Don't Be Scared, It's Only Street Art: The Performance of Stencil Graffiti
Catherine Ming T'ien Duffly

There was a time when bold, sprawling graffiti letters colored both my social world and my suburban landscape. Growing up, most of my friends were boys who, like many boys in the suburbs, considered themselves graffiti artists. Late nights I walked with them along railroad tracks and ducked into abandoned buildings to scout out a new spot or a great piece. They spent hours discussing graffiti styles and whether so-and-so from one town over was a "toy." I associated graffiti with so much ego marking and straight-boy posturing. And I never once did a piece of my own.

The first time I saw a street stencil was after I'd moved from my east coast suburb to Oakland, CA. It was an unassuming "Free Mumia" stenciled all over the streets of Oakland and San Francisco. A goal of my graffiti-writing friends had been to get a tag or a piece up in the most hard-to-reach places. They scaled buildings to get each piece up higher than the last. The stencil I encountered was down on street level, in the same realm as the architecture and advertising I experienced daily. I was struck by its simple lines and by how personal the encounter was: a moment of intimate connection and subversion in a public space. Looking at the stencil, I thought: "I can do that."

Stencils are meant to be caught by the eye. Sometimes seen under the feet of commuters and shoppers and lovers and nannies pushing baby strollers, they are aimed at a downtrodden public; at people exhausted by work or out of work. The power of stencil graffiti lies in the act of viewing it. The performance of the stencil occurs in the space between the art and its audience. The spectator of the stencil engages in a surreptitious/clandestine act just by viewing it. There is a conspiratorial performance that occurs when a person happens upon a stencil on the street. The stencil "works" through its multiple levels of performance: the performance of the artist, that subversive act of getting their artwork up; the performance of spectators, as they make connections between their environment and the art and in remembering other examples of similar work they have seen in the past; and the performance and interaction between the art and the viewer and, by extension, between the artist and the viewer.

This type of public art interrupts the urban landscape and renders it more complicated. We are constantly bombarded with advertising and state-sponsored visual imagery in the urban environment. Stenciling, as a form of culture jamming, disrupts our relationship to that corporate and "official" visual imagery (1) . What is political about stenciling is not only or always its message but the way this street art encourages spectators to interact with and interrogate the piece and the way that it interacts with and disrupts the urban landscape. To give context for their present-day performance I will lay out some of the history of stencils.

The history of stenciling begins with a purely aesthetic practice (as in fabric or furniture decoration) developing to a more political practice with examples found all over the globe. One of the earliest art techniques, stencil art has its origins in cave paintings produced 22,000 years ago. Egyptians decorated inner walls of pyramids and the Chinese decorated silk with stencils. Stencils have been used as a decorative technique on floors and furniture since the medieval period. (2)

Stenciling as a form of graffiti (referred to here as stencil graffiti or street stencil) has origins in several different geographical locations and historical moments. Josh MacPhee writes, "There is no clean and simple narrative history [of street stencils]... Instead there is a complex web of evolution that connects and disconnects along the way." (3) Again, just as stencils perform though layering and accumulation of multiple images and meanings, so too can we understand their varied histories through a similar layering of historical sites. Just as their meaning cannot be located in a singular place, neither can their history.

Listed below are several historical sites of origin for the street stencil as it is used today:

1970s, Nicaragua – The stencil became popular as part of the Sandinista campaign, which used a stylized version of Sandino, an anti-colonial hero, as a symbol of resistance. Members of the campaign stenciled thousands of replicas of his image all over Nicaragua.

1970s and 1980s, South Africa – The anti-apartheid resistance movement used stencils in response to increased censorship in the press. People used walls and the street to communicate news and call for action.

1976, Mexico – The radical Mexican art collective, Group Suma, used stencils to confront power relationships and daily hardships. They created huge murals using life-size stencils representing different elements of Mexican society.

1976, Berlin – The Berlin Wall, in its fourth incarnation, was a highly politically charged barrier that became a canvas for artists and activists.

Early 1980s, Paris – Blek le Rat, a student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, began stenciling in the streets of Paris with life-size stencils of human figures. His work inspired the generation of stencil artists to come.

1970s, New York City – Street stenciling grew out of the graffiti explosion in New York when artists such as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat popularized it in the art world. Seth Tobocman, a well-known stencil artist in New York City who started stenciling in the early '80s, cites traditional graffiti as his motivation to begin stenciling on the street. Artists brought their work out of the gallery and into the street. (4)

In New York City links could be made between graffiti/street stenciling, the Happenings of the 1950s, and the Streetworks of the 1970s. Lucy Lippard's "The Geography of Street Time" catalogs many streetworks of that era. Echoing the performance of street stencils today, Lippard writes, "Sometimes the chance audience happens upon mysterious 'traces' of past activities, which may or may not be decipherable at a later date. Pavements provide a visible surface for graphic streetworks." (5) In much the same way, stencils represent "traces" of the artist who put them there. They are the "evidence" of late-night illegal activity that might have transpired the night before to bring us the art we see before us.
Jose Esteban Muñoz has written about this idea of using ephemera as kind of "invisible evidence." He poses a challenge to institutionally sanctioned scholarship that favors traditional scholarly archives, for example, over forms of "evidence" concerned with memory and performance. Munoz writes of ephemera: "...it is all of those things that remain after a performance, a kind of evidence of what has transpired but certainly not the thing itself. It does not rest on epistemological foundations but is instead interested in following traces, glimmers, residues, and specks of things." (6)

It seems appropriate to connect stenciling not only to global political movements, but to link it to avant-garde movements such as the Surrealists, Dadaists, and Futurists. The use of collage by these artists was a precursor to the use of street stencils and is helpful in understanding how stencils perform. Collage involves the transfer of materials from one context to another, during which process the original context is not completely erased—resulting in a double-reading of the image/work. This concept of "double-reading" is explicated in the Group Mu Manifesto which states that the use of collage "…leads to a double-reading: that of the fragment perceived in relation to its text of origin; that of the same fragment as incorporated into a new whole, a different totality." (7)

Stencil artists make use of their "canvas" in much the same way. Swoon, a Brooklyn-based street artist, has said regarding her work in the context of the street and other graffiti, "I know the [piece] is going to wear away really soon, and it's got all these holes in it and you can still see the tag behind it and you can even still read it. So I kind of feel like it's a collaboration: we're using the same walls." (8) Artist/architect Toben Windahl writes, "It was the beauty of the aggregate that was compelling—the palimpsest of city walls, stickers on top of tags on top of stencils on top of posters, all in various states of decay. It was the invisible community of street work that was moving, people responding to others, building off their images, crossing them out, a secret nod to their presence." (9) The stencil is laid over and on top of the urban landscape. It is viewed next to advertisements and brick and pavement and other stencil and graffiti markings. All of these elements inform the way we perceive the piece. In the case of stencil graffiti, the street is the original context which cannot be erased, nor is it meant to be.

There are several forms of stenciling that range from the bluntly political to the expressly personal statements or poetically cryptic. Do street stencils function to create social change? Or do they operate solely within the world of symbolism? This article suggests that stenciling may be seen as a performance of protest, whether or not the "message" contained in the stencil announces it as political. The more poetic stencil can work towards social change as it encourages spectators to think for themselves. Regarding the revolutionary possibilities of poetic stenciling, Josh MacPhee writes, "In a world run by the capitalist need for everything to have a fixed meaning within the market economy, the open sign of the stencil can be disorienting, confusing or even liberatory." (10)

As a teenager, I never felt that graffiti was something I could "do." But stencils have always seemed more accessible to me; they seem more do-it-yourself. The stencil evokes possibilities that are related to my longing for a culture and aesthetic of revolution. Working on this project I have found myself "performing" on a couple of different levels: through my writing/theory-making on the subject; and as a spectator of the work. It seemed appropriate, therefore, that I would also "perform" as artist-activist and create my own performance of self, i.e. my own stencil.

As other street artists are stepping out into the night all over the city, in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx, I prepare myself to do the same. This is my first stencil. I choose a recognizable image and some text that holds personal significance to me. I cut my stencil out on card-stock and, taking a suggestion from Josh MacPhee's book, Stencil Pirates, I place it in the cut-out bottom of a shopping bag (11) . In a nod to my teenage, late night excursions—black hoodie sweatshirts pulled up over our heads and down over our eyes—I choose black as my couleur de guerre. Armed with my shopping bag stencil and a can of spray paint, I am ready. As artists are stepping out into the night all over the world, I join them and add my voice to the streets.

Catherine Ming T'ien Duffly is a Master's Candidate in Performance Studies at NYU. New to stenciling, she usually uses puppetry as a mode of protest performance.