When Roa sent me some photos of his recent work in Moscow, he mentioned that he’d arrived in LA. LA? What was he doing in LA. Then I remembered that his upcoming show with Thinkspace is almost here. I was thinking it was still months away, but no. The show is less than two weeks away.
The show opens November 13th and is going to be at a special pop-up location in LA (2808 Elm Street, Los Angeles, CA). Let’s hope that Roa has time to paint a few walls around LA in addition to whatever he’s up to for this solo show.
This summer, I sat in a massive pitch-black room and muttered “Holy shit. Holy shit. Holy shit. Holy shit…” over and over again. I couldn’t stop repeating “Holy shit” for maybe for five minutes. I’d been anticipating this moment for nearly a year. I was somewhere underneath New York City. I was waiting to be shown The Underbelly Project. Technically, I was there to take photos, but really I didn’t care at all if images came out or not. Really, I just wanted to see firsthand what was going on 4-stories below the streets of New York City.
Revok and Ceaze. That light comes from the lights that were set up temporarily for an artist who was painting that night.
Imagine Cans Festival, FAME Festival or Primary Flight: Some of street art and graffiti’s best artists all painting one spot. That’s kind of like The Underbelly Project. Except that The Underbelly Project took place in complete secrecy, in a mysterious location and without any authorization. Over the past year, The Underbelly Project has brought more than 100 artists to an abandoned and half-finished New York City subway station. Each artist was given one night to paint something.
Know Hope had this entire room to himself. What was this room meant to be? An elevator shaft? An office? I have no idea.
Workhorse and PAC, the project’s organizers, have put countless hours into their ghost subway station, and now they’re finally ready to unveil it to the world, sort of (more on that later). So I guess that’s why I was in that dark room, sitting in silence, waiting for them to give me a flashlight. I’m still not sure why I’d been extended the invitation to see the station firsthand, but I couldn’t be more grateful for the opportunity. The Underbelly Project is going to be part of street art history.
Surge, Stormie Mills, Remi/Rough and Gaia
Eventually, Workhorse and PAC came over to where I was sitting and lent me a flashlight. I stood up, already coated in dust and probably dirtier than I’ve ever been, and got a full tour of the station. I’m not somebody who is good at estimating the size of a space, but The Underbelly Project took place in a space that was meant to be a subway station, so I guess it was the size of a subway station with a few tracks. The station is like a concrete cavern: random holes who-knows how deep into the ground, dust thick like a layer of dirt, leaky ceilings and hidden rooms. Except the whole station is covered in art. Think of FAME Festival’s abandoned monastery transplanted to beneath New York City. I’m not an urban explorer, so I had no idea that there are abandoned subway stations throughout New York, but The Underbelly Project seems like just about the best possible use of one.
Of course, having been down there myself, I’m going to be prone to hyperbole. Even at it’s simplest, even if The Underbelly Project is “just another mural project,” it’s a story that the artists can tell for years, and it may even be evidence that street art isn’t so far gone and corporate as some people have suggested.
Swoon and Imminent Disaster. Disaster's piece is stunning beyond belief and fits the space so perfectly.
The list of artists who painted for The Underbelly Project goes on and on, but here are just a few:
Swoon
Gaia
Know Hope
Revok
Roa
Dan Witz
Jeff Soto
Faile
Mark Jenkins
Elbow-toe
TrustoCorp
Mark Jenkins and Con. This is at the end of a long and dark tunnel that, at the time, was not otherwise painted.
On my visit, The Underbelly Project wasn’t finished. In fact, somebody was painting there that night. Nonetheless, the space was already substantially painted and postered. I spent that night wandering around the tunnels, taking photos and getting lost (and also scared – Damn you Mark Jenkins! You can’t put a sculpture like that at the end of a darkened hall. I thought it was a person!).
TrustoCorp
And what now? The walls have all been painted and the artists have moved on to new projects. When the last artist finished painting the last wall, Workhorse and PAC made access to The Underbelly Project nearly impossible by removing the entrance. Even if any of us wanted to go back (and I do), even if we could remember how to get there (and I don’t), we can’t. Nobody can. For now, The Underbelly Project has become a time capsule of street art, somewhere in the depths of New York City.
Meggs
Brad Downey once explained to me why he thought Damien Hirst’s diamond skull is interesting. It had something to do with what people would think of the skull in 1000 years, when its original meaning has been lost to time. That’s when the skull is going to become a true icon and object with immense power. In some ways, The Underbelly Project is like Hirst’s skull, without the price tag. One day, decades from now hopefully, somebody may rediscover that old subway station and have no idea what they’re looking at. Hopefully, they’ll just feel that it’s something incredibly special.
Dan Witz. This was the first time I'd seen his street art in person. It's the perfect setting for Dan's Dark Doings series.
Here are some more images from The Underbelly Project, and expect more over the coming days on Vandalog and around the blogosphere… Or you can pay £1 to read an in-depth article about it in today’s Sunday Times.
Stash (well, part of his piece). This is another room like Know Hope's area.Swoon and ListerL'Atlas, Mr Di Maggio, 1010, Paper Twins, Bigfoot, Control/Jice. Photo by WorkhorseFaile. Photo by PACSkewville, PAC, SheOne, Revok/Ceaze. Photo by PAC
Hot on the heels of their most recent opening, “Portraits”, at the Brooklynite Gallery with yours truly, Sten and Lex collaborated on a new wall deep in Bushwick on Waterbury street. For this piece the duo returned back to paint instead of their most recent process of poster-stencils.
As most of you may know, one of Roa‘s beloved works in East London is facing removal after the owners of the building were told they have 14 days to remove it or the Council will. The whole ordeal is a bit ridiculous, since the Hackney Council is calling the piece a “blight on the environment”even though the owners the building gave the artist permission to paint int he first place. An online petition is going on to save the work and pretty much tell the Council to back off. So sign it and try to save the piece. I would hate to start seeing even more works under glass…
Once and a while I am going to post art works, whether they be installations, video, or other ephemera, that exist in the public realm and have existed parallel to contemporary street art but have been categorized into other art movements. Since the dawn of modernity and urbanization, there has been a rich history of artists using the city as their medium and subject, from impressionism to fluxus. Yet interestingly, these street practices that have existed before contemporary Street Art do not have much of a presence on the internet and the dissemination of these works are still limited to access to institutions and exhibits.
I would like to take this opportunity to present the Bus Shelters of Dennis Adams. The installations here were erected between 1983 and 1988. The aluminum and steel structures each featured a light box that presented the pedestrian with an image or text, the result being a didactic conflict with the routine of daily life. The pictures of political scenes becomes innocuous without context, like any floating image, and are a disparate discourse from the everyday. To gain more insight his various political projects check out this interview
Here are two pieces that Best Ever painted for the Stroke.03 fair in Berlin earlier this month. The above piece was outside, and I believe this second piece was inside the fair (click on the image to see a larger sized photo):
Benjamin Gaulon‘s Printball machine was in Vienna recently for BLK River. The machine is an interesting use of Graffiti Markup Language that uses paintballs to print a pre-programmed message onto a wall. For this piece, they wrote TEMPT, which is an entire story itself. Here’s a video of Printball in action:
Logan Hicks sent over some photos from Wide Open Walls, the painting trip that he is on right now in Gambia. Logan, Eelus, Mysterious Al, Broken Crow and other artists are visiting small villages right now and painting walls there in an effort to improve the towns and increase tourism.
