Dscreet met up with famed photographer Alex Fakso during a recent trip to Buenos Aires and made the above film for Very Nearly Almost. Great stuff. You can read an interview with Fakso in Very Nearly Almost issue 21.
Weekend link-o-rama
It’s a bit late, but it’s link-o-rama time…
- CRASH painted the wall at Bowery and Houston. He is the first train painter to paint the wall since it became a curated spot a few years ago excluding the collaborative Martha Cooper 70th birthday edition of the wall (although DAZE did paint it back in the 1980’s).
- A Love Letter For You, the dramatic film made around Steve Power’s mural project of the same name, is screening in Chicago this month.
- Vagrant Space, AVOID pi’s new space/residency/project based in North Carolina, has a show at Tender Trap in Brooklyn next month.
- S.Butterfly has photo of Horfee’s London show.
- Do you hate assholes? Do you love people who act like human beings? So does Morley.
- The Centre-fuge Public Art Project is trying to raise some money to expand their work.
- Mumbo Sauce, a group show co-curated by Roger Gastman, opens next month at The Contemporary Wing in DC. The show includes work by BORF, Mark Jenkins and others.
- Shepard Fairey has designed the official mission patch for a space mission. Yes, it’s kind of an odd collaboration and other 100 artists probably could have designed something good for this patch, but I really like Fairey’s design. Great art? I dunno. Solid design? Definitely. Hyperallergic has more examples of patches for space missions.
Photos by Ludo
Gaia in Newcastle, UK
Gaia was in Newcastle, UK last month for some murals organized by Unit44. I’ve got photos of the wall here, but I think the video Gaia made with Unit44 is even more interesting. In it, he speaks about the challenges of being a muralist/street artist trying to do more than just impose advertising (aka street art) onto communities. I don’t agree with everything he says, but he makes some very valuable and interesting points.
Photos by David Bilbrough
TrustoCorp at an abandoned theme park for Mass Appeal
Wow. Interesting project from TrustoCorp and Mass Appeal. TrustoCorp visited an abandoned theme park in California and turned the place into their very own TrustoLand. If the video above leaves you wanting to more, check inside the latest issue of Mass Appeal magazine.
Submit your video to the MOCAtv YouTube channel
Yesterday MOCAtv (MOCA Los Angeles’ YouTube channel) announced an open call for content for the channel. Jeffrey Deitch, Carlo McCormick, Martha Cooper, Ethel Seno, and I will be reviewing content on YouTube with “#MOCATVUPLOAD” in the video title and then selecting the best of those films for inclusion on MOCAtv. Read more about the project here.
I can’t wait to see what gets submitted.
Web hosting craziness link-o-rama
For the last week or so until today, we’ve been in the process changing Vandalog’s web hosts. No need to get into the technical details, but now the site should run more smoothly and with less downtime. Unfortunately it means that we haven’t been able to write anything new on the site since that process began (everything that’s gone online was pre-scheduled). So this is a mega-link-o-rama combining the usual weekend link-o-rama content with stuff that I could have written about last week even if I’d had the time.
- Martha Cooper turned 70 this weekend, and the graffiti community came together at Bowery and Houston to give her a giant surprise birthday present (pictured above). How and Nosm told Cooper that they were planning to repaint their piece at Bowery and Houston and told her to come by at noon on Saturday, but they didn’t tell her how they were going to have to piece repainted. They brought together a bunch of new and old graffiti legends and painted a giant blockbuster tribute to Cooper. BSA has plenty more great photos of the piece in progress and a perfect shot of Cooper reacting to seeing the mural.
- WK Interact’s pop-up show in NYC is absolutely fantastic, a must-see show. Think it this way: This show, as I understand it, is a retrospective but it’s made up of the work that WK had in his studio, not work borrowed or on the secondary market from collectors, so this is a lot of unsold work. And yet, the show is still one of the strongest I’ve seen from any artist in quite a while, and the work holds up just fine next to anything else by WK. Even the work that has been sitting in the WK’s studio for a few years is just masterpiece after masterpiece. Good stuff.
- I love this t-shirt designed by Snoeman for Carnage (Snoeman is the zine’s featured artist in their latest issue).
- Sick new Dabs and Myla mural in Melbourne.
- Mr. Brainwash has lost another lawsuit by a photographer upset with MBW’s appropriation. Basically, it boils down to MBW’s work being too similar to the original photograph, with no original contributions to the work by MBW.
- Aiko’s installation at the Japan Society in NYC is beautiful. Can’t wait to see it in person.
- Sounds like Logan Hick’s show in LA was a big hit. Here are photos of the finished and installed work.
- Some crazy walls from Abik.
- This year’s OFFSET lectures in Dublin will include JR and Faile.
- NYC has some amazing graffiti on trucks.
- A quick Overunder tag.
- Os Gemeos talk about their show at the ICA Boston and their massive mural there from last summer (if you can spot me in the video, you have eagle eyes by the way).
- It appears that Phil Frost hit a massive billboard in LA, and then the billboard was stolen. But the whole thing seems like a shady PR scam for Ace Gallery. Melrose&Fairfax has the full story, but one point they don’t make is that Ace Gallery has a history of controversy, so that makes me even more doubtful that this billboard and its theft are real. Also, let’s face it, there’s a good chance that the billboard is illegal anyway since this was in LA, so who cares if the ad was stolen off of the billboard?
- Is this new David de la Mano piece a comment on the removal of Hyuro’s Atlanta mural?
Photo by Luna Park
Weekend link-o-rama
As I’ve been gearing up for midterms, I’ve missed posting some great outdoor work (and other things) this week.
- Does the buffman have a sense of humor or did mobstr do this himself?
- Barry McGee, Chris Johanson, & Laurie Reid showing together in SF.
- You may have seen the video of Margaret Kilgallen on Art21 before, but here’s some previously unseen footage of her and Barry McGee from that shoot.
- I love this piece by Disk.
- And also this one by the highly underrated Ludvig.
- There’s a fundraiser to benefit Essam, the artist who was beyond those brilliant drone strike posters and then subsequently arrested, taking place later this month.
- Graffiti geeks will love this tattoo flash.
- Jack Murray aka Panik ATG has written a must-read post about some historic London graffiti on The Foundry being covered by a street-art-emulating ad for Microsoft’s Surface. Hopefully somebody once again uses that surface for something creative very soon.
- Ron English has a new colorway of his Temper Tot art toy for sale exclusively on his website.
- I’m not quite sure what has happened here. First, an artist who goes by the name Edwin painted this piece in Hackney Wick. Now, it looks like this. It seems to me that Sweet Toof went up and added his teeth to the piece as a subtle diss to Edwin for ripping off Lenny The High Roller, the character that Sweet Toof and Cyclops used to paint back when their Burning Candy crew really dominated Hackney Wick. Yes, lots of street artists paint skulls and graffiti writers paint skulls, but the similarities here, particularly the eyes and given the location, are too much to ignore as mere coincidence. Also, this might be a stretch, but the hands in Edwin’s piece kinda look like Gold Peg’s hands (who also painted with Burning Candy in Hackney Wick and elsewhere).
- This film about M. Chat is screening in Philadelphia next week at the Slought Foundation. Strange thing though. The description of the film actually never gives the name of the artist, but M. Chat has a Wikipedia article and a Twitter account and shows work in galleries. Additionally, the Slought Foundation has posted downloadable templates of M. Chat’s work for people to customize and put up on their own. I called up the Slought Foundation and was told that Thoma Vuille, the man who it seems was behind M. Chat, is not involved in the show, although the man I spoke with suggested that the M. Chat logo may have been painted by a collective rather than just one man (like The Toasters collective with one logo and multiple members). So, is this appropriation of an unexplained urban mystery or theft an artist’s creation? I’m not one for strict copyright laws, but it does seem to me like the moral thing to do here would be to at least give some credit to Vuille aka M. Chat rather than pretend that the cat is still a complete mystery.
Photo by Carnagenyc
Weekend link-o-rama
As I tweeted the other day, my mind is kinda stuck on how much I wish the Parra show at Jonathan Levine Gallery opened today and not on Saturday so that I could go see it. So while I’ve been distracted by that point, here’s some of what I almost missed this week:
- KATSU’s April Fools prank is a bit early, but still pretty funny.
- The Outsiders / Lazarides has some really nice prints by Ron English. They are variations on his Figment image, aka Andy Warhol wig and a skull.
- Barry McGee, Chris Johanson and Laurie Reid are showing together at City College and SF starting today.
- Here’s a new piece from the always-interesting 0331c, but if you don’t know 0331c’s work, here’s an introduction.
- Nice video of Eine updating one of his walls in London from saying PRO PRO PRO to PROTAGONIST. Interesting comment about street art being a thing that “looked like it would offer what graffiti promised but didn’t deliver.”
- Nychos x Jeff Soto = Yes!
- New work from Isaac Cordal.
- Woah. Nice work from How and Nosm in San Fransisco.
- Jonathan Jones is up to his old tricks of dissing Banksy to get more hits for his column, and I’m biting. He writes, “Banksy, as an artist, stops existing when there is no news about him.” Even if that is the case, is that the end of the world? Does that relegate Banksy to “art-lite”? No. Banksy is one of the most talked-about artists in the world. I would bet that the same criticism was leveled against Warhol, who I believe Jones likes. Banksy’s manipulation of the media, playing it like a damn violin sometimes, is some of his greatest artwork of all. He manipulates the media to spread a message. The best example of this was probably him going to Bethlehem to paint on the separation wall because he knew that the media would cover it. He was able to play the media to draw attention to an issue that he felt strongly about. Banksy’s paintings are sometimes great and sometimes not. But his ability to make people fascinated with him and his paintings is just as much of an art, and that shouldn’t discredit him.
Photo by Luna Park
Ronzo is oh so fresh
Ronzo recently returned to Village Underground in London, where he also currently has a sculpture up, to paint this mural on one of the most highly-visible spots in Shoreditch (if I’m remembering the intersection correctly).
Fresh in Town – Roachio! from Ronzo on Vimeo.
Photo courtesy of Ronzo
Miss Van in São Paulo
In this film by Dscreet for Very Nearly Almost, Miss Van (cover artist for the latest issue of Very Nearly Almost) talks about her love of São Paulo and her return to painting on the street.
Miss Van Sao Paulo 2013 VNA from The Baron on Vimeo.