``We have initiated an innovative and covert campaign of guerrilla action to subvert the forces of ugliness by exposing them for what they are on their own territory.''

- The Coalition to Raise Aesthetic Consciousness

Vandalism is a bit of a loaded term; people tend to think of the most brainless and ugly examples of the appropriated canvas and then extrapolate from there to condemn the entire genre. But vandalism can be beautiful, especially when what is being vandalized starts out ugly.

In Nazi-occupied Poland, a group of Warsaw youths known as the ``Little Wolves'' painted the slogan ``Poland Fights On'' on buildings, vehicles and even personnel of the invaders - on a regular basis. They also made mimics of the ``For Germans Only'' signs that the Nazis used to enforce their privileges - and attached them to lamp posts and other potential gallows-sites.

You know those plant racks out in front of supermarkets? What if you showed up one day and found ``Heinous Welsh Squash'' and ``Common Dickweed'' for sale? Luther Blissett and Lester Green of San Luis Obispo, California conspired to invent some exotic plants and put them up for sale at the local Scolari's and Thrifty's.

Not satisfied, they also changed around the letters on a local feed store's marquee, making spendid anagrams like ``Phone That Tip: Watch 14 Dog Rapes'' out of more ordinary bargain announcements.

There's a loosely-organized group of smog-haters who are doing their part by printing up cheerful-looking bumperstickers that read ``I'm Changing the Climate! Ask me how!'' I'm guessing that they aren't putting these stickers on their own S.U.V.s.

Street signs, particularly ``official'' traffic signs, are splendid foci for enigmatic artwork (such as these examples from the Interdimensional Pixie Broadcast Network show) or for protest (for instance this modified sign from Brigham Young University).

They also work for political art. Rent one of those electronic sign boards that normally flashes things like ``SLOW - ROAD WORK AHEAD'' and program it to say ``PREPARE TO STOP ... CORPORATE CONTROL OF THE MEDIA'' instead. That's how Together We Can Stop Capitalism met the National Association of Broadcasters at their convention.

In Brooklyn, a group of artists created some official-looking street signs that announced NO SUV PARKING - and then they gave out official-looking parking tickets to sport utility vehicle drivers who violated the new rules!

The folks at the Institute for Applied Autonomy have created a cargo van that works like the head of a dot-matrix printer - applying huge block-letter graffiti to the road as it drives along.

Don't be daunted by signs that say ``Post No Bills.'' You can adopt it as a genre, and create your own stencils that read ``Pay No Bills'' (which reminds me of the British graffiti that responded to the frequently-encountered warning ``Bill Posters Will Be Prosecuted'' with ``Bill Posters is Innocent!'').

In the U.S., people who want to avoid being part of the experiment on the safety of genetically engineered food don't have it easy. There's no requirement to indicate genetically engineered ingredients on a product's label. A group called Label This is taking matters into its own hands - they do research to find out which products have genetically engineered ingredients, print up appropriate informative labels, and go to the grocery stores and apply the labels themselves.

The really destructive vandalism, alas, is usually bought and paid-for, and protected by the powers-that-be. But if you want to interrupt pathological, media-simulated social interaction, you've come to the right place.

One way to reclaim private advertising in public places is to Convert Billboards to Chalkboards. This is one you can do in your spare time - hop to it!

A project called ReTag uses stencils to aggressively graffiti-tag buildings with the logos of the very companies that inhabit them. For example, tagging the ``Gap'' clothing store with ``Gap'' logos.

``At a certain point, market saturation becomes redundant. The McDonald arch is the same as the crucifix,'' one ReTagger said, ``In a sense, we turn their own logo on them. They call it vandalism, but it's their own logo they have to clean up.''

A couple of Intel engineers managed to etch some graffiti directly onto the surface of one of the Pentium microprocessors. Takes a scanning electron microscope to catch sight of the message (``biLL Sux''), but that was enough to get the engineers canned. (Whoops! Turns out this was all a hoax - nice one though!)

Vandalism can be used to make something ugly, but it can also be used to point out ugliness, or to replace it with art. The archetypical vandalism is the spraypainted graffiti, which at its best is very beautiful form of Art Sabotage indeed, and ought to be seen as a generous act of civic beautification when it occurs.

A while back they put up an anti-vandalism billboard on a street near my home. Of course, the cause of civic uglification is promoted no better than by billboards themselves - advertising supplements that drop into the landscape like the cards that fall out of magazines. It's no surprise that vandals consider them fair game; I've never seen an even amateurly vandalized billboard that didn't look better than the original.

Billboard Liberation, as it's being called, is attracting dedicated practitioners. Reports here and there indicate that it's popping up all over. And we highlight some great examples in our scrapbook.

Adbusters has put together a brief guide for the prospective billboard improver that they call ``Adding the Blemish of Truth.'' And Earth First! has adopted the process of monkeywrenching.

On a related note, Elvis Schmiedekamp Has a Posse.

The folks at Baby Smasher Industries will sell you some amended ``instructions for use'' stickers that show how restroom baby-changing stations are really meant to be population control devices.

Why wait for the department of public transportation to get around to putting in bike lanes?

The folks at KASTsystem are exploring the cutting edge of vandalism and interactive public sculpture.

The folks at Fortean Times have kept their fingers on the pulse of curious vandalism: Authorities in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, were called to the scene to investigate when fifteen trees in a city park were fitted with doorknobs and locks. Residents of a Rio de Janeiro slum painted all of the buildings in their neighborhood a uniform pale green, perhaps to confuse police.

A similar stunt was pulled by residents of Prague, Czechoslovakia during the Soviet occupation of 1968. Vandals tore up or painted over street signs and highway markers so that only locals could find their way around.

In 1982, during the USSR-supported anti-Solidarity crackdown by the government in Poland, someone changed all of the signs at the ``Stalingrad'' metro station in Paris to read, instead, ``Gdansk'' (the city where the Solidarity movement was founded).

In August of 1968, when troops from the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact nations occupied Czechoslovakia, the destination signs on city buses in Prague were changed to read ``U.N.: S.O.S.''

Protesters in Vienna, Austria symbolized their opinion that the Soviets should go away and leave them alone by affixing a suitcase to the hand of a statue of Stalin.

An unusual case of widespread and engimatic asphalt embellishment involving Stanley Kubrick and Arnold Toynbee is worthy of mention.

Self-vandalism? Pete Wagner reports that in the sixties, student anti-war protesters in the United States used to write the word ``FUCK'' on their foreheads so that they wouldn't be photographed for the news media. Protesters were in danger of being suspended if they appeared in the papers as campus radicals.

When right-wing firebrand Barry Goldwater ran for the presidency of the United States government in 1964, his frequently-postered campaign slogan was ``In your heart you know he's right.'' The graffiti rejoinder ``but in your guts you know he's nuts'' became a coast-to-coast depropagandizer.

Similarly, U.S. government president Gerald Ford's ``Whip Inflation Now'' program's ``WIN'' buttons were inverted by cynics who wore ``NIM'' (``Need Immediate Money'') buttons instead.

Creative and pleasantly pointless was the icon replacement at a mall in Sacramento.

I'd be remiss not to include the beautiful Crop Circle phenomenon here somewhere. Here's art etched right on the heart of agriculture. Curious circles are appearing everywhere these days (``police have no suspects and know of no motive'').