A short entry tonight. Three anti-Bush bumper stickers I’ve seen in Kansas City in the last few months:
- “Bush is a punkass chump”
- “Any other whore in 2004”
- “If I’d wanted an ex-cokehead for president, I would have voted for David Bowie”
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Stuck on a light pole here in Silver Spring: “Bush lied / Thousands died.”
Stickers are interesting little artifacts, aren’t they? Bumpers or otherwise, it’s all about colonizing inhospitable spaces as surfaces for writing. Unlike graffiti and tagging, the sticker bears the mark of mass production and seems curiously immune to its surrounding environment.
Thoughtful points, Matt. There is also the category of stickers with space for handwritten material that may vary from individual sticker to individual sticker. For example, in one of the elevators at Georgia State for years there was one of those “Hello, my name is” party stickers with “RAGE” written in fat magic marker in the blank space.
Then there are commercial attempts to co-opt graffiti. On my recent trip to Atlanta I noticed advertisements in the MARTA train stations for … Nissan? … that were designed to look as if a graffiti artist had written over a mass produced poster. But putting ten identical copies of this advertisement in a single station ruined the illusion.