Last week I had a word about a type of street art, namely eyebombing. This week I have another new-to-me term (terms, actually) that involves a sort of guerilla art, something called blackout art. The idea is this: you take an existing text—a meme, a tweet, a page out of a newspaper or book—and you black out terms until you’re left with something that’s at least funny and is sometimes artistic.
Here’s a simple example using a Jane Lynch meme:
The caption “I am going to create an environment that is so toxic” has been blacked to leave just “I,” with the metacommentary “Scottish people agreeing.”
The high road of this art form, so to speak, involves creating poetry and is thus known as blackout poetry. One article about teaching this technique to students credits the poet Austin Kleon for inventing this type of art in 2005. That article illustrates the process with the following as the final product:
My favorite version is when people edit tweets, perhaps in part because it practices a constrained art form on an already constrained text. A lot of the ones I’ve seen are political—taking a tweet by a politician and altering it, often in profane or insulting ways. Here’s one of the more innocuous ones I’ve found:
I learned about blackout art from a Beyond Wordplay article, which has many examples of redacted tweets, memes, and even advertising billboards, and from which I’m getting some of these examples.
One of the best examples is one in which the Tweeter in Chief waxes lyrical about pelicans, the “wind gods”:
This blackout poem inspired two things. One was a subreddit r/othepelican that collects examples of blackout art. The other is the verb to pelicanize, meaning to perform this art on a tweet. If you want to become a blackout artist, try your hand on the Pelicanizer.com site. I gave it a shot:
I’m eager to see what others can do with pelicanization.
Ok, origins. I hadn’t really thought before about the term cinder block, a kind of hollow brick made of concrete:
Why are they cinder blocks? Let me back up slightly and talk concrete. When something is made of concrete, the bulk of the material is aggregate: some combination of stone, gravel, sand, and similar materials. This is glued together with cement, typically a gray material called Portland cement. (The words cement and concrete are not synonymous, though people sometimes use them interchangeably when talking about pavement.) The word concrete means “to grow together”: con- for together, -crete as in accrete, create, and increase.
Back when people burned their waste, they produced a lot of ash—or as it’s sometimes called, cinders. Ash was (and still is) a waste product from a lot of industrial processes. One thrifty use for this waste ash was to create concrete bricks whose aggregate material included cinders.
As far as I know, we don’t make cinder blocks out of cinders anymore. If you look carefully at how these bricks are described by building material stores, they’re officially called concrete blocks. But the name has stuck, and the online catalogs for these stores wisely accept the search term cinder block. Stores should always speak the language of their customers, right?
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