this might be an option for funded activist groups. Now that most billboards are made to hold printed tarps rather than pasted up sheets of paper, it would certainly be easier and faster for guerrilla Guernicas to be painted on canvas and installed at whim. For those who do take the guerrilla approach, it might help to read this basic primer on how to appropriate billboards. Also check out the Wooster Collective for ideas and techniques.

I don't think it matters whether the images are photos, stencils, handpainted, collaged or what. If the project really took off, part of the excitement would be seeing the results of many different people interpreting a well know work in their own way. I will happily publish any photos sent in by participants of the project.

This is what I'm envisioning:

 

 

 

Disclaimer: I did these in photoshop, not the real world. Part of my motivation for open-sourcing the idea is that in the last year, I haven't managed to act on it myself. I'm hoping that people with stronger motivation or resources will be able to make it happen if I plant the seed here.

Meanwhile, I think I'll look into what it costs to rent a billboard in my area and set up a contribution fund on Fundable.org to cover the cost. Fundable is great for this kind of thing because they automatically refund everyone's money if the fundraising for a project is not completed within the specified deadline.

Tags: billboard, Picasso, Guernica, antiwar, war, peace, politics, News and politics, culture jamming, free culture, activism, iraq, art, culture, collaboration, street art, tagging, graffiti, design, opensource