NYT Article by Keith Plocek

As a middle-aged man, I sometimes get weird stares when people catch me slapping a sticker on the back of a stop sign. I don’t look like the typical vandal, I guess, though I suspect more of them resemble me than people might expect. It’s been years since I met another one in person, but we know each other from what we leave behind.

My current batch of stickers is heavy on the color pink. Before that, I was all about black and white, riffing on the logo for the band Black Flag. The stickers almost always feature the words “street couch,” my tag of sorts. The name comes from my website and Instagram account where, predictably enough, I post pictures of street couches. The stickers are a separate but maybe related activity. I enjoy looking at what people leave outside on the street — couches, chairs, mirrors, you name it — because those objects tell stories of private lives that have become public. With the stickers, I’m leaving a little bit of myself out there, too.

The metal and glass surfaces of most cities are speckled with vinyl and adhesive. There’s no way I could look at it all in even my small part of the world, Venice, Calif., but I take in what I can: the creatively misspelled names of graffiti artists, cryptic ads for low-power radio stations, expressions of high-energy conspiracy theories, graphics for products I’ll never buy, promotions for protests that have already passed. I like the way all the colorful rectangles overlap and curl, the way my neighborhood’s surfaces change over time.

Taken individually, most street art is bad. The graphics are often cliché, with many artists taking characters from pop culture and modifying them only slightly. Marilyn Monroe with tattoos. Chewbacca with a joint. Mickey Mouse, but get this, he’s just a skeleton. Where’s Waldo? Oh, he’s right over there, looking through the sight of a sniper rifle. But maybe that’s the nature of the enterprise. My sticker designs are really bad, too — there’s only so much one can do with a little vinyl rectangle, and I don’t think they should be viewed as individual artworks anyway. Stickers are more interesting in the aggregate, when several artists collectively decide to cover an electrical box at a stoplight or a trash can in a rail station. Stickers add slapdash flair to otherwise functional objects, subverting the best laid plans of urban designers.

I think about that loss of control often when I’m walking down the street with a pink rectangle in my hand, sliding my thumbnail between the sticker and its backing. I don’t recall exactly when — maybe fifth grade, maybe fourth — but I have a distinct memory of working on a writing assignment for school and crumpling up sheet after sheet of lined paper. I didn’t want to erase the errors; I wanted to be perfect. I threw ball after ball of paper onto the kitchen floor. My father brought up that incident in a letter he wrote me shortly after I started grad school. It was his way of telling me I needed to stop being so hard on myself and just let go. Having someone tell you to relax, of course, doesn’t necessarily make it easier to do so, but he was right. I have issues with control. I often like things to be just so.

Stickers don’t allow me time or space to obsess. When I’m placing a sticker on the back of a sign, there is little chance I’m going to be able to line it up exactly with the sign’s edges. If any part of the glue touches the metal, that’s the spot. No do-overs. Trying to peel off the sticker to readjust will just ruin it. Once the sticker is on there, it’s on there. And it looks better that way. Off-kilter. Hurried. Perfect.

Of course, many people don’t like seeing stickers plastered all over the city. I know this. I get this. But I’m not pasting my designs on church marquees. I only stick them where there are already others, in neighborhoods with lots of bars and restaurants, maybe even some record stores, hopefully a few bike racks too. It doesn’t make what I’m doing right, but also doesn’t make it so bad. I’m just adding to the milieu and talking to other sticker artists, our conversations repetitive but constantly overlapping and morphing. Together we make the city a little more chaotic, a lived place instead of an architectural rendering. Together we add meaning to surfaces that have been left blank by design or neglect.

I like the feeling of leaving a little bit of myself behind for someone, maybe even me, to find later. There’s a strange joy in waiting for a burrito and seeing a mark I left months before — or having a friend text me at 1 a.m. because they just saw my sticker in a bar bathroom. I don’t know how many people notice my stickers among all the others slapped on functional light poles and busted phone booths. I don’t know if they appreciate how my designs blend into the frenetic whole; that’s out of my control. But I do like the idea of them pausing, if only for a moment, to consider what’s been left behind.