RJ Rushmore has been involved in contemporary art as a writer, curator, photographer, arts administrator, and fan since 2008. With a focus on street art, graffiti, and public art, RJ facilitates and promotes catalytic and ambitious art outdoors, in galleries, and online. He founded the street art blog Vandalog and has worked at The L.I.S.A. Project NYC, Mural Arts Philadelphia, and Creative Time. Currently, RJ is Co-Curator of Art in Ad Places.
It simultaneously amuses and saddens to me to no end how Richard Hambleton can be promoted and his works purportedly sold for astronomical sums by Valmorbida while at the same time fantastic paintings of his have difficulty reaching 5 figures at auctions when Valmorbida isn’t involved. Hambleton is one of the original street artists from the 1970’s, but his story has never really been told since the 1985 book Street Art by Allan Schwartzman. The short version is that Hambleton’s street art in the 70’s and 80’s, particularly his shadowmen, are easily up there with work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, or Jenny Holzer, but he has never really received due credit.
It’s difficult to say if Standing Lady Shadow #R1-R9 is worth the tens of thousands that a gallery might ask for it, the hundreds of thousands Valmorbida might ask for it, or something else, but I’m pretty confident that anything this solid by Hambleton should go for more than the $6,000 opening bid that artnet has it at right now.
I just hope there’s someone out there with $6,000 and a good home who agrees with me… The auction ends of December 20th just after noon Eastern Standard Time.
This weekend I’ve been without solid internet access, and Caroline and I have both been knee-deep in exams and final essays for the last week, so here’s a belated link-o-rama…
The New York Times has a story on Living Walls, centering on the removal of Hyuro’s mural a few months ago and now the removal of Roti’s mural. I hope that this does not dissuade artists or the amazing people behind Living Walls from doing more of the amazing work that they have become known for over the last three and a half years.
I’m not always a fan of KR (I don’t care how good the ink is, a marker should not cost $10, and it should be designed to be refillable) or his murals (I’d much rather see pieces by Just or Katsu using similar techniques), but Olive47 got some great photos of a piece by KR in Miami.
Well, the street artists went to Miami, did their thing, and now most everyone is on their way back home. I’m guessing we’ll have a few more posts on Vandalog devoted to the murals left behind in Miami this year, but my friend Olive47 has sent over a few photos to get us started. There’s work by Chanoir, El Xupet Negre, Celso Gonzalez, Olive47, Free Humanity, La Pandilla, Logan Hicks, and one unknown artist (if you know, please leave a comment) 2Square.
After seeing that Brooklyn Street Art is running a contest for the best street art photos of 2012, I thought to myself that maybe I should enter. Then I remembered that I’m not actually a great photographer. I’m competent and I still post photos to Flickr and Instagram, but there are a lot of people with a lot more talent than me. So instead of submitting to BSA’s contest and surely losing, I decided that I would just highlight a few of my favorite shots here on Vandalog. So, here are my 10 favorite photos that I took in 2012… Continue reading “My favorite shots of 2012”
I always struggle to describe the work of Spanish artist Xuan Alyfe. Today, I’m thinking the best way to describe it is as a cross between Momo, Isaac Cordal, and Interesni Kazki, if I’m limiting myself to using street artists as reference points. Well, whatever it is, it’s interesting.
This work from Aakash Nihalani was done during Nuart earlier this fall, and I love it. It’s simple and site specific. Remember, always practice good placement. If you do that, you don’t have to paint 7 stories tall just to catch people’s attention.
What Are You Doing To Participate looks like a great show of zines opening this week in LA with work from Mel Kadel, Matt Leines, Pez, and many more.
Okay, so now you’re probably thinking “What the hell is RJ on about? That line came out of nowhere. I think it’s the punchline to some knock knock joke, but it makes absolutely no sense at the start of a post. I don’t think I’ve heard heard RJ say banana and I couldn’t care less if I had.” And you’d be right. That line makes no sense out of the context of the joke in which it belongs, and until we have that context, we can’t say for sure whether that line is good or bad. And yet, this is pretty much what a show that’s on right now in Miami asks visitors to do…
Marc and Sara Schiller from Wooster Collective wrote a must-read piece about unauthorized Banksy exhibition in Miami this week and why they find the exhibition so objectionable that they won’t be attending. The works in the show in question were removed off the streets to be sold into private hands, and the art fair hosting the show is fully aware that Banksy disapproves of the show. If this sounds familiar, it’s because these are the some artworks that were shown in The Hamptons a little over a year ago. This time though, the works are supposedly not for sale as they are now part of a private collection. Regardless of all that, as the Schillers note, Banksy’s best work really only works when experienced in context in which it was intended (whether that intended context be on the street or in a gallery), and bringing these pieces indoors probably makes most of them much much much weaker than they were on the street.
This is certainly not the first time we’ve seen someone trying to make a buck off Banksy and it’s reasons like this that Banksy created Pest Control, a controversial committee which determines the authenticity of Banksy works on the market and which refuses to authenticate any street works or works not originally intended for resale.
The show is accompanied by this ridiculous wall text:
Wall text at the show itself, wherein the organizers have a cheeky cop-out for their dickishness. Photo courtesy of Arrested Motion.
What this wall texts shows is a fundamental misunderstanding of Banksy’s practice. By removing the work from its original context, they are only showing a part of the work. To see the works “as artworks themselves” is to see them on the street without a plexiglass cover on them. Taking them out of that context to evaluate them is like removing 1/64th of a Warhol print from the rest of the piece, framing it, and hanging it on a wall to evaluate on its own without considering the other 63/64ths of the piece. A wisp of Marylin’s hair is unlikely to seem a great artwork all on its own. As the Schillers say in their piece, Banksy’s best work is about context and site specificity, and you usually need “The long shot” providing context for the work for it to make complete sense. Even his best gallery work has this same feature, where it makes sense in a gallery or museum context, but might not make sense on the street. Asking what value there is in a Banksy street piece hung on a gallery wall is a bit like asking what value there is in a Picasso that’s been put through an incinerator.
Plus, I can’t help but laugh at the way they refer the Banksy as a graffiti artist and his work as graffiti.
The Schillers write, “It’s intentional on our part that this article doesn’t mention the name of the show that will take place this week in Miami. Nor will we mention the name of the speculator who is crassly attempting to profit from the work. Attention is what he desires.” I however must acknowledge that a good chunk of Vandalog’s readers are also regular readers of Arrested Motion, who visited the show and did publish that information, so hiding it it a bit futile. The show is called Banksy: Out of Context and it is at the Context Art Miami, an offshoot of Art Miami.
Nonetheless, I do agree with the Schillers that the show should be actively avoided, particularly since it is not free to visit. Context will cost you between $10-$50 just for a one-day pass. Instead, why not stop by the always-exciting Fountain Art Fair where Living Walls has organized dozens of street artists to paint next to one another in an outdoor portion of the fair? There, the work may be a bit out of place as street art, but at least the artists are on board with the idea and making the work there with the knowledge of where and how it is going to be displayed.
Read more on Wooster Collective, where the Schillers have written a lot of similar things to what I’ve echoed here, but they probably use better grammar.
The spot on Hanbury Street in London previously occupied by Ben Slow’s work (twice) is now home to a collaboration between Bom.K of Da Mental Vaporz and Liliwenn that looks a bit like a wall-sized game of exquisite corpse.
The ARD*POP-UP Festival took place in Oslo this November and was the first iteration of this festival, although the organizers hope to move it from city to city in the coming years. This year, the festival brought Pez, Kenor, Phlegm, and others to the streets of Oslo for some really fun murals, although it does look like they were concentrated in a pretty small area. Here are a few of my favorites:
