LA Material Culture: VEKS EVICT '24
I'm thinking of doing a series of posts about low-stakes, ephemeral aspects of Los Angeles's material culture - physical stuff or images that people in LA probably would recognize, but would never actually bother posting about online or spreading outside of certain subcultures.
Here's the first thing that made me think this might be a good idea: the VEKS EVICT '24 sticker.
Here are two from Venice Blvd:
And one on Vermont:
I'm sure that this is a two-person project, since you can google up each of these graffiti writers individually and find traces of them online. I've wondered whether more than two people are putting them up, though - they're incredibly dense, all over the city. Most of the time when I'm riding on a major stroad or artery in the city, I'll see one of these at least once a minute - often more frequently! Apparently, you can find them in Toronto and SF too.
I first noticed them on Venice boulevard months ago. I wish I'd kept better track of when I started seeing them. Googling this particular sticker is pretty hard - googling graffiti topics is difficult in general, and "evict" is a pretty loaded search term. I did find an actual video of someone putting them up on Facebook, as a product advertisement for a sticker-applicator pole.
I genuinely don't know a ton about LA graffiti culture, but I have been known to put up stickers myself. If you're interested in the topic, I recommend checking out maple's intro to the topic on Cohost, before it goes down. There are plenty of art and advocacy-related stickers in LA, but in the parts of the city where I spend time, the kinds of art stickers maple describes feel relatively uncommon compared to stickers which are just a professionally-printed, black-and-white sans-serif tag. I see these even more than I see a sticker with a hand-written tag on it.
I have some really intense opinions about the quality of professionally-printed, black-and-white, sans-serif, tag-only stickers that probably need more time to cook before I share them in greater detail... but basically: I'm always glad to find parts of the city where the messages, colors, shapes, fonts, and artstyles on the stickers are more creative, expressive, or even overtly philosophical/political than what we're seeing on veks evict '24. I love and respect graffiti tagging generally - it's an art form my life in the city would be way more boring without - but the black and white tag stickers really just don't do anything for me.
The funny thing, though, is that I actually quite like the veks evict '24 sticker. I gather that the point of a black-and-white, professionally-printed eggshell sticker with your name on it is to show how active you are in the scene and to stick your name everywhere so that people can see how widely you've ranged or how densely you've covered a particular region of the city. This sticker surpasses anything else I've seen in this area - it's fucking everywhere. It feels less like these people are just doing Regular Tagging Shit and more like they are pursuing an art project of vast territorial size and scope. Hours and sweat necessary to pull this off is boggling.
Every time I see one, it's a reminder that someone was here, where I am, standing precisely where I stand now, at night, prodding the city in a way that I also feel I am prodding the city when I'm out on my bike. My road miles coverage is absolutely dwarfed by whatever this project is doing. It's covering the city so densely that it feels like a friend.