The mosaic in Brooklyn is a fascinating representation of the Unabomber, as it places him in a universal symbol of love: the heart.
“Museums are to art what taxidermy is to nature,” commented Elberto Muller in an interview for the philosophical online magazine Gadfly. And although he had to renounce this maxim to some extent in order to be able to exhibit his art in galleries, there is no doubt that his work is primarily at home in the streets.Elberto Muller, better known by his stage name Sluto, is a graffiti artist, writer and artist who decorates trains, bridges and walls with mosaic tiles made of various materials. He draws on motifs from pop and subculture and combines them with symbolic elements from legends and sagas, such as humanized animals, villains and Pegasus.
His preference for mosaics arose when he lived in Kiev (now the capital of Ukraine), then one of the most important cities in the USSR. Public expressions of art were created there in the form of mosaics, which served as propaganda for the socialist regime, the Russian revolution and the working class.
The importance of this form of artistic representation in Soviet art is explained in part by its public accessibility for the purposes of socialist propaganda, its longevity (compared to mural painting), and not least by the fact that large sums of money were used to finance it. The mosaics of socialist realism can often be seen in public places such as schools, residential buildings, factories, underground stations and cinemas.
Sluto began by creating mosaics for freight trains, which he still refers to as "blank canvases", and then extended his work to the streets. He can depict anything with tiles: from clowns, flowers and chewing gum machines to burning police cars or a terrorist of the Neo-Luddite Revolution.
Who was the Unabomber?
The heart chosen for this special edition of Artbits comes from the streets of Brooklyn, New York. It is a mosaic by the aforementioned artist, a blue heart with a face outlined in black: that of Theodore Kaczynski.Known around the world as the Unabomber (university and plane bomber), he set off alarm bells for US security services when he carried out a total of 16 mail bombings between 1978 and 1995. In most of these attacks, he had a clear agenda: to target people he considered responsible for technological progress. He himself was strongly opposed to this.
Perhaps the most striking case was the murder of Thomas J. Mosser on 10 December 1994. Mosser was an executive at Burson Cohn & Wolfe (BCW), a public relations and press agency in New Jersey. According to the Seattle Times, federal authorities reported that Kaczynski killed him in the belief that he had helped Exxon clean up its image after the devastating oil spill in Alaska known as the Exxon Valdez disaster.
The Unabomber finally made his ideas public in a 30,000-word text entitled "Industrial Society and Its Future", which was published by the Washington Post and the New York Times. He had previously asked the same newspapers for publication and offered to stop sending bombs in return. But that was not enough for the authorities. Police set up a hotline, 1-800-701-BOMB, asking for information that could lead to the bomber's arrest. They offered a reward of one million dollars.
The Unabomber has since become something of an underground hero, and his belief that rapid technological progress has undermined human freedom continues to be echoed.
Freedom Tunnel - The Tunnel of Freedom
A railway tunnel runs beneath Riverside Park in the borough of Manhattan, New York, and at certain times of the day sunlight peeks through its grating. In the last decades of the 20th century it served as a refuge for the homeless, but after the reopening of the Amtrak Empire Connection (i.e. the resumption of train service to Pennsylvania), a large-scale eviction took place.This did not stop street artists from using the walls of the tunnel for their art, as there was little risk of being caught by the police. Over time, the tunnel became a hub for New York's graffiti scene. Works by artists such as Sane Smith, Ghost, Twist and Dan Plasma can be found here.
The Unabomber, the folk hero of the alternative groups who identified with Ted's ideas, was portrayed here by Chris "Freedom" Pape, the graffiti artist who first discovered the tunnel for art and gave it his name.
So Sluto's Heart is an homage to Freedom's portrait of the Unabomber (he even uses the same shade of blue) and a tribute to the hidden, illegal and unregulated street art graffiti that is difficult to market or suffocate behind museum and gallery walls.