Paul Curtis (aka "Moose") is a pioneering UK street artist and the creator of "reverse graffiti." It's form of "clean tagging" where, instead of marking walls with paint, he uses cleaning products to remove grime from urban spaces, leaving pictures or messages.
In this fascinating talk from the agIdeas Conference in Melbourne, Moose shares his street art ethos. Explaining how he works in "re-facing," not "defacing," and every mark he makes shows people how polluted the world is.
Curtis occasionally accepts advertising jobs, believing that at least his form of advertising doesn't generate any additional waste. He was even hired by the UK police to make street ads for an anti-gun campaign. This didn't stop the police from trying to arrest him for "criminal damages" two weeks later. To which he responded that he wasn't making a mark, he was removing one and if they wanted to arrest someone they should arrest the polluters. Luckily he got off, so he could keep "collaborating" with the street cleaners with his unique style of graffiti.
Bio
Paul Curtis
Moose is the pseudonym of Paul Curtis, a British graffiti artist. Instead of the typical methods of graffiti, Moose works by cleaning dirt and grime off surfaces to create his art.
Paul Curtis (aka Moose) discusses his work in the medium of reverse graffiti, which is a method of "clean tagging" or creating temporary messages and images on surfaces by removing dirt and grime.
Form of visual communication, usually illegal, involving the unauthorized marking of public space by an individual or group. Technically the term applies to designs scratched through a layer of paint or plaster, but its meaning has been extended to other markings. Graffiti is widely considered a form of antisocial behaviour performed in order to gain attention or simply for thrills. But it also can be understood as an expressive art form. Derived from the Italian word graffio (scratch), graffiti (incised inscriptions, plural but often used as singular) has a long history. It has been found in ancient Roman ruins, in the remains of the Mayan city of Tikal in Central America, on rocks in Spain dating to the 16th century, and in medieval English churches. During the 20th century, graffiti in the U.S. and Europe was closely associated with gangs. Graffiti was particularly prominent in major urban centres throughout the world; common targets were subways, billboards, and walls. In the 1990s there emerged a new form of graffiti, known as tagging, which entailed the repeated use of a single symbol or series of symbols to mark territory.
"What a self-important *sshole who presumes that *he* has not only the right but the obligation to deface public and private property in a way that *he* considers to be artistic."
the person who wrote the previous quote is a tool.
@BrianC79
Although I don't presume to know the mind of the original poster, I'm under the impression that, online, when someone uses an asterisk around a word, e.g. *he*, then it's actually a word of denoting the word in bold and isn't meant to have the ironic connotations of quotation marks.
What a self-important asshole who presumes that he has not only the right, but the obligation to deface public and private property in a way that he considers artistic.
@kayemmdee: T,FTFY
@BrianC79: Happy now? And out of curiosity, do you fix every grammatically incorrect comment you come across on the Internet? Peace out.
You mean reface, not deface. And why do you think you have the right to put the completely innocuous word 'he' in between asterisks - which you probably meant to be quotation marks. Who the hell quotation marks the word 'he'? There's no irony in using the word 'he' to refer to a human male. Here's a litle rule of thumb, that every eight year old should know: if it's not being used in anything but its current commonly accepted sense, and it's not a quote or speech within a narrative, DON'T USE QUOTATION MARKS.
Also, you used the same symbol in the same sentence for two different purposes, twice as (incorrectly used) quotation marks, and once as a stand in for a missing letter, (correct usage - congratulations). At least try to be consistant, or how the hell will anyone know what nonsense you're trying to get across at any given time?
And just to preempt any criticism of my own usage of quotation marks around the word 'he', as everyone should know, quotation marks can be used to indicate that "an instance of a word refers to the word itself rather than its associated concept".
Peace out.
What a self-important *sshole who presumes that *he* has not only the right but the obligation to deface public and private property in a way that *he* considers to be artistic.