Update on 13th Head

Ask and you shall receive an answer!

@starlajo very kindly pointed out that perhaps I could email 13th Head and ask them what it is all about. She's a smart cookie that one. I did, and Jim (who owns Phantom & 13th Head) responded with some info about these posters, and better yet, photos of the launch!

This is what Jim had to say about 13th head (I figure that he can say it more eloquently than I):

We are printing and placing poem posters in 13 centres thru' NZ for six months. We are also placing poem posters in Nashville, Tennessee and Sydney, Australia and Paris, France. Six poets will be featured each month. Our next round will be launched in Christchurch on Janet Frame's birthday at the end of August.

We had a launch last week at the Wellington Seafood market you mention. They kindly loaned their premises (walls) to us. This opening was officiated by Michele Leggott the outgoing Poet Laureate.

So there you go. Very cool idea, great poems, and more amazing street art for Wellington! Awesome.

Who is 13 Herd?

Cycling into work this morning, some fresh paste-ups caught my eye on the Wallace/Taranaki St bus stop. Big A2 posters which I could only guess had poetry printed on them (I'm a pretty speedy cyclist).

Then cruising down Cuba I spotted more outside the Wellington Trawling Sea Market (which do great fish & chips FYI):

And all along the front of the shop:

Here is a close up of the paste-ups

So this confuses me quite a bit. Phantom have their name on the bottom right corner, however there is not one of these pasted up in the Phantom allocated areas. Curious. Also, do you think that Wellington Trawling are ok with this? Seems a little full on, and apart from in the bus shelter, I didn't see them anywhere else.

Anyone got any interesting information about 13 Herd??

Wellington City Council, what are you doing?

So the anti-graffiti campaign for Wellington has been up and running for a while and to be honest my take on the whole campaign was “it’s butt ugly, but its WCC so at least it is not going to leave Wellington, and hopefully we won’t have to put up with it for too long”. That’s kinda where I left it. A number of people have noted just how darn ugly it is, but that was as far as it went. I thought…

Here is a visual of one of the AdShels:

Last night, talking to my lovely new flatmate who is the editor for the Capital Times, I found out just how bad this campaign is. The ‘graffiti’ that is responsible for this supposed outbreak, is actually some artwork which was COMMISSIONED. The very talented drypnz who has done a number of pieces around Wellington - including outside Rex Royale, one of my favs:gets paid for this work, because he is talented and people appreciate good street art.

The more I heard about this, and the more I have read about it this morning, the worse it gets. So it would seem that the photographer for this campaign just went out and took a photo of graffiti, they didn't realize that it was ‘legal’ street art. When the Capital Times hit the Council up about this, they said that they had spoken with Dryp and apologized. Dryp never had a phone call – and lets be fair, its not hard to find him – and so the council retracted their statement and said that someone (I’m wondering if that might be Wellington Wall Street) have voiced their concerns about using commissioned work to highlight ‘illegal’ graffiti and the Council apologized to them. Awesome guys.

So, let’s check this off:

1. Develop an ugly idea for a campaign
2. Take a photo of commissioned work to portray to the public as ‘illegal’
3. Force the Wellington public to see this awful creative
4. Claim to have apologized to the artist
5. Retract statement and say that they will stop producing the posters (I don’t believe they have said they will stop the whole campaign though

Good work. And who is responsible for this campaign? Is there an agency behind it? A misguided design studio? Worse still, was it done in-house? Some of the comments from Wellingtonista's blog about this campaign have been hilarious. This is my favourite though:

"I found the whole campaign creepy. All the people in the adverts were white, suburban and somehow infected by an 'otherness' from the presence of street art/vandalism."

Would love to know any other information if anyone knows anything.

Updated: Richard from WCC commented on this post on my other blog - and for the record, this is what he had to say:
We at the City Council just want to clarify that we didn't mean to use graffiti art on advertising for our anti-graffiti campaign. It was an honest mistake. We did not mean to cause offence and apologise to Drypnz and any other artist who's been offended.
As I told the Capital Times, we were unaware that it was legal graffiti art when we took the photos for the campaign and will not be using it on any future advertising for the campaign.
We at the City Council now feel suitably chastised for our lack of street-cred and general blundering absence of cool.
You're welcome to your views about whether the campaign is 'ugly' or not - but it was produced because a majority of Wellingtonians have a fairly low tolerance for illegal graffiti - especially tagging (and yes we think we now know the difference between tagging and street art). We don't intend to stop advertising our anti-graffiti kits - which have been flying off the shelves. Perhaps that's an indication that people in the real world have a problem with their neighbourhoods being vandalised.
Just to close, perhaps you should consider your favourite comment from Wellingtonista: "I found the whole campaign creepy. All the people in the adverts were white, suburban and somehow infected by an 'otherness' from the presence of street art/vandalism." At the risk of running up against your perceptions, and the perceptions of whoever made the comment, we're aware that at least one of the few people in the images doesn't consider themselves to be 'white' at all. And since when was it a crime to be 'suburban'?
Richard MacLean - Wellington City Council

At least they are paying attention to what is being said about them.

Wanganui

So in Wanganui (where I spent the weekend) there is a building near the design school on the corner of Rutland St and Drew Avenue which I believe owned by a Mitchell-Anyon (not sure if it is Ross of Leigh?? Pretty sure they are both pretty artsy though) who has made it common knowledge that he is happy for this building to have stencils spraypainted onto it. From what I understand - what my mother and grandmother told me as they took me to check it out - the people of Wanganui are not quite as excited about this as I am. They believe that it is encouraging tagging, but looking around Wanganui, I didn't think it was that big a problem.

So whoever owns this place is into the art scene and can appreciate it, which is amazing, and means that artists who have put time and effort into creating a stencil can put it out there for the public to see without having to worry that they will get caught, or that it will be painted over.

As the stencil below says, Graffiti is Fun, not scary, especially if people are brave enough to embrace it. The following are just a selection of some of the stencils that were on this one building, there are many more, and I will continue to check when I go back to Wanganui.

If you'd like to check these out for yourself, the location is:

View Larger Map

Is it an issue?

Are stencil's an issue? Really? I quite like Stencils. I like them much more than tagging. Stencils require care, thought, time and effort. Someone has taken it upon themselves to create something. It is not an issue, in my eyes, it is art.
Both of these are just down the road from me on Taranaki St. Location:

View Larger Map

The Pic of the Bunch

This is my favourite all time stencil. It was on the building right across the road from work until it was demolished to make way for a horrid apartment building. It was like whoever did it, knew how much I love both stencils and Nirvana.

Location:

View Larger Map