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Column: Billboards vandalize our cities and minds — so this artist is fine with vandalizing billboards

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If you’ve looked up from your own phone as you’ve made your way around town, you’ve surely seen it — the painted silhouette of a man slumped over his mobile phone, completely absorbed in its world. It’s called “The Clone,” and it’s been stenciled on sidewalks, on electrical switching boxes and on other surfaces of opportunity from coast to coast. Its creator is a Los Angeles-based street artist who goes by the name Thrashbird, and he has also crafted more monumental installations.

On huge blocks of cement at an abandoned factory in eastern Oregon, he painted his “Valley of Secret Values,” dead-ringer trompe l’oeil giant designer handbags. He used old tires to form the Chanel bag’s signature shoulder chain. His latest big L.A. undertaking was transforming a Fox News billboard in Silver Lake into its own parody.

Thrashbird, who grew up seeing the work of Banksy and L.A. poster artist Robbie Conal, has crafted his own work to make his mark, and his point.


What is street art and how did you get started doing it?

I just look at it as the pure renegade form of the term. 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, wanted to make their mark, but they didn't really know how. So they used this new art form of illegally or renegade-like action in the street and putting up their art.

I fell in love with it as a teenager because it just really spoke to me as a way to speak out in a world where I didn’t feel like I had a voice or had a place to say anything. It seemed like a way to interject what I had to say, I guess whether or not people wanted to see it. 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.

I call him “The Clone.” “The Clone” was basically born from me watching everyone in society, pulling my friends, become addicted to their smartphones. So I thought it was kind of an interesting way to hold up a mirror to people in society.

When I was a kid, I would put up my hoodie and I would shelter myself from the outside world. So I used that as this metaphor that the world is blocked out there. I took the photos of myself, the original photos of myself that I made the stencil from; when I took the photo I really tried to exaggerate and sort of give this almost hunchback Igor character. But it doesn’t seem like it’s so far off anymore.

Have you gotten any grief over that 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.

You found some challenges in doing street art in Los Angeles, because Los Angeles is a city where signs and images have been built to accommodate the speed and scale of the car.

It definitely affected the aesthetic of my work. I had to take all of the ideas that I had, and break them down to very, very basic, simple ideas that people could process in a split second, because I realized that a lot of the work I was doing didn’t really seem to be resonating with anyone. And I kind of picked up that that was because you couldn’t really see what was going on in the imagery from a car as you were passing by.

So I simplified a lot of things. And that's a big reason why “The Clone” is very simple — just a big silhouette with only a couple little points of detail. I made it an entirely black silhouette, and it instantly became recognizable from 100 feet or from very close up.

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 of property because I have a very different view of vandalization. I was raised in a more rural area or a smaller city that wasn’t billboard-obsessed and definitely not an ad culture-obsessed. I look at 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.

(Adam Clark / Billboard Bandits)

So the billboards are asking for it?

Yes, in my opinion. I started vandalizing billboards because it was my way of fighting back against this ad culture that was constantly being sold or marketed something at all times whether I wanted it or not. And it was my way to say, I’m not OK with this, and what you’re doing is to me is just as much a negative thing as maybe how you interpret what I do.

With the Fox billboard, I saw an opportunity to speak on some issues that are really important to me, and I wanted to do it in a very profound way that really caught people’s attention, because my whole goal with art is to get the conversation going, I want you to engage, I want you to have a reaction.

I know it’s not always going to be positive. That is the No. 1 goal for me as a street artist.

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.

How long did it take you to plan and how long to execute this? I can imagine this is sort of a lightning operation.

Well, you know, it’s interesting with billboards. You can’t ever tell how long they might be up — for a couple of weeks, or they might be up for a month, they might be up for two months.

From the time I actually set eyes on one of the billboards to the execution was about two weeks.

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.

You use a fake name to protect your identity. And what you are doing really is against the law — it’s trespass or vandalism, whatever you want to call it. You’ve been lucky — or have you had to deal with facing the consequences on occasion?

Oh, no — I’ve had to face the consequences on occasion. Ironically, I do a lot of work in very rural places, in abandoned places, and that’s where I’ve had to face the most consequences, at locations that are completely derelict and have been abandoned for who knows how many years. That’s where they seem to care the most. And I don’t know why that is.

I’ve had to face the consequences and it’s not fun. But I really feel as though I believe in what I do wholeheartedly. And I feel that I am doing something for good, so to me that risk is worth it.

And that consequence is worth it in the end, because I would rather have lived a life where I felt like I had at least tried to do some good and not just sat idly by, even if that resulted in jail time or some fines.

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 for — 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.

Your most audacious project, which drew a lot of attention — positive attention from tourists and some locals, and negative attention from the authorities — was in Lime, Ore., at an abandoned concrete plant. You called it the “Valley of Secret Values,” where you painted monster-sized luxury handbags, Chanel and Hermes and Louis Vuitton. What were you saying in portraying these giant multi-thousand-dollar handbags, and what happened?

When you looked at these giant concrete monoliths before I painted them, they all looked to me like giant bags. So I immediately thought there was this metaphor that spoke to the ephemeral nature of all material goods that we consume.

I’m an advocate for sustainability and reuse and recycling, and I would like to see the companies that make a lot of products that we consume embrace the sustainability format. I’m not against buying goods. I’m an advocate for things that are produced ethically and sustainably and that are well made so that I don’t have to buy a new iPhone every year.

This installation attracted tourists, but the local authorities said no, we can't have this, it’s a danger, shut it down.

They blamed me for making it into this dangerous tourist attraction, and to be fair to them, the place was dangerous if you didn’t know what you were doing. But it had been sitting abandoned since 1980. People already visited it, but I feel as though, after I started painting the bags, it definitely increased the amount of people that were stopping there. And the authorities got really upset about it.

How did you feel when the giant handbags got bulldozed?

For a street artist, nothing lasts. Your stuff always comes down. It’s not meant to last, but if there is the opportunity for it to last, you would like to see that.

And I was extremely disappointed to hear that they had decided to tear it down, because I actually had approached them about trying to make it something that could be a tourist attraction and actually could bring money into the local communities around it. But they didn’t want to hear any of it.

Do you ever look at people react to your work, whether it’s in Lime or Los Angeles?

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.

Patt Morrison’s new book is “Don’t Stop the Presses! Truth, Justice and the American newspaper.”

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