There’s very little reference to DC Gecko aka Docteur Gecko on the planet right now, seeing as he’s an enemy of the state (well at least the world of advertising) I can’t blame him. However I have found a rather brief interview with the guy at a popular graffiti blog Ekosystem, and a page on Flickr and another at Fotolog. The fact is this this guy does something I love and any publicity he gets can only help his startling one man campaign against the highly commercialised planet we live on nowadays.

DC Gecko used to be a traditional graffiti artist, tagging and spraying when and where he could to make his mark on his local territory, originally born on Reunion Island, which as it happened spawned another great of the graffiti movement Jace, nowadays DC has set up camp in Spain, primarily based in Madrid. His work has become a familiar sight to the locals, and from all accounts, without too many objections, and of course he has received praise from around the world’s graffiti community.

If there’s one thing the world could do with it’s less advertising, I myself, after graduating from Brighton, decided to hunt down a position in an ad agency, I applied to literally everywhere in London and the few replies I had recounted the same standard refusal letter. Most of the advice I received was that advertising agencies only take on psychology graduates or kids straight out of school who are prepared to make the coffee, run around doing errands, and live by their wits (i.e) with nominal or no pay for the first few years. But I knew deep down exactly why no one would touch me, I had great ideas, hopefully I still do, the trouble was that for the vast majority – they were subversive.

Yes I honestly believed I could "change things from the inside", I had probably taken too many psychoactive substances and read too much William Burroughs by that point, but the fact is I considered the prospect of  being an advertising terrorist a worthy career, if I could find a seam, a loose thread in the umbrella organisation of modern media and industry, if I could persuade them through philosophical jargon, historical art reference, the grandeur of illusionism, that the world had changed and advertising would eventually be replaced by "viral recommendation" (which finally seems to be happening now), then I’d have lived a full and worthwhile life or at least it was a start. The fact is that dream died, instead I moved out of London, and into a poverty-stricken town by the sea where no agency would waste their money blasting the locals with advertising.

I remember crawling back from a squat party in my late teens and clicking on the TV, there was a corny movie flickering away, it starred the late Dudley Moore as an advertising executive suffering from a nervous breakdown, well actually he was a loony, they’d locked him up in mental home (an environment I am very familiar with) and left him to his own devices. To cut a long story short he ended up employing the rest of the patients in his new and brutally honest advertising agency, one classic campaign was for Volvo cars "It’s boxy but it’s reliable". That film didn’t make me laugh, I hardly ever did back then – I was so po-faced and serious – but it did seem like a proverbial step forward, a self-hallucinatory sign that the age of advertising would be over in my lifetime. But of course it was most likely the magic mushrooms doing the thinking for me :/

I’d spent most of my college years attempting to subvert advertising, I used to collage billboard posters together to create abstracted and familiar forms, relying on the public’s subconscious awareness of former campaigns to inject subjective resonance in to the works. It got me an art degree but it didn’t make me any friends in the advertising sector. I ended up as a dogsbody at Campaign Magazine on the "Creative" sales team for a while before I suffered the first of many nervous breakdowns. Try selling classified space to novelty printers when you can’t understand the intrinsic value of 1" of space in a free marketing magazine and you’ll join me.

DC Gecko has done what I could’ve/should’ve many many years ago, but you don’t get points for "could", if you don’t do it you have done nothing, which is in my life’s story (so far) a concurrent theme – and that’s predominantly why I have so much respect for his work. Gecko is at the forefront of the "Culture Jamming" movement, he creatively "doctors" advertising hoardings, especially illuminated bus shelters around Madrid. Ironically some of the first bus shelter posters he worked on were produced by J. C. Decaux which partly explains the name, that and the abundance of geckos crawling around his home in Reunion Island. If there’s one company who I am sure are desperate to put a bounty on DC’s head, it’s J. C. Decaux…

The Docteur had a problem, when the local government went on a clean up rampage and stuck to their guns graffiti began to disappear, the walls were blank and no one could touch them. He tried making small sculptures of geckos and leaving them in hard-to-reach places and yet they were still broken or stolen. One day, as he rode the bus he realised that by using luminous inks he could work on illuminated bus shelter posters far more surreptitiously. In the day J. C. Gecaux and bus companies would send out inspectors to check the posters were clean and visible, and at night the DC would subvert the advertising world for the better. See some examples of his work:-

Super Size Me (Day)
 

Super Size Me (Night)

Heineken

Marlboro

Marlboro Detail
 

Carerra

If you live in Spain keep an eye out for DC Gecko’s work, and do read the interview at Ekosystem if you want a little more information on his work, and of course check out his Flickr stream for all the goodies!

This post is tagged bus shelter, DC Gecko, Docteur Gecko, Doctor Gecaux, gecko, JACE, posters, Spanish graffiti, street art