The artful dodger

By JAMES HARPER, Times Staff Writer

© St. Petersburg Times, published February 2, 2000

He makes his art on the run, slapping posters here, barrels there. And so Mark Taylor Michaels makes a name for himself. For the police record, too.

ST. PETERSBURG -- The nab came as Mark Taylor Michaels was wheeling a suspicious-looking metal drum down Central Avenue on a handtruck. A police officer asked him what he was doing, and pretty soon the whole story came out.

Michaels, a nascent artist and self-confessed media hound, was indeed responsible for the drum, which had drawn fire trucks and bomb experts to a downtown street corner a few weeks before. Michaels also admitted he was the one who had been pasting posters of himself on garbage bins, boarded up windows and a few other places people might care more about.

The officer was sympathetic. He told Michaels his uncle was an artist, who left St. Petersburg when his work didn't get the attention he thought it deserved.

He cited Michaels anyway.

A few days ago, Michaels found himself in a Pinellas County courtroom, having pleaded no contest to 76 violations of the city's graffiti ordinance. The only question now was how much Michaels should pay in restitution for the work required to paint over the posters.

The city wanted $7,884.

"Obviously I'm promoting myself with my own art. It's art that's promoting itself."

That's how Michaels, 29, describes his savvy blend of conceptual art and shameless huckstering. He's made a habit of placing his mixed-media sculptures on sidewalks outside news media outlets in St. Petersburg, Tampa and Orlando, where he knows they'll attract attention.

"The media is like my gallery. Public venues and the media. I don't really try to hide it. If I get a reporter's attention in a place like this, I tell them that, but I also say, if you don't think what I'm doing is interesting enough to merit coverage, then I haven't done my job yet, and I'll keep working."

Indeed, pushing himself into the unfamiliar is what makes art exciting for Michaels, a law school dropout who earns his living painting signs, moving other people's furniture and trimming trees. His finances have seldom been more precarious. Yet, he says, he has never felt more alive.

"I like to have the dimension where I'm always doing something different. I try to think up new things. Which is tough, though, because it means you're always a little bit ignorant about what you're doing. You know, I'll start buying some materials -- suddenly I want to do something with foam or barrels or something. I don't really know anything about the materials until I start working with it."

He agrees with fiction writer Donald Barthelme that "not knowing is essential to art."

"There has to be some kind of discovery. The artist has to surprise himself -- at least somewhat -- for it to be interesting. The flip side, of course, is that you're always kind of struggling through ignorance, and you end up being inefficient. You waste time, and you waste money, and you make a lot of wrong turns and stuff."

So far, Michaels has produced murals, posters and various sculptures using stacked boxes and barrels, even mannequin heads perched on a stick. (These last he placed along Kennedy Boulevard in Tampa, then got the Tampa Tribune to write about them.) The idea, he says, is to bring together various images in an unexpected way, so that people will think about them.

His use of public space, rather than art galleries, to make his artistic statements may seem presumptuous to some. But it is in tune with the "outsider" movement in art, in which artists try to break through social and other barriers to reach an everyday audience.

The posters that got Michaels in trouble were done in a style reflecting a group show Michaels was participating in at a downtown St. Petersburg art gallery. Mostly they were exaggerated images of his own face. Generally, he tried to put them in places where they wouldn't hurt anything or bother anybody. Still, he did it at night, when no one would catch him. "It seemed like the most efficient way to promote the art, myself and the show all at once," he says simply.

The first posters remained unmolested for weeks, until the city's graffiti control squad caught on to them. Eventually, Michaels noticed that the posters would be painted over within 24 hours, so he figured this particular idea had run its course.

Meanwhile, Michaels got front-page attention with another stunt. Around noon one day, he left a metal drum decorated with faces of newspaper columnists, the nuclear symbol and other ominous warnings such as "The End" in front of the St. Petersburg Times' downtown office. Police and fire officials assumed the worst and called in the hazardous materials squad, which determined that the only substance inside the drum was wet cement.

Michaels says the newspaper's security chief asked him later to move the barrel, so he did. With all that cement inside it, it was too heavy even for two people to lift. So he wheeled it to a nearby alley behind his then-girlfriend's art gallery. Several weeks later, he decided to move it to a friend's warehouse a few miles out Central Avenue. That's when he got stopped by the police.

An observant officer recognized one of the images on the barrel as the same one used by the mysterious poster hanger.

Michaels appreciates the irony that he was caught because of the memorable quality of his imagery.

"It is kind of absurd -- I'm trying to hide and advertise at the same time."

With his pale blue eyes, smooth complexion and thick boyish hair, Michaels has movie-star looks and the cool air of someone who usually gets his own way.

In Pinellas County Judge Karl Grube's courtroom, however, he was uncharacteristically solemn. Eight thousand dollars, after all, is a lot of money when your paycheck is irregular. In a borrowed necktie, Michaels fidgeted while a state prosecutor questioned the main witness against him: Sheri Weaver, manager of St. Petersburg's Graffiti Abatement Program.

Armed with Polaroid photographs of the illicit artwork, Weaver explained all the effort that goes into finding, documenting and removing every piece of graffiti and unauthorized signage in St. Petersburg. Like many cities across the country, St. Petersburg has found that an aggressive approach toward graffiti discourages further vandalism.

Bottom line: the city figured it had spent $108 painting over each one of Michaels' 76 posters, and it expected him to pay it.

As Derek Spilman, Michaels' pony-tailed lawyer, prepared to cross-examine Weaver, Judge Grube summoned both sides to the bench. Grube had a courtroom full of teenage smokers, open container violators and other petty criminals waiting for hearings, and all this technical haggling over the costs of graffiti removal was slowing things down. Couldn't the two lawyers just lay out their cases informally to him?

In a few moments, they did.

The lawyers sat down and Grube announced that $200 would be reasonable. He gave Michaels 30 days to pay it.

The artist relaxed a bit.

"We're definitely disappointed," Weaver said later. "I think $200 sends a bad message. I don't mind if it had been lower (than the city's request), but he did cause a lot of anguish to a lot of people, and a lot of work for us, and we are supported by the taxpayers."

Besides, Weaver said, the calculations used in Michaels' case are the same ones the city has used successfully to get court awards of almost $43,000 from 55 previous defendants, all of them teenagers. Sometimes the city puts liens on parents' homes in order to collect the debts.

Michaels was the first person to challenge the assessment, she said.

Spilman, his lawyer, said later that the city has been way out of line. Spilman examined the city's records, which showed the average time spent painting over one of Michaels' posters was nine minutes. The city employee who does the work earns $8.10 an hour.

State law allows restitution only for costs directly caused by a person's wrongdoing, not for administrative expenses that are continuous and ongoing, Spilman said later. Yet the city was including "every overhead thing they could think of."

Turning $80 or $90 in damages into a $7,884 return is "better than any Internet stock I know," he said.

Weaver said she would leave it to city attorneys to decide if the city should rethink its policy.

Michaels, meanwhile, was just happy that he will pay only $250, counting the $50 fine that was previously levied when he pleaded no contest. The judge withheld adjudication of guilt.

Spilman's fee, however, will be about $2,500. "I'm hoping he'll work with me on that," Michaels said. (Spilman said he charged Michaels for only about half of his time, and he's letting the artist pay the bill in small monthly installments.)

One thing Michaels has noticed: In some places the paint is fading from the posters that the city covered up.

"The image is kind of creeping back through," Michaels said, trying to suppress a mischievous smile.

"I just hope there won't be a new trial or anything."

© St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved.