Evol Deeds

Evol wrote me back, and as the first person to inquire about the tags, I’ve been generously offered (and thus, you have been generously offered) an exclusive peek at the project's website, which will launch on April 10th.

The original tag inspired me on multiple levels—the text alone, “New York City is money,” seemed to raise important questions. Its placement on a police barricade led me to infer each tag was made to comment on the specific site on which it was installed. The concept of evil deeds seemed to speak to those committed by the city itself.

Ironically—and perhaps sadly—none of these elements appear to be central to the project at all. Instead Evol seems interested in the tags for their physical properties as a canvas, opting to approach them quite formally. The majority of the tags depicted on the creator's website are adorned with scribbles, Evol's name, and superficial social commentary (e.g., Vote and Fuck War). In fact, the variety of the images and texts adorning the tags (and the haste with which they were rendered) leads me to believe they are inconsequential, somehow unmotivated by the creator’s intent.

Evol's primary interest (as detailed in the "project information"section of the website) appears to be that the tags can act as a friendly transmission medium, easily removed from their surroundings and kept by passersby; that others can easily create work on a similarly transient substrate, spreading Evol's idea; and that because they inflict little damage upon the sites on which they are placed, the choice to employ shipping tags presents little legal risk.

All of these motivations seem unsure, naive, and well, very reminiscent of undergraduate art school work. They also seem to ignore the fact that much of what empowers street art is precisely its extralegality: work imposed on a privately owned environment becomes imbued with an innate urgency, an innate critique.

While I’m disappointed to find the richness I expected wasn’t fully realized by the project as a whole, I remain appreciative of Evol’s public gesture, which achieved just what it should have: the tag I saw delicately—yet decidedly—affected my day.