Tonight at Brooklyn Street Art‘s movie night at the Living Walls Conference in Atlanta, BSA’s Steve and Jaime showed a bunch of interesting films, but one really stood out for me. I think I saw the first few seconds of this video months ago and wasn’t drawn in, so I ignored it. But, watching the whole thing, I see I clearly made a mistake. Nearly a dozen artists took over this abandoned building in Jaffa, Israel earlier this year and covered it in art. Then, they invited their friends to come and see what they had done. The installation was called Feel in the Cracks. The project reminds me of FAME Festival’s abandoned monastery, where much of the best work of the festival is hidden away, only available for those willing to explore.
I’ve got to hand it to Wonky Monky, Untay, Slamer, Signor Gi, Ross Plazma, Nitzan Mintz, Natalie Mandel, Latzi, Kipi, Dioz and Dede for going out and taking over this building, but then being pretty public about it. Plenty of abandoned buildings get painted, but then to host a public party pointing out that fact seems pretty exciting and ballsy to me. It’s a very loud and very blatant call for people to take space and improve it, whether they have the legal right to do so or not because perhaps there is a morality about the use of space that overrules legality.
Despite Washington DC’s zero tolerance policy, its public spaces continue to boast a range of “illegal” works from stickers and paste-ups to out-of-the-way graff pieces. On my recent visit, DC’s prolific sticker artist iwillnot gave me a tour of some works – all done, as he explained, “without permission.” Here is a sampling:
YoteCoffee Head Duck & HK & unidentified artistRose Jaffe & political paste-upPearCoffee Head Duckiwillnot
November, 2011- Dscreet, Adam, add their art to the original piece by El flyer, Simo, Produkt, Leeny, Other, Labrona, Gawd, Giver, Nixon.
When I started to hunt Montreal illegal street art, it appeared to me that a city is not static as usual people can think it. When you look closer, you can observe the walls change by the art that sticks on them. I was able to see the evolution of the streets and in the same time I saw ordinary places becoming amazing spots. When an artist, or a group of artists take over a wall, a door, and make it themselves, they give a soul to the city. Below you will see the transformation of some pieces whether completed or fixed. Interestingly, from a collective action or an individual one, it results that the urban environment is likely to be changed and magnified. The walls are for everyone but some of them exclusively belong to some artists. Hope they stay like this!
Until I was looking through Carnage NYC‘s photos, it never really dawn on my just how much variety You Go Girl has in their work. You Go Girl is one of those rare artists somewhere between a street artist and a graffiti writer who really has no boundaries for how they get up. It could be stickers, rollers, posters, spraypaint… It could be a character, tag, a throw-up… You Go Girl doesn’t fit comfortably any boxes. That sets them apart from a lot of street artists and graffiti writers who seem to find one thing and stick to doing that well until they get recognition for it (and then they keep going but at least by that point they might be getting paid).
Here’s just a small sampling of the different styles of work that You Go Girl produces on the street:
You Go Girl with The Reader aka BoansYou Go Girl with The Reader
Although Bamn‘s works are often iconic pieces of the New York street art and graffiti landscape, he doesn’t seem to get too much attention online. We’ve only mentioned him twice, for his portraits of Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning. There aren’t too many street artists making such prominent and political artwork. I think a lot of artists could take a cue from Bamn and use the streets to get the truth out there. Here are a few pieces he’s done, both recent and a bit older:
What am I missing? Because I don’t have much to add this week for the link-o-rama. It’s the middle of summer? Aren’t people getting up? Am I just not seeing it?
Sweet Toof is understandably upset that a recent mural project in Hackney, where he and the rest of the Burning Candy crew painted some of their best illegal street art and graffiti, intentionally avoided including local artists. You’ve gotta love this quote from Sarah Weir, who heads the charity that commissioned the new murals: “We unashamedly wanted to showcase the best international artists and transform this part of the canal into a destination for street art.” That might be the dumbest thing I’ve read all summer, except for course for arguments defending the NSA or calling for Edward Snowden to return to the USA. First of all, murals (while interesting) emulate street art and graffiti, but there is a distinct difference between legal murals by street artists and illegal street art by the same artists. I’m sure that on Vandalog I have referred to murals as street art for the sake of simplicity, but not in a context like this where the difference between murals and street art is actually quite important. Hackney Wick’s canal already is a destination for street art, in large part due to the work of Gold Peg, Sweet Toof and the other members of Burning Candy. Weir is trying to turn it into a destination for murals, most likely at the expense of street art and graffiti if the intense pre-Olympics graffiti removal efforts in the area are anything to go by. Mural projects and festival are awesome, but they are not the same thing as illegal street art or graffiti.
Israel Hernandez, an 18-year-old Miami graffiti writer, was killed this week when he was tazered by police. They were chasing him after catching him writing in an abandoned building. CNN’s coverage of Hernandez’ death was surprisingly fair. Their piece was framed as the tragedy that is clearly is, rather than a piece demonizing Hernandez for his artwork like you might expect from some mainstream media.
The difficulty with photographing sticker art or graffiti stickers is that it’s really difficult to provide context for the sticker without losing all the details that might make it interesting to begin with. This context versus context struggle exists when photographing just about any sort of street art or graffiti, but it’s especially true with stickers. They are usually so small that you have to get inches away for a good photo, but then it’s hardly clear if the sticker is on a busy street or in a leafy suburb, surrounded by other interesting things or the lone bit of culture for an entire block. This is especially important with illegal work like stickers where an artist is taking a risk to put something in a particular location of their choice (okay admittedly stickers are not all that risky). Understanding the context of the piece can really add to my appreciation for it. I don’t know if I’ve the first person or the thousandth to figure this out and I don’t consider myself a serious photographer, but I think I’ve stumbling across an interesting way to take photos of stickers that balances context and content: Panorama mode.
My iPhone has a panorama mode that I don’t think I’d ever used until earlier this summer, when I accidentally realized it could be useful for photographing stickers. I was just fooling around with my iPhone, seeing if the panorama mode could work if you had something up very close and also something far away that both needed to be in focus. So I tested it by photographing a sticker and trying to move from the sticker to some background elements across the street. I saw the resulting image and suddenly I hardly cared about my little experiment. I saw a photograph that captured the details of a sticker while still giving context to its placement, and I fell instantly in love with the technique.
Obviously taking photos with a wide angle lens or in panorama mode is nothing new, but I can’t remember ever having seen it used for this purpose before. If anyone wants to prove me wrong, please leave a comment. I’d love to see what other people have been doing with this technique.
What do you think of this technique? Does it is balance content and context well enough? These are just some early shots by me, and I’m no photographer, so if you think you can take this further and do it better, please do and let me know how it goes. I would love to see others improve upon this. For me, it’s made documenting stickers so much more fun and fulfilling. Anyone can photograph another printed André the Giant sticker, but this technique highlights how context can make even printed stickers unique so long as the placement is interesting.
Although I’ve hardly written about Enzo and Nio on Vandalog before, I’ve been a big fan of their work for a while now. They work together to put up some great street art, mostly around NYC and other East Coast cities and in the form of wheatpastes and stickers. Their work is clever and fun, but also a bit controversial at times, which might explain why I haven’t known them to do any outdoor work with permission. There aren’t many street artists left in New York City with their talents who haven’t transitioned into doing primarily legal work, so I have to hand it to Enzo and Nio for keeping their work to street art’s roots of illegal free expression and surprise. Also, while so many street artists quickly fall into a pattern with one or two trademark styles that they unwaveringly stick to, Enzo and Nio put out a visually diverse range of street art. They have some images or phrases that repeat and some works that are part of a series, but it’s not just one series and one series often doesn’t look anything like the next. They’ve even ventured into gif art (and yes, the model in that piece is my girlfriend and Vandalog contributor Caroline Caldwell).
I’ve somehow neglected to post enough about Enzo and Nio, but I hope I can change that starting today. Enzo and Nio are a real pair of street artists, not just artists using the the street.
Enzo and Nio in collaboration with Olek. Photo by Rhiannon Platt.Photo by Erika SequeiraPhoto by Erika SequeiraPhoto by Erika SequeiraPhoto by Erika SequeiraPhoto by Rhiannon PlattPhoto by Jason EppinkPhoto by SMKjrPhoto by Amolho4
The Greek street artist Bleeps painted the above piece in response to a recent street art festival in Athens. Essentially, a mural festival was held ostensibly to spark discussion about the economic crisis in Greece and “on the controversial issue of the value of street art in a period of crisis.” Oddly it would then seem, the festival featured no Greek artists. This raises the issue of street artists being flown around the world to paint murals in communities to which they have no connection to in order to aid the existing power structures there. Bleeps says:
[In] the field of street art which has become a main “attraction” for the last decade, we have been experiencing the proliferation by corporate logic and the state in an “antagonistic” policy, while independent voices are either kept in silence, or subjugated.
Most recently the Αthens School of Fine Arts (state University) in collaboration with municipality of Nikea and private galleries organized a “crisis” street art festival entitled “CRISIS?WHAT CRISIS?”, from which Greek artivists were of course excluded. The organizers invited 20 European artists to create works for the festival. The formal argument of the Αthens School of Fine Arts to exclude local artists was that graffiti and street art in Athens are mostly anonymous and of dubious artistic value. The attempt to commodify art in the public sphere and the “politicized” orientated one, is more than obvious.
In addition to that a festival’s spokesman stated that the goal of the imported artists is to start a discourse with the local ones. Of course no discourse can occur on the basis of exclusion.
There are some amazing street art festivals around the world, but there’s something to be said for the argument that festivals and murals are antithetical to street art and graffiti. I imagine there is more to the story here than just Bleeps’ critique (although I can’t find much about the festival online), but I think Bleeps makes a valid point. Maybe next year Bleeps will be invited to take part in the festival, but I hope he declines the invitation. After all, capitalism is absolutely brilliant at co-opting it’s critics. As @JonHanna recently tweeted, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they make you a brand, then they win.”
A piece of street art that’s only executed with modest skill, but is site specific or is placed somewhere special, can be better than a piece that’s absolutely technically flawless but unoriginal in placement or at home on any other wall in any other city. With this piece, ABOVE has practiced absolutely perfect placement and really got me smiling, even the work could probably be replicated with equal impressiveness on walls around the world. Although, ABOVE does say it took him 7 months of searching to find the perfect spot. Check out why he had to be so particular by watching the video…
