Subculture communication.

SCHABLONE BERLIN

BY CAROLINE KOEBEL AND KYLE SCHLESINGER

TUCSON: CHAX PRESS, 2005

150 PP./$16.95 (SB)

"Schablone," the art form that appears with random frequency on the walls and in the streets of Berlin, is the German word for "stencil." Stenciled images have a distinct character: broken lines, fragmented shapes, reductive iconography, ragged, blurred, or dripping at their spray-painted edges. They comprise an efficient and striking network of visual signs. These images are meant to be read immediately even as they mediate the complex social order, signals sent to and from one subculture to another, or from one individual to the body politic. Some are overtly political (images of George W. Bush, Saddam Hussein, and Osama Bin Laden above the phrase "triple terror"), some passionate (a raised green fist with VEGAN below it), and others wistful (the outline of a young girl, hands wrapped around her knees, head resting; or a man from the back, exiting through a door). No single message or sensibility unifies the images; only their method of production creates a common idiom. Some images are recognizable and legible (portraits of Antonin Artaud and Marlene Dietrich); others become almost equally famous through repetition (the dachsund). Most seem hastily done. Others are suggestive of violence, scratched or dripping. Some are hauntingly still, composed, delicate.

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Schablone Berlin, by Caroline Koebel and Kyle Schlesinger, documents this activity of stenciling, and in its pages works to replicate some sense of the views and sightlines that occur in the urban setting. The photographs displayed in this book record actions taken in real time and in a real space. Thus the format of the book suggests documentary work, not photographic protocol. The printed images bleed to the edges, as if to insist that the world they come from continues beyond the frame. The lens frames their presentation, as a gesture of showing, offering, pointing, rather than as an act of photographic composition. The varied textures and colors of walls, residue of stains and wear, create palimpsestic layers. Responses scribbled and others rubbed out call attention to the history of provocative exchange. Not static icons, but instruments of intersubjective exchange, the stenciled images are communicative expressions. They assume a public and circumstantial audience. The trail of activity that connects artist and audience, artist and landscape, and image to image across the gaps of walking, glancing, coming unaware on an already familiar icon in a new location, is inscribed in the way the book structures its own intertextual play.

The book is testimony to a cultural belief long lost (if ever present) in American life--that the cityscape is what the French would call espace. Abstract, conceptual, espace is produced in the realm of the symbolic, emphasizing social and cultural meaning, rather than literal, physical form. The existence of these schablones on urban surfaces bespeaks a common understanding of the city as a site of public communication. Unsanctioned art, youth culture identified, redolent with pop images and icons, these signs are both urgent and modest--in your face and out there, but also, inexpensively made. They cannot be taken away without cutting out a piece of the wall. This is conceptual art--its material substrate is the real. These images are meant to be traded only as ideas, transferred freely, circulated widely through the simple act of looking.

As aesthetic detectives turned critical flaneurs, Koebel and Schlesinger have captured not only specimens but the process of encounter. A close-up of a tiger's face segues into a spread where the image appears in context (on a wall by a painted door, behind the frame of which a third stencil depicts a woman half-hidden by the architecture). On the facing page, the outline of a screaming rock musician howls against dried-blood red ground. A book is also an espace, after all, not just a series of page surfaces read in a literal sequence. The artists play with the spatialized references of the photographs. The icons find an echo in the gestures of passing pedestrians. These effects resonate and we see that the stenciled forms set up a referent against which the lived is read. Turning a page is analogous to rounding a corner, and just as "streets kilometers apart become linked narratively" through the reappearance of a stencil, so does the narrative of viewing and reading actively compose itself backward and forward across the pages.

Equal parts subjective impression and theoretical analysis, the introduction by poet-critics Koebel and Schlesinger draws the threads of printing history and graffiti subversion together in a moody rumination on appearance and disappearance, the ephemerality of these signs, their public role, and the physicality of their rapid production. The subtext of the book is a comment on cultural difference, on the conviction that somehow alternative culture--radical, subversive, activist, and chaotically but collectively organized--is thriving in Berlin in a way that it has been expunged from the sanitized and surveilled spaces of contemporary America. If that is true, we have something more urgent to learn from this book than how to appreciate this stencil art.

JOHANNA DRUCKER is the Robertson Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia and is a well-known book artist and scholar of visual and graphic media. Her most recent book, Sweet Dream: Contemporary Art and Complicity, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2005. A book of Creative Writing, From Now, was published by Cuneiform Press in August 2005. She helps run the Virginia Arts of the Book Center in Charlottesville, Virginia.