DAILY POO ON THE STREET
We know, we know. Visual pollution, PR for planet fail, mental health scourge, capitalist lackeys: advertising shits in your head. But have you seen the state of mainstream print ‘journalism’? Its invidious failings, the malevolent and self-serving agenda have been deftly skewered before but the new flyingleaps artist’s poster is a further distillation of what our right wing media has to offer. The cynical stirring up of resentment, propagating mistrust and hate, producing and preying on vulnerabilities in the pursuit of profit. Day in, day out, it’s an unrelenting diet of… POO.
Chunky Mark aka The Artist Taxi Driver aka Mark McGowan regularly ‘fixes’ the Daily Mail’s front page for them. With Daily Poo (2021) he’s delivered a disturbingly squidgy, inanely grinning poomoji on a black ground to obscure the twisted, unreliable and spitefully sensationalist headlines that usually appear there. Much like The Artist Taxi Driver’s newspaper reviews every morning on Twitter and Instagram, Chunky’s poster going up around the UK is a public service.
It’s been argued that the Daily Mail and its ilk represent ‘decent, hardworking people, struggling to pay their bills, ambitious for their children and loyal to their country.’ These rags claim to lay bare the wrongdoings of the rich and powerful but if this is occasionally the case it’s only ever part of the story. The psycho-social, commercial and political imperatives behind such exposés remain shrouded in self-interested mystery. Erstwhile Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s recent eviction from office due supposedly to breaking his own rules leaves so many questions begging. Was it all just some cheap, prurient distraction? If so, what from? A change in policy that should’ve been declared and debated openly? Ever felt like you’re being played again and again?
The Tory cabinet have proven themselves to be mealy-mouthed, corrupt and uncaring. Their populist, ‘reforming’ agenda of hounding immigrants, base misogyny, Islamophobia and homophobia, undermining the NHS, etc., all that pre-dated Covid but the pandemic has turbo-charged their Parliament dodging strategy which seems to boil down to, “What would garner Daily Mail readers’ approval?”
Daily Poo (2021) is the artist’s latest comical critique in a career that’s taken many forms: Dancing outside New Scotland Yard wearing a tutu and pig mask; Sending grannies into space by means of a customised shopping trolley and rickety wooden ramp (having first, of course, briefed potential candidates before lift-off, “Are you sure you’re going to cope with all the public interest that’s likely to follow your space mission?” (prescient shades of Bezos and Branson there!); Dining on corgi and swan in protest at royal misdemeanours…
During the stormy Brexit years McGowan’s pointed Dada provocations gave way to critical interviews with politicians, activists, journalists, academics and everyday folk as to the fall out caused by ex-PM David Cameron gifting the right wing of his party a UK EU referendum.
During the pandemic by various means he’s continued to call out Tory incompetence, their lies, the devious and criminal chumocracy. What’s more, while Chunky’s observations can engender rage, the artist also regularly elicits tears of laughter.
Look out for Mark McGowan’s work appearing in the forthcoming BEANO exhibition at Somerset House this autumn. As his Daily Poo (2021) poster typifies, critical mischief making is his speciality.
If our pandemic circumstances are not very funny then Archer’s rendering of woodgrain really is. Fat stripes and a few seagulls (like, after a bit, the artist got a bit bored of fat stripes). Archer often inflects her painting style to suit her subjects. Same Shit Different Day is spot on. It’s a painting – and we know paint is involved ‘cos it says so on the can! – that parallels our profound ennui. It’s angry too. A furious, furry cri de coeur.
We keep going. Not to let the side down please note s/he got ribboned up to go out vandalising. And it’s a blue sky day, clouds are doing that scudding thing they do, our bear has probably been detained by the authorities and can expect a long stretch of confinement for their anti-social outburst. Plus ça change? Archer has helped us smile at our melancholy.
*Apologies, cannibalised this line off the wonderful Emma Arnold talking about the inspiring Jeff Ferrell.
On the Street
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All posters are 30×20 inches.
All posters printed in 2021 are limited editions of 100 – prior to that they are editions of 300. All are 30×20 inch.
(apart from More That Unites Us (2017) and Agitate In Memoriam (2018) which were limited to a run of 100)
Dr.D aka Subvertiser
While the debate goes on as to whether flyposted and other oppositional art or visual activism has any direct effect in bringing about sociopolitical change, what it can do at its best is feed into the publics’ disposition.
Through strong imagery, cogent or quizzical text, humour, relatively speedy production and distribution, via its capacity to occupy anomalous spaces in the urban environment and through an imaginative, enacted engagement with matters of concern it can generate social media interest and help inform, even propel, opinion.
Dr. D’s targets include surveillance culture; the social effects of neoliberalism; commodification; mealy-mouthed and uncaring politicians; abuses of power in the media… Much more than bald sloganeering Dr. D’s imagery and text pieces often emerge, on reflection, as enigmatic meditations on twenty-first century existential angst.
Transgressing boundaries can reveal hidden rules. One could cite the precedents of the carnivalesque ‘telling truth to power’, vaudevillian comedy, Dada gestures in art but all of these, in a – it’s only a bunch of pucks/entertainers/artists – sense, operated in ‘sanctioned’ arenas. Dr. D’s contributions to the urban environment are rarely sanctioned and it’s this that contributes significantly to their traction and incisiveness.
The urban spectacle would have us believe that its over-riding character is, yes aspirational, but emphatically neutral and apolitical: that generally we’re going to be just fine if we carry on pretty much as we are. Dr. D’s pithy interventions, highlighting so many germane issues and employing such a variety of modes of address, repeatedly suggest otherwise.
