The stencil is a plan looking for a place and the history of stenciling is a story of activists and artists applying this utilitarian process to their own causes and communities. Stencils have been sliced from dried banana leaf to decorate bark cloth; cut from leather to spread the Buddha's image throughout the Far East; carved from wood to ornament religious sanctuaries; hand-cut from paper to decorate title pages and reproduce illustrations; mass-produced in plastic to teach children how to write; painted beneath hockey rinks to emblazon a team's logotype; and, most recently, distributed through the internet by stencil activists eager to have their slogans downloaded and sprayed or sponged on neighborhoods across the globe.

Artisans and soldiers from ancient times to the present have discovered that simple geometric, silhouetted and linear forms have a structure compatible with the process and style of stenciling. Early spiral forms common to Greek and Roman decorative art are one of the easiest forms to stencil, as is the spiral's kin, the rectilinear "swastika" (Sanskrit for Rwell-being) whose long decorative history is overshadowed by its appropriation by the Nazis. Military units used the stencil to make simple, temporary signs and instructions in the field.

What was once a practical process increasingly became fashionable in typefaces. Professional designers crafted stencil-like letter forms to convey either a vernacular sensibility or a utilitarian aesthetic. At the turn of the century, the Parisian type foundry Deberny & Peignot commissioned Georges Auriol to design a display typeface with a stencil/brush style that reflected the Art Nouveau period. The more vernacular stencil typeface, Tea-chest, designed in 1936, appeared as though it were lifted directly from a packaging label. In that same year, Harper's Bazaar found it chic to use a stencilled logo. Josef Albers' Kombinationsschrift alphabets were a more utilitarian set of typefaces, consisting of ten basic permutations of the circle and the rectangle. Albers 1 and 2 could form any letter or number and were ideal for stenciling.

The ease and style of stenciling was at its height during the Art Deco era in France, where both spare and ornamental forms pervaded books and advertising art. In the early 1920s and '30s French publishers, influenced by Japanese printed textiles, used stenciling to produce color separations for book illustrations. Their technique was similar in form to the hand-coloring common in England a hundred years earlier, but differed in its methodical efforts to reproduce the tones of an image. Craftsmen reproducing works by Fauvist painters such as Derain cut separate stencils for every tint. Stenciled reproductions of Picasso's designs for the Ballet RuPablo, 1920, are among the more notable examples of fine printing during this era. As printing technology developed, however, the art and craft of stenciling in book design declined.

Stencil a rose on a dining room floor and contribute to a long-standing folk tradition, perfected by those unable to afford fine carpets. Stencil the same rose on a neighborhood cross-walk and you have an encounter reminiscent of what the Situationists would describe as "gestures contained in a transitory decor." The economy of the method philosophically unites decorative stenciling on bare floors during the 1800s and slogans on sidewalks in the 1990s. But throughout history, the stencil has served authority equally well, from Theodoric, the illiterate king of the Ostrogoths (454-A.D 526), who used a stencil of gold ingot to sign his name, to the official "Defense d'Afficher" (Post No Bills) stenciled throughout Paris today.

Most contemporary stenciling shares an affinity with handbill, bumper sticker and mail art ephemera as efficient methods of dissemination, but the site-specific nature of stenciling distinguishes it from its printed kin, appearing more intrusive than the random distribution of handbills. Today, stencil activists can custom order laser-cut stencils through the web. A group in Baltimore, the Cultural Cryptanalysts Collective (CCC), confers recognition on local urban art with a stencil that reads, "This Place Designated a Museum." The CCC makes this stencil available for downloading, encouraging activists to distinguish local sites in their communities.

The CCC's stencil is a grassroots acknowledgment of a neighborhood inspiration. A photographer can call attention to marginalised expression without leaving a mark. In "Ambush in the Streets," Jules Backus' photographs haved saved at least some of the stenciled art that multiplies to combat its inevitable decay.


by
Lawrence Mirsky, Director
Herb Lubalin Study Center
of Design and Typography
The Cooper Union


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Heller, Steven and Louise Fili. French Modern : Art Deco Graphic Design. San Francisco : Chronicle Books, 1997.

Knapp, Ken. Situationist International Anthology. Berkeley: Bureau of Public Streets, 1981.

Walsh, Peter, "Mapping Social and Cultural Space: the Ramifications of the Street Stencil," [http://math.lehman.cuny.edu/tb/issue3/g allery/walsh1.html], 1996

Western Cell Division, "On the Street - Off the Street" [http://math.lehman.cuny.edu/tb/issue3/gallery/wcd.html], July 1996.

Waring, Janet. Early American Stencils on Walls and Furniture. W.R. Scott: New York, 1937

Wilson, Eva. 8,000 years of Ornament : An Illustrated Handbook of Motifs. New York : H.N. Abrams, 1994.