Local man documents graffiti in Champaign-Urbana

Posted in ARTS by Dylan Heath on Wednesday, February 2, 2011 at 2:00 pm

Johnny Storm became fascinated with a tag spread out across Champaign/Urbana, after seeing it over and over again. In June he named it the Downtown Smiler and started taking pictures and posting them to a Google map. Since then, he has collected over 50 tags throughout the area. In his interview he talks about local taggers and his hopes for an online collaboration for graffiti artists and observers alike.

Smile Politely: When was the first time you saw it [the Smiler tag]?

Johnny Storm: The first time I saw the Smiley it was at the FedEx box next to Chicago Loan and Title downtown. At the Cowboy Monkey, there was a massive version of this tag just drawn on the wall with a very large sharpie. It got me thinking, "How risky is this process?" This is a pretty large tag and it was a little bit involved. If you're good at making the tag, and he probably practiced it many, many, many times, then I guess it wouldn't take too long, but this is Cowboy Monkey — it's pretty public. It got me to thinking about the direction things might be taking. Was he moving from less risky tags to more risky tags? Was he changing his target?

SP: What was the first time you decided, "Instead of just admiring the Smiley I'm going to take pictures of it"?

JS: I was already taking pictures when I began actively walking around looking for these things. Shifting from merely taking pictures and keeping them for myself, I was discussing with our janitor at the office [Pavlov Media] the sightings that we had both seen. Maybe a few days later I sat down and took everything that I had and started placing it on the Google map. I thought it only natural to make it an open collaboration project so that anyone else who had seen the tag might be able to go ahead and put it up as well.

SP: What did the janitor have to say about the tag, as somebody who would potentially be the person to clean them up?

JS: He admired them, actually. We both did. I think that was our common point of interest there. We both liked the placement of the tags. The tag itself is unique and interesting. We found it subtle.

SP: What was it about this specific tag that drew you in?

JS: Well, let me explain that by contrasting it with another tag. I don't know if you've seen the tag Star. It's the word star with an inverted pentagram not encircled. Given how whimsical the tag has become over time, it's almost no doubt she is female, probably young. I'm sure she's a student or was a student. She keeps adding more hearts, more smiley faces, more curly Q's, more interesting flowers everywhere. She is really developing it. Rather than quality you got the feeling she was going for quantity, which is a strategy. I don't think I can admire that quite as much as I did with the Smiler. The Smiler always seemed well placed, well thought out. I could appreciate the time and effort he went into deciding where was the most foot traffic, what is the best place to have it seen. If I were to point to anyone who is the most prolific in town it would probably be her by shear numbers. At the time the Smiler struck me as being probably second most prolific. In earlier years, the Robot was probably the most prolific in town. I think Star has most everyone beat hands down. I don't necessarily consider it good tagging, but it's interesting.

SP: What I find interesting about the Smiler is you can tell that it's something this person has drawn over and over and over again. They've got it perfectly down.

JS: Every copy is impeccable, absolutely impeccable. A couple of my co-workers one night thought it would be funny to draw one on my white board. I did a double take when I walked in the next day. Here I had been chasing him around for the last few weeks and one shows up on my board. The gut reaction is inevitable, you can't help it. But as soon as the brain takes over you can say, "How likely is it that this guy broke into my office or at least snuck into my office and found my desk and put . . ." That's magical thinking.

SP: Do you find yourself finding other tags that interested you? Do they just kind of pop up everywhere you go?

JS: I think over time I started noticing Star coming more to the sidewalks and more to the streets, less to the alleyways. I really haven't seen any really significant pieces outside of the one you've covered [Paradox]. Those are specifically minimalist for a reason of course. I think the last one that I saw that seemed to be occurring more and more often was what appeared to be a rather worried looking face with a stick of TNT in between its teeth. It was stacked up over and over again by a person with a paint marker. That had started to pop up more and more often. There were probably a couple that I began to see pop up more and more. Kay Why [also written as KY] much more sporadic than any of the others.

SP: I've seen that one a lot in Downtown Urbana.

JS: Oh yeah, absolutely. It seems to be more in the dark places in Champaign but it seems to be more prevalent in Urbana. I could be wrong about that. One of the worst things in trying to document this stuff in the ways that I had been is that you're looking for patterns that might explain where this person is going or where they maybe live. You're trying to figure out something about them. Unfortunately, at the end of the day it seems more likely that what you're actually discovering is where you've been and what you've seen.

SP: Do you have any interest in branching out your pictures to other tags?

JS: Actually, I've considered it. One of the troubles with the organization of something like that is how to go about it. Take something like an open collaboration Google map and devote it to a single tag. It's quite easy for everyone to recognize the tag. Everyone can contribute. Everyone takes a picture, uploads it with their cell phone and then posts it on the map.

SP: How long have you been doing this?

JS: I would say I started taking the pictures of the Smiler tags in June and I probably also started posting them to the map in June. I think you have to be a pedestrian when you're looking for these things, particularly with the Smiler. It always appeared to me that he meant for these tags to be for pedestrians anyway. So he put them in places where pedestrians were most likely to see them.

SP: Do you plan on going on walks specifically to find Smiler and take pictures or do you just walk around and happen to see them?

JS: Well, both, but during my most productive period of finding all these tags I absolutely would go out with the express intention of finding them. Part of the reason was for my own sanity. When I was not trying to look for them [tags] and happened to notice one I would certainly take the time to document it. But then I would immediately shut that part of myself off again so I wasn't paranoid running around looking for tags.

SP: Yeah, I know what you mean by that. I think I've got a few of my friends trained to where if I run off they know it's because I saw a tag across the street.

JS: It will make you crazy after awhile. It's that feeling of tumbling down the rabbit hole in a way. You start with one and it opens this doorway and you're not necessarily expecting it and there it is and you can't really ignore it anymore after that.

SP: That almost seems like the point of graffiti; it's kind of a special thing that you really don't get until you start looking for it.

JS: Yeah, it's true, but at the same time it finds its way in most people's subconscious as well. When you have a particular piece that seems especially poignant and timely or just happens to be absolutely beautiful you really can't help but stop and take notice. And, even if you haven't, the image will tend to stick with you and chances are if you were to see another one just like it you would absolutely recognize it later; you couldn't help but do so.

SP: I've noticed a lot of the Smilers are associated with politically motivated taglines.

JS: Yes, it's true he does involve a lot of interesting quotes. He clearly has a left wing activist message. Maybe that was the other thing that drew me to the Smiler as well. Not only was he trying to spread his tag, he also had something to say. When you attach the message to such a strong symbol the message stands undiminished for a very long time in people's minds. He seems to have had a knack for being able to do this. Or he worked it out as he went. Ether is a likely possibility, I suppose.

SP: Is this something that you've ever done? Have you every scrawled your name across a wall?

JS: Oh . . . hmm . . . good questions. I would say, I've always had a love of graffiti, but I'm not sure I've really made a point to actually participate. I'm not sure if that's because I simply felt like I didn't have anything to say or perhaps because I felt like I was more capable of expressing myself in other mediums. It's not to say I haven't written on walls before. I remember one time I was in grade school and I was teaching some kids, younger than I, the Greek alphabet. I was with this rock writing on the brick wall on the side of this gymnasium. I didn't realize it at the time but a cop car had slowly pulled onto the black top and crept all the way behind me across the entire school yard and then turned on his lights behind me. I thought, "My god, what in the hell is this. Oh, it's you. Here we are." I argued that it was merely a rock and I was writing on the side of the building. I think he probably would have made it a point of taking me back to my house and escorting me to my mother but then he saw what I was writing on the wall and just told me to get the hell out of there.

SP: Really more of a scare tactic than anything else.

JS: I've never been particularly fond of police for any reason. I can commiserate with graffiti artists. However I have always been interested in knowing what graffiti artists think about the process of erasure. I would love to see a book entirely devoted to erasure. I'm fascinated by the idea. It's sort of Zen.

SP: [Paradox's] "The Cake is a Lie" tag was covered over with white paint. I took a picture of that and sent it to him and he was like, "Oh well. Hopefully someone will do something with that."

JS: That's the way the ball bounces, but now it's ready for someone else to do something with it. It's fascinating. I'm satisfied to be able to have the body of work that I do have. I became even more satisfied with it once I started finding some of the pieces that I had documented only weeks before disappearing left and right. It's only a matter of time.

SP: Are you finished with this project?

JS: I would like to revisit it at some point. My time is really too distributed right now to focus on it the way I would like to. If I were to get the opportunity to sort of start back up again I would probably invest my time in creating a website that would actually allow many different tags in town to be documented with complete history with who found them and that sort of thing. Maybe even a place for street artists themselves to anonymously post messages. I think that would be an interesting resource to have in town. Something that could stay at the grass roots level perhaps. And perhaps it could be something more on a national level as well I suppose.