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Title: A Field Guide to Wheatpasting Author: Crimethinc Language: en Topics: Wheatpasting
Like graffiti, wheatpasting is a
technique for communicating with your neighbors and redecorating your
environment. Because it’s easy to mass-produce posters, wheatpasting
enables you to deploy a nuanced, complex message at a large number of
locations with minimal effort and risk. Repetition makes your message
familiar to everyone and increases the chances that others will think it
over. If you’re looking for posters to paste up, we offer
a wide selection of poster designs to print out or order in bulk.
To make wheatpaste, mix two parts white or whole-grain wheat flour with
three parts water, stir out any lumps, and heat the mixture to a boil.
When it thickens, add more water; continue cooking it on low heat for at
least half an hour, stirring constantly so as not to burn it. Some
people add a little sugar or cornstarch for extra stickiness; don’t be
afraid to experiment. Wheatpaste, once made, will last for a while if
kept in sealed containers, though eventually it will dry up or become
rotten—and sealed containers of it have been known to burst, to
unfortunate effect. Keep them in a refrigerator if you can.
You can also obtain wallpaper adhesive at any home improvement store;
this comes in pre-mixed buckets or boxes of powder. Wallpaper adhesive
is much quicker and easier to mix than wheatpaste, and not much more
expensive even if you are paying for it. Don’t get the brands advertised
as “easy to remove,” obviously—get the most heavy-duty adhesive
available.
If you’re wheatpasting to express information or ideas, good design is
key to getting your message across. Remember, most people will see these
from a distance, so make the headline huge and legible and use images
that are simple, high-contrast, and equally large. Be sure the headline
communicates the basic idea on its own. You can also include a paragraph
or so in smaller print for the casually interested, and it’s always a
good idea to add a webpage address or similar link for those who want to
pursue things further.
Don’t limit yourself to pasting up standard-size photocopies; many
photocopying franchises offer much bigger options. You can make huge
posters to put up; if such printing technology is unavailable, you can
paste up big images comprised of smaller copies. Be creative: you could
also paste up old anarchist newsprint publications, or those police
target-practice sheets with photos of masked men on them, or bus
schedules screenprinted with artistic designs, or income tax forms
stenciled with the appropriate messages about taxation, representation,
and exploitation.
This may seem counterintuitive, but the thinner the paper, the
better—thin paper takes paste better, and will be more likely to rip off
in tiny pieces rather than all at once if an art hater takes a dislike
to it. Another way to foil such philistines is to run a razor quickly
down and across each poster several times immediately after you’ve
pasted it up; a pasted poster sliced in this manner will only come down
one small piece at a time.
A new poster for you to put up!
https://cloudfront.crimethinc.com/assets/posters/police-officer/police-officer_front.pdf
Click above for a downloadable PDF.
If you’re pasting up a lot of small posters, carry them in a way that
enables you to access them easily without it being obvious that you have
them. A messenger bag will serve for this—just make sure you can reach
into it and slide one out without much fumbling. If you’re posting great
big posters, roll them up, top side out so you can swiftly unroll them
down the wall, and rubber band them individually.
You’ll need a container from which to apply the paste. Wheatpaste tends
to be thick, so a vessel with a wide mouth such as a large plastic
bottled water container is well-suited for it; wallpaper adhesive tends
to be thinner and more consistent, so it can be dispensed out of smaller
holes, such as that of a dishwashing soap container with a pop-up
nozzle. It can help to have something to smooth the posters up on the
wall—a window-washing squeegee from a gas station will suffice, or you
could get a plastic wallpaper smoother from the same retailers that
provide wallpaper adhesive. Big paintbrushes can speed the application
of wheatpaste, too. You could do all of this with your hands, but it
will leave you messy.
For each poster, pick a good location, and make sure it’s clean; most
smooth metal, glass, or stucco will take pasting nicely, while wood or
concrete will be somewhat less accommodating, and brick even less so.
Next, apply the paste. The more wheatpaste you use, the longer it will
take to dry, so use the minimum amount to make all of the poster stick.
If you’re using smaller posters, spread paste over the wall, place the
poster on the pasted area, smooth out all air bubbles and wrinkles, and
spread some paste over the top to hold down the corners. If you’re using
larger posters, unroll them flat on the ground and apply the paste to
their backs there, then put them on the wall, smooth them out, and add
another layer of paste. Starting out on the ground renders you less
conspicuous while you’re making sure the paste is evenly applied.
When you think about where to paste, balance the length of time the
poster will probably stay up against the amount of traffic the location
gets, factoring in the question of which demographics will most
appreciate your design. Often, it is better to put up a poster in an
alley that will remain for six months than it is to put up twenty along
Main Street that will be gone by noon.
Because wheatpasting is somewhat less than legal in many places, it
doesn’t hurt to go about it inconspicuously. Late in the evening can be
a good time for it, when the streets are quiet but not yet empty and you
can pass yourselves off as students going to a party or workers walking
back from a bar. Behave as though what you’re doing is perfectly legal,
while being careful not to do it before the gaze of the authorities;
you’ll be surprised what you can get away with. Even in cities locked
under the control of thousands of riot police, anarchists have still
been able to decorate whole districts with posters.
A bicycle can be a useful accessory for postering. You can carry
supplies in a basket on the handlebards, and it can function as a ladder
to reach places where your art is more visible and harder to remove. It
can also assist you in making a quick getaway, should the need arise.
Also, bring something to clean up with—even if you wear latex gloves to
keep your hands from getting sticky with wheatpaste, it can get all over
your clothes, which is a dead giveaway that you’re the culprit.
A well-coordinated group can cover a city in posters in the course of a
single evening: divide up the area, set the target locations in advance,
and carry out the action quickly so you’ve all disappeared by the time
people notice the new posters everywhere. Wheatpasting can also be
applied to rework the images and messages of billboards. A group
attending a mass mobilization could make wheatpasting kits including
ready-to-use wheatpaste, posters, and maps showing vulnerable zones of
the city to distribute to other groups with time and energy to apply.
Finally, you could put up posters with this wheatpaste recipe on them
and a call for submissions, encouraging others to participate in
decorating your town.
Most wheatpasting goes so smoothly that there’s not much to tell, but
it’s always possible to push the limits, and this is the story of a time
we did just that.
It was the night before the one-year anniversary of September 11, 2001,
and we had scammed over two dozen posters five feet tall and three feet
wide from the local photocopying franchise with which to address the
pressing issues of terrorism and war. We had cased our city and
identified the prime locations for these, in the downtown shopping
district and along a few major thoroughfares. We mapped out the area and
established the best order for visiting these locations, so we could get
the most done in each section of the city before police could take note
of our activity, and then move to another zone.
We divided five roles between us. One of us would ride a bicycle, doing
reconnaissance in a radius of a few blocks around every site. The other
four of us would travel in a vehicle. This vehicle would drop off a
scout to stand lookout at one end of a street, as most of our targets
were on one-way streets, then drop off the two people who were to do the
pasting around a corner out of sight from the target, before driving
down the cross street to keep watch from another direction. After the
two had decorated the sites chosen in that area, they would meet the
driver around another quiet corner, and the three would pick up the
pedestrian lookout and move on to the next area, followed by the
bicyclist. The driver, the bicyclist, the scout, and the pasting team
were all connected by two-way radios with earpieces so news of the
movements of police or others could be immediately relayed among us. The
corporate news media had made a big deal about the extensive security
precautions that had been made for this anniversary; accordingly, we
were taking precautions of our own.
We spent a couple of hours brewing wheatpaste, then went out around
midnight. We hit all our targets downtown without any trouble to speak
of; at one point, the bicyclist informed us that a police officer had
stopped a motorist a couple blocks away, but we did our work quickly and
were out of there before the police car moved.
Having done some smaller-scale wheatpasting in which we were trying to
pass as law-abiding citizens, it was actually a bit of a relief to be
running around in all black with huge plastic jugs of wheatpaste and
rolled posters. Everything was on the table and it was just a matter of
moving fast and staying aware. We dashed past a civilian at one point,
and I said hello—he just stared at us like we were Martian invaders.
The last target was a freeway underpass, where eight columns held up the
other highway. We were to put up eight posters, four facing each traffic
direction. After so much success, we were starting to encounter some
problems: our clothes had inevitably been covered in wheatpaste, and it
was starting to clog the microphone and earpiece of our two-way radio.
All the same, the scouts took their positions and we were dropped off
next to the underpass to finish the job. Ducking down whenever cars came
and jumping up to apply the posters between them, we did four columns,
then leaped over the concrete guardwall to run across the freeway. In a
scene out of slapstick comedy, I was holding the wheatpaste in one hand
and the posters in the other, and so had to hurl myself over the wall,
crashing absurdly on the asphalt without my hands to break my fall. My
friend helped me over the other wall, and we began the fifth column.
At this point our radio made some kind of noise, but it was impossible
to make out the words through the wheatpaste. An instant later,
headlights appeared, and we got down behind the column, moving slowly
around it as the car approached and passed us. It was a police car. It
kept going, so we set back to work wheatpasting, but no sooner had we
done so than headlights appeared from the opposite direction, and we had
to work our way around the pillar again, hiding as another police car
drove by. This was starting to look bad. It was impossible now to get
our radio to work, so, abandoning the posters, we set out walking
quickly away from the underpass. As more headlights appeared ahead, I
tossed the last jug of wheatpaste into the bushes.
We turned down the first side street we reached. Wheatpaste stains more
visibly on dark colors; in our black camouflage with paste stains all
over it, we looked more than a little suspicious, especially so late at
night in a district with no pedestrian traffic. Worse yet, it turned out
the street we had turned down was a long corridor with no exits on the
sides, running through a closed warehouse district—no alibi could
adequately explain our presence here. At that moment, a police car
turned onto the street, slowing to a crawl as it approached us. We kept
walking, maintaining our conversation as calmly as we could, acting as
though we were oblivious to the policeman as he inched past, blatantly
staring at us.
Strangely, he kept going! Seeing that we had no posters or paste, he
must not have felt that he had enough evidence to justify arresting
us—though the stains on our clothes would have given us away on closer
inspection. We made our way down other side streets and walked all the
way back to our secret hideout, where the others were waiting, relieved
that we had escaped and excited to tell us about the police cars that
had started following them and forced them to abandon us.
We slept a scant few hours, then went out shortly after morning rush
hour to inspect our work.