These past few weeks Invader has been quite busy plastering San Diego with his signature tile creatures. Preparing for the “Viva La Revolucion: A Dialogue with the Urban Landscape” at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. The show, while taking place inside and on the streets of San Diego, is set to open July 17th and is sure to be one of the most talked about street art shows this summer. As one of the featured artists, Invader will not only have pieces within the museum walls and all around San Diego, but created an interactive movie map of his Invasion of San Diego. Here is the trailer for the film thus far:
In the vein of Sebastian Peiter’s highly recommended street art bookGuerilla Art, Babelgum posted his 60 minute documentary (included with the book) encompassing the beginnings of street to the current trend of commercialism in the asset market. Featuring countless high profile names in the game, Guerilla Art takes a look at the current place street artists have in the elite world of art today and where the genre is headed in the near future.
The description on Babelgum is a more adroit one than I will write, so I am going to post theirs instead:
A new generation of street artists are the latest hot property of art collectors and advertising brands. Featuring Futura 2000, Rammellzee, Banksy, Os Gemeos, Space Invader, Barnstormers, Espo, WK Interact, Zevs, Blek Le Rat, André, Noki, Miss Van and Eine. Filmed in New York, London, Paris, Sao Paulo and Tokyo the documentary introduces the graffiti-inspired street art pioneers Futura, Rammellzee and Blek Le Rat. Art patron Agnés B and art curator Jerome Sans comment on the early days of Keith Haring and Jean Michel Basquiat, when graffiti changed the streets of New York and the urban landscapes of the rest of the world. The film portrays a new generation of street artists led by UK stencil artist Banksy, whose artworks achieve record prices at auction houses like Sotheby’s and who is collected by Damien Hirst and celebrities Angelina Jolie & Brad Pitt. Other new street art styles featured are the mosaic tile wall images of Invader, the lyrical folklore inspired murals by Brazilian twins Os Gemeos and the “Visual Kidnappings” of advertising billboards by Parisian artist Zevs. GUERILLA ART reveals how street artists have developed a unique system of economic survival. Their works are bought by young peers and new collectors. Street artist collective “Pictures on Wall” sells limited-edition prints online and organises the Santa’s Ghetto art sale, filmed right in the centre of London’s shopping district. Once street artists have made a name for themselves, they run their own clothing labels or design special lines for streetwear companies. Futura creates record covers and logos for youth brands. Parisian artist André is a typical cultural entrepreneur running an art store, working on designer toy lines as well as opening clubs in Paris and other cities. Noki creates one-off anti-couture fashion pieces using street art techniques. Rammellzee performs a mythology of his own Gods in clubs and gallery spaces. “Over the last few years street art has established itself as an art form. But where can this street-based movement go from here, after works by Banksy have been boarded up, chiselled off the walls, to be sold on eBay for money far exceeding the gallery prices?” Tim Marlow – White Cube Gallery Curator.
Click here to watch the film and feel free to post your reviews in the comments
Graffiti Analysis is an extensive ongoing study into the motion of graffiti. Custom software designed for graffiti writers creates visualizations of the often unseen motion involved in the creation of a tag. Motion data is recorded, analyzed and archived in a free and open database, 000000book.com, where writers can share analytical representations of their hand styles. Influential graffiti artist such as SEEN, TWIST, AMAZE, KETONE, JONONE, and KATSU have had their tags motion captured using the Graffiti Analysis software. All tags created in Graffiti Analysis are saved as Graffiti Markup Language (GML) files, a new digital standard used by other popular graffiti applications such as Laser Tagand EyeWriter. Graffiti Analysis 2.0 is an open source project that is available online for free in OSX, Windows and Linux. Graffiti writers are invited to capture and share their own tags, and computer programmers are invited to create new applications and visualizations of the resulting data. The project aims to build the worlds largest archive of graffiti motion, and bring together two seemingly disparate communities that share an interest hacking systems, whether found in code or in the city.
Surely one of the most talked about exhibits going on currently is KAWS at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut. As a fellow New Jerseyian, I feel it is my duty, nay my privilege, to hail from the same state as such an incredible street turned gallery artist. Made famous for his defacement of bus shelter advertisements back in the day (thanks to Barry McGee who gave him the key to the locks), KAWS continually reinvents his art taking it one step further with each new endeavor. What truly amazes me is that his aesthetic hardly changes, and KAWS’ logo/monster/creature-like-thing is still his work’s trademark embedded into nearly every piece.
Even though one might deem that KAWS’ work is out of place in a white walls museum stiff setting, the pieces are so loud and speak individually, that the white walls are a nonfactor in this instance. I especially enjoy the fusion of his colorful character and celebrity or model portraiture. The pieces are comical, yet strangely sadistic, in the sense that KAWS’ creatures own the subject and are not just a form of vandalism; rather, they belong in the picture. In some odd welding of pop, street, urban, and collage art, KAWS’ new works seem right at home on these walls, and I would be hardly surprised if they do not begin to appear in galleries or modern art museum collections more often.
The exhibit also boasts many of his more affordable collaborations like shoes, skateboards, etc. KAWS’s style just goes to show everyone that his work truly is relatable to and for the public, even in museum space. So if anybody wants to buy me one of the skate decks, I definitely would not decline such a gift.
Oh, and the music is a bit cheesy. You might want to turn it on mute. Or play a little Bruce in Kaws’ honor.
I came across this fantastic video that features an overview of Herakut’s work at the current “Happy Doubt Day” exhibit in Dusseldorf, Germany at Springmann Varol. The video features great animation of the paintings as well as pictures from what i presume to be opening night. Enjoy.
James Jessop has made a video with SpineTV for all you graffiti nerds out there. James has a collection of markers and pens for tagging, from back in the mid 1980’s to the modern markers used today. In the video, he tests out each of these markers, goes through the history of his tags and even reveals one of the new secrets that graffiti writers have been taking advantage of this year. A must-see for those obsessed with graffiti history.
Remi/Rough and Jaybo have put together a two-man show in Santander called No Beginning No End. Here’s some of Remi’s work from that show. You can check out the rest of the show on Remi’s flickr.
But that’s not all Remi has been up to. Recently, he and the rest of the group Agents of Change painted a massive wall in Manchester. They made this video, but you can probably skip to 4 minutes in and just see the end result of their work:
I’ve heard people say that Agents of Change’s hands are similar to this piece that Zeus and Eine painted last year (and which Remi coincidentally painted over with the property owner’s permission as part of The Beautiful and The Canned), but Agents of Change have really crushed it in Manchester and I’m not sure if you can claim that any one person’s trademark is painting giant hands (here’s another piece with a series of hands by Run).
Honestly, I’m rushing this post because I’ve got to leave my house in 5 minutes, but have a look at this video from Mundano. What really interests me about artists like Mundano and Zezao, as well as many more traditional mural painters, is that the setting of the painting becomes as important as the content. Mundano painted this piece in an important place, so now I’ve heard about something important that I probably never would have seen otherwise.
With Ludvig, you probably either love it or you hate it. For me, his style is a unique twist on old-school graffiti. That’s why we met up recently to make this time-lapse of Ludvig painting at Leake Street in London. Good stuff.
