October 17, 2005

{ Fuck This Book - Bodhi Oser - Chronicle Books }

The art of stickering centers around a single concept: placement. You just can't call it street or geurilla art if you're only bothering to slap your work on the back of your sketchbook or the bumper of your dad's '84 Ford Escort wagon. Never has the concept of perfect placement been better illustrated than in Fuck This Book, a photo-documentation of one man's quest to insert the F-bomb into as much public signage as is humanly possible. From the obvious ("Fucking In Rear") to the only slightly less-obvious ("Fuckle-Up and Drive Safely"), Fuck This Book captures the true ubiquity of everybody's favorite curse word. Part of the fun comes in seeing official postings transformed into lewd giggle-inducing statements ("Please Don't Feed the Pigeons" becomes "Please Don't Fuck the Pigeons"). It's also nice to savor the thought of these little landmines laid out in some bustling city park or street corner, quietly awaiting an unsuspecting audience. What at first seems an entirely juvenile endeavor becomes a bit more involved as you turn each page. Soon, it's not the "Fuck" stickers you're focusing on so much as the sickening overabundance of great places to slap them. If it took itself more seriously, you might begin to wonder if this book isn't perhaps the active stage of a manifesto designed to undermine textual pollution in our immediate environment, a way of confronting the faceless authority of signs that attempt to tell us how we must behave. Then you come across the "Dancers Kick Butt" bumper sticker, transformed brilliantly into "Dancers Fuck Butt", and all notions of this being something serious fly gleefully out the window.

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