Art that strikes back
You’ve surely seen it — the painted silhouette of a man slumped over his mobile phone, completely absorbed in its world. It’s “the Clone,” and it’s been stenciled on sidewalks, on electrical switching boxes and other surfaces of opportunity from coast to coast. Its creator is a Los Angeles-based artist who goes by the name Thrashbird. His latest L.A. undertaking was transforming a Fox News billboard in Silver Lake into its own parody.
What is street art to you, and how did you get started doing it?
Street art and graffiti are kind of separated a little bit differently. Street art was born from just a space where people had something to say … so they used this new art form of … renegade-like action in the street and putting up their art.
I fell in love with it as a teenager.… I loved the rebellious nature of it and the way that you could strike back in a sense at the culture that you didn’t really feel like you were a part of.
Maybe the most recognizable thing you’ve done is the silhouette of a millennial with very bad posture slouching over his phone, looking down. Have you gotten any grief from your fellow millennials who say, “We’re not like that”?
No, I haven’t really. I think everybody gets the joke. It’s meant to have some humor in it but also some reflection, and I think that there’s no real denying that that is literally how everyone looks.
If you step outside of your house and you look in either direction, you’re going to see someone who is in that position on their phone. That’s just the way we all look now, and I’m just as guilty of it as anybody.
Your recent big-scale work in Los Angeles was on the Fox News billboard in Silver Lake. How did you decide, That’s what I want to do. I’m sure Fox would consider it vandalism.
I’m always interested about the way that people look at vandalization. … I was raised in a more rural area or a smaller city that wasn’t billboardobsessed and definitely not ad cultureobsessed. I see the way that we go about building modern cities as vandalization. I don’t think that having 4,000, 10,000 billboards planted all over a city is meant for anything other than trying to constantly sell you something. And for me, that’s vandalization of my eyes and my brain.
So the billboards are asking for it?
Yes, in my opinion…. I don’t have a high opinion of Fox News, because I think they fabricate a lot of the information they put out as fact, and I think that they lie a lot. And I think that they prop up an administration that is really hurting the country. So I wanted to call them out for it.
You had several people there working on it. How long did it take all of you up there to pull it off ? I presume this was very late at night.
Probably two and a half hours. It went very smoothly, other than a couple of brief pauses for some [police] cars that we had to watch go by and make sure they weren’t going to come back. And they didn’t.
We were very fortunate. Sometimes I sort of feel like I have an angel looking over me when I do them, because some of the situations and things that have happened, they just lead me to believe that I really am doing the right thing, that I really am meant to be doing what I’m doing, because it should have gone very differently.
No jail time so far?
No, I’ve had jail time. Some fines I’m still paying off in different states, and I’ve had to go to jail in different states.
Has any judge said to prosecutors, get out of here, this is nothing?
I had a judge in Colorado who laughed at the prosecutors when they asked for the amount of restitution that they asked, and said, “That’s absolutely ridiculous. I’m not going to ask anyone to pay that.” It was for some electrical boxes that I had put the Clone on. They were asking like $35,000 for restitution. I told my lawyer I can drive from L.A., paint those back to their original color in one night, and drive back to L.A. for less than $1,000.
In other cases, my lawyer has actually been able to show that what I had done had actually improved the value of the property.
Do you ever look at people reacting to your work?
Yes, I do. I do pay attention to how my work is being received and whether or not people are engaging in conversation or in debate over it, because if you’re going to put stuff out in a public space, then I feel as though you owe it to all of those people to be engaged in the conversation instead of just putting it out and then disappearing and not saying anything about it.