Reflections: Street Art ≅ POD.

This is less a practical guide on either street art or print-on-demand (POD) and more my own observations on how and why Wheat Twins can operate within both spheres. What I’ve found is that there’s a natural affinity between street art and POD. There are some areas for potential friction but I’ll leave that topic for another post. For now, I’ll focus on what works between the two.

The affinity between street art and POD rides on the easy fit between street art production with the capabilities of POD. If one is already making street art, incorporating POD into that practice is not only unobtrusive but also a neat way to expand the practice into new digital and physical spaces. Up to now, these spaces were not easy expansions to street art but were additions that required serious work. At the same time, it’s not clearly as obvious why the movement from street art into POD would occur in the reverse direction, i.e. from POD into street art. The reason for this is that POD is less a genre and culture than it is a mechanism and infrastructure. POD facilitates activity rather than generating it. The point here is that the manner in which the mechanisms of POD are deployed is the reason why POD can very easily be adopted for the purposes of making art. I’ll break down the features that make this process not only easy but very likely.

The long-tail nature of POD isn’t, as of yet, in the uniqueness of the base products onto which graphics are printed. We might call these base products templates or patterns. In the industry, they’re usually referred to as “blanks.” Although POD relies heavily on digital fabrication techniques, each t-shirt, for instance, isn’t a wholly customizable product that’s unique from other t-shirts. What matters isn’t so much the t-shirt as t-shirt, but the t-shirt as a vehicle for the graphic that’s printed on it. The product becomes a pattern that can have many variations, or permutations.

More concretely, a particular blank t-shirt that’s used as a template or pattern is first chosen and fixed. Onto that template, various graphics can be added. In this way, the template can’t be escaped by any of the permutations that comprise its POD set. This feature is what makes POD effective and possible. In POD, what matters is how one configures and reconfigures the permutations within a given pattern. These permutations often function graphically. Similarly, street art heavily relies on industrial or commercial means of production for the goal of graphically delivering its content or message. And like POD, these messages aren't mass-produced in bulk, but are usually made to serve particular instantiations.

I do want to add that mural art, including non-stenciled graffiti, is very much a part of street art along with certain forms of three-dimensional installation including mosaics, tiling, found-objects, landscaping, and other urban interventions. However, the dominant forms of “street art” seem to share much more in common with Andy Warhol’s explorations of commercial techniques of image reproduction than to the frescoes by Michelangelo or Fra Angelico despite the fact that it's the latter two who painted on buildings. The uniqueness of a fresco by Fra Angelico is partly in the unrepeatability of the instance in which the artist’s hand applies pigment onto a freshly plastered wall, and very crucially, all before the plaster dries and sets. In a fresco, the image is integrated into the material surface of the plaster in a manner that is substantially tied to it, at least more so than work made by wheat pasting or stenciling.

On the other hand, street art's reliance on quickly deployable means of production leads to a focus on the graphic, or “message,” over the particular surface. In the case of POD, the blank serves as the platform to the message. Here, the final product is the integrated instantiation of the message with the blank. In this product, the message takes the leading role in identifying it as a particular “work.” In the case of street art, this “product”—the POD equivalent of the printed t-shirt—is the base wall, architecture, pavement, subway car, or street furniture that integrates with the “message” and hosts it. The diversity possible in the type of platform utilized allows the “message,” or “content,” to take precedence over the platform that serves to host it. Nearly anything can become host to the “message.” Adding to this, the iterative nature of street art takes precedence over the singular instantiation of a work—the work takes shape across multiple iterations across different sites. Many street art techniques are repeatable by nature, and often a work of street art will appear as one in a series. Iterations of the same “work,” or "pattern," multiply across many different sites within a city, and even across many different cities around the world.

In this way, both street art and POD function as media that’s broadcast to an audience. This is why and how POD can become another medium by which to continue making art. At the same time, the immediacy of POD as a medium gives it a hyper iterative quality with the potential to be even more sensitive to its public reception. And crucially, the physical instantiations of POD as real products satisfy the desire to find physical expression in time and space for ideas that are otherwise only images. To sum, POD has been an exciting venture for Wheat Twins. We hope to continue to use this channel as an integral part of our on-going art making. 

Thank you and God bless.