John Fekner’s work, strictly speaking, is not new to New York. A quintessential New Yorker, Fekner was born here and raised in Queens, where he still lives. And not inconsequently, a good deal of his art has become part of New York itself, if only temporarily, interacting with and appropriating parts of this sprawling metropolis.

In the past ten years, Fekner has produced a wide range of work that might at first appear unrelated. His output includes paintings, cast paper reliefs, video, audio and performance works, sculpture, and a computer-generated piece. He is best known, although not always by name, for over three hundred “environmental/conceptual” works consisting of dates, words, and symbols stenciled on roads, buildings, and cars mainly in Queens, but also in the Bronx and Manhattan, as well as in Toronto, Washington D.C, and various cities in Sweden. Despite the diversity of media and appearance, the work demonstrates consistent interests involving general concepts of perception and transformation, as well as specific environmental and sociological concerns such as urban decay, chemical pollutants, mass media, and the plight of Native American Indians. Indeed, Fekner is exemplary of an artist who will use whatever means necessary to communicate a vision or message, and whose work changes as that vision expands.

From 1971, while still an undergraduate, until 1976, Fekner produced a series of portraits comprised of faint, tiny marks of ballpoint pen on canvas. A reaction to the blatant, immediate, and banal imagery of Photo-Realism and Pop Art, these paintings required concentration and time before the image would “ pop out,” demonstrating a “way of not supplying so much information, of leaving the viewer to examine the work and gradually call forth recognition and recollections.” 1

In 1976, Fekner was among the first to receive studio space at P.S. 1, the abandoned Long Island City school renovated into a major alternative space for artists. The move from working in the seclusion of his parents’ small apartment to sharing the sprawling, run-down building with other artists had a profound effect on his work. Unable to continue his immaculate, delicate portraits in the decrepit school, he instead concentrated on a “portrait” of the building itself, which he came to realize was like an “elderly person who has acutely perceived his experience of life”2  Interested in capturing the building’s accumulated history, Fekner made cast paper impressions from walls and architectural details, allowing the layers of paint, rust dirt, and mildew to become imbedded into a new object. Like his earlier paintings which were, in a sense “camouflaged,” many were installed undetected throughout the building. 3

At that time he also moved beyond his immediate surroundings of P.S.1 and into the community, stenciling random dates in three-inch high numerals onto various surface where they would trigger associations in the minds of passing motorists and pedestrians. One of the first projects in 1977 was Youth Piece, which entailed stenciling “Youth 1946” through “Youth 1980” sequentially on thirty-five pillars of an underpass between two cemeteries in Queens. Youth Piece draws attention to the passage of time and focuses on the immediate environment, namely, the cemeteries, by invoking past childhoods and the inevitability of death. Not lost upon the artist was the fact that the particular stretch was the scene of drag racing in the fifties and the site of several deaths.

With these projects, Fekner began soliciting help from neighborhood teenagers who would assist him during his nightly forays. Collaboration and involvement with the community have remained essential to his work. He eventually invented “ Queensites” as an umbrella term for the stencil projects.

His awareness of P.S.1 as an “abandoned institution in one of the more run-down sections of the older cities of the Northast United States,” 4 touched off an increasing concern for the particular environment in which he had spent most of his life. He began two series of larger stencil pieces, generically entitled “Warning Signs” and “ Historical notes,” which have continued to the present. The former deals with urban decay, the menace of television and advertising media, toxic wastes, and radioactive materials. The latter delves into the community’s past by drawing attention to Native American Indians, the original inhabitants of Long Island.

The stencils, which range in height from three inches to three feet, gradually have become more conspicuous, sometimes painted in bright colors against a white background. Fekner employs a ubiquitous, traditional-style lettering, mimicking the “official” look of stencils on packing crates and other industrial materials. The words or symbols are direct, yet their anonymous application provokes an aura of mystery, heightened by the essentially “styleless” appearance of stencil. The words or phrases often function like captions, identifying or categorizing a condition, thus fulfilling a fundamental human need to impose order on the world around us. In some instances, the stenciled word “DECAY”  on an abandoned car or building has prompted the car’s removal or the building’s demolition. Other pieces remain, changing over time, gradually becoming assimilated into the structure itself; one more layer in the strata of paint, rust, and pollution of contemporary urban archeology.

Essential to this body of works, and of primary importance to Fekner, is the experience of them within the environment. For example WHEELS OVER THE INDIAN TRAILS is viewed from below as one approaches the Pulaski Bridge near the Queens Midtown Tunnel. “WHEELS” draws attention to the unending stream of cars, trucks, and buses, a reminder of the pervasive mobility of contemporary life. At the same time, “OVER INDIAN TRAILS” reminds us of the original inhabitants, the routes they must have used, and their subsequent near eradication.
Fekner began the stencil in the most desolate areas of Maspeth and Long Island City, stencilling messages such as DECAY ABANDONED, INDUSTRIAL FOSSIL, and FLUOROCARONS PRESERVATIVES ASBESTOS where only truckers, factory workers and police would see them. Later he went to Madison and Park Avenues, the heart of Manhattan’s advertising industry, to stencil POST NO BILLS, DE-EMPHASIZE ADVERTISEMENTS, and SOFT BRAINS WATCH THE SCREEN AND BUY THE JEANS. Television and billboard advertisements, Fekner believes, engender a mentality geared to quick consumption and discourage literacy. He reached an even larger audience when a series of his stencilled pieces were photographed as a backdrop for Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign speech in the South Bronx 5
Attracted to the Charlotte Street area because of its use as the site for a counter-cultural conference, Fekner stenciled DECAY, BROKEN PROMISES/FALSAS PROMESAS, BROKEN TREATIES, SAVE OUR SCHOOL, and LAST HOPE, the latter with assistance from the building’s inhabitants. Fekner’s messages, aired on television news and distributes to newspapers nationwide, bluntly, succinctly, and poignantly summarized the conditions of the devastated neighborhood.

Complementing a series of stencils using the international symbol of a circle with a diagonal slash over the letters “TV,” Fekner executed a series of sculptures using tar and real television sets. In one installation, three tarred sets were stacked one atop the other, with the sign for “NO TV” stenciled on stills from commercials on two of them. An “X” was superimposed on the screen of the third television, tuned to a station and running continuously. The tar invoked association of being stuck watching television, as well as the “tube’s” destiny as a cultural fossil, preserved in much the same way as remnants of past eras are preserved in tarpits.

Just as he had used stenciled words to ironically critique advertisement, Fekner is not adverse to employing the television screen to convey messages about the environment. Invited to experiment in creating images on a computer terminal, Fekner produced TOXIC WASTES from A to Z, a parody of children’s alphabet learning aids which runs alphabetically through a list of toxic pollutants. Employing colorful designs and patterns in a deceptively simple lighthearted manner, Fekner engages our attention in order to alert us to the dangerous chemicals. Similarly, in a recent piece on the underpass of the Long Island Expressway, Fekner stenciled the word “NO” and the international symbols for storage barrels and radioactive materials to protest the transportation of such materials on the heavily trafficked route. The stark white backdrop and purples and yellows of the radioactive symbols draw the motorists’ attention, interjecting a somber message along the stretch of the barren freeway.

Fekner’s illegal methods of working late at night to spray-paint messages in public places are not unlike those of the subway graffiti artists. But rather than signing with an individual “tag,” Fekner prefers anonymity, hoping to focus attention on the content. His aims are to provoke an awareness of one’s immediate environment by acting “as the eyes of the community, for the community” 6 and to activate individuals to “work towards the betterment of the urban environment” 7

That Fekner has succeeded is demonstrated by changes that have occurred directly in response to his art. Fekner elaborates: “ We have done stencils that have definitely caused attention and gotten the condition improved. We got rid of squalor, made changes that made it more fit to live in our community”.8 Future plans include more collaborative projects, music, and expansion of his audience by working environmentally in other communities and creating indoor installations- seeking new terms not only to engage dialog, but to provoke action as well.

This is John Fekner’s second record album. His first was produced two years ago by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Fekner is a visual artist as well as a musician. He is clearly associated with the East Village “Post-Graffiti” group. His word/images were shown at the Civilian Warfare Gallery in May 1984. IDIOBLAST is distributed by EXIT Art in New York.
Although Fekner has been involved in serious art-making since 1972, he experienced what might be termed an ideological shift in the 1970s. His recent work has been intensely political without sacrificing a certain inate poetic quality sound. He mixes fragments of televised political speeches with advertising and other pre-recorded mundane statements. These collaged sound fragments are backed-up with an intense rock and roll beat. It reminds me a bit of John Cage’s VARIATION IV, also a sound collage (1965), with an uptempo beat. There are also elements of real time “ phase music,” particularly the early repetition of Steve Reich where fragments of speech are recorded on a tape loop. Fekner’s music is less refined and plays heavily upon the media glut.
Fekner’s group, City Squad, incorporates vocal arrangements with keyboards, bass, and synsonic drums. The result is very urban, a slice of East Village life with an ear for ecstasy.

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