From Truth Out: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/15986-jilly-ballistic-and-the-new-aesthetic-of-dissent
By Rebecca Carter
Sunday, 05 May 2013
Irreverence is a powerful tool, a tool that can combat the absurd and help you to stay sane when surrounded by absurdity. As one of the greatest minds of our time, Lewis Black once said: “Patriotism and religion are only good and only in balance if they have a sense of humor. And when they don’t, things go awry. All we have to do is look at our enemy” – he meant al-Qaeda – “that is a group that does not have a sense of humor. That’s what happens when you get all wrapped up in what you believe in and no one is going ‘haha,’ and then you’re screwed.”
And even if we are screwed, at least we can laugh at ourselves, and that’s the first step to becoming unscrewed, right?
Street artists in particular provide that mirror to reflect society’s absurdity back on itself. From Basquiat to Banksy, they provide those little messages hidden in plain sight that break the fourth wall of your day-to-day life and have the power to refocus your perspective, maybe help you look at advertising a different way or make you think a little bit more about whom the police are stopping to search and why. Even the simplest tag of a name on a wall becomes a sociopolitical statement, a reclaiming of private space for the public, an individual voice among the masses demanding to be noticed. When you add the guerilla factor of illegality to the equation, it is the boldness of the act of street art itself that has made it such a fertile ground for challenging social norms.
Hailing from New York City, the birthplace of modern street art, Jilly Ballistic is among the current wave making noise in the street art world. Using the imagery of the Internet error message that has become ingrained in our cultural lexicon, she has been transforming the subways of New York City and Brooklyn into a place where no mainstream advertising is safe and you might end up sitting next to a gas-masked, World War II-era chorus girl on the G train.
So this is probably a painfully obnoxious question to be asked as an artist, but for the sake of context, how did you start out as an artist?
I had no formal training as a visual artist, but as a fiction writer. A very broke fiction writer. So to promote the books I had written, I took to spray-painting excerpts on found objects in the street. Trash, basically. Discarded couches and broken stoves, for example. The concept went over well, and I sold books. But during that process, I came to love this public form of communication. I developed more and more ideas and went about ways of making them a reality.
Who or what were some of your early inspirations?
Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger are my knee-jerk responses. As is Nabokov. But New York City itself is a huge influence and inspiration. I was born and raised here, so I may be a little biased in saying it is a great environment, literally. Most of my work is site-specific and I enjoy working along with an environment most. I don’t intend to cover it. Whatever I paste up has a purpose for being there.
Is there a danger element to being a street artist? Is there a fear of getting caught?
It’s laughable that what I do is considered illegal. Looks like paper is still a very powerful thing!
Continue reading at: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/15986-jilly-ballistic-and-the-new-aesthetic-of-dissent
