Another massive month in Melbourne in April with some great events, shows and work on the streets. This month I’ve also decided to include a bit more on graff and also some work off the streets in some of Melbourne’s awesome abandos.
Melbourne Train Graff. Photo by Luke McManus.
There’s been an explosion of panels running in Melbourne recently, including a couple of whole cars. Whilst some of the pieces are not the best in quality it’s still rad to see so much graff on trains again lately. Are the authorities asleep? Or is it our lack of trains to meet demand to blame so they HAVE to run them? The best of Melbourne graffiti Facebook page is a good place to keep up with what’s running, they cover anything running each day on the Melbourne rail network (good and bad). Here’s my favourite flick from the page for April. Continue reading “Melbourne Monthly Madness – April 2013”
A note from the editor: This is a guest post by Australian street artist CDH. Although I personally disagree with some of the conclusions CDH reaches in this post, I think it may be the start of a debate well-worth having, and it’s one that connects closely to my upcoming book, Viral Art. – RJ
Street art is primarily consumed as digital images online, rather than as paintings on walls in the physical world. Juggernaut sites like Street Art Utopia pump out new images each day to their million plus audience. Street art fans are likely to subscribe to multiple sites and so this audience encounters far more street art online, than on the streets. The street art fades away but the digital images live on, which makes them the primary cultural product that we engage with.
In many ways it’s very positive; I can view global works from locations I may never visit, or the works may be gone by the time I do visit. It’s also just more efficient; I don’t need to travel all over my city to view the latest works, I can just check out the Melbourne Street Art page. There are many other consequences of online consumption to the street art medium that I don’t intend to investigate here. I’m primarily interested in exploring two consequences of online consumption:
Audacity: Before the internet, placing works in a high traffic location was the only way to ensure a large audience (of generally passive observers). Today a work can be painted in any back alley, photographed and shared online with a huge audience of active consumers. Contextual spatial elements like the police station around the corner and the legality of the work are typically discarded online. So connecting with the audience doesn’t implicitly demand the same personal risk.
Lifespan: Digital images of street art bounce around the internet long after the original work has been buffed into oblivion. In Melbourne, the limited legal spaces make it common to see writers paint a piece, photograph it and buff it immediately for their mate to use the space. The works exist in the physical world for just a few minutes, but live on indefinitely online. They’re made for online consumption.
Online dissemination has generally diminished the audacity and the physical-world lifespan of street art. In the experiment here, I will take these 2 elements to their logical minimum and reduce them to zero. I have created street artworks that require no audacity and have no physical-world lifespan. I do this by photoshopping street art images into photographs of physical locations. Ultimately if we primarily engage with street art online and the digital image has effectively become the art (rather than the physical object), why not make this cultural production more efficient? This just cuts out the laborious middle step of painting a physical object, to then photograph, to then share online.
Results:
This image utilizes a portion of a photograph by sultan-alghamdi
Interpretation:
This is an art experiment, so we should examine these images honestly. My interpretation is this: I think this is an interesting idea but ultimately I think these works are really just a bit shit. If the images were printed out, framed and hung in a gallery it would feel completely in place. But on a street art blog it feels out of place. It seems dishonest. An unspoken rule of street art has been cheated- it’s not on the actual street anymore, so can it even be street art? We had a similar debate in the early 2000s, when street art first transitioned into the gallery system; it’s a weird limbo space outside of what’s really street art. Perhaps it can be called ‘street inspired art’, like the gallery street art was originally described. The term ‘street art’ again appears amorphous and manipulable.
This experiment also draws attention to the idea that street art is really something halfway between art and mountain climbing. These photoshopped street art images are like photoshopping yourself into a picture at the top of Mt. Everest; the real point is that you climbed the mountain, not that you got a photo. Street art is less about the image and more about the task of creating the image. The street art audience is continually fascinated with large scale works. It seems absurd that artistic merit could be proportionate to the scale of a work, but when interpreted through the prism of the ‘audacity and the task’, it seems perfectly reasonable. Perhaps it’s why street art is closely tied to cultures that are intertwined with physicality, like skateboarding or parkour.
What are we actually engaging with when we view street art images online? We’re consuming a digital facsimile of a street work, not the actual street art in its original psychogeographical location. People sometimes falsely believe the photograph is an objective representation of truth. In reality the photographer’s eye subjectively selects images to present. Those images are then open to the same forms of manipulation as the photoshopped images above: Perspectives are forced; contrast and lighting can be adjusted in Photoshop; colours can be enhanced; the photograph might be taken from a crane or an angle that is inaccessible to a viewer in physical reality. So who is really the author of the online content we consume? Is it the street artist, the photographer or a convolution of the two? This photographic subjectivity and influence become even more noticeable when images of the same artwork by different photographers are compared side by side; sometimes they look like completely different artworks. With the online dissemination of the digital image, where exactly does street art end and digital art begin? Perhaps it’s tied up in abstract elements like the intent of the photographer or the place of exhibition.
“The Giant” by Os Gêmeos. Photo by RJ Rushmore.Photo by Nate DorrPhoto by AnubisAbyssPhoto by Dylan Pech
Post-Script: Coincidentally, after submitting this article, thesephotos, which depict one of my pieces, appeared on the Melbourne Street Art Facebook page. The tagging has been photoshopped out of the original image by the photographer. Random experiences like this never cease to amaze me in street art. On a personal level, it’s flattering that someone has taken the time to digitally restore the work but it also demonstrates that the digital image is not an objective record of reality. Similar to a restoration, the photographer constructs their interpretation of my original intention, not the work as it exists today. What if I tagged the work or intended for it to be tagged? Like a photoshopped image of a girl in a magazine, this photograph represents a mutable, aspirational reality. The photographer and I become collaborators in the construction of a new cultural artifact, that is consumed by the online audience but only exists in a digital realm.
Before photoshop. Photo by Melbourne Street Art.After photoshop. Photo by Melbourne Street Art.
A bit late on this one, but tonight the shop/gallery/bookstore Needles and Pens celebrated 10 years of existence with a huge show at The Luggage Store in San Fransisco including work by Know Hope, Deuce Seven, Pez, and so many other talented artists. Luckily, the show is on through June 8th.
Okay, I’ll admit this is a slightly odd collaboration, but still probably a pretty cool opportunity for M-City and I like the result. Earlier this week, M-City painted a car for the Lotus F1 Team as part of an event for burn, Coca-Cola’s energy drink. Lotus F1 Team driver Kimi Räikkönen even picked up a stencil and spraycan for a little bit. The event took place at burn Yard, a traveling event that will also be headed to Hungary, Korea, Mexico and Brazil. Here’s more from the event:
Last class of the school year yesterday. Now for finals. Can’t wait… Here are some distractions in case you’re in a similar boat:
NoseGo has some new prints available today with Unit44. These are not giclee prints, but rather archival pigment prints, a significant step up in quality as I understand it.
And Kaws has a solo show in Tokyo at the moment. It’s Kaws, so feel free to check out the photos, but you pretty much knows what’s coming.
JR and José Parlá collaborated on a mural on the outside of Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, where they have a two-man show opening next week. Glad to see Parlá working outdoors, but it always strikes me as a bit odd since he tries to distance his work from graffiti. I guess when there’s a show to promote… Although to be fair, the show is about a series of collaborative murals that JR and Parlá made together in Cuba.
JR’s Inside Out project booth in Times Square is a huge hit. He’s been covering the street with photos of people who stop by his little photobooth, and it looks awesome. The billboards in Times Square were even (briefly) givenover to JR for the project. The whole thing is a fight against outdoor ads and for public spaces for the public, but JR manages to make his point without beating people over the head with politics. Instead, JR just shows people a better world and makes them smile. I’m not a JR fanatic, but I absolutely love this project.
Young New Yorkers is a restorative justice, arts program for 16 -17 year olds who have open criminal cases. The criminal court gives eligible defendants the option to participate in Young New Yorkers rather than do jail time, community service and have a lifelong criminal record. After our successful pilot program last year we continue to finance the project by hosting a silent art auction this summer – which would not be possible without the very generous donations of our artists, friends and collaborators – This year we are also publishing a catalog which contains critical essays on Youth Justice, Art as Social Practice and Street Art in order to make connections between these projects and our youth at risk.
The following is one of those essays and we’ll be publishing more of them on Vandalog as we approach the auction – so feel free to join the developing discourse…
We are a self-organized and grassroots effort. If you’ll like to help us find a locale for the auction, donate your time, partner with us or just be more informed please visit our website or Facebook page or write to Rachel@youngnewyorkers.org.
A couple years ago I was doing a wheat paste installation on a friend’s outhouse at his rodeo arena. A team roping competition was to start several hours later. I woke up around 5 a.m., drove an hour to the site and started working before sunrise. An 18 wheeler loaded with calves was parked nearby. A white cowboy emerged from the cab and groggily made his way to the outhouse. Upon seeing me he mumbled to himself “…Where else would you find on old black man wallpapering the outside of an outhouse at dawn at a rodeo event on an Indian reservation? Only in America.” We both laughed. In retrospect, it was an improbable moment but in the words of Spaulding Gray, it was also a perfect moment in that it captured the bridge building potential of public art.
That’s the question I get asked most frequently – what the fuck is an old black doctor doing making street art along the roadside on the Navajo reservation? Admittedly, it’s an unlikely journey which upon further inspection it makes perfect sense.
I came to work at a small clinic on the Navajo nation 26 years ago bright eyed and full of idealism and misconceptions. My first misconception was that as an African-American I’d be accepted by the Navajo who I thought would share a sense of solidarity with me as a member of a historically oppressed group like themselves. Wrong. I learned quickly that people here are focused on addressing their daily needs such as herding sheep, hauling water, firewood and/or coal and taking care of family. Acceptance into the community is hard won. There’s an expression amongst people here that unless you’ve walked amongst the Navajo for 2 years, they don’t take you into their trust. They’ve grown weary of outsiders coming to take from them leaving little in return.
My first year here I set up a black and white darkroom. After work I’d go out into the community to spend time with people as they were doing chores around their homesteads or hanging out with their families often getting to photograph these experiences. I’d started shooting black and white film in junior high school. My junior high school experience was unique and in retrospect, was instrumental in influencing my efforts to contribute fully to my adopted community.
I attended a small, alternative school in the mountains of North Carolina called The Arthur Morgan School. The school had 24 students, aged 12 – 15 in grades 7, 8 and 9. Being an actively engaged community member was demonstrated to us in practical terms every day. Each student had work assignments that we’d rotate weekly. The projects involved everything from preparing meals to working in the garden to repairing bridges on the dirt roads around the school. Once a week we’d have community meetings where students and staff would sit around in a large circle to discuss issues affecting our lives at the school. Coming from a traditional, all black public school, I remember being impressed that my opinion in these meetings mattered just as much as anyone else’s including our principal.
During my family practice residency in West Virginia during the early 80s, I’d make frequent trips to NYC hoping to see break dancing on street corners + burners on trains. My dream was to become a member of the Zulu Nation and it was during this time I started experimenting with graffiti.
Public Health Meets Public Art
The Navajo nation is located in the Four Corners region of the U.S. The land area of the rez is 27,500 square miles in size which is larger than the state of West Virginia. It’s home to roughly 160,000 people. Coal, natural gas, oil, uranium are found in abundance here. The Navajo should be one of the wealthiest groups of people living in the U. S. However, because of the way the contracts were written to exploit those natural resources, the Navajo people are amongst the poorest people in the U. S. Health problems on the reservation reflect those of other impoverished communities. Rates of diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, alcohol and drug abuse, domestic violence, teen pregnancy, interpersonal violence are all higher than the national average. The unemployment rate is close to 60%. Yet in the midst of what many from outside the reservation characterize as overwhelmingly dire circumstances, there are people living lives of dignity, celebrating the joys of family, farming and community.
My first intersection of public art and public health occurred shortly after I arrived on the reservation. Concerned with what we considered irresponsible advertising in that it was promoting cheap, sugary drinks in a population plagued with Type 2 Diabetes, a community health nurse and I went out one night to correct a billboard on the reservation.
It used to read “Welcome to Pepsi Country.”
Building Community
Wikipedia defines community as a social unit that shares common values. It goes on to say that “in human communities intent, belief, resources, preferences, needs, risks and a number of other conditions may be present and common, affecting the identity of the participants and their degree of cohesiveness.”
What does it mean then to build community and what are the implications of such an undertaking for someone from another community whose belief system differs from the host community? I didn’t consider any of these questions before I started placing photographs along the roadside.
During my time on the reservation I’d been following street art from a distance. Any time I’d go to a big city with graffiti or street art, I’d seek it out. In the mid 90s I did a project called the Urban Guerrilla Art Assault where I’d place black and white photos on community bulletin boards and in store windows in Flagstaff. In 2004 I traveled to Brazil for the first time and was blown away by the abundance, diversity and caliber of the street art there. I returned to Brazil for 3 months in 2009. The first day of my return the feeling of being alive and intrigued by art on the street made by the people and for the people consumed me again.
There was one guy whose work I saw and liked as I moved around Bahia. His name is Limpo. It turned out that during my last 3 weeks there I rented a flat immediately above his studio. I spent everyday in his studio talking with him and street artists from around the world who’d stop by to share ideas in sketch books, videos online and street art books. The highlight was getting to go out on the street with one of the artists as he did a piece. These guys loved what they were doing. Their energy and enthusiasm were infectious. As I left Brazil, the street art community that had embraced me and stirred my soul said “keep it going!”
When I returned to the States I decided to enlarge and start wheat pasting images from my 22 year archive of negatives along the roadside. I got a recipe for boiling wheat paste off the internet, talked with people at Kinko’s about how to make enlargements and away I went. My first forays were at night. I pasted onto roadside stands where people sell jewelry to tourists venturing to the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley and Lake Powell. As I contemplated doing this, I had to consider how to introduce a new art form into a traditional culture. What imagery is acceptable? After stumbling a couple times, I settled on what I considered universally beloved Navajo themes – Code Talkers, sheep and elders.
One of my first pastings was of Navajo Code Talkers that I pasted onto an abandoned, deteriorating jewelry stand along the highway to Flagstaff.
I was shocked a week later as I drove by the stand to find people repairing it. Curious, I stopped to find out what was up. The guys working on the stand didn’t know I’d placed the Code Talker photo there. They said that so many tourists were stopping to photograph the stand, they decided to repair it and start using it again. I asked if I could take a photo as well and told them that I placed the image there. They responded by asking me to put something at the other end to stop traffic coming from that direction. This was my first validation from the community to continue pasting and it was my first insight into the potential of art to promote economic independence for the roadside vendors. More importantly, I appreciated the potential of this work serving as a tool to bridge cultures and races of people.
It is through these types of interactions with people as I’m installing art that I get to better know my community apart from the constrained interactions I have in the clinic. Installing art in communities on the reservation where people don’t know I’m a doctor who has been here for 26 years and that I have a sixteen year old 1/2 Navajo son, I defend what I’m doing by telling people that my project is a mirror reflecting back to the community the beauty they’ve shared with me over the past quarter century. It’s my hope that a stronger sense of self and collective identity is nurtured through the images which thereby strengthens the community.
Last summer I decided to pursue a dream suggested by a fellow street artist to invite some of my favorite artists out to the reservation to paint murals and to work with local youth. I called this experience The Painted Desert Project.
The Painted Desert Project
The Painted Desert Project hates stereotypes, respects the unique culture in which it operates and spreads love.
Before the first group of artists came out last summer to paint murals (which included Gaia, Labrona, Overunder, Doodles, Tom Greyeyes and Thomas “Breeze” Marcus), I sent to the non Native American artists copies of a book chapter on the Navajo creation story, a book of images and observations about the land and the people, a beaded item from one of the roadside stands and a film (“Broken Rainbow”), in an effort to sensitize the artists to the different world view here. I attempted to pair artists with various roadside stand owners and arranged for sweats with tribal elders to bless our efforts and to give the artists an idea of acceptable imagery and Navajo taboos.
It’s important to me that artists come to the project without preconceived ideas of what they’re going to paint. It’s important that they have enough time to interact with community members and spend time in this land of enormous skies and stunning landscapes then create work that reflects this interplay of cultures and landscape. In this way, the art is responsive to the moment like jazz. My hope is that the artist leaves enlightened and that the community feels enriched or vice versa.
Gaia saying goodbye to Matilda + her son, Tony
Last summer as the first group of artists was preparing to leave, we did something I’d never done in my long tenure here. We invited members from the community to my house to share a dinner with the artists. It was a simple meal shared around a candlelight lit table outdoors under the stars. How can this type of rich exchange not inform my medical practice which like my art practice attempts to heal and spread love?
My hope for the project this year is to not only share art but to do community service projects. For example, last summer Doodles painted a killer mural on a nearby food stand which burned down last fall. I’d very much like to get him back this summer to help the vendor rebuild the stand and then repaint it.
So when mofos ask me what’s up? What’s an old black doctor man doing wheat pasting on the Navajo nation? I tell them like the brothers told me in Brazil. I’m just trying to keep a good feeling going round and around.
Damn. It’s almost May! Sorry this is so late but it’s worth the wait. March was another action packed month in Melbourne.
Baby Guerrilla. Photo by David Russell.
Starting off with Baby Guerrilla‘s show in Footscray. Baby Guerrilla’s paste ups have been adorning Melbourne’s walls for a few years now, and they are some of my favourites, her gallery work was new for me and I loved seeing a different side of the artist.
Baby Guerrilla. Photo by David Russell.
Adnate was 1 of 3 Melbourne graffiti/street artists that entered the renowned Archibald prize. From the Archibald website “The Archibald Prize is awarded annually to the best portrait, ‘preferentially of some man or woman distinguished in art, letters, science or politics, painted by any artist resident in Australasia’.” It’s great to see some more modern painting techniques making it into this more conventional competition. Adnate painted a portrait of Samantha Harris; an Australian indigenous model. Also make sure you check out the video by Michael Danischewski below.
