Ed Andrews: Great white art
A guerilla piece of art in California and the example it sets for us all.
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This week, a massive great white shark swallowed a surfer in California. Good times!
Okay, I should probably explain myself before someone writes a strongly worded letter to HUCK towers. There’s no need to start the hexing just yet and you can leave that little wax doll with pins in it for someone who I think really deserves it, like Mel Gibson. Fear not readers, for neither the shark nor the surfer were real.
What actually happened was that some guerrilla art pranksters constructed a giant shark around the bronze statue known locally as the ‘Cardiff Kook’ in the seaside suburb of Cardiff-by-the-Sea in North County, San Diego. The end result was this surf stereotype effigy being gobbled up like a real-life Jaws poster. You can check out pictures of it courtesy of our friends at Surfers Village.
The statue - officially called the Magic Carpet Ride - was made by artist Matthew Antichevich and erected in 2007 in honour of the sport. However, local surfers haven’t taken too kindly to it and you can see why. The gnarly dude looks more like he’s dancing on the set of Grease than indulging in the sport of kings. They might as well have just erected a soundsystem playing a montage of surf dialogue from Point Break on endless repeat! Apparently, this is not the first time this statue has been messed with: the Kook has also been given a pumpkin head for Halloween, a crucifix and crown of thorns for Easter and some women’s underwear for National Edgar Hoover Day!
And why not? This sort of thing is great. I mean, what better demonstration of the so-called Big Society than this? Instead of petitioning the ‘democratically elected’ local authority to remove this ridiculous piece of crap, just take it in turns to fuck with it and make a few people smile.
Personally, I’d love to see this sort of thing put into practice more. Like replacing the ‘Don’t’ signs in local parks and beaches with ones actively encouraging you to have a barbeque, smoke cigarettes and get pleasantly drunk in the sunshine. Taking it to the next level, why not a choral rendition of Brick in the Wall by Pink Floyd in the Vatican (with a few obvious lyric changes of course) and putting up ‘Caution: Vermin Outbreak’ signs outside the House of Parliament?
But as fun as these little japes would be, the sad fact of life is that the voices of dissent are always going to be ignored or suppressed if they conflict with the interests of the rich and powerful. As much as politicians may claim to care what ordinary, low-wealth and low-influence people think, they don’t really give a fuck. Apart from compliantly buying stuff, paying tax and marking a cross in a box every few years, it would be more convenient to them if we didn’t exist. As pretty much all of us fall into this category, the best we can do is let our fellow low-ranking human beings know that we think things are shit too, and then openly make fun of them.
This hungry Californian great white demonstrates this perfectly. Whoever did it deserves a freakin’ medal. They’ll probably just get arrested, though.
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Great white art (text) by Ed Andrews is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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