Well, it’s been quite a week for me at least. Here’s what I wasn’t posting about while I was busy breaking up fights…
Tox has been jailed for an absolutely insane sentence of 27 months for writing graffiti. There are not words the express who screwed up that sentence is. The British Transport Police claim Tox’s graffiti caused passenger delays, but sending him to jail for 27 months just costs taxpayers a boatload of money. Graffiti writers should receive sentences of community service and/or fines. Not jail time.
With two new videos that have come out this week about artists making machines to spray paint using skateboards, I thought I’d mention some bike-based graffiti-making machines that have been made in the past before posting those videos…
In 2009, someone in London made a spraycan holding device that attached to a bike (similar to DTagno’s gadget from 2008, but mounted on a bike), so that they could ride their bike and paint at the same time. The above photograph show the results of that device. And then earlier this year, Akay did something similar with his spray-painting robot that can paint a rainbow. Those were both on bikes though. The two devices unveiled this week use skateboards.
D*Face returned to California to once again paint The Ridiculous Pool, an empty pool used for skating. Except that he didn’t paint it in a traditional way. Instead, he came up with a device that hooked up a spray can to the bottom of a skateboard so that the lines of each skater in the pool are painted onto the pool. Pretty cool. Check it out:
But that device is overly complex and difficult to build. Certainly not how I would have made it. Why did D*face have to cut the deck up? Dave the Chimp has a much simpler solution, and he’s been taking it to the street:
Dave says he made his device to encourage a punk/DIY spirit and get people to actually do stuff instead of just sitting around all day and thinking it takes money and months of research to do something cool.
Labrona and Gawd. Click the photo to view it large.
Last night might have been my busiest 1st Thursday ever, and I didn’t even stop off everywhere I wanted to. Either way, I’ll have to go back to a few galleries this week to actually look at the art properly. Even with a cursory glance though, the Charming Baker show was the highlight by a mile. I’m not sure how sustainable it is to sell paintings at the prices they sold for last night, but damn it looked good. Here’s a few things I could have posted about last night, had I not been out being a gallery-hopping scenester…
Everfresh have created the graffiti writer’s dream machine: The Graff Mobile.
Conor Harrington has been painting some murals of bulls in Ireland. I like this one. This one, not so much. Unfortunately, I cannot figure out why that is about either of the walls.
Showpaper has done round 2 of its Community Serviced project where they get artists to paint newspaper bin boxes for Showpaper. Check out all the photos from round 2 here.
Wow. While not entirely street art, there is a bit of street art animation in this video, and the entire thing is so impressive that I just had to post it. The video is called On the Inside Looking Out, and it took the artist Jeff Frost about 9,000 still photographs in the Southern California desert to make it, about half of which ended up in the final animation. Just watch…
A cautionary tale for artists: it is definitely possible to get too conceptual with your street art. This video is from Faceheads, a Russian art collective.
A note from RJ: After writing this, I read Rub Kandy‘s interview in the most recent issue of IdN, where he speaks about street art that is created for and best experienced on the web.
What do Kidult, Blu, Maismenos and Katsu have in common? They are all examples, although not the only examples, of artists using the internet in a similar way to how graffiti writers and street artists have traditionally used the streets. These artists are each trying to spread a message at all costs. That’s standard street art/graffiti. But with these artists, a traditionally static artform is turned into a performance, what they do might be fake or impossible to see in person and, most importantly, they see the spread of their work online as at least as important as the physical pieces.
Check out these videos from Kidult (the first one is hilarious), Blu, Maismenos and Katsu…
With all of those videos, the resulting films are more important than the actual physical artworks. And yet, they were all done by street artists and graffiti writers and include (or pretend to include) art that is generally considered street art/graffiti. Who cares if anyone ever sees any of those artworks in person, or if they are even real? Even in the case of the real works that are depicted in those videos, most of those were seen by far fewer people, or at least art/graffiti fans, than these videos. In the case of Katsu’s tag on MOCA, that was buffed in less than 24 hours and it was a while before the existence of the tag and the story of it being buffed was even confirmed. The important thing for these artists is that the videos get seen. These videos and photos are more impressive than the actual work they capture. The intended audience for these street pieces is not the public on the street. These, and many other, pieces of street art and graffiti were created with an online audience in mind rather than a physical one.
So what does this mean for street art if the streets and a medium for viewing street art are being used in this way? Is street art just as legitimate when specifically designed, executed and documented for an online audience? What about graffiti? Does it even matter if a piece is real, so long as people see it? I would say that, at least when it comes to graffiti, it does not really matter if a piece is real or not. So long as it creates fame. Of course, fake videos won’t work at creating fame forever, but they are a temporary technique that can accomplish one of the goals of graffiti. It seems the case is more murky with street art. Certainly the street art in these is still art and probably still street art, just maybe not “street art” as the term is generally understood today. I consider the work in The Underbelly Project to be street art and graffiti, but others do not because it had to be viewed through photographs. Street art that is specifically designed to be viewed through the filter of documentation is still street art, but it’s an evolution too. As I’ve said before, I think hacking is 21st century graffiti, so maybe the internet is the new “street.” It’s quickly becoming a better avenue for artists to show their work to the public than real life.
If you’ll notice that there were a good number of posts on Vandalog this week, you’ll notice the opposite thing next week. With family in town visiting and moving in with some friends and starting the couch-hopping segment of my summer in just a few days, things are rather busy. And so is the art world. Here’s what I have been reading this week:
Everyone’s talking about this Shepard Fairey thing, but frankly I don’t really care. Dude was being hassled and got a bit irritated and snapped. We all do it. Oh and didn’t everyone know that he has assistants to put up his street work?
This video features Marcelo, who is one of the 127 carts that carry the art of the graffiti artist Mundano, and just one of the 20.000 that have in São Paulo.
Logan Hicks’ show on now at Opera Gallery in NYC has some new work from him on anodized aluminum. Those pieces are of greyscale figures or scenes on what looks like a solid piece of black aluminum. In reality, the aluminum has been anodized/dyed black. In this new video, Logan explains the process of how his artworks on anodized aluminum are made:
Wow, last week went by quickly. And Steph moved in with me today, temporarily. Should be a crazy few weeks. Here’s what I’ve been meaning to write about:
Faile’s new print with Paper Monster could have been great, but I think they picked such a weak image to work with. Oh well. I’m sure there will be more and better Faile prints in the future.
I’ve never heard of Anton Steenbock, but I want to see more like this.
Glen E. Friedman has won his lawsuit against Mr. Brainwash for using Friedman’s iconic photograph of Run DMC. I still say I’d rather have seen MBW win this case. Not because I think MBW’s work based on that photo looked good, but because I’d rather see more room for artists to re-appropriate content and less restrictions on copyrighted material. What MBW did to Friedman’s photograph was transformative. The original photo is a great photo and an iconic one. What MBW did was make it look totally silly. And that should be covered by fair use, for the benefit of better artists.
The .WAV (We Are Visual) collective recently placed a large Microsoft logo on the construction hoarding outside of a soon-to-open Apple Store in Hamburg, Germany. A similar idea to Zevs’ original liquidated logos (before he changed what he says they mean), and very well executed. Check out the video:
