His Way and the Highway
Guerrilla Artist Installs a Freeway Sign, and Nobody Notices
By Kristin Friedrich

In the last nine months, millions of drivers cruising north on the 110 Harbor Freeway have utilized a multi-colored, badge-shaped sign to help them transition to the northbound Interstate 5 freeway. The sign is unremarkable until you consider one factor: It's not supposed to be there, and it wasn't installed by a Caltrans employee. The freeway sign instead was erected by a Downtown artist, partly because he thought the area needed more signage, partly because he thought it would make a compelling art project. And he did it all in broad daylight, one morning last August. Now, after nine months with not a single public official noticing, Richard Ankrom is coming clean. "I remember getting lost in the '80s on that part of the freeway," Ankrom, 46, says. "And when I moved Downtown 10 years later, I figured out why." Confident that other drivers had the same problem, Ankrom, who also works as a sign maker, decided to address matters in his studio at the Brewery Art Complex. He researched the size and color specs of standard freeway signage, then purchased the appropriate aluminum which he shaped and treated. He brought paint swatches to roadside signs so he could best determine colors, then mixed his reds and blues to match. He even added a patina (a trick gleaned from his occasional work on movie and TV sets) so that his creations wouldn't look glaringly new. Ankrom chose the Third Street bridge for his functional/guerrilla art project because it was accessible from the street, it was close to the 5 freeway, and because that's the point where he usually got confused. His biggest challenge was obtaining the button-shaped reflectors for the route shield. Reflector tape is used these days, but Ankrom wanted his sign to match those already in place on the Third Street sign. It took him three months to track down the reflectors. Then he was ready to go. Move in, Rubber Ducky Ankrom first planned to dress in black and install his sign at night. Then, he reconsidered. "If what I'm doing is truly correct and righteous, I should do it in broad daylight," he surmised. He went to Home Depot instead, and bought a hardhat and reflective vest. On a quiet, gray Sunday morning last August, Ankrom parked his truck -- decorated with an "Aesthetic De Construction" placard -- on Third Street. With a bogus work order on hand in case anyone confronted him, he approached his chosen overpass. A handful of friends (including photographer Gary Leonard) were stationed nearby to chronicle the event with pictures and videotape. They communicated via walkie-talkie.The signal "Move in, Rubber Ducky!" meant the coast was clear. Ankrom climbed a ladder, scampered over the razor wire and was traversing the sign's catwalk in seconds. Only a pull-up handrail separated him from the speeding traffic two stories below. "I was nervous," Ankrom admits, "But I knew I had to seem calm and collected, just Johnny Lunchbucket putting up a sign." Ankrom affixed the word "North" and an "Interstate 5" route shield without a single misstep. He scampered back over the wire and into his truck, then he and his compatriots went to breakfast. The entire installation took 20 minutes. Ankrom has assembled the footage his friends shot into a 10-minute video, which he screens for visitors to his loft during Brewery Art Walks (it can also be viewed online at www.netbroadcaster.com/movies/ documentary/documentary.html). He has submitted the short to several film festivals, and is waiting to hear about a Chung King Road gallery show in Chinatown in coming months. Although friends have alerted him to other places with confusing signage, Ankrom isn't interested in a repeat performance. And now that his work has endured for the better part of a year, he's ready for the secret to get out. "I am a little disappointed that the colors are slightly off," he says, noting that the sign has faded a bit. "But all in all, it seemed like everything really came together on this one."
> Link to LA Downtown News Website, article

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Guerrilla Public Service: The Man Who Would Be Caltrans
By Paul Cullum

PASSING NORTH THROUGH DOWNTOWN ON THE 110 FREEWAY toward Pasadena, between the Third and Fourth Street overpasses, artist Richard Ankrom found himself suddenly confused by the lack of official signage for the 5 North exit. Not clearly labeled overhead like signs for I-5 South, those for the 5 North, which occur two miles later, are haphazardly stuck on a roadside traffic pole, an afterthought at best. Ankrom could have called Caltrans and officially complained, further burdening the beleaguered civic bureaucracy. But being an artist, he did the next best thing: He fixed it. That is to say, following explicit specifications he found on the Internet and verified in the field, he crafted a red-white-and-blue "5 shield" and green "North" sign out of 0.080 mm 5053 aluminum, covered it with zinc chromate primer and Pantene colors, added an "age patina" of gray paint, and even special-ordered button reflectors, which are discontinued and stockpiled in a warehouse in Tacoma, Washington. (He had to tell the pesky warehouse clerk it was for a movie -- not altogether untrue, as it turns out.) After stashing the sign and a ladder in the roadside shrubbery -- and stenciling the side of his truck with the logo "Aesthetic De-Construction" -- he parked on the Third Street bridge just north of the existing sign, set out two orange traffic cones, donned an orange safety vest and hardhat, and physically mounted his homemade handiwork (taking care to sign the back first). He even mocked up a phony invoice, in the event that anyone objected. Yet despite legitimate road crews working the same stretch of freeway, no one seemed to notice. Nor, in all probability, would they ever have, the sign having functioned perfectly fine since August 5, 2001, when he first erected it. Except that, being an artist, Ankrom felt compelled to document and display his actions in the form of a 10-minute installation video, which was shown at small gallery events and his own Brewery loft during the Art Walk two weeks ago, and has been posted on Netbroad caster.com since November. Opening on a GPS view of L.A.'s 527 miles of freeway, the video documents the entire artistic process from start to finish, culminating in the installation itself, which was witnessed by 11 observers (including the woman who once rescued the Chicken Boy statue from a downtown diner), three of whom were armed with video cameras. It also lists his accomplices by name, including the guy who gave him the haircut that made him look passably respectable, begging the question whether "criminal barberage" is a crime. And then, against a backdrop of Martin Denny cocktail jazz and Jerry Goldsmith's theme from In Like Flint, there is Ankrom himself, eyes glowing pink in the pre-dawn light, looking like Satan, proclaiming: "I have taken it upon myself to manufacture and install these missing guide signs to ease the confusion and traffic congestion at this section of the 110 freeway." Like the best art, almost nothing about this action was arbitrary. Interstate 5 links Los Angeles to the Pacific Northwest, where as a child in Washington state, Ankrom used to dream of the pulsing megalopolis which lay Oz-like at the other end of it. Disillusioned with two months of junior college, he hitchhiked to California, where he has been self-employed for the past 20 years -- as a commercial sign painter. (His work can be seen at Ross Dress for Less, in the Moulin Rouge section atop the parking garage at the Universal CityWalk and in several hundred feet of relief-wall lettering at the Santa Anita Racetrack, which he completed while on the end of a 90-foot snorkel lift.) As antecedents, he cites performance artists like Chris Burden, who once had himself nailed to the top of his Volkswagen, as well as De Stijl, a Dutch magazine and group co-founded by Mondrian, which advocated an art which would invisibly blend into its surroundings. "Essentially it's a conceptual piece," says Ankrom today from the imagined safety of his downtown loft. "It's such a broad swath -- it overlaps into performance and installation and public art and all these other things. I think the most interesting things are controversial. And I'm out on a limb too, because I don't know where I'm going to go with this now. But this is my idea of art. Art should be incorporated more into the government's system of design and concept." He christens this new utilitarian commando aesthetic "Guerrilla Public Service." Ankrom's past work generally incorporates the element of social critique. He has fashioned a series of acrylic hatchets, axes and medieval broadswords featuring flower petals suspended in the transparent blades. In response to the L.A. riots, he created a number of neon Taser guns, many with S/M overtones, which used active electric arcs. And long before the recent power crisis, he envisioned an art completely autonomous from the power grid, in the form of a satellite which would collect solar energy and microwave it back to a sculpture installation on Earth. (He plans to discuss the project with an upcoming delegation from the French consulate.) But it's his recent additions to the 110 freeway, once known as the Grand Army of the Republic Highway between here and Long Beach, which currently preoccupy him -- in no small part due to the legal ramifications which still remain largely unexplored. "I think the worst thing they could charge me with would be trespassing and defacing property, which I believe are still misdemeanors," he says. "But whatever the consequences are, they are. And that would again be part of the documentation of this thing. Even if I went to court, I'd get a public attorney, get a video-friendly judge, and videotape that. I wouldn't be able to pay the fine, so I'd have to do public service, which is sort of what I'm doing anyway. So it all comes full circle. But I would think if they were smart they wouldn't touch it, because it would only make them look worse. "I really wasn't trying to give Caltrans a black eye," he insists. "It's too easy." > Link to LA Weekly Website, article

Net Art and the Practice of Transgression
by sabater

Mythologies, in the form of religions, may not be as affective in our society as they are in other countries, but mythologies, albeit secular ones, rule our lives. As Roland Barthes said, "everything can be a myth, provided it is conveyed by a discourse." In other words, there are myths anywhere there is representation. Or put another way, anywhere there is representation, there is a taboo, a law, a commandment, waiting to be broken and transgressed. Whenever I think about transgressive art, I think about Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa Bernini was commissioned to depict the saint in one of the most sacred moments of Catholic life æ Saint Teresa's transverberation; of one of the early moments in her long journey to being one with God. With the voluptuousness of the statue's lips, the intricacy of the robe, even the Cupid-like qualities of the angel piercing the saint's heart as she swoons, Bernini seems to give more importance to the carnality and sensuality of the mystic experience than to its sacredness. The mystic experience becomes polluted with the language of voluptuousness and sensuality chiseled into the curves and folds of the statue. The statue becomes in itself a rendition of the equivocal representation of rapture. What makes Bernini's work all the more interesting is the fact that the saint's life was as convoluted as the folds he chiseled on the statue's robe. Saint Teresa was always crossing a line --transgressing-- with her writings and her life and that is why she was both feared and revered. It was for her actions that she was recognized not for something innate in her. As far as I remember, she was actually born of Jewish convertos (as well as San Juan de la Cruz --a coincidence that does not escape a lot of scholars who believe their mysticism owes more to Jewish than Catholic traditions). She spent her life trying to prove how little she knew about things, like canon law or philosophy. All the while, she became one of the most powerful Abbesses in Spain and one of the most influential writers of her time. Actually, for one who spoke little of herself, she was and still is one of the most powerful influences in the culture and history of Spain and of all Christendom. This takes me to what seems to escape many when speaking about transgression: Transgressors need to know how to speak the structures that they set to transgress. Saint Teresa was very aware of the danger she was in for her mystic raptures. On the one hand she describes in her poems the kind of personal relationship that goes counter to the mediated God of the Catholic Church. On the other hand, she was an example of what the Reformist movement deemed as heretic, given the eroticism in mystic rapture. Either way, she was viewed as a threat. Nevertheless, she managed to propagate her version of Catholicism through one of the most intense monastic and missionary campaigns of the Counterreformation. That she managed to do this from within the confines of the Spanish Inquisition proves that the most effective transgressions are so profound that, unless there is a discursive or representational crisis, they hardly go noticed. In his book On Erotism, Georges Bataille talks about this element in transgression: Compared to work, transgression is a game. In the world of play, philosophy disintegrates. If transgression became the foundation-stone of philosophy ? silent contemplation would have to be substituted with language. This is the contemplation of being at the pinnacle of being. If myth is representation (an idea-in-form), then transgression is a game of representation (an idea transformed); but not one in which the act is described. A transgression occurs when the myth is usurped and its connection to both its signifier (meaning) and signified (content) is broken. That is why, for art to be transgressive, it has to have a certain degree of openness to allow for actions and interpretations that cross the line, reversing not only the order of things but reversing the order of power as well. And to reverse the order of things and power, the transgressor really has to be in touch with that power structure. One great example is the recent CalTrans road-sign dupe created by artist Richard Ankrom (ankrom.org). Actually, it is not a dupe in the sense of creating confusion, it is a dupe because he set out to correct a confusion on his own accord and not by waiting for Caltrans to take action. This "guerilla public service", as Ankrom calls it, is a way to spread "the benefits of the artistic endeavor in everyday life, what we see, don't see and take for granted". Ankrom could have protested the lack of signage or even defaced or further confused what CalTrans already has there as an act of subversion or even revolt. But what he did was even sneakier: He took matters into his own hands and did what the system would not do at all æcreate a road sign to easily explain the exit at an intersection. What I love about this guerrilla public service project is that Ankrom learned exactly how to make and install his road signs so that the project would be seamless with the official signage. From experimenting with Pantone colors, to measuring the site and even going so far as to dress up like a CalTrans worker in order to walk over the sign expanse; every single step of the way was a necessary learning experience. Ankrom was successful because he learned how to sign and speak fluent "Caltrans-ese" through his road paintings and installations. He found and opening, a gap in the system and proceeded to bring attention to the gap by becoming an agent of the system he wanted to change. His sign was so perfect that neither the motorists, not the agency in charge of signage, really saw the "error" until it was pointed to them. Are there any instances of transgressive works in the NetArt world? What is an artist to use in order to transgress the "order, law and commandments" of the Internet? Marc Anderssen created with Netscape a way to naturalize the Internet by providing a structure, what Barthes would call "a second-order semiological system" that could create the semblance of order out of the chaos of the Internet. Netscape and all the subsequent browsers became the gateway to the myth of the World Wide Web: The text, images and sounds that you can read, see and hear become tangible objects through the browser. It delivers the web as a space, a place, a domain, a community. It creates an articulated representation of the Internet, making it natural, even common place. Almost as if to presage browsers, Barthes wrote: Myth is a pure ideographic system, where the forms are still motivated by the concept which they represent while not yet, by a long way, covering the sum of its possibilities for representation. Some of the NetArt that I find most interesting is the one that can use the system --the data streams, the network, the technology, the language-- to reveal a whole new way of looking and interacting within the structures of the Internet. The early browser art of JODI and Mark Napier are examples of works that sought to destroy the semblance of order that the browsers gave to the Internet. As a space for myth the browser becomes the first place for transgressing all the laws and commandments of the Web and Internet. Still, it does not mean that a web transgression needs a high level of programming. One of the biggest mythical structures of the Internet is the myth of WYSIWYG æwhat you see (truth) is (true) what you get (and therefore truthful). The myth of WYSIWYG has not been better exploited by any other group than ®?ark. They have set out to mimic perfectly the WTOs web site to the point that WTO supporters do not recognize the difference. They've usurped a domain, infringed on copyright and even sent their YesMen "representatives" to events in order to speak about global trading issues. ®?ark is one of the most powerful and successful examples of how conceptual art can transcend the representation of the concept to become the concept itself. In other words, ®?ark biggest transgression is that it does not only comprehend the myth and sets out to trangress it, ®?ark has become a myth. A smaller myth-making project is the Google Adwords Happening. I particularly like this project because it was so obvious, that nobody had tried it before. Adwords have been around for a while in Yahoo! and Amazon but, because they are there all the time, nobody pays attention to them. They are the " what-goes-without-saying" of the Internet. Seemingly less important than a banner ad, they purport to be gateways to information that, in this case, a googler might be seeking æthat is, until Christophe Bruno started meddling with them. He showed how easy it is to turn the Google site into raw material for his poetic pursuits. By playing with these forms of representation with no code, no software, just words and a few bucks he showed how the myth of WYSIWYG can be turned into art. Every system of power has its own mythology æits own way of expressing power. Power is a form of speech, a discourse, a representation. To counter power, own needs to transgress its system of representation by revealing its myth-making structures. In a subversion, or protest a subject pits itself in a duality against the 'offending' power. In other words, it is a defensive mode. In a transgression, the is no defense --only broken laws, commandments, taboos. The subject crosses the boundaries set forth by the myth, and in the process, both become polluted.
In a transgression there are no winners, no losers just maculated myths.