Carmichael Gallery is once again featuring artwork by some of my favorite artists. Opening Saturday evening is Disambiguation with new works that reinvent traditional graffiti forms by Carlos Mare, Rae Martini, Remi/Rough and Sixeart. The exhibit continues through October 6 at 5797 Washington Blvd in Culver City, CA.
Photos courtesy of Carmichael Gallery
For pretty much as long as Vandalog has existed, I’ve heard rumors that Shepard Fairey would be coming back to show at D*Face’s StolenSpace Gallery in London. He had a solo show there in 2007, Nineteeneightyfouria, which closed early for some reason, prohibiting me from seeing it in the flesh. But supposedly it was pretty fantastic. Rumor has it (seriously, this is a rumor that I heard a few times, pure speculation/hope, not something that I can say with any certainty is grounded in fact, please don’t take it as such) that, at the time, Shepard signed a contract with StolenSpace Gallery promising that he would do two shows there. But the show never seemed to materialize, and everyone just awaited his returned.
Now, five years later, Shepard Fairey will return to London and StolenSpace Gallery for Sound & Vision, a show highlighting many of the musical influences on Fairey’s work. The show will include an installation of a temporary record shop featuring both records from Fairey’s personal collection available for listening and scores of Fairey’s LP-sleeve-sized artworks. Here’s more of what Shepard has to say about the show.
Sound & Vision opens October 19th and runs through November 4th. And yes, it’s pretty much guaranteed to be packed the entire time, but it’s also not a show to miss.
Images courtesy of OBEY Giant
This is Part Two of a two-part interview with Adam COST. You can read Part One here.
COST could sit next to you on a train, or brush by you on the street and you’d likely think nothing of it. I walked by him three times before I finally asked, “Are you Adam?” He is a regular guy. He just happens to have been one of New York City’s most wanted. In Part Two of our interview, COST discusses a number of things including graffiti as a form of rebellion, his relationship with REVS, and, to put it simply, Madonna.
V: How do you see the face of the graffiti writer changing?
COST: Hipsters, like they’re hip! They call them hipsters around here. My friends and I aren’t hip. We’re just like dudes. The older graffiti writers don’t look like the newer graffiti guys. Like REVS looks very working class; he’s very filthy. He’s a welder so he always looks filthy, like he climbed out of a manhole. Me, I try to keep myself clean. I like to present myself that way for aesthetic reasons, like what I do with my life, where I live and how people perceive me. Some of my friends look like nerds, and some of the newer guys we hang out with are real cool, hip-looking guys and fit right in in this area. The newer guys are all like that.
V: But weren’t you guys part of the fashion of the time in the 80’s? Wasn’t graffiti was a cool scene?
COST: I don’t know if we were so fashionable. Our attitude was more like “Fuck you and fuck the system.” We were angry, rebellious guys. There was a definite punk attitude to what we were doing. It was a “Fuck the whole system. Fuck the government. Fuck socialization.” We just revolted against the whole system. Fuck politics and all the politicians. Rudy Giuliani. Stuff like that. We were anti. The best way to describe what we did was like “We’re anti. We’re not artists, we’re anti-artists”. I consider myself an anti-artist if I’m an artist at all. That would be the best way to describe my art. It’s against the system. That’s why I want to show you the Bushwick Five Points wall I just did. At the bottom of the wall, the title, it’s says “You can’t turn rebellion into money.”
I didn’t go to the yard at 13 and say, “You know what? I’m gonna go write on these trains because I want to make money.” You know what I mean? So that’s what inspired the title of the wall. I went to the yard because I was rebelling, and my family situation was not a good one. Looking back, my family was splitting up, like my parents. The whole family was a mess and I was at that age where you get rebellious and I went into graffiti. Guys nowadays are doing graffiti and street art to make money. I don’t do art to make money.
V: Speaking of the fucking of systems, fucking of establishments, and fucking the man….. Did you fuck Madonna?
COST: [Pause] I’m a little younger than Madonna, but I’ll tell ya, she used to hang out at a club called Danceteria. I knew her boyfriend, RP3, who’s dead now. If you look at her old videos, she used to wear a belt buckle tag around her waist that said “BOY TOY.” Boy Toy was that guy RP3. He used to write Boy Toy and RP3, and that was her boyfriend at that time. He ODed and he’s been dead for a long time, but Boy Toy was her tag that he gave her and that’s why she used to wear that in those early videos. I’m not exactly sure when he died. It’s been awhile since the posters, but I think yeah, he probably did see the posters. That poster was like the pop-poster of our campaign. It’s not like I planned it out that way though.
V: Okay, but you have avoided my question.
COST: Have I really? I tried to be as-
V: It’s a yes or no.
COST: Oh, Madonna? You don’t kiss and tell, right? Let’s just leave it at that.
V: Did Madonna ever say anything about it?
COST: I’m sure she knows it exists because she has a publicist. So everything like that is getting plopped on their table and I don’t think she has a problem with it because she was into graffiti and stuff back then.
V: Why did you do it?
COST: I don’t know if there was an exact reason. At the time it was just one of our obscure posters. We were producing a lot of just random stuff, and that one seemed hit the nail on the head for your ham-and-eggers, your average Joe’s. Everyone loved that one. We did many versions of posters and people always say that poster is probably the most recognized of the batches and batches we put out. That was the most accepted. And again, she’s an icon. Madonna is an international icon. She’s like a Michael Jackson or something. So I was using an icon as a prop, I guess.
V: That poster was extremely popular. Supreme turned it into a shirt in 2010.
COST: Yeah, certain posters like “COST Fucked Madonna” were very accepted by society. There’s a lot of knock-offs. There are stickers and posters out there like “ELVIS FUCKED MARILYN.” I didn’t see that coming. I didn’t think it was going to bring such an acceptance with the public, but the public really absorbed that poster.
V: After years of turning down other offers, why did you choose to collaborate with Supreme?
COST: They put Johnny Rotten from The Sex Pistols on the cover of the magazine and that kind of appealed to me, as opposed to Lady Gaga on the cover. It was a little more my speed. More raw, less pop. They understood the direction that I wanted to go and what I wanted my work to represent, in a sense. They were good to catering to me as an artist, in the sense that they just let me be who I wanted to be within their repertoire and it worked, I guess. It was okay.
V: Now that you’re starting to go heavy with wheatpasting again, what’s different this time around?
COST: I’m definitely using new fonts and new slogans. At this point it’s like I’m kind of in phase 1 of probably a 15 or 20 phase period, and phase 1 is really just getting my name back out on the streets and letting people know that I’m here, I’m there, I’m everywhere. It’s just phase 1 of a slow steady process of probably a 20 phase period I call “moving forward towards death.” Continue reading “Vandalog interviewed COST – Part two”
Longtime readers of Vandalog may know that I have a pretty strong dislike of giclée prints. Typically, they are not all that well printed, and they are extremely overpriced. I don’t know anything as high-margin for artists as a giclée print. But NoseGo recently came out with three giclées that prove my point about pricing and buck the trend. These three 8.5″ x 11″ prints, editions of 50 each, are on sale on NoseGo’s website for just $10 each. Not a bad deal, and NoseGo still shouldn’t have much trouble making a buck or two for himself off of these. I can’t speak to the quality of the printing, but the images certainly are cute and I don’t know NoseGo as the type of artist to put out sub-par work just to make a buck off his fans. You can pick up the prints here.
Photos courtesy of NoseGo
ABOVE recently released this time lapse video regarding the extreme popularity of social media. It’s a bit like having a mirror put between yourself and your computer screen. I don’t know though, I’m pretty sure he’s trying to say that you should tweet this or post this on Facebook so all your “friends” can ‘like’ it.
We’ve got 5 issues of Very Nearly Almost magazine’s latest issue to send off to Vandalog readers. I’ve been a fan of VNA since around the time I started Vandalog, and it’s a magazine that I always recommend as an alternative to Hi-Fructose and Juxtapoz.
For issue 19, they’ve got a great cover article on Anthony Lister, as well as interviews with Twoone, Remed and others. As it tends to be with VNA, my personal favorite part of this issue is not what you might expect (the interviews) but their photos of graffiti and street art in Newcastle. Of course the interviews are great too, particularly Lister’s.
We’ve got 5 copies of VNA issue 19 up for grabs, just answer this question in the comments: What country is Anthony Lister from? Out of those who answer correctly, 5 will be selected at random and sent a copy of the magazine. Answer by noon East Coast time on Saturday, September 8th. We’ll notify the winners via email shortly after that.
Photos courtesy of Very Nearly Almost
This is an essay I wrote a couple of years ago for a book that was to be a collection of essays by a number of different people in the street art world, but the final product has not yet materialized, so I’m posting the piece here instead.
I don’t want to see the plan succeed/There won’t be room for people like me/My life is their disease/It feels good/And I’m gonna go wild/Spray paint the walls – Black Flag
Good subcultures get co-opted by the mainstream. That’s what happens. Punks and preps, hippies and hipsters, gangsters and geeks have all had parts of their cultures brought into the mainstream, and that attention usually harms the actual subculture.
Sometimes it can feel like street art is getting taken over the mainstream more and more every day. Plenty of people have told me that Vandalog contributes to that co-opting of the culture. The most obvious examples naturally also tend to be the most popular names in street art: Banksy and Shepard Fairey. These guys used to be the torchbearers of street art, but their newfound fame as household names has come at a price: they certainly aren’t the revolutionary artists they once were, and I would go so far as to say that in their outdoor work they are as much guerrilla marketers as they are artists. There’s plenty to say on that topic alone, but I won’t get into too much detail about the negative aspects of street art. I still have faith in the general movement of street art: Even as some artists “sell out,” it’s inevitable that street art as a whole will remain authentic, powerful and revolutionary for a long time to come.
Anyone who has read Norman Mailer’s 1973 essay The Faith of Graffiti has probably had a good laugh at Mailer’s suggestion that graffiti was already dying out. Street Art, a book by Allan Schwartzman and published in 1985, makes a similar suggestion about street art. Looking through Street Art, you’ll see the work of early street artists like Jenny Holzer, John Fekner and Richard Hambleton as well as many other names that have mostly faded from the history of street art. Most of those artists no longer make street art. Of course, street art didn’t die out, and Schwartzman was far from the last person to write a book about it, but something special is definitely captured in Street Art: The first generation of modern street art.
While most of that first generation has now moved on from street art into other mediums, they inspired future artists to start working outdoors. In the early to mid-90’s, artists like Phil Frost and Reminisce were members of a new generation doing work on the street. Frost doesn’t work outdoors anymore, and Reminisce only very rarely does. They and many (but of course not all) of their contemporaries have more or less moved on from their roots. Then in the 2000’s, new artists like Swoon and Leon Reid IV became involved in the movement with as much passion as previous generations. While both Swoon and Leon Reid IV are both still actively making work outdoors, they have somewhat moved away from street art’s anti-establishment roots: a good portion of their outdoor work is being done with permission and in cooperation with galleries, museums or arts organizations. Over the last few years, the internet has allowed street art to grow even further, and talented new artists from around the world are coming to light all the time. Artists like Roa and Escif were already well known among street art fans before they first painted outside of their home countries because people had seen their artwork online. That’s an oversimplified history, but hopefully it shows in a very general way that street art is always evolving.
Since the 1970’s, the media has lost and gained interest in street art numerous times. Naysayers often suggest that the interest of media and the injection of money can only serve to destroy street art culture, but each time this cycle repeats, street art is reborn and brought back to its core values by a new generation of revolutionary artists. Even as the most world-famous street artists stop making street art, there’s always a talented and idealistic artist just starting out with a can of spray paint or a bucket of wheatpaste, working their way up from the bottom.
Artists and even people who don’t consider themselves artists are interested in the opportunities that only street art can provide. Once the idea that street art exists is in somebody’s head, it can’t be taken away. Now that the idea of street art has become part of the collective mainstream public consciousness, it can’t be taken away from there either. Even as its general popularity may fluctuate, the idea of street art is always going to be resonating with somebody around the world, and that’s all it takes. People want to express themselves and communicate with the public, and there are few better ways to reach the public than street art.
Street art doesn’t discriminate. A trained artist in a studio with dozens of brilliant assistants can make street art, but so can a teenager with nothing more than a permanent marker and an idea. Practically any wall is an equally valid place for a piece of work for drunken men to piss on or for kids to be inspired by.
The combination of almost no barrier to entry and the fantastic power wielded by street artists, a combination unrivaled by any other art form, is why the underground nature of street art will always triumph over any push to make the genre truly mainstream. It just takes one person with a crazy idea to shift the culture in a new direction, and there are thousands of those people out there trying out crazy ideas every day. You can’t make a culture mainstream if the thing is constantly changing, you can only make out-of-date segments of the culture mainstream.
And does it really matter if one segment of street art becomes mainstream? The fact that you can buy an OBEY shirt in a department store doesn’t diminish the power that street art has in giving a voice to any person who has something to say, and it doesn’t make it any harder to pick up a can of spray paint for the first time. Street art is a great way to buck the system, especially if that system is the street art establishment itself.
For the last three decades in particular, working outdoors without permission has fascinated artists, and they keep finding ways to do it differently. During that time, stars have been born and many have faded away. Media and art-world interest has waxed and waned. In the end though, the mainstream popularity of street art doesn’t make much of a difference. Artists will always have the drive make street art and the public will always notice street art. That’s not going away. Even if it’s just one artist reaching one other person, street art can change the world. Of course, it’s never going to be just one artist. From here on out, it won’t be less than an ever-evolving army.
Photos by RJ Rushmore and bitchcakesny
There’s something about these RAWHIDE rollers by Ankles and Smile that I really like. Obviously they’re influenced by ReadMoreBooks, Steve Powers and maybe AvoidPi, but that’s alright by me. These guys are doing some rollers that are a step above what you’re likely to see day-to-day. And they are (or at least Ankles is) based in Adelaide, Australia, so it’s cool to see something so nice coming out of a city that isn’t internationally known for their street art or graffiti.
Photos courtesy of Ankles
Oakland has some of the most exciting and slightly underground graffiti and street art going on the USA right now, and GATS (which stands for Graffiti Against The System) is one of the most exciting guys in that already exciting city. iamOTHER is making some videos about what’s going on in Oakland, with a particular focus on GATS. The first part of that series is above.
With what has been a relatively slow summer in regards to wheatpasting, Cost, Set, and Smells of KRT and Keely came as a breath of fresh air. Flipping between monochromatic color schemes to eye popping fluorescents, the designs in these posters grab the attention of viewers from a stylistically minimalist stance as well as those drawn in by painfully bright colors.
Of particular interest is the use of “emergency orange” in some of Cost and Smells collaborative pieces. While this color has been co-opted in the area by EKG for quite some time, I was glad to see someone else incorporating it into their work, especially when paired with an orange door.
For those who may not be drawn to text-based work, they are sure to notice the razor-sharp edges of Keely’s lizard. Having a presence on the streets for a while with stickers, these wheatpastes are the largest images I have seen from the artist outside of Pandemic’s walls. The imagery, scale, and voracity with which this team hit the streets recently makes for an exciting end to what has been a relatively slow summer.
All photos by Rhiannon Platt
