While most of us in New York were sitting in our homes fearing the snowstorm, the Bronx Documentary Center gathered some of the city’s legendary writers and documentarians for a panel. One of a series of events, Steel Canvases brought together Bio and Nicer of Tats Cru, Henry Chalfant, Eric Deal, and Crash to discuss trains. Of particular interest is the groups discussion on the proliferation of imagery and styles pre-internet. Thanks to Ricky Flores, those of us who couldn’t make it for fear of snow or not can see an edited video of the panel’s highlights.
Robbie Conal is the latest artist in our Tim Hans shoots… series, where photographer Tim Hans takes photo-portraits of street artists and we pair Tim’s photos with an interview.
RJ Rushmore: What was it like to have your artwork, voice, and likeness featured on The Simpsons?
Robbie Conal: It was like being Knighted by the Queen of England. (In case you were wondering, that’s where Great Britain used to be.)
RJ: Most street artists put up the majority of their work themselves, some are even quite protective about not allowing others to put up their work, like stickers, for them. Why do you reach out to volunteers to put up your posters?
I’m always looking for a communal experience: the posters are my little way of participating in the public dialogue about issues that are important (not just to me). You know, like that rumor called, “democracy.”
Likewise, getting a bunch of like-minded loonies together at, say, Canter’s Deli, in LA in the middle of the night, talking the talk, walking the perp walk—getting up a smack of counterinfotainment on the streets together—is a bonding experience. Those are the only moments in my life when anarchy actually works and I don’t feel so alone (you know, just me and my weird beliefs and my little pieces of paper)—ha! And, of course, we get more up for more peeps to see a minor surprise on their way to work or (these days) looking for it, in the morning.
RJ: Have many of your volunteers gone from putting up work with you to doing postering campaigns of their own?
Conal: There have been a few—plus some great graff writers have joined us, rather gleefully, I might add. MEARONE, MAN1, VYAL. KOFIE, AXIS, and Shepard Fairey to name a few.
Actually, MEARONE, Shep, and I did a guerrilla street poster national tour together in 2004. It was Mear’s, Shep’s and Elizabeth Ai’s idea, not mine.
Shepard Fairey, Robbie Conal and MearOne
You might vaguely remember that George Bush’s mafia stole the 2000 Presidential election. That pissed Mear, Shep, and Elizabeth (and a shitload of other people) off! Kind of politicized them— in the sense that it made them pay attention to “party politics.”
They decided that they’d each do an anti-Bush, anti-Iraq War street poster —in their own styles—and take’em on tour around the U.S. before the 2004 election. Then one fine day they came and got me, as in, “Hey, kids! Let’s go get the old guy out of his rest home on the west side and make it a triptych!” And I’m very grateful they did. Called the tour, “Be The Revolution.”
We had a tour launch party at the Avalon in Hollywood, 1,200 peeps showed up, Ozomatli, Culture Clash, the great slam poet Jerry Quickley all performed. My offset-litho printer, Typecraft, Inc. in Pasadena printed up @ 15,000 full color street posters, 5,000 of each of ours—pro bono. We rocked around the country as best we could. It was verrrry interesting.
RJ: What do you think about the street art movement’s popularity over the last few years?
Conal: To be honest, I always thought it was inevitable. My idea of genuine indigenous American art forms is based on a “bubble up” theory of cultural creativity. The “American Dream,” of single family home ownership, keeping your kids “safe,” you know, away from the mean streets of, say, any “inner city” neighborhoods in any big city, pushes families into places like Pacoima, Simi Valley, Orange County, for Chrissakes! There’s nothing for young teens to do out there. “Safe”? A 14 year old red blooded American kid taken out to nowhere with nothing to do? Give me a break!
However well meaning, that’s some idiot’s idea of safe. But give a kid access to some markers and a U.S. Post Office with free mailing address label stickers and all that nowhere time . . . SHAZAM! You’ve got a budding graff/street artist! Likewise: Give a kid a skateboard (and nothing else)—what were they back in the day: a slab of wood and 4 fucked up, salvaged old clip-on roller skate wheels, right?—the kid will live on it 12 hours/day/7 days/week and be able to skate air on that thing. Stacy Peralta makes Tony Alva makes Shawn White makes that kid in Pacoima (or frickin Frozen Tundra, New Jersey, for that matter!) into a world-class creative athlete. Same goes for a kid and a bike—Simi Valley suddenly ain’t so bad. Cause there’s plenty of room for you get on your pony and work out new tricks—the contemporary equivalent of a cowboy/girl and his/her pony out on the range. Instead of becoming a rodeo champion, the kid invents The X Games!
Then there’s the fashion industry: how do you monetize a great graff piecer’s work? Put it on something a fan can walk away with. Like a T-shirt. Make bank at the same time you’re making the fine art world think it’s missing something, and you’re in it. Fine with me, pal.
RJ: The way you start with oil paintings and then turn those into poster is pretty atypical. It seems like the more typical process for activist street art would be to make something in a format that is quick to develop and quick to print (like Shepard Fairey or Emory Douglas). How did you develop your method of starting with oil paintings and turning those into posters?
Conal: I’m a painter. I went to art school all my life. When I was 8 years old—in NYC—my parents sent me to The Art Students’ League to (on 57th Street) by myself—to draw dead flowers and, you know, plants and vegetables. Some fruit—an apple, an orange—what they called “still life.” I wanted to draw naked ladies, but the administrators there told my parents I was too young. Theodoros Stamos, an excellent abstract expressionist painter who was teaching there at the time, would sneak me into the “life drawing” classes. He’d say, “OK kid, there’s your naked lady—just sit down, shut up, and draw.”
Actually, that was probably the only thing that could get me to shut up. Then and now.
When I was 13, I went to the High School of Music & Art—a public “specialty” school—pretty much just like LA High School for the Arts is now. They smell exactly the same.
From ’63-’69, I majored in art and psychedelic drugs at San Francisco State. I was an O.H., an “Original Hippie.”
M.F.A. at Stanford (’78) and blah-blah-blah…you get the idea.
So street art, postering, came after all that. But painting is still how I get my torque on the subjects I address. Like Lucien Freud said, for me, “paint is flesh.”
RJ: Although you’re an important figure in the street art movement, you don’t seem to be so pigeonholed as solely or mostly a street artist, unlike many of your contemporaries. Do you think that being an oil painter has helped you to avoid being pigeonholed in that way, or is it something else?
Conal: I’m not sure about that—it might have a little to do with it. Mainly because one of the many, many artificial hierarchical rankings in the history of the Western Art aesthetic is that oil painting is the highest form of art making. Ha! (And I start with paint, so I don’t have to prove to the art world that my choice of medium is “worthy.”)
But, to be honest, I think it’s my perspective on the world—outside of whatever specific venue my art might be inhabiting at any particular moment—street, art gallery, museum, private home, man cave, dungeon. My thought process is always political—and I’ve had both an academic and a full-on mean streets education.
Also, my parents were union organizers in NYC in the 1930’s and 40’s. My Dad was “blacklisted,” by the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950’s. That was basically for having different ideas from its august members about systemic political and economic issues, like what government’s job is; what system of government and what economic system could best (and how much it should) provide for the health, education and welfare of its citizenry.
ART has always been my most receivable way of expressing myself about issues I care about. (Meaning, you really don’t want to hear me whining about what I think is wrong with the world, now do you? You’re way better off, if you just look at the nasty portrait of the ugly old white man in a suit and tie. Read the 2 or 3 punny words. Work it out for yourself.) Democracy, with a small “d” being my pet peeve. In the sense that I miss it, want it back (the small amount of it we ever had). I sincerely think the world desperately needs it for us to survive. And I’m a wise guy. So, as for ordnance—the instruments of mass destruction at my disposal—all I got is wise ass humor, sweat equity, and an evil eye.
Photos by Tim Hans; Shepard Fairey, Robbie Conal and MearOne posters courtesy of Robbie Conal
General Howe has been putting up street art since at least 2007. His recent work may seem like quite a change of direction, but I don’t think the change is as drastic as it might at first seem, although it is significant. Like Insa, General Howe has begun making animated gifs. In my most recent post on Complex.com, I pointed out a few artists who I think are using the internet like a street artist or graffiti writer uses the street, and not only do I not think that’s crazy, I think that shift is fantastic. I’m not saying that street artists should stop working on the street, but I am saying that the internet has opened up a lot of new opportunities for artists to interact with the general public (kinda like street art), and it’s exciting to see artists taking advantage of those opportunities. A piece of street art can be seen by a lot of people, but an animated gif can go viral. There are a lot of gif artists out there, but I want to point out General Howe specifically for two reasons: 1. His Disasters of War series has some work that just makes my jaw drop, and 2. He has worked on the street for years and then transitioned to animated gifs.
These pieces are all from General Howe’s Disasters of War series. Goya for the digital generation. For the series, General Howe has appropriated imagery from the G.I. Joe animated television series and modified them into gifs that deal with issues of war and terror. Something about these just stops me in my tracks.
Mr. Penfold had a show in Sydney late last year, and I’ll admit that it was hearing about that show that got me to have a look at what Mr. Penfold has recently been up to outdoors. Whatever the initial reason, I’m glad I had a look because it brightened up my day.
Riddled with the obsessive need of more more more, Cassius Fouler’s compulsion to keep creating has found a home with Arlene’s Grocery. Opening Monday, February 11th at from 7-10pm, Withdrawal Anxiety catalogues the artist’s most recent work, which takes the form of sculptural wood tags, canvas, and paper. Much like the go hard or go home attitude behind the graffiti world that Fouler is drawing upon, he has been incessantly creating for Withdrawal Anxiety to avoid exactly that.
Fouler has shared several progress images for his upcoming show, we also have this from the press release:
When you’re compelled, you gotta do what you gotta do.
But what if you suddenly can’t do that anymore?
Then you gotta do what you can, and you work with what you’ve got.
In this collection of recent paintings and collages, Cassius Fouler has graffiti on the brain, and the work provides a glimpse into the nature of creative compulsion as well as the increasingly hazy line between graffiti and fine art.
Well, I think the content of this new piece by Mr. Thoms rather self explanatory. I was almost disappointed by the location outside Florence, since it looks as though this wasn’t done in a highly visible spot, but on second thought, the people who will most likely encounter this are the probably the people who should: explorers, graffiti/street artists, homeless, basically those who rely very little on the stock market for happiness.
Z from Bomit has curated GO! STICKER, a show of sticker art by about 100 artists. The show opens later this month at The GO! Shop, a part of Wynwood Walls in Miami. At least by number of artists, the show is quite massive and maybe “organized” is a better word to describe Z’s role that “curated,” but it will include work by some world-class sticker artists like Os Gemeos, Invader, Skullphone, Pez, D*face, Baser, Aiko, Ader, and Shepard Fairey.
Stickers occupy a strange space in the graffiti and street art communities. For some, stickers are an essential part of their practice, maybe even the primary piece of it, but other reject stickers entirely and look down on them. Some spend time working on unique handmade stickers that act as markers of where they have been. Others print up tens of thousands of stickers with the same design and distribute them to fans worldwide. The fanbase for stickers also seems to be oddly separate from the fanbase for most street art and graffiti, kind of like the men and women who obsess over freight train graffiti. All of which is to say that I’m very glad Z has put this show together, but I’m also very curious and unsure of what the response will be. Sticker art is important and deserves to be highlighted, and Z is one of the best possible choices to put together such a show, so I hope he succeeds at making stickers appeal to more than just us sticker-heads.
GO! STICKER opens February 13th from 6-10pm and runs through February 28th at The GO! Shop in Wynwood, Miami.
Next month, the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg, Denmark will hold a show about nearly 30 years of graffiti in Denmark. Two of the artists due to be in that show are Sabe and Faze, writers from Denmark who have been at it nearly since the beginning of modern graffiti in that country. Henrik Haven caught up with Sabe and Faze as they worked on a piece together in Copenhagen.
It seems that Hrag Vartanian was not a big fan of Les Ballets De Faile, Faile’s project with the New York City Ballet. Personally, I really liked to the project. Yes, Hrag is right in pointing out that people were expecting more (like Faile having involvement with set design and costumes), but what Faile did do was, I think, a major success. Nine artists out of ten would have seriously messed up this sort of collaboration by not striking the right balance between completely ignoring the setting and embracing it too much. Ignore the setting, and the work could just have been shown anywhere and would have looked out of place. Go too far in trying to bend the work to the situation, and the artists’ essence is lost and the whole thing comes off as a cheesy joke. Faile struck just the right balance. There was a lot of classic Faile, mixed in with some new ballet-inspired imagery, but the ballet-inspired imagery didn’t look out of place at all. Faile’s work has always had a mix of grit and classical beauty, that ballet with their spin fit perfectly into that. I’ve got to disagree with Hrag on another point and say that I thought the work looked like it fit in just as well as anything else in the theater, particularly the massive “Tower of Faile” piece.
Thoughts on Crummy Gummy? I’m not sure what I think. Another Mr. Brainwash-inspired derivative artist who never needs to be mentioned again, or actually kinda funny?
Occasionally I write pieces for Complex.com. This week, they published piece of mine called 10 artists using the internet like the street. List posts can be entertaining, but I wouldn’t normally say that I’m proud of my list posts. This particular piece is different though. It’s a list of visionary artists doing game-changing work that blurs or even completely ignores any lines that exist between the street and the internet. These are the artists I’m writing about right now in the book that I’ve mentioned here from time to time. So consider this post a little teaser of what I’ve been thinking about lately, and what I’ll be writing about in great detailing in the future.
Please check out the post, because I think these artists are doing really important work, and I’d love to get your thoughts on what they are doing. Maybe I’m onto something here, or maybe you think I’m on the completely wrong path. Either way, I’d like your input. So, go check out 10 artists using the internet like the street and let me know what you think by leaving a comment on this post or over at Complex.com, emailing me, or tweeting me.
