Category: Random

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“Spatial Distributions of Power: Illegal Billboards as Graffiti in Los Angeles.”

“In this way, via a constant bombardment of a hegemonic truth, corpo-political regimes control the means by which individuals seek to know, decipher, and act on themselves. Acting as if they were freea in within a liberal, democratic system of rule, the good consumer citizen is calculatedly and spatially constructed.”

BC Biermann, a PhD Assistant Professor of Film/Media Studies California Baptist University – Riverside has recently published a paper on “Spatial Distributions of Power: Illegal Billboards as Graffiti in Los Angeles.”

Check out the full article here

via http://antiadvertisingagency.com/ and PublicAdCampaign (duh)

-Gaia

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Random Coolness

Time for some links to other blog’s cool posts:

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New from Cept, and the politics of graffiti removal

Cept has put this piece up recently. It looks great, but that’s not really the whole story. It was painted on top of a classic Cept. Why paint over the old piece? Turns out that the council demanded that the owners of the wall remove the graffiti because there had been complaints about it. Instead of paying the £5000 to clean the wall, they just had Cept paint something new there. Graffoto has the whole story, along with other examples of Hackney council’s inconsistent and often absurd graffiti removal policy.

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12-year-old arrested in NYC for doodles on desk

Animal New York reports “A 12-year-old girl from Queens was led out of her school in handcuffs after she was caught doodling on her desk with an erasable marker on Monday. Alexa Gonzalez wrote, “I love my friends Abby and Faith,” and even had the gall to add a menacing smiley face.” For a time, she was even suspended from school and sentenced to community service in family court, even though a spokesperson for the city’s school admitted that the situation was handled badly. By Friday, the school had decided to end her suspension which had begun earlier that week. It seems as though she will still have to do her community service though as well as write an essay about what she learned from being arrested. You know what I learned? Her assistant principal isn’t the sharpest crayon in the box.

Via Animal New York and New York Daily News

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Want a Steve Powers/ESPO tattoo?

Steve Powers says:

Hello,

Celebrating the release of “A Love Letter For You Brick Valentines On The Philly Skyline” book by Free News Projects, we’re doing a series of events in Philadelphia. The one I’ll tell you about here is I am taking over the Northern Liberties Tattoo shop for a week (more or less depending on demand), and the only artwork that will be on offer will be all Steve Powers, all week long. All your favorite icons, punchlines, poignant reminders of the futility of life, hilarious illustrations of our inadequacies, True depictions of true love from the Love Letter project, and of course, PIGEONS. Its all here, it’s cheap, its permanent. No, I’m not tattooing, no skills. I will, however, sign your arm and let one of the skilled pros on staff at Todd’s shop re-ink it, fair enough? Sometime during the week, we’ll be having a book signing at Exit Philadelphia Skateshop next door, watch the project blog www.aloveletterforyou.com for time and date. THANKS

Best Regards
Steve

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Graffiti Markup Language

First thing first, I think I need to note that this post is actually way cooler and less cheesy than it will seem at first, it just takes some time for the awesomeness to sink in.

For years, people have loved the projects that Graffiti Research Labs and F.A.T. have done. GRL’s is probably best known their Laser Tagging device:

And of course there was The EyeWriter Project for Tempt.

Then at Nuart, I saw Graffiti Analysis.

All interesting experiments, but not really anything that could be used by the average person. Well know that’s changed with Graffiti Markup Language (GML). GML is a file type that can store information about graffiti tags. And now you can create your own applications using GML files and GRL and F.A.T. have already released a number of applications to the public.

This film explains this a bit:

GML = Graffiti Markup Language from Evan Roth on Vimeo.

GML files are stored on 000000book.com, where you can see hundreds of digital tags. Those tags can be created on the iPhone with two applications, Fat Tag: Katsu Edition and Graffiti Analysis (a slightly simplified version of the Graffiti Analysis application which is now available for download for your computer). I’ve tried out both apps, and they are pretty cool, but essentially it’s just a fun way to draw on your iPhone.

I realize this probably isn’t the clearest explanation of GML or the applications you can use it with, but that’s in part because the possibilities are pretty endless. As silly as the whole thing sounds, just try out some of the applications and play around on 000000book.com before you rush to judgment (as I originally did, almost laughing the whole thing off).

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The Faith of Graffiti giveaway

This month on Vandalog, I’ve organized a few giveaways.

The first of those giveaways starts today with two copies of Jon Naar and Norman Mailer’s seminal graffiti book The Faith of Graffiti. When it was first published in 1974, The Faith of Graffiti was the first book to take a serious look at graffiti. In 1974, Jon Naar’s photos and Norman Mailer’s essay gave the graffiti movement some mainstream legitimacy, as Mailer was one of the first to call writers artists. Looking back now, the book acts as an important historical document, preserving the very first generations of New York graffiti. Mailer’s understanding of graffiti was unparalleled at the time, and his writing is still an important starting point when looking at graffiti in the context of art history and art criticism, while Naar’s photos, taken at a time when few other photographers were paying much attention to graffiti, are invaluable evidence of how widespread and powerful graffiti culture was in the 1970’s

For years, it hasn’t been easy to get a copy of The Faith of Graffiti, as it was out of print, but last month it was reprinted in an expanded edition. This book is an absolute must-have for fans of graffiti and street art; my 1st edition is one of my prized possessions.

So how can you get a free copy of The Faith of Graffiti? Easy. HarperCollins has given me two copies of the paperback edition to give away. To enter the contest, you can either comment on this post (make sure to include your real email address, otherwise you can’t win because I won’t be able to contact you), or go on twitter and tweet a link to this post along with the hashtag “#vandalog”. But you have to enter before 6pm (GMT) on Wednesday, January 13th. After that, I’ll randomly pick two winners. Good luck.

Of course, not everybody can win, so if you’d like to buy a copy of the book, just go to Amazon.com.

Photos by Jon Naar

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Uncommon – cool artist designed iPhone cases

I’m not big on blogging about products here. Mostly because a lot of graffiti/street art related products are kind of silly (see: the graffiti mug). But Uncommon makes what seem like very cool cases for your iPhone. I’ve never seen one of these in person, but I might buy one. The artist line up is pretty solid.

Uncommon lets you design your own case using your own artwork or artwork from their catalog. The concept is interesting enough, and the lineup of artists is just perfect: Ron English, San, Mode2, David Ellis, Tinho, Anthony Lister, Herbert Baglione, Date Farmers, Usugrow, Dennis McNett and Monica Canilao just to name a few (and these are just the artists they are starting with, who knows how many more will be added in the future). One of the great things about these cases is that the artists haven’t contributed just one image each, some have contributed a dozen. And while those in a hurry can buy a “premade” case (like those pictured above), creative risk takers can customize their case by placing the graphic themselves: you can blow up the imagine so that the all you see is Ronald Mcdonald’s giant head painted by Ron English or shift the design so that a Date Farmers drawing appears at the top, center or bottom of the case.

Here are two cases I designed from the same image by David Ellis:

The cases aren’t cheap ($39.95), but that seems like a small price to pay when you spend hundreds of dollars on a phone and most other cases make it look so ugly.

Here are two more premade cases:

By Greg Gossel
Special edition for Juxtapoz

In short, these are pretty cool.

Buy them at getuncommon.com

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Holiday gift guide: books

There was a very positive response from my first holiday gift guide post about affordable prints, so I thought it might be worth putting together a similar list for art books.

1. The Faith of Graffiti by Norman Mailer and Jon Naar
Okay, this book isn’t actually released until December 29th, but it absolutely needs to be included in this list. A full decade before Subway Art was published, Mailer wrote a brilliant essay to accompany Naar’s photographs of the very earliest New York City graffiti, most of which would be considered tags today. This book is an essential piece of graffiti history, but it has been largely ignored by history in favor of the next book on this list.

2. Subway Art: 25th Anniversary Edition by Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant
While Naar did a great job documenting the very earliest stages of graffiti, Subway Art is what turned graffiti into an international phenomena and forced people to look at graffiti as more than petty vandalism. This new edition of the book includes new photographs and is in a much larger format, so many of the photos that are in your old copy of Subway Art are now printed much larger and nicer. While The Faith of Graffiti documents the earliest moments in graffiti history, there is no more important book about graffiti or street art than Subway Art.

3. Keith Haring by Jeffrey Deitch and many others
If you like Keith Haring, this is the definitive book of his artwork. It’s pretty huge, weighing in at almost 9 pounds. It’s not cheap either (almost $40 at the time of this post), so it’s really for those who absolutely love Haring, but you’re not going to find a better book of his artwork.

4. Brooklyn Street Art by Jaime Rojo and Steven P. Harrington
Probably the best of Prestel’s series of street art books, this is a solid overview of Brooklyn’s street art. A great stocking stuffer.

5. Street Art: The Graffiti Revolution by Cedar Lewisohn
In my opinion, maybe the best street art book for the street art lover. Not just a book of photos, this book covers a great deal of street art history in a very serious way.

6. Wall and Piece by Banksy
Honestly, I kind of hope that nobody buys Wall and Piece because it’s on this list. Pretty much anybody who reads Vandalog should have at least one copy of Wall and Piece. Banksy is a genius. ‘Nuff said.

7. Young, Sleek, And Full Of Hell by Aaron Rose
I just read this book a week or two ago, and if you liked the film Beautiful Losers, this book is a great companion. It tells the story of New York’s Alleged Gallery, mostly through pictures and interviews with many of the people who were associated with the gallery over it’s lifetime.

8. Pictures of Walls
A funny little stocking stuffer. One of those things that makes me smile.

9. Untitled II: The Beautiful Renaissance by Gary Shove
This book doesn’t take itself too seriously and it’s full of pretty pictures. It’s good overview of recent street art, and includes some new artists that I wasn’t familiar with as well as many of that greats that I know and love.

10. The Thousands: Painting Outside, Breaking In by RJ Rushmore
Can of had to include my own book, didn’t I? What I love about this book isn’t what I wrote, but what other people wrote. Know Hope’s biography of Chris Stain taught me as much about Chris as it did Know Hope’s personality. An excerpt from Mike Snelle’s forward to the book was recently posted on Drago’s website.