Poster Boy

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Over the last year, anonymous guerrilla artist Poster Boy has been splicing and dicing advertising billboards on the New York underground. 'As long as you're not hurting others, it can't be bad,' he tells Ben Walters

Since last spring, advertising posters on New York subway platforms have been undergoing a few unplanned alterations. In these real-world cut-and-paste mash-ups, a HSBC hoarding turns into a skewering of the Britney Spears phenomenon; a trainer advert is used to lampoon Usain Bolt's penchant for Chicken McNuggets; an Indiana Jones poster becomes a critique of colonialism.

There have been more than 400 such interventions since last April. Around 11.30 one recent Thursday night, their creator, who doesn't sign his work but goes by the name of Poster Boy, stands on a subway platform in Brooklyn. He's looking at the poster for The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, a black field with the left half of Brad Pitt's face at one edge and the right half of Cate Blanchett's at the other. "Sometimes they make it too easy," he smiles, taking a razor blade to Pitt's forehead.

Poster Boy's work straddles two boisterous artistic subcultures: street art and culture jamming. Imaginative aesthetic subversions of public spaces currently span the globe (from London's The Decapitator, Spain's Jorge Rodriguez Gerada, the Adbusters collective and the likes of Shepard Fairey and Banksy) but the New York subway has an especially rich heritage from the graffiti boom of the 1970s and 80s to recent installation work using sound and air. Culture jamming, meanwhile, developed as a more precisely targeted assault on corporate communications, satirically inverting branding and advertising techniques. Melding both traditions, Poster Boy's work is witty, web-savvy and economical: although ephemeral in situ, it's preserved and appreciated on Poster Boy's Flickr site and YouTube channel, and the only materials it requires are chutzpah, imagination and a 50 cent blade.

For obvious reasons Poster Boy, 25, values his anonymity, but he agrees to let the Guide tag along and watch him in action. In person he's friendly and open, sincere and curious, developing and revising his ideas as we talk. He shows the same playful, experimental attitude when working. As we walk along the deserted Brooklyn platform, he pauses in front of the poster for the animated movie The Tale Of Desperaux, on which a rodent mock-heroically brandishes a needle like a sabre. "I would love to do something with that mouse," he chuckles. Moving on, he casually slices away Will Smith's eyes - "that always gives a creepy effect" - and sticks a blonde's face atop a portly business suit. "See how much fun this is?" he laughs.

High spirits notwithstanding, Poster Boy takes serious precautions. He operates only on empty platforms and works slouched against the wall, which shields his activity while giving him a good lookout along the platform. He knows which stations are accessible and quiet; how the CCTV cameras work; the rotation of subway and NYPD officers. He's had several close calls: once, while pacing up the exit stairs after being rumbled by station employees, he passed two plain-clothes cops. "And they looked mean. They weren't going to
tick me off and let me go. They meant business."

At our first stop, Poster Boy notices a young man on the opposite platform taking photos but decides he's merely curious. Then a uniformed figure appears at the far end of the platform - maybe a cop, maybe a store employee heading home. A train arrives and Poster Boy hops onboard. "It's not worth the risk," he says. He knows another suitable station nearby, and knows that he's wanted: a friend was recently arrested for graffiti-writing and pumped for information about Poster Boy. The chief of the NYPD Vandal Squad supposedly said: "I like his stuff but, you know, we gotta find out who this guy is."

The answer to that lies in the tale of a teenager from an east coast inner city. "I'd get high and steal cars," he recalls, "but my family and friends thought I was successful just in the fact that I didn't get anyone pregnant, I didn't get into drugs and I was keeping out of jail." Fired up by community college figure-drawing and philosophy classes, he got into art school in New York, where he worked on hand-me-down canvases and stole food to get by.

He began messing with posters out of curiosity and a lack of other materials: "At first, it was just something to keep me occupied while waiting on the subway." When he realised they were printed on self-adhesive vinyl, making them giant, re-stickable stickers, he saw there was fun to be had "maybe mixing up some words or cutting out a head and finding someone else's body that it might look funny on". He began combining images from clusters of posters, yielding elaborate and sophisticated results.

Witty and playful as it is, there's no missing the political edge of Poster Boy's work, rooted in indignation at what he calls "this mass advertising always attacking people. They don't have a choice: they're riding the subway, they already paid their two dollars. Why the fuck should they be force-fed this stuff?" As well as consumerism, his pieces have targeted racism, gentrification, gender inequality, US immigration and foreign policy (for Transporter read "Deported"; for Iron Man, read "Iran = Nam") and, recently, Israeli action in Gaza.

Poster Boy retains strong connections to the above-ground art world. As a student, he worked for a major painter and his conversation is peppered with references to Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Goya, Duchamp and Basquiat, along with Chomsky, Baudrillard and Andy Kaufman. He knows the value of branding, and its drawbacks. Having cultivated the good favour of the blogs that first picked up on his work ("Is the new Banksy loose in the New York subways?" asked Gawker, the widely read Manhattan media blog), he nurtures his persona online and through interviews. But he also produces work under other aliases, including two graffiti writers and two gallery- exhibited painters. He's also collaborated with other street artists like Aakash Nihalani, whose fluorescent tape shapes make "plinths" for kerbs and lamp-posts, and Ellis Gallagher, who uses chalk to capture the shadows of buildings and bicycles.

He hopes his most notorious persona will be his most influential: Poster Boy likes the idea of inspiring a Fight Club-style legion of self-motivated subversives. On our trip, there's evidence of similar work by other hands: words cut and pasted together, faces and eyes removed or replaced. It's not as if such things never happened before Poster Boy, but he hopes his online popularity could be the spark that ignites other fires. "That's what I want Poster Boy to be about," he enthuses. "The idea of taking your environment into your own hands and making it what you want. As long as you're not hurting other people, it can't be bad."

Not long ago, Poster Boy had an encounter at a subway station in Brooklyn that encapsulated his desire to inspire without leading. As he cut and pasted, he noticed he was being watched from the opposite platform. "Sixteen at best, young black kid. No one else was around so I kept on working. A few minutes later I heard ripping noises: he's ripping down a poster, just with a key or whatever, cutting out some guy's head, putting it somewhere else. I loved that. I took it as a compliment so I gave him the thumbs-up. And he gave me the middle finger, like, 'Fuck you! I don't need your approval.' I was like, 'Man, what an asshole!' And I loved it! That's the pinnacle of Poster Boy's career."

If his images are like judo throws, using their target's own strength against them, Poster Boy's speedy working method has the thrill of improv. Back in front of the Benjamin Button poster, he assuredly slices around Pitt and Blanchett's half-faces and conjoins them on an adjacent wall, tidying the bottom edge with his razor. After a moment's thought, he swipes Desperaux's needle and affixes it above the face. He returns to the Benjamin Button poster, carving from it thin strips of black with which he fashions sutures down the face's centre and - "the finishing touch!" - dangling "thread' to garnish the eye of the needle. The result is a grotesque triumph, a Frankenstein for the Nip/Tuck generation. "That's a piece," he says with satisfaction as a train pulls up. (This is a copy of an article by Ben Walters for The Guardian)


I found this video of Poster Boy in action on Wooster.



And here is Poster Boy's Flickr stream.