The Splasher

Got a turkey and swiss at a deli on Stanton Saturday night before the Horrors show. As I was walking south down Chrystie towards Delancey, I happened upon some of the handiwork of a dude known as The Splasher . This is a guy who goes around splashing bright paint all over street art and then pasting these little manifestos next to the splashed art (each manifesto has a warning at the bottom that the glue used to paste them contains shards of glass—yikes). The whole situation has gotten a lot of press, including articles in New York magazine, the Gothamist, Curbed, the New York Times, and others I’m sure (“Defacing the defacement or vandalizing creativity?" askes the Times). There’s a bunch of photos of the splashings , but I can’t find a list of their locations….

The one on Chrystie is red paint obscuring a comic-style drawing of a couple. The man is carrying a U.S. Treasury briefcase and the woman is cradling in her arms what appears to be a bomb. The manifesto posted next to it is titled “Art: the Excrement of Action” and essentially condemns art as a second-rate representation (or should I say “bastardization”) of primary actions/experiences.

Just to throw my two cents in, art is just a way to communicate. Yeah, I know that’s arguable, since I’m sure there are people who create art for art’s sake alone, or for themselves—not to show to anyone. But at any rate a lot of art is simply an attempt to communicate something. It doesn’t do a whole lot of good for one person to have an experience or feeling and not try to share it with other people—especially if that experience bestows information that is useful in some way. So who gives a damn if you’re debasing the purity of an experience, because you’re getting something good in exchange—you are spreading an idea. I mean, nothing I could write in this post could come anywhere close to evoking what it felt like to see the splashing. So I bastardized the experience, so what? I still had it and remember it. But by writing about it, now other people might have a similar type of thing….

I’m fully aware that I myself have even made the opposite argument many a time, specifically to SK recently about not writing something down because I don’t want to sterilize or censor an experience just to make it presentable to other people. So maybe we all have certain things we want to keep pure…but for Christ’s sake, you gotta put some of your shit out there for others to consider, too.

The other interesting thing about it is it’s one more iteration of the “graffiti question”: how do you resolve the fact that graffiti, while it is undeniably art, is also an act of property destruction, which is not cool considering property laws are pretty crucial for a democracy to work. Graffiti could even be considered a form of splashing, since putting graffiti on some great work of architecture, like a church or a sculpture or something, is basically the same as what the Splasher is doing. So how do you resolve that? Is graffiti good or bad? And is splashing good or bad, given that it is basically a vandalization of graffiti? And, is splashing art?