When we meet, he is ankle deep in cut-out letters, spraymount and a scattering of UK election campaign propaganda. He’s recently finished a two-storey high paste up outside Shoreditch’s Cordy House in support of the Robin Hood Tax – a simple suggestion whereby .05% of profits made by big business gets allocated to social services and charities. To erect the behemoth on brick, it took one scissor-lift, twelve hours and a sea of paper and paste.

“So this is where the magic happens?” I ask.

“Hardly. I don’t really work like that.”

Known for altering a billboard of Amy Winehouse with the words “I hear Duffy’s selling coke” and likening Tony Blair to Darth Vader this most unlikely graffito is unconvinced of his status as a street artist.

“Artists lock themselves up in studios and create something from nothing. I drive past a billboard and think up gag lines. I have a quiet chuckle and I come here and knock something up”.

It doesn’t take long.

“I drove past a nice low billboard advertising the UK Independence Party on the M4. I got some paint and parked up a lay-by. Walked – in the rain – and painted ‘Kilroy Silk Woz Ere’ then fucked off.”

You can probably see it as you land at Heathrow.

“I work on my own. So I’m carting along ladders, buckets, paper, everything. And a camera. It’s not that I don’t have any friends – though that’s true too. Just that nobody I know fancies heading out at three in the morning in the London piss to put posters up.”

My first encounter with Dr D was thru an East End billboard reading “HMP London / Open Prison / I.D. must be carried at all times”. At the top right third was “dr.d”. Being an anorak of the vandal variety, seeing someone new sparks the curiosity. Seeing someone good sparks inspiration.

There were rumours. Questions over Dr.D’s identity, gender, even whether Dr.D was a group or an individual. The same sort of buzz that surrounds any really successful vandal who hides under a pseudonym. But Dr. D was no Banksy. There wasn’t a constructed mystery wrapped up in a commercial venture. You had billboards, and you had the occasional poster knocked up for sale for a tenner at a group show. Whoever Dr. D was, they or he weren’t in it for fame or money.

I found more and more billboards doctored with a laconic back-of-the-class-with-a-peashooter wit. Evening Standard street displays that weren’t all they seemed. The Olympic rings with blood spattered on them reading “Made in China”. Police adverts changed from “Make a Visible Difference” to “Make a Risible Difference”. Dr.D was tipping the axis of how I viewed the streets of London by a few degrees. His humour was no different to me scrawling on toilet doors but D was scrawling on the walls of a bigger bog.

This glue-stained scarlet pimpernel is, in my eyes, delivering overtly political messages with the aim of encouraging people who see his work to rethink their socio-political spaces. He’s less convinced.

“You say it’s political, but I’d rather let the paper do the talking. I’m more of a piss-taker and a chancer. Politics and politicians are asking for it. They spend thousands on campaign posters begging for votes to get a job in Parliament. But they way they put themselves forward is totally laughable.”

The last time he was caught by the long arm of the law, he was customising a then-new David Cameron “Year for Change” poster.

“Must’ve been a pretty sharp copper because I was there in full hi-vis, all the kit and all the gear to make it look as if I’d been working. But he obviously spotted something that wasn’t right – the fact that that poster had been up for a few days. He came over, had a word and well… most of what I was trying to put up is in that pile over there.” He indicates towards a smattering of letters on a counter.

When he’s not covered in paper and glue, slipping under police radar he’s “a rat catcher. And if you bought any burgers out of a burger van in the East End in the mid-90s, you probably bought them off me. Not that the rats or burgers are connected.”

I tell him that he doesn’t make life easy for himself. Is there a Mrs. D? “Who’s to say I’m not Mrs. D?” And where did the name come from? “It’s an old DJ name. Works nicely these days because Dr. D can also scan as ‘doctored’.”

I’m taken to an alleyway behind his surgery. Stencils litter the earth floor and he picks up one of a cut-out man like the ones you see indicating the men’s loos. Beneath are the letters WC.

“It’s World Corruption. I put a few of these up in the Foundry toilets in Old Street on copies of the Financial Times. I’m experimenting a bit more with stencil and lettering. My dad was a typesetter so I suppose that’s where my obsession with letters comes from. Oh…and an old art teacher knocked my grade down when I made a piece that spelled “magic” with a “k”. The national curriculum in this country seems to say that you can’t make good art unless it’s spelled right.”

He’s reluctant to push himself as ‘the next big thing’ but walks about his studio with a quiet confidence. He makes good work that makes people laugh…and then think. As unassumingly humble as he is, he says the best feeling is when artists say he’s done something that’s influenced them.

“I find it weird when I’m asked where I think my art will go because I don’t see myself as an artist. I wish I was. I wish I could paint and draw freehand but I can’t – the closest I’ve been to being an artist is living in a squat with artists.

I got into paste-ups after reading Naomi Klein’s No Logo and was shown the work that Ron English does with pop culture and billboards. Those two ideas came together and Dr. D was born – it’s a low skill way of expressing myself. Nobody else does it like me because it’s stupidly complicated, hugely inconvenient and a ball-ache. It’s a long way to go for a bit of a chuckle.

What I do is a problem-solving exercise that comes out of pragmatic laziness. How can I adapt a board to say something in the easiest possible way? The logistics is what influences how the final piece looks.

What makes me different is not just the scale of what I do but the fact that it’s not my job. We all know artists who are under personal pressure to create, to come up with something new. They spend hours crafting, devising et cetera. I don’t. I see a billboard and think of ways of making it funny. Or I pick up on funny things my friends say.”

Dr. D’s stock in the street art world seems to have risen. In reputation at least. One of the outfits he works with recently told me that D is their “golden boy…does the best stuff around.” Asked about this, the doctor hesitates.

“Sometimes I wish the guys who could paint, the ones I’m secretly jealous of, had more of a message that comes out in their work. Arty people are so…arty. I’ve hung shows where guys would turn up and not even have a screwdriver.

And a lot of street art people don’t really get what I do. I know I’ll never sell huge amounts and most of my work is off the streets within weeks. And it’s big so you can’t nick it. That makes me a non-commodity. I don’t push to sell limited edition canvases or prints because that’s not really what I’m about.

I think like an ad-man but I’m not promoting a product, I’m working for my own ends. And often times it’s just so I can drive past a board I’ve done and smile to myself.”

Most of what I have written is true. But I have changed some details to ensure the good doctor’s work can continue. The messages, the jokes, the subversion – all of that will stop if I let my lips loose. The need to keep D as anonymous as possible is greater than any truth I can offer you. As of now, the doctor is in.

===

This article was originally published in Who’s Jack Magazine, June 2010.

But there’s an elephant in the museum. As you move from room to room laid out with videos and photographs by the likes of Walker Evans and Bruce Nauman, look up into the corners. What do you see? The Tate’s own CCTV. “When people go into a gallery, they expect to be watched. There’s a lot of expensive work here and it has to be protected,” said Simon Baker, Tate’s new curator of photography. Well, it obviously works for the French. By failing to directly address the security setup in the Tate Modern’s own halls, they’ve undermined what is otherwise a beautiful, intelligent and informed show. The Tate has accepted that we’re indifferent to living under the gaze of a Panopticon and is wholly complicit in it.

No one knows how many CCTV cameras there are in the UK. The best estimations put the number at 5m, or one camera for every 12 people. That’s 20% of the world’s CCTV cameras on a whingey North Sea island. It used to be that we were only six feet away from a rat. Now we’re only six feet away from a camera. This exhibition showcases everything from super-secret American military bases, aerial landscapes of the Kuwaiti oil fields after the first Gulf War to people dogging in cars. It shows the theft of privacy and questions the basic notion of privacy.

Early photographic subjects were ignorant as to what was happening to them. Faces of people in early albumen prints resembled deer in headlights, intrigued but unsure what that man behind a box with a cloth on his head was doing. Ignorance became acceptance as the power of the camera became a tool for the media and the state. We grew aware of the gaze. A photograph of the artist Edgar Degas leaving a pissoir echoes its way to a snap of Paris Hilton crying pathetically in the back of a police car on her way to jail. A surveillance photograph of militant suffragettes used by police in 1913 bears an uncanny resemblance to modern police spotter cards used to identify “potential troublemakers” at demonstrations.

Launching the show in London highlights and mocks our current indifference to surveillance. The Tate boasts of the show’s timeliness “due to the increasing availability and use of street surveillance and mobile phones”. It celebrates and attacks our voyeuristic culture.

If you feel dirty viewing Gilles Peress’s images of the Rwandan genocide, you should. If you’re captivated by Merry Alpern’s sneaked shots through a bordello’s window, brilliant. If you feel the horror in Jonathan Olley’s photo of a static oppression palace, the Gold Five Zero watchtower in South Armagh, good. You’re meant to be shocked, and you’re meant to think.

But where is Wikileaks’ Collateral Murder video? Curators say that it’s a testament to the strength of the show’s message that everyone who comes can think of other things that should also feature. Not having the most current and devastating piece of surveillance in the public domain in a show that purports to provide a “provocative perspective” on the “iconic and taboo” is negligent. This show is the closest the BP-sponsored Tate will come to being overtly political. They usually wait until an issue has become vanilla until they wield a sword of topical criticism.

The show is not so much timely, but backtimed. It uses history and reflection in the hope people will be clever enough to flesh out topical issues the Tate is too cowardly to tackle head-on. It is politicisation by proxy. Then again, the Tate is a bit slow. They only opened a modern art museum 10 years ago.

===

This article was first published on the Guardian’s Comment Is Free, 28 May 2010 and subsequently republished on The Comment Factory.

Its curators concede that words used in photography are also used in hunting. Capture. Shoot. Release. Like a hunter, a photographer either sneaks up on prey or chases after it. The strength in Walker Evans’ composition lies not only in a clever use of thirds, but in his covert methods. Nobody knows their photos are being taken candidly. Yale Joel photographed people as they arranged themselves in a one-way mirror – spying on people going about the everyday and capturing them at their most vain. Some people made a television programme based on that idea, franchised it and called it Big Brother.

Exposed is an intelligent and informed show. Everywhere you go in the exhibition, you cannot escape what artyfarts call “the gaze”. If you feel dirty viewing Gilles Peress’ images of the Rwandan Genocide, you should. If you’re captivated by Merry Alpern’s sneaked shots through a bordello’s window, brilliant. The show is showcasing the theft of privacy and questions the basic notion of privacy. You should walk out of it feeling like a thieving pervert. What steals your soul isn’t the act of photography, but consuming the image and walking away without considering it. You ask yourself at what point does nosiness and prying become art? At what point does the documentation of death and oppression become pornography?

Surveillance is a “functional image taken with purposeful intent”. As you walk around the show, look up. Find one of the five million CCTV cameras in the UK gazing at you with impassive regard. Then see if you can view the show with your new, more complicit eyes.

=====

This article was first published in Juxtapoz Magazine, 28 May 2010. Click thru for the photos.

Why? Libel. Apparently.

Instead of redrafting the Amnesty International press release and passing the words off as my own [really? that happens in the press?], here’s a link to the press release.

UPDATE: The ad is causing a bit of a stir in the FT newsroom. Emails are circulating amongst staffers, freelancers and management. In pre-Twitter days, if a newspaper decided to pull an ad, the public might’ve heard about it the following day. And only in hushed whispers. These days, its all over the Guardian and the Index on Censorship and the blogosphere like a rash. A pink one.

Could this be the rebirth of Amnesty – an emergence from the shadows of letter-writing and reactive press releases? Bear in mind that one of the blogs linked to above belongs to Naomi McAuliffe, Amnesty’s Digital Campaigns manager. It was her post on Twitter that told the world about Lionel Barber’s paper and its decision to snip the ad.

Sources at the FT say that one of their advertising department’s main concerns was whether Amnesty had the indemnity to deal with any potential comeback for the advert. The division between editorial and advertisement at the Financial Times is strict. What those on the outside looking in can fail to see is that editors at the FT are more than too aware of what the repercussions of pulling advertising are. Especially when it is put up by Amnesty International and targeted to run on a specific date. Like many newspapers, they’ve pulled ads at the last minute. But not many have been of a campaigning and activist nature.

“We know how this can look bad,” an FT editor tells me. “But as far as we were concerned, it wasn’t editorially deliberate. The guys in advertising have a tight code of practise. I think the main concern was whether or not Amnesty could provide indemnity should a complaint arise.”

Is this an editor passing the buck? No. Is this a department in a newspaper being a bit over-cautious about the political nature of the advertising? More likely. When you go out on a limb [albeit a rather sturdy, low-hanging one in Amnesty's case], you have to be prepared to deal with the consequences. The free publicity generated and garnered by the buzz is invaluable. The important question is, after the smoke clears, will you have understood any more about Shell, the Niger Delta and the inhumanity its people are subjected to in the interests of bloody, black gold?

It’s strange because although I really like them as people, I know they’re capable of better work than what’s being produced. I wish they’d shake the fear of being labeled political and actually embrace that element in their work – collage and montage offer a unique opportunity to sharpen an edge. As it stands, they’re aesthetically competent but lacking in venom. Something tells me their heart really isn’t into the street work but that they know they’re onto a good thing because it has proved commercially popular.

I also know the Miss Bugs isn’t exclusively what the collaboration do. One of them in particular likes to keep that work separate from the street scene. Work which draws from the ephemeral and landscape. But that’s all I’m allowed to say.

Am I one of those people who don’t rate things unless there’s a political text then when they have one, slate their lack of aesthetic?

Anyway. Here’s the piece.

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Photo courtesy Miss Bugs.

Fucking Waste of Money looks a bit like this:

They erected the picture on Thursday – the same day my erstwhile companjero, Sky News’ Niall Paterson, took these photos of the increasingly bizarre Peter Mandelson on the Labour campaign trail. [Thanks Niall...and apologies again re outing your campaign trail sleeping habits to Guido Fawkes].

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Pictures courtesy kennardphillipps and Niall Paterson. All rights reserved.

Of his latest stick ‘em up he’s said: “I never thought I could cram in a reference to WWII graffiti, a has-been chat show host and a suspect political party on one board but here it is. Not my best ever but worth a look….”

For more info on this most prolific of gentlemen: http://drd.nu/

A bit of background – photographer Steve Lazarides founded LazInc many moons ago…it was unofficially running out of the boot of his car at one stage. One of the main artists on his roster is Banksy. The others are a who’s who of street art including Bast, Blu, Conor Harrington, David Choe, Faile, Invader, Lucy McLauchlan, Mark Jenkins, Mode2, Paul Insect and Vhils. Original works by these artists stem from a few hundred to a few hundred thousand pounds. Lazarides is a primary market dealer with direct affiliation to the artists he sells / represents. Though he might have slightly ostentatious taste in wristwatches and people hold mixed feelings about him [usually dependent on what they can get out of him], he’s a decent guy all round. His significance as the man who offered a platform for street art in this country cannot be negated. But he’s not someone you should really cross. That is all.

The Gluts are Gina Birch, Kaffe Matthews and Hayley Newman. Gina’s a founding member of The Raincoats, I once lay in Kaffe’s sonic bed in Aarhus, and Hayley’s a polymath live artist. They call their style “eco-electro. George Monbiot meets Lady Gaga and her twin sisters.” Whether I’ll be treated to a neosocialist knees-up or a trio of women screeching their way through their forties remains to be seen. But as a fan of pre-grrl rock punkstress tunes of the The Raincoats and having once dabbled in sound art, I’m erring on the positive.

Also on the bill are: John Jordan’s Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, The People Speak (and their Planetary Pledge Pyramid), Question Time, photographer and great Dane Kristian Buus and filmmaker Emily James. Hosted by Mikey Weinkove, people will get to take home a live-press zine, designed and printed on the spot by The Ladies of the Press.

Of course, I did not attend the demonstrations in Copenhagen. And my cynicism behind environmental pressure groups remains the same, if not reinforced by my recent trip to Haiti. This doesn’t preclude me from engaging with the issues – it just means I’ll most likely be found at the back with my arms crossed mocking the I Only Fly To India brigade. Like the middle-class art-school wanker I am.