/ 20 March 1997

Hazel Friedman DESIGN OF THE WEEK

MEAT is meat … uh, no, we started with that one the last time a hunk of beef won the Mail & Guardian’s design of the week award. But the nutrition principle remains the same. Except that this time it comes from a billboard poster produced by an anonymous androgyne with a penchant for producing imagery straight out of a Boys Own annual. To date, two such billboards featuring jocks in jocks, feeling each other up, have appeared in Smit Street, Braamfontein, and outside Corporate House in Jan Smuts Avenue, in Rosebank.

And if you think the images cheapen our urban morals, wait till you get wind of the production costs. A mere eighty bucks to photocopy and enlarge the images. Oh yes, and the price of a bottle of wallpaper glue to ensure that nothing short of the jaws of life will remove the posters from the billboard.

“This is the first of many such interventions,” says the anonymous provocateur. There are such lovely walls around this city. Unfortunately they are activist-unfriendly.

“The whole exercise has given me an enormous sense of liberty. I can put whatever images I want, wherever I want. And they’re so big it’s too much of a bother for anyone to remove them. Now I’m ready to paint the town pink.”

All it takes is balls and a feather boa.

@SPORT