Yes. KATSU is the man. He continuing to explore what graffiti can look like in this century and he’s leaving most street artists in the dust in the process. These screenshots are from a piece by KATSU within the game Minecraft. I’m not a gamer, but, as far as I understand it, the vast majority of Minecraft games are not played in an online multiplayer setting, but they can be. So, like Franco and Eva Mattes performing during a game of Counter-Strike or Diego Bergia getting his graffiti into Tony Hawk’s Project 8 (which spread his Where’s Lepos project from the street into a game), KATSU has brought his graffiti into the digital world and could potentially put it in places in the digital world where others could see it. Most likely though, this throw-up wasn’t made in a multiplayer game and won’t be, so in that sense it’s more like doing something in a sketchbook and posting a photo of the sketch to Instagram than doing a piece of graffiti, but it’s still pretty cool and it’s another step for KATSU towards doing graffiti in the world of 1’s and 0’s.
The project was announced through F.A.T. Lab, where KATSU is currently an Artist in Residence. In that post on F.A.T. Lab’s website, KATSU says “The future of graffiti for me will be in the form of black hat tactics.” For those who may not know, “Black hat” is a term used to describe hacking which would typically be considered invasive or malicious in some way, rather than the good kind of “white hat” computer hacking. I can’t wait to see what KATSU does next. A move from physical graffiti to the digital graffiti of website defacement could be very interesting.
So I’ve decided to start a monthly post on Vandalog to try and capture all the goings on in and around Melbourne each month as there’s always a lot happening. For completeness sake and because I don’t want anyone to miss out on this, here’s a belated January round up. What a great way to start the year! Continue reading “Melbourne Monthly Madness – January 2013”
A few weeks ago, Acrylic Walls shared photos of their mural residency in South Africa, which includes artists Gaia, Freddy Sam, Jaz, and Know Hope. Local Freddy Sam has brought together international artists for, what I termed, a love letter to South Africa. However, sometimes love bites back.
One local took to Gaia‘s wall to voice his disapproval of the piece with not enough buff paint. Being an advocate for community and public space, Gaia used what some would view as heartbreaking into an opportunity to engage with the surrounding neighborhood. A hand erasing his Edwardian-animal hybrid has been accompanied by the phrase “revisionisme, uit te vee,” or “to erase revisionism” in Afrikaans. By commenting on the methodologies behind his piece, Gaia acknowledges the temporality of his work as well as its effects on those who, by their proximity to the piece, become forced viewers.
Robbie Conal is the latest artist in our Tim Hans shoots… series, where photographer Tim Hans takes photo-portraits of street artists and we pair Tim’s photos with an interview.
RJ Rushmore: What was it like to have your artwork, voice, and likeness featured on The Simpsons?
Robbie Conal: It was like being Knighted by the Queen of England. (In case you were wondering, that’s where Great Britain used to be.)
RJ: Most street artists put up the majority of their work themselves, some are even quite protective about not allowing others to put up their work, like stickers, for them. Why do you reach out to volunteers to put up your posters?
I’m always looking for a communal experience: the posters are my little way of participating in the public dialogue about issues that are important (not just to me). You know, like that rumor called, “democracy.”
Likewise, getting a bunch of like-minded loonies together at, say, Canter’s Deli, in LA in the middle of the night, talking the talk, walking the perp walk—getting up a smack of counterinfotainment on the streets together—is a bonding experience. Those are the only moments in my life when anarchy actually works and I don’t feel so alone (you know, just me and my weird beliefs and my little pieces of paper)—ha! And, of course, we get more up for more peeps to see a minor surprise on their way to work or (these days) looking for it, in the morning.
RJ: Have many of your volunteers gone from putting up work with you to doing postering campaigns of their own?
Conal: There have been a few—plus some great graff writers have joined us, rather gleefully, I might add. MEARONE, MAN1, VYAL. KOFIE, AXIS, and Shepard Fairey to name a few.
Actually, MEARONE, Shep, and I did a guerrilla street poster national tour together in 2004. It was Mear’s, Shep’s and Elizabeth Ai’s idea, not mine.
Shepard Fairey, Robbie Conal and MearOne
You might vaguely remember that George Bush’s mafia stole the 2000 Presidential election. That pissed Mear, Shep, and Elizabeth (and a shitload of other people) off! Kind of politicized them— in the sense that it made them pay attention to “party politics.”
They decided that they’d each do an anti-Bush, anti-Iraq War street poster —in their own styles—and take’em on tour around the U.S. before the 2004 election. Then one fine day they came and got me, as in, “Hey, kids! Let’s go get the old guy out of his rest home on the west side and make it a triptych!” And I’m very grateful they did. Called the tour, “Be The Revolution.”
We had a tour launch party at the Avalon in Hollywood, 1,200 peeps showed up, Ozomatli, Culture Clash, the great slam poet Jerry Quickley all performed. My offset-litho printer, Typecraft, Inc. in Pasadena printed up @ 15,000 full color street posters, 5,000 of each of ours—pro bono. We rocked around the country as best we could. It was verrrry interesting.
RJ: What do you think about the street art movement’s popularity over the last few years?
Conal: To be honest, I always thought it was inevitable. My idea of genuine indigenous American art forms is based on a “bubble up” theory of cultural creativity. The “American Dream,” of single family home ownership, keeping your kids “safe,” you know, away from the mean streets of, say, any “inner city” neighborhoods in any big city, pushes families into places like Pacoima, Simi Valley, Orange County, for Chrissakes! There’s nothing for young teens to do out there. “Safe”? A 14 year old red blooded American kid taken out to nowhere with nothing to do? Give me a break!
However well meaning, that’s some idiot’s idea of safe. But give a kid access to some markers and a U.S. Post Office with free mailing address label stickers and all that nowhere time . . . SHAZAM! You’ve got a budding graff/street artist! Likewise: Give a kid a skateboard (and nothing else)—what were they back in the day: a slab of wood and 4 fucked up, salvaged old clip-on roller skate wheels, right?—the kid will live on it 12 hours/day/7 days/week and be able to skate air on that thing. Stacy Peralta makes Tony Alva makes Shawn White makes that kid in Pacoima (or frickin Frozen Tundra, New Jersey, for that matter!) into a world-class creative athlete. Same goes for a kid and a bike—Simi Valley suddenly ain’t so bad. Cause there’s plenty of room for you get on your pony and work out new tricks—the contemporary equivalent of a cowboy/girl and his/her pony out on the range. Instead of becoming a rodeo champion, the kid invents The X Games!
Then there’s the fashion industry: how do you monetize a great graff piecer’s work? Put it on something a fan can walk away with. Like a T-shirt. Make bank at the same time you’re making the fine art world think it’s missing something, and you’re in it. Fine with me, pal.
RJ: The way you start with oil paintings and then turn those into poster is pretty atypical. It seems like the more typical process for activist street art would be to make something in a format that is quick to develop and quick to print (like Shepard Fairey or Emory Douglas). How did you develop your method of starting with oil paintings and turning those into posters?
Conal: I’m a painter. I went to art school all my life. When I was 8 years old—in NYC—my parents sent me to The Art Students’ League to (on 57th Street) by myself—to draw dead flowers and, you know, plants and vegetables. Some fruit—an apple, an orange—what they called “still life.” I wanted to draw naked ladies, but the administrators there told my parents I was too young. Theodoros Stamos, an excellent abstract expressionist painter who was teaching there at the time, would sneak me into the “life drawing” classes. He’d say, “OK kid, there’s your naked lady—just sit down, shut up, and draw.”
Actually, that was probably the only thing that could get me to shut up. Then and now.
When I was 13, I went to the High School of Music & Art—a public “specialty” school—pretty much just like LA High School for the Arts is now. They smell exactly the same.
From ’63-’69, I majored in art and psychedelic drugs at San Francisco State. I was an O.H., an “Original Hippie.”
M.F.A. at Stanford (’78) and blah-blah-blah…you get the idea.
So street art, postering, came after all that. But painting is still how I get my torque on the subjects I address. Like Lucien Freud said, for me, “paint is flesh.”
RJ: Although you’re an important figure in the street art movement, you don’t seem to be so pigeonholed as solely or mostly a street artist, unlike many of your contemporaries. Do you think that being an oil painter has helped you to avoid being pigeonholed in that way, or is it something else?
Conal: I’m not sure about that—it might have a little to do with it. Mainly because one of the many, many artificial hierarchical rankings in the history of the Western Art aesthetic is that oil painting is the highest form of art making. Ha! (And I start with paint, so I don’t have to prove to the art world that my choice of medium is “worthy.”)
But, to be honest, I think it’s my perspective on the world—outside of whatever specific venue my art might be inhabiting at any particular moment—street, art gallery, museum, private home, man cave, dungeon. My thought process is always political—and I’ve had both an academic and a full-on mean streets education.
Also, my parents were union organizers in NYC in the 1930’s and 40’s. My Dad was “blacklisted,” by the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950’s. That was basically for having different ideas from its august members about systemic political and economic issues, like what government’s job is; what system of government and what economic system could best (and how much it should) provide for the health, education and welfare of its citizenry.
ART has always been my most receivable way of expressing myself about issues I care about. (Meaning, you really don’t want to hear me whining about what I think is wrong with the world, now do you? You’re way better off, if you just look at the nasty portrait of the ugly old white man in a suit and tie. Read the 2 or 3 punny words. Work it out for yourself.) Democracy, with a small “d” being my pet peeve. In the sense that I miss it, want it back (the small amount of it we ever had). I sincerely think the world desperately needs it for us to survive. And I’m a wise guy. So, as for ordnance—the instruments of mass destruction at my disposal—all I got is wise ass humor, sweat equity, and an evil eye.
Photos by Tim Hans; Shepard Fairey, Robbie Conal and MearOne posters courtesy of Robbie Conal
General Howe has been putting up street art since at least 2007. His recent work may seem like quite a change of direction, but I don’t think the change is as drastic as it might at first seem, although it is significant. Like Insa, General Howe has begun making animated gifs. In my most recent post on Complex.com, I pointed out a few artists who I think are using the internet like a street artist or graffiti writer uses the street, and not only do I not think that’s crazy, I think that shift is fantastic. I’m not saying that street artists should stop working on the street, but I am saying that the internet has opened up a lot of new opportunities for artists to interact with the general public (kinda like street art), and it’s exciting to see artists taking advantage of those opportunities. A piece of street art can be seen by a lot of people, but an animated gif can go viral. There are a lot of gif artists out there, but I want to point out General Howe specifically for two reasons: 1. His Disasters of War series has some work that just makes my jaw drop, and 2. He has worked on the street for years and then transitioned to animated gifs.
These pieces are all from General Howe’s Disasters of War series. Goya for the digital generation. For the series, General Howe has appropriated imagery from the G.I. Joe animated television series and modified them into gifs that deal with issues of war and terror. Something about these just stops me in my tracks.
Occasionally I write pieces for Complex.com. This week, they published piece of mine called 10 artists using the internet like the street. List posts can be entertaining, but I wouldn’t normally say that I’m proud of my list posts. This particular piece is different though. It’s a list of visionary artists doing game-changing work that blurs or even completely ignores any lines that exist between the street and the internet. These are the artists I’m writing about right now in the book that I’ve mentioned here from time to time. So consider this post a little teaser of what I’ve been thinking about lately, and what I’ll be writing about in great detailing in the future.
Please check out the post, because I think these artists are doing really important work, and I’d love to get your thoughts on what they are doing. Maybe I’m onto something here, or maybe you think I’m on the completely wrong path. Either way, I’d like your input. So, go check out 10 artists using the internet like the street and let me know what you think by leaving a comment on this post or over at Complex.com, emailing me, or tweeting me.
Today I discovered an artist who had spent the better part of a year plagiarizing the work of others by photoshopping his own name into photographs that he found online. That artist is from Oklahoma City and goes by the name Bubo. He was quite active on Twitter, with 1399 followers before he deleted his account earlier today. His website was also wiped clean around the same time, but I made sure to take screenshots before that happened. Bubo’s deception began to unravel when my friend Wayne brought his work to my attention. I had a look at Bubo’s website and it was immediately clear that things were not right.
Work by SPQR attributed to Bubo on his website. Note the “Bubo” signature added to the piece.
In the “walls” section of his site, Bubo had 13 photographs of different piece of street art. The work was of varying styles, from photorealistic to 1-layer stencils. And a lot of it looked familiar. I identified 5 pieces that could not be by Bubo, and one that was highly unlikely, with most of the rest being quite suspect as a result. With some quick Googling, I found that Bubo had put work on his website by SPQR, L.E.T., Priest, David Zinn, and Joe Iurato, as well as this unattributed piece which seemed unlikely to be by an artist who I already knew was stealing at least some of the work posted on his website. You can see the SPQR piece above, and the other pieces here, here, here, here, and here. Bubo added a small stenciled signature to some, but not all, of the photographs on his site. He also tweeted some of the works as his own, as shown here and here.
Thanks to another one of his tweets, shown below, I was able to determine that Bubo was also not the artist behind the unattributed piece that I recognized (does anyone know the artist? Is it maybe OaKoAk?). After all, the piece was posted to Nuart’s blog and Wooster Collective in 2011, so it was clearly not Bubo’s if he was claiming the work was “new” in November 2012.
This evening, I spoke with Bubo over Skype. He immediately came clean to me admitting that his website was full of other artists’ work. Bubo explained that some of the work on the site was his own (4 of 13 pieces in the walls section), but that he began passing of other work as his when he received negative reactions to his own pieces and positive reactions when he post other people’s work.
Bubo sounded genuinely remorseful and was very clear that he understood that what he had done was wrong. At times it sounded like he was practically in tears. He made almost no attempt to justify his actions. I asked Bubo why he would put his name on another artist’s work. He said, “I thought that if I did that, it would make [people] like mine I guess and draw more attention to my own stuff. That’s really it.”
Bubo also apologized to all the artists whose work he passed off as his own, many of whom he does know the names of, saying, “I’m very very very very remorseful, I’m very sorry to those guys because that was their shit. They put their life into it. It came from their mind, their hand, all of that. and I took it.”
After our conversation, he wrote this confession/apology/explanation…
I guess you know by now that the only thing that I told the truth about was my health. That is no lie but it’s my fault, I did it to myself and I deserve it. This was supposed to be bubo’s summer, I worked for about 8 months straight on the road and saved every penny that I could. I saved right at $16,000 and came home to okc to tear the place up but I got into drugs and it ruined me. That stupid fake weed shit, I was doing about 8-9 grams of it a day and I think it gave me my cancer but I can’t prove it, no one can. Nobody even knows what’s in the stuff, just nasty chemicals…
My first piece that I put out was the stupid walmart piece but everyone hated it. I tried the BP piece next but I got the same reaction. I thought that if I put that stuff directly on their property that it would be better but it didn’t matter. I wanted friends so bad in this world that I stole other people’s art to get them. I don’t have any friends, none that truly care about me anyway and I’m sick of being alone. The first piece I stole was the “eye” piece. People loved that one and I got many followers from it. I had people talking to me now and I couldn’t stop doing it. I have been alone for a long time now due to something else that happened to me a number of years ago.
I loved the attention and just talking to people. That’s really all it was about, I just wanted people to like me but I went about it the wrong way. I still can’t believe that it has gone on so long and that RJ is the only one to ever say anything to me. I’m sure other people knew as well but they chose to remain silent about it.
I had an awesome job but my drug use ruined that for me. I have cleaned up but have gotten myself so far down that I can’t pay for gas to get back & forth from work.
I have made several mistakes over the last year and I give you my word, I will be paying for them.
I want to say to the Artist’s whose work I stole, I apologize, very deeply. Your work means the world to you and I messed with that pretty hard. I will never in my life ever do this again, not in any way, shape, or form. I swear that to you and I offer you this consolation: The entire time I was stealing from you, I was slowly committing suicide and didn’t even know it until it was to late…:)
bubo
I’m not sure how much of that story is true about Bubo getting cancer from a drug habit that distracted him from his goals of making his own art, but I do believe that he is sorry. Maybe it’s true or maybe it’s not, but what I’m pretty sure of is that Bubo is a pretty desperate and confused guy who just wanted to fit in and maybe get a piece of the street art pie. I don’t think he is an evil genius who set out to manipulate people or become the next Mr. Brainwash through some complex scheme without creating his own work. I think he just got up for a bit and then made some very serious mistakes that he kept making when he saw that he was rewarded for them. The work that Bubo was doing that was his own wasn’t bad. It wasn’t great, but he had the potential to become a solid artist if he just worked at it. Maybe he would have been one more in a sea of Banksy clones, but that’s not the worst place in the world to be. At least, it’s a hell of a lot better place to be than a plagiarist.
Bubo’s twitter profile moments before being deleted
What makes something like this even possible? What makes someone think it is okay even for a second? Bubo’s career is kind of amazing in a very wrong way. When he shut down his Twitter account, he had 1399 followers, and he was having conversations with those people every day. Sometimes he would post photos to Twitter claiming them to be his own work, and of course his profile had a link to his website with all of the plagiarized pieces. And yet, nobody called him out. He had been at it for a year. It wasn’t just street art either. He was posting paintings on Twitter and his website that he did not make. How could nobody have seen this? Much of the work that Bubo stole had appeared on major blogs like Wooster Collective. Or, if people had noticed what Bubo was doing, how could they have stayed silent? Even Bubo seems amazed that he was able to keep going for so long.
I’ll admit that it seems that a community willing to criticize Bubo’s actual work may have been one of the contributing factors to his initial plagiarism, but I think that an overly-congratulatory and self-promotional street art community contributed to Bubo being able to pull of his deception for so long. On Twitter, artists who follow back and retweet every last positive mention of themselves inevitably leads to people following them and saying positive things about their work. Sometimes, the street art world, particularly over twitter, can be a big circlejerk. And in that circlejerk, nobody is going to question another artist’s work unless they absolutely know for a fact that it has been stolen, and maybe not even then. Perhaps if the street art community was generally more to giving and receiving constructive critiques, these kinds of things would not go on for so long.
The nature of the internet played role too. Since Bubo was posting photos online and he is based in Oklahoma City, where there aren’t many people going around photographing street art on their lunch breaks like in NYC, nobody seems to have questioned him about where exactly his works were located. He could post photos without any serious concern that someone might try to track down the work to see it in person.
And why would Bubo think his plagiarizing was okay or get any joy out of it? For the joy part, again, I think it goes back to the way that the street art community can be extremely supportive and positive to the point where it is detrimental sometimes. In addition to the drugs, Bubo seems to have become addicted to the modest fame that he had achieved and the fan-base he built up. In our Skype conversation, Bubo gave some insight into how he rationalized his actions. He said, “This is a fact. If you look at all of these people. Every single one of them steals people’s shit. Half of these millionaire artists out there, they don’t even do their own stuff anymore. And that’s a fact. So who’s the really bad person? I mean, they’re the ones making money off of it.” But there’s an obvious and crucial difference between Jeff Koons or Shepard Fairey appropriating work and employing assistants and what Bubo did: Those artists never lied to anyone. Everybody knows that Koons and Fairey employ paid assistants to help execute their work, and appropriation is part of the conceptual basis for some of what they do, not usually something that they try to hide. Bubo took others’ work and posted it as his own with no such conceptual component. Bubo just wanted to get more fans and be loved for the work he was posting as though he had thought-up and executed it himself.
While Bubo was able to go plagiarizing for nearly a year, he was eventually caught red-handed with only minimal investigation on my part. And I suppose that’s thanks to the internet too. If he were in Oklahoma City and just showing the plagiarized work to people there in handmade zines 20 years ago, he could still be at it (although then the question becomes how he would get access to the photos that he edited in the first place). So if you’re thinking about emulating Bubo or you already are, keep in mind that it’s only a matter of time before it all comes crashing down. And if you know of an artist doing anything like this, please, do not let it continue. Call them out on their lies. Stealing and re-attributing artwork may seem harmless at first, but plagiarism is unfair and potentially detrimental to the artists being plagiarized. For more stories like this, just check the blog You Thought We Wouldn’t Notice.
I would love to get other people’s thoughts on Bubo’s story in the comments section, particularly if your work was stolen by Bubo or you were a victim of his deception.
Here are links to the pieces that Bubo plagiarized that I was able to trace to a source:
For the second artist in our Tim Hans shoots… series, where photographer Tim Hans takes photo-portraits of street artists and we pair them with interviews with those artists, Tim met up with artist and designer Tristan Eaton.
Caroline: At what point were you like ‘screw art school’?
Tristan: I dropped out of SVA after my Junior year because I couldn’t afford to enroll again. At that point I had no choice but to say fuck you, I’m gonna do it on my own. I started doing illustration work and showing in galleries when I was 17, before I started college anyway, so I had an inflated sense of confidence. The next 4 years of broke life humbled me, but I never stopped learning and making art no matter how poor I was.
C: When you told relatives or family friends that you were a “toy designer” how did you explain what that meant?
T: That never happened. I never set out to do toy design, nor have I ever fully identified as one. By freak chance, I designed some toys for Fisher Price when i was 18, then later helped start Kidrobot and designed a lot of toys. But it was never my profession or my main focus. Any commercial work, toy design work etc., I’ve ever done has been a distraction or separate from my work as an artist. I’m an artist first, everything else is second.
C: There are some incredible painted/modified Dunny’s and Munny’s out there, but I’m curious if you’ve ever seen ones that were so bizarre or bad that you were like “don’t put my name with that”.
T: Of course! But that doesn’t matter. The fact that we’ve given people inspiration to be creative is the whole point. I’ve met accountants, mail men and even cops who paint Dunnies and Munnies. All of them didn’t see themselves as artists until they started customizing toys. That’s amazing to me. On the collector side, a lot of toy collectors graduate into collecting prints and paintings by many of the Dunny / Munny artists. It’s become an amazing platform for discovering artists and even launching careers in some cases.
C: If you were stranded on a deserted island and you could only have one of the following things, which would you choose between a sketchbook with a marker, 3 buckets of house paint, or a large amount of play-dough?
T: Sketchbook & marker!
C: How was it celebrating KidRobot’s 10th anniversary?
T: Awesome. My time at Kidrobot feels like a lifetime ago, but it’s amazing to see how far it’s come. I’m very proud of it’s legacy.
C: What are you working on now?
T: Right now I’m just working on paintings and mural work. I do a few commercial projects here and there to pay bills, but I’m really trying to get better as a painter! It’s hard, but it’s the most rewarding thing in my life.
