Innsbruck, Austria Street Art - Part 3 of 3

I'm gonna wrap up my blog-series of Innsbruck [Here's Part 1 and Part 2], Austria street art with a potpourri of images that, while lacking a common theme, reflect some of my own aesthetic sensibilities (which admittedly verge toward the absurd). Consider this stenciled kitty playing near the cracks of a sidewalk. Who put it here, and why? Is there a message, or does it simply project the pleasure of placing a soft, cuddly animal in a gritty urban setting? As far as I can tell, much of this stuff seeks to inspire opened-ended questions like these (though beer and boredom no doubt play a role).

I'm no tough guy, and I don't purposely plunge into places where I'm not wanted. At the same time, any seasoned street-art hunter knows that you've sometimes got to skulk along some decidedly unfriendly districts to find stuff that matters. There is, after all, a palpable sense of disenfranchisement that motivates a sprayer's choice to seize property in this manner. That's why I found myself walking alongside an elevated train track while visiting Innsbruck one quiet Sunday morning. All that dismal stone stretching underneath: prime territory for tags, stencils, and the occasionally goofy juxtaposition of a sexually charged advertisement amid a dank enclosure.


Stenciling is the art of repetition, of course. Thus I can rarely travel long during one of my street art searches without spying some version of Banksy's Flower Thrower. This guy is everywhere, an ever-present sign of peaceful revolt transformed into a sort of stuttering shorthand of hip fashion - kind of like those Che portraits you see on t-shirts and the walls of college dorms. That's why I had to smile when I spotted a miniature version sprayed underneath an imposing sign of Innsbruck culture [my rusty Google-Fu translates the plaque into a commemoration for a male choir]. Something about the contest of size and the comparative simplicity of the illegal icon speaks to me.


Let me conclude my Innsbruck series with another motif that captures my attention: spray can mockery of video cameras. These devices are, as you'd imagine, increasingly ubiquitous, constant reminders of our post 9/11 surveillance society. They also signify the inescapable feeling that all public property is somehow privatized. That's one message that many of today's stencil-slingers send, that our shared commons have been supplanted by a simulacrum of public life, a fake agora. These spaces, seemingly open, are closed off to folks who cannot consume them properly; they must be protected against those who would contest their faceless authors. The videocamera is the sleepless sentinel who earns rebuke from the masked tagger. As ever, though, the question remains: does defacing a place reveal anything useful? Or does it merely substitute one injustice for another?

We Were Devo

Jenny and I geeked out this past Saturday, driving over the hill to Saratoga's Mountain Winery to see Devo. Just last year, the guys in yellow plastic dropped their first album in a decade: "Something for Everybody," a time-capsule of tunes that manage to blur retro vibes and contemporary angst. The band endured the talkshow circuit and released a couple videos - eg., Don't Shoot (I'm a Man) and Fresh [warning: semi-crappy quality on that latter clip] - but Devo failed to attract the fleeting attention of today's texting-generation. No matter. Jenny and I were thrilled to see a band that's rocked our roadtrip playlist since we were kids.

The crowd skewed fortyish (and upward): lots of silver ponytails, SUVs crowding the parking lot, and one scraggly looking dude reading a paperback copy of Dune as the seats began to fill. Not everyone was waiting for their AARP invitations to arrive, though. Jenny and I giggled at the sight of a twentysomething quartet sporting plastic uniforms and matching garrison caps. They marched in fascistic consumer dystopian glee, and we just had to giggle. Oh, and the souvenir shack was doing brisk business in $35 "energy dome" hats. [I settled for a $25 t-shirt and a $10 beer]. We yawned through opening act DJ Real (think Adam Sandberg, but less funny), chilling as yellow lights began to twinkle over the surrounding countryside. And then, there they were.

Now let's get ourselves situated. Two of Devo's founding members - Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale - are 61 and 63 consecutively. 61 and 63 years old! So you gotta give props to these guys. The band tore through the new stuff with twitchy abandon, popping the tunes open like newly unearthed fallout shelters. The lyrics are fresh but the vibe is classic. Then they played through a catalog of hits, changing costumes every twenty minutes or so. In less than two hours the band dialed the crowd backward from the post-ironic oughts to the pre-Reagan seventies. Not every seat was sold, but no one was sitting for this show. We danced the entire time. And while Jenny and I didn't splurge on center-row tickets, we were perfectly positioned for the highlight of our night: Mark Mothersbaugh careening into our section, jerking pom poms like a spastic spudboy. There were no encores but, heck, the entire show was an encore. We loved it.

(Photographs by Andrew Wood)

Chatbots Talk God, Past Each Other

Please tell me this wasn't staged...

Innsbruck, Austria Street Art - Part 2 of 3

Following up on yesterday's post, here's some more Innsbruck, Austria street art.

"Our Rise is Your Fall"

"Don't You Want Somebody to Love"

A line from Rumpelstiltskin ("No one knows my little game")

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Innsbruck, Austria Street Art - Part 1 of 3

During my recent trip to Austria, collecting footage for my forthcoming Salzburg Global Seminar video project, I took a side-visit to Innsbruck. I had no specific agenda for that stop; I just thought it'd be nice to spend a couple days on my own, seeing someplace new. One surprising highlight: the amount of street-art sprayed upon public (and private) spaces. While recent media attention has understandably focused on the upheavals in Greece, it's clear that a sizable contingent of Austrian youth feel disenfranchised and angry; you merely need to read the signs they plaster, stencil, and paint. Of course I found a similar concentration of street art in Vienna during my visit last year, so I guess I shouldn't have been too surprised. Austria is feeling the same pressure that's sweeping through the world. Here's a sample, with more to come:

Anti-fascist Action

"Double-cross the slumlords"

Mordechai Vanunu: a technician who revealed secrets
about Israel's nuclear weapons program

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Kafka Museum Peeing Statues

This video from our 2011 European Grand Tour offers, at least, the virtue of literal truth. They're statues, they're at Prague's Franz Kafka Museum, and they're peeing. Supposedly the streams form phrases from famous local residents. Better yet, I'm told that you can text a message and watch them pee something for you. And to think we learned about the interactive nature of David Cerny's installation after we returned to the States.

One More Down...

One more dictator teeters on the edge of oblivion. Moammar Gadhafi has always been a strange, unsettling, and lifelong part of my worldview. He took power in Libya in 1969 and later invented a name for his country that would be the odd delight of Model United Nations-geeks for years thereafter: the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. He was known for keeping a bevy of female bodyguards, for sleeping in a tent, even when he traveled on diplomatic business, and for his uncanny ability to outlast his enemies. He was also widely considered to be insane.

For most of my life, Libya provided a general utility villain for action-adventure flicks. I can still hear Doc Brown warning against the threat of nuclear terrorists in Back to the Future ("Who do you think? The Libyans!"). When I was stationed in Rota, Spain back in the 80s, I imagined the ease at which that wily evil dude could target us from across the Mediterranean. And, of course, I remember watching the televised violence of a U.S. airstrike on Tripoli when I was in high school. I was one of those Model UN-geeks, and we were participating in a General Assembly meeting when someone rolled in the TV. We stared awestruck as the bombs fell. There was a moment of silent attention and then a burst of enthusiasm as each of us began banging out resolutions. Libya's dictator struck me as just a little goofy.

Yet Gadhafi shed no small amount of blood. His assassins spread fear around the world, blowing up a disco to kill U.S. soldiers and planting a bomb on Pan Am Flight 103 that killed 270 people over (and at) Lockerbie, Scotland. Yet when he admitted his culpability to that latter mass murder, Gadhafi launched a process that began to transform him into some sort of elder statesperson. His willingness to help stem the flow of immigrants from Africa to Europe and his alleged assistance in the fight against Al-Qaeda clearly contributed to that cause. Even so, the people of Libya have had enough.

News reports now depict Gadhafi as a tattered shell of his former self, hiding somewhere in Tripoli as close aids and trusted henchmen slink out of sight. Rebels driving battered pickup trucks (aided by some NATO bombing for good measure) have him surrounded. No one knows what will happen next, but it's clear that the Arab Spring is becoming a year of revolution whose latest victim is one fellow who stuck around far too long.