Street he(art): Street art on the Strand has history, message and meaning

This started at a red light, in 5 o’clock traffic, at a busy interchange, with a werewolf staring at me.

It was the classic Lon Chaney Jr. style werewolf. It had been painted from a stencil on a utility box. It made me smile. I remembered those great old monster movies. I thought, “Who did this? Why? What does it mean? Was it meant to lighten the banality of bumper-to-bumper traffic? Was it a statement on pop culture?”

Utility boxes are those dull gray or green boxes you see on street corners housing important electrical stuff. They usually go unnoticed. Until of course, you paint a stencil of a monster on them. Then they scream, ‘Look at me and think about this awhile.’

I began to see different images – young women and celebrities and animals and monsters and vintage pinups and cupids with Uzis. They were on those utility boxes, but also electric poles and the backs of street signs and beach accesses and seawalls. I became obsessed with searching for them.

This street art didn’t appear to be malicious. It simply seemed like it wanted to be seen, like the street was an open air gallery. Regardless, its existence is illegal, and the act of putting it up is considered malicious damage of property.

I understand the law, but I also know there’s a distinction between someone throwing up some scribbled spray paint and what I was seeing. Street artists are splashing art along the Grand Strand’s streets, and I needed to know more.

The werewolf wasn’t signed, but other pieces were. His art used human subjects, usually women. It was stencil or poster art with striking two- or three-color designs.

I needed to find him. I asked local gallery artists. I asked surfers who surfed near a piece he did at a beach access.

Finally, I tracked him down online, and we agreed to meet. It was like slowly approaching a wild deer. We exchanged messages a few times. Then, it stopped, like a branch cracked under my foot. The deer sprang off.

Time passed. Art faded, got defaced, ripped down, buffed out and tagged over with sloppy spray paint. I felt the itch to reach out to King Max again. I needed to discover something beautiful and defenseless, like an endangered species, before it was gone forever.

I would become the deer and learn about street art in the classroom and the studio from two pros. I enlisted Brian “Cat” Taylor, an art instructor at Coastal Carolina University and the founder of Cult .45 (a street art crew from Savannah, Ga.), and Blake Brown, a local freelance advertiser, artist and a member of the street art scenes in Charlotte and Charleston.

I’ll need to know the basics before I go out on the streets and find the ghost who calls himself King Max.

Pretty Vandalism

Out at CCU, on my way to meet with Taylor, I notice a HVAC building festooned with art. Five walls painted with five different murals. Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” highlights one wall. The geometry of Piet Mondrian’s “Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue” lines another wall. On the other three – Hamlet speaks to Yorick’s skull, Miles Davis plays blue jazz, and the Greek muses whisper to passersby.

It wasn’t street art, but it sure felt like it, and Taylor was to blame. I find the culprit in CCU’s sculpture and hot-works courtyard. Behind us, a revolution is brewing on the curved courtyard wall as working-class metalworkers stand against a backdrop of fiery reds, oranges and yellows.

Taylor designed all of these murals, and his students painted them. He points to the people portraying the metal workers on the mural and says, “We used student athletes as models for this one.”

For CCU, it’s all so revelatory and revolutionary, bringing the streets into the classroom.

“I teach them the style and history of street art,” Taylor says. “I don’t teach them how to sneak around at night and do it.”

He doesn’t need to. Not only have Taylor’s students created the six murals on campus, they’ve also painted a whole wall of The Coop Bar & Grill on S.C. 544 in varying street art styles.

I guess if you want to get technical, you can trace graffiti back to cave drawings, but it really starts form as a art/ambiguous messaging system during WWII when “Kilroy Was Here” began to be written along crude drawings of a long-nosed man peering over a wall.

I join Taylor for one of his classes, and he schools me as I’m surrounded by college students sketching on easels.

“Here’s a quick history for you. Graffiti is a text-based artwork. A guy named Cornbread from Philadelphia was the first to really do it. Then, TAKI 183 started it in New York in the ‘60s ” says Taylor. “Street art uses pictures and words and all forms of sculptures, wheatpastes, stickers, paints and really everything else. It’s like graffiti grew up and became street art.”

Taylor tells me about Blek le Rat – a Parisian who came to New York in the ‘70s and witnessed the possibilities of graffiti, a voice for the voiceless, art for the everyman. When he returned to Paris, le Rat started to make stencils of rats and painted them everywhere.

“He’d started doing larger stencils for murals on butcher paper,” Taylor says. “He’s really the father of modern street art.”

The most well-known street artist today, Banksy, has said, “Every time I think I’ve painted something slightly original, I find out that Blek Le Rat has done it as well, only 20 years earlier.”

Graffiti still exists, but we’ve moved into a post-graffiti world – a world where street artists can become millionaires. Banksy is a prime example of how guerilla marketing can result in a street artist developing a brand. He’s looked at as street art 101. Even a graffiti novice knows Banksy, because he uses familiar images and twists them according to his targeted statement. Like him or not, his influence is unquestionable.

Taylor has doubts about Banksy’s continuing impact. During Banksy’s new Dismaland installation in England, he invited other artists to participate and charged admission to visitors of the attraction.

“At some point, you’re not an artist anymore, you’re a curator,” says Taylor. “All of Banksy’s new stuff is fun, but it’s not real or lasting. It’s plastic, indicative of today’s click-and-go society. His old stuff had heart. It was raw and real.”

Raw and real seems to be what’s fleshing itself out on the Grand Strand. It made me remember a time from my youth, in the ‘90s, when I started seeing these strange stickers popping up in different bars and on street signs all over town. These stickers had a picture of the professional wrestler, Andre the Giant, and written on the sticker was the phrase, “André the Giant Has a Posse.”

They were strange and funny and something about them stayed with you.

Shepard Fairey, an artist from Charleston, was responsible for the sticker campaign, and the message would later morph into the iconic Obey campaign. Taylor says, “Shepard was away at college when he made those stickers, and he sent them to all his buddies in Charleston to put them up everywhere. They just spread.”

In a 2004 interview for the American Institute of Graphic Arts, Fairey said of the stickers, “At first I was only thinking about the response from my clique. … The fact that a larger segment of the public would not only notice, but investigate, the unexplained appearance of the stickers was something I had not contemplated. When I started to see reactions and consider the sociological forces at work surrounding the use of public space and the insertion of a very eye-catching but ambiguous image, I began to think there was the potential to create a phenomenon.”

The randomness of the sticker attached to the zeitgeist, the curiosity of the time. It worked for Shepard. He has since gone on to start a guerilla marketing firm, clothing line, design company and ad agency. He did a nine-story high mural of Nelson Mandela in South Africa, and the HOPE campaign poster for Barack Obama.

These are the capabilities of street art. It’s not just thumbing your nose at the system. It’s bigger than that. It can be about social and political awareness or the investigation of the intangible or the creation of ambiguity or the push of a phenomenon.

“I started Cult .45 when I was in the Savannah College of Art and Design as a way to work with other artists and use street art as a weapon of the mind,” says Taylor.

The crew uses a sheep or lamb’s head motif in their art, and they’ve put pieces all over the world.

“I have a piece on the Great Wall of China, and I’ve never been there. During the war, soldiers were putting my stickers on their humvees. Anytime I have friends traveling somewhere, I’ll still send stuff with them to put up.”

Throwing-Up and Growing Up

Just to keep you in the know, throw-up is like a street artist’s signature. These signature styles seem to be moving in two directions along the Grand Strand – playful cartoonish work and personal artwork. They’re usually stencils or posters, and a lot of this artwork appears to have evolved over the years.

“A lot of the stuff you’re seeing in town isn’t original. Those stencils are on Google,” Blake Brown says when I stop by his home studio. “But it’s getting better. I’ve seen new work out there.”

“There’s always a kid who wants to write his name on every mailbox down the street with a sharpie,” Taylor says. “Eventually he’ll add a character to it. Maybe it’s someone else character. It’s a growth spurt. They don’t know any better. At some point, someone will point out they’re promoting someone else’s art. It takes time.”

Around the Grand Strand, you’ll see the occasional free-hand graffiti, but street art is a different animal. Like Taylor was telling us, it’s a mixed media, using varied techniques. If you strap on your street art spectacles, you might spot a poster stuck up with wheatpaste or a painted stencil or a graphically designed sticker or a woodblock installation (a piece of posted wooden artwork).

If you go to the cities around us – Charleston, Wilmington, Savannah, Charlotte – you might see murals, mosaic tiling, yarn bombing (wrapping stuff in yarn), billboard/advertising manipulation, street sculptures and installations. LED lights have begun to bring the art to life, and street art is becoming even more temporary as video mapping allows artists to throw patterned light projections on buildings.

“I’ve walked up in broad daylight and put up a piece on a building in a hipster neighborhood in Charleston. People stopped and watched. They thought I was supposed to be doing it,” says Brown. “And Charlotte is always a great city for art.”

“It’s hard to do work here because it’s all highways. It’s easier to do work in a walking town like Charlotte,” says Taylor. “A parked car is a calling card that you’re up to something. In a walking town, you can drop your backpack in some bushes and walk away.”

“That’s the thing about street art,” Brown says. “It can be murals or stencils or posters. It can be simple like stickers or something elemental like tiles. Whether it’s graphic design or painting, you just need to be original and have something to say. A lot of people thought Jackson Pollock was just slinging paint, but he was the first mother****er to do it.”

We Built This City with Paint and Rollers

Last year, Myrtle Beach cracked down on graffiti by passing an ordinance requiring property owners to remove it within 48 hours of notice or the city can put a lien on their property. This year, the Waccamaw Riverkeepers received a grant to initiate the Graffiti Removal Intervention and Prevention (G.R.I.P.) program. The program buffs or paints over graffiti at boat landings.

“Most police will give you the Broken Window Theory,” says Taylor. “If you let a broken window go, it leads to graffiti, and graffiti leads to drugs and drugs lead to other crimes and on and on. They’ll tell you the real estate prices will fall and nobody will want to live there or visit, but the fact is if street art is done beautifully, the prices of homes will go up because successful people with ideas want to live around art and ideas and creativity.”

Mark Kruea, Myrtle Beach’s public information officer, didn’t mention a Broken Window Theory when I discussed street art with him, but he did say, “We always want to keep our family-friendly image in mind. Some people get upset by slogans on T-shirts at the beachwear shops, so I can’t imagine what would be said about street art.”

That’s not stopping other places across America beginning to accept and integrate street art into their urban evolution. Boston, Seattle, Salt Lake City and cities all over California have embraced their local artists by starting utility box art campaigns. Columbia, Mo., doesn’t scream art town, but even they’ve invited artists to turn their downtown traffic signal boxes into objects of art.

The Jacksonville, Fla., Cultural Council created a public art project which gives local artists access to not only utility boxes but Skyway supports, bike racks, benches and outdoor sculptures. The goal appears to be replacing the drab public areas with artwork for the public, by the public.

“First of all, it’s no longer street art if you get paid for it or you have someone’s permission,” says Taylor. “Murals and commissioned work are great, but it separates the artist from the art. Street art is 100 percent the artist, but we all have to grow up and evolve.”

And how does Myrtle Beach feel about participating in their local artists’ evolution?

“We had a few councils that talked about these sorts of things a few years ago, but we haven’t considered it lately,” Kruea says. “Some things should blend into the background and become invisible, not everything has to be painted in a different way. We’re not opposed to working with local artists. If you look down on Main Street, artists decorated the vacant storefronts.”

“I follow those initiatives like Jacksonville on Instagram,” says Brown. “Sure, it’s a rush to go and do it at night, but utility boxes are an eyesore. Advertisements force products down your throat. I love the artists who are changing the way we see things or manipulating advertising to make statements. It doesn’t make sense that cities see art as the problem.”

Because of the art on utility boxes in Surfside Beach, I asked them if they’d ever considered a program that incorporated local artists decorating utility and traffic boxes. I received an email in response from Town Administrator Micki Fellner stating, “We encouraged local businesses to incorporate nostalgic murals into their own properties. It was never considered for utility or traffic boxes as the town does not own them.”

This does leave property owners with some freedom to decorate within Surfside city limits, but what these community leaders are doing in initiating these various art programs are innovative and the stuff that draws attention to your town for its innovation. It gives the landscape more energy and just makes the place more attractive. Plus, it decreases the instances of graffiti.

But Kruea would say, “Freestyle art falls into the graffiti family,” and according to Myrtle Beach’s strong anti-graffiti ordinance, it’ll get you up to $500 fine (usually less) or 30 days in jail, plus court costs.

In Surfside Beach, the fine can run you between $1,092.50 and $2,000 for a general session charge. The larger fine is for tagging a church or something heinous like that.

According to Taylor, tagging a church doesn’t follow the code of street artists.

Yes, there’s a code.

“No places of worship, no mom and pop shops, no cars, no houses, no schools, no windows,” says Taylor. “And don’t go over any other work unless you know yours is better than theirs. Only a toy [an amateur] tags over beautiful work.”

Brown is still wary this attention may cause the opposite effect.

“You know this article will probably draw attention from the graffiti artists,” he says. “Graffiti artists don’t like street artists. They’ll probably tag other people’s work in town.”

Both Taylor and Brown have had their pieces tagged and altered and buffed, but they continued to venture out alone in the dark to get their art out there.

“Street art is supposed to interact,” says Brown. “Once it hits the streets, it’s not yours anymore. You can’t worry about what happens to it after you do it.”

Leaving a Landmark

There’s a rumor about the hot rod mural on the side of Surfside Auto Parts. On the north side of the building, a set of hot rods race and spit fire as a cartoon character named Rat Fink roots them on. Rumor is owner John Litcher caught a kid spray painting the wall, and instead of calling the cops, he asked him to paint the mural.

“Not true,” Litcher says. “But it was a good story.”

He goes on to tell me about wanting a memorial for Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, cartoonist and hot rod designer, after he died in 2001. He couldn’t afford a professional artist, but along came a homeless man on a bicycle with a wagon full of paint.

“It’s faded now, but he did a great job.”

Litcher says after he paid the man, the guy came by occasionally, but they eventually they lost touch. He adds, “I do have a graffiti story though.”

We follow Litcher, snaking through stacks of car parts to the deck in the back alley. He shows us what looks like a bad tattoo on concrete. The word, “Revolt,” is barely legible in big bubble lettering. Below it are some washed-out slapdash words in black spray paint.

“It’s supposed to be a Martin Luther King Jr. quote,” Litcher says. “But all they finished was ‘Injustice anywhere is a…’”

The quote goes, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” But with it unfinished, it’s just confusing and ugly.

“I told everybody who comes in store, I just wished whoever did it would come back and finish it,” Litcher says. “I was young once. I know how it is.”

Litcher has owned the store since 2000. It’s an old-school place. They tell great stories and laugh a lot. Counters are filled with things like mock grenades and car oddities. For special events, they build hot rods from beer cans.

“This store has been here since the ‘70s ” says Litcher. “Not many of these kinds of places exist anymore, and this one will probably die with me.”

When I ask how he would feel about someone coming up here at night and putting some street art on his building for an article, he just smiles, “It would be another story for me.”

Meeting the King

So I finally meet King Max down the street from Surfside Auto Parts. We trudge in the dark through the back alley. Some of the first work I ever saw of Max’s was a couple of vintage pinups on a seawall. I suggest we give one of those to Surfside Auto Parts.

“Those pinups are actually from a famous artist of the ‘40s and ‘50s, named Alberto Vargas,” Max tells me. “I did those when I was still searching for originality. All of my art now are people I know.”

After some urging, he agrees the pinups fit an auto parts store. Max’s philosophy on street art doesn’t seem to be as much a strike against a power system as much as an attempt to change the face of our ignored or ugly landscape.

“I think I do stuff they don’t want to take down,” Max says. “I’ve tagged TVs thrown out by the side of the road. The garbage man wouldn’t even take them. I like to put beautiful women on dumpsters, because who’s going to get mad at art on a smelly old dumpster?”

Max’s street art career started back in high school.

“The first things I probably did were putting up Shepard Fairey stickers,” Max says. “A friend of mine was printing them off his computer.”

Lately, Max has been screwing wooden paintings of young women and men to poles around town.

“It’s no different than the handyman signs you see everywhere or lost dog signs,” Max says. “Except over the next three months, my art will devolve just like life. The wood will warp, decay and fall apart.”

Max tapes the stencil of the classic beauty below the scrawled and abandoned graffiti from years past. He shakes a spray paint can, and the marble rattles inside. “One of my favorite noises in the world,” he says.

We could’ve done this during the day. Litcher gave his approval, but this experience is as close to the real thing as I was going to get. It’s bad enough I was breaking code by hitting a mom and pop shop, even if I had permission from the pop.

As Max sprays the outline of the pinup, it feels real. I get nervous and keep watch. Max wears a painter’s mask and a hat pulled down tight. He fills the outline in blue. We let it dry for a few minutes before he applies the stencil’s details in black, and just like that he’s done. We both take pictures of the woman lounging on the back deck of the parts store, keeping watch on the alley, overwriting all the scribbles from before.

Max packs his bag, and we’re on our way. He shows me pictures of some of his work and says, “It’s not my quote, but I think it’s true to say, ‘society gets the kind of vandalism it deserves.’”

Before we separate, I don’t ask Max where he’s going. I don’t want to know. I’d rather discover where he’s been on my own. Earlier, he did tell me he had plans.

“I’ll see a spot somewhere, and I’ll think the space is perfect for something I’m working on.”

The Grand Strand has become a canvas. This subversion may be in its infancy. Maybe it’ll sputter out. Maybe this current will claim the streets. For now, these artists seem content giving art for free. All they ask in return is for you to slow down and pay attention.

“That’s the goal, getting up and staying up. It’s such a fleeting moment,” Taylor had told me back at CCU. “You just hope the right people see it, before the wrong people take it down.”

Postscript

The next day, I stop by Surfside Auto Parts to talk to Litcher and ask if he’s seen his new artwork. He’s not there, but the employees rave over the pinup.

The next day, I get an email from Litcher. It’s a simple two lines that read, “What a great surprise to find some new art on the back of the building. Very cool. It’s hard to keep from taking every customer to see the favor a stranger did for us.”

King Max may’ve been a stranger, but he wasn’t a ghost or an endangered species. He’s just an artist searching for a place, a little space to get noticed in a town not known for its arts.

“That’s the goal, getting up and staying up. It’s such a fleeting moment,” Taylor told me back in his classroom. “You just hope the right people see it, before the wrong people take it down.”

This story was originally published September 24, 2015 at 1:47 AM with the headline "Street he(art): Street art on the Strand has history, message and meaning."