Cel Out is a street artist working Melbourne, Australia. I started checking out his work after Caroline posted about one of Cel Out’s most recent pieces. The work is Banksy-esque, without coming off as little more than a sub-par ripoff (most of the time). I can’t wait to see what Cel Out does next.
Photos by Cel Out
Labrona sent over some photos from his time in Miami last month, including some collaborations (with Omen and Five), work by his friends (Miss Me and Kin), and the latest En Masse wall. En Masse is a collaborative project based in Montreal where artists draw together in black and white, similar to the American project Paint It Now.
Photos courtesy of Labrona
We had it right when we were younger: bubble wrap releases endorphins. Fra.biancoshock reminds us of how it’s done with this simple little install. I don’t know if it eliminates stress so much as transfers it from the person popping the bubble wrap to the people surrounding them. But hey, it’s free, it’s fun and why restrain yourself from finding joy in the simple things?
Photos courtesy fra.biancoshock
Stikki Peaches pastes up these humorous pop art pieces in Monreal, each of which asks the question “What if art ruled the world?” Imagining the answer to that, I doubt things would look like an acid trip-style satirization of contemporary pop culture. Maybe more like this. But this hardly matters when I’d like to keep seeing reality through Stikki Peaches’ imagination.
Photos by Space27
This is the first in what will hopefully be a long series of a posts where Tim Hans photographs artists and someone at Vandalog interviews them. I’ve known Tim since we were in high school together and been a fan of his photography for nearly that entire time, so I’m excited that Tim will be sharing his work with the Vandalog community.
To start off this series, Tim met up with the Australian duo Dabs and Myla. I interviewed Dabs and Myla last summer as part of the research on the book that I’m working on, and I’m now publishing some highlights from that interview for the first time.
Dabs on getting into graffiti in Melbourne:
I grew up in Melbourne. I didn’t even venture that far off my own train line. I lived on a trainline called the Belgrave Line. I lived way out on the end of the line, so most of my time was spent traveling in and out of the city on that line. So I didn’t really see much other than my local graffiti. I didn’t have that much money for magazines and books either, I had a handful of magazines, which were mostly an Australian magazine called Hype, but I didn’t really look beyond Melbourne even into other parts of Australia other than those few mags. The only graffiti I was paying attention to was what I was seeing in Melbourne at the time and what had come before me.
Dabs’ early views on street art:
When street art really started to boom, I was really against it for some reason. Graffiti writers didn’t like putting the two things in the same category: Like a skateboarder and a rollerblader. When people started putting those two things together, skateboarders started hating rollerbladers. I think it was a similar thing with graffiti and street art. But over time I guess I got a bit more tolerant and a bit wiser to what it is. Now, I don’t really have a problem with street art! But I do think the two things need to be segregated more because they really are so different.
On why their work has found an audience:
Myla: I think what people say continuously is that it makes them feel happy when they see our work. I think that’s why people like it. It’s because everything we do is so positive.
Dabs: The most common thing we hear is, ‘I really like your work. It just fucking makes me smile.’ Even from the hardest dudes. It’s cool when anyone says they appreciate or like our work, if its like an old lady, a little kid or a middle-aged girl or whatever, but I love it when super-hard dudes say that. I get a kick out of it.
Dabs on working both indoors and outdoors:
The transition from a street-based artist or a graffiti writer to fine art is notoriously hard. It’s a really difficult thing for people to make that transition. So many people I know have found it hard. They are so far away from each other, and finding a way to make that transition other than just reproducing it onto a canvas can be a super bitch. For us, it was pretty easy I think because we always went at it on a completely different path. That was one of the reasons why we never painted characters on walls was because we where trying to keep our graffiti and illustrations separate from each other, and I remember about 4 years ago Rime said to me ‘Why wouldn’t you paint characters on walls? That’s stupid. That’s what your paintings are. Why wouldn’t you do that? It helps tie things to your paintings.’ Originally, when we started working together, our graffiti was our graffiti and our paintings were something different. Even though they are under the same name and made by the same people, it was like we were attacking them as different people, just with the same name. We tried to push the two away from each other, and eventually the roads have kind of worked back into each other. I’m happy for it to be like this though!
Photos by Tim Hans
The last time I wrote about yarn bombing, I criticized the lack of differentiation in the craft and was skeptical of it being classified as “street art”. Even with that bias, I find this R2D2 yarn bomb absolutely brilliant. The piece was up in Bellingham, Washington and created by Sarah Rudder for International Yarn Bombing Day. As cool as it is, the piece was only left up for the day before the artist took it back home to reuse it and improve it for next year (expect speakers and legs). That’s fair, I would probably want to hold on to something that looked that awesome too. “Even if I had left it out to weather the elements, R2D2 is made out of an acrylic yarn that wouldn’t bleed, fade, or stretch for quite some time,” the artist says on her blog. It’s great that she put that in that consideration, but the piece wasn’t left up so it doesn’t make too much of a difference. As incredible as it looks, this supports the criticism that yarn bombing is a “do it for the photo” method of street art.
Photos by Sarah Rudder
This year, Chicago-based street artist Don’t Fret made it down to Miami for Art Basel and the surrounding street art and graffiti free-for-all. Here are a few of his pieces from down there. Don’t Fret is funny, but not the kind of witty, buzz icon, media satire type of humor that I’m accustomed to seeing in street art. It’s nice to see an artist focusing more on a simple concept than on displaying talent, but also not really focusing on concept that much either. I don’t know how much of an artistic background Don’t Fret had before he started doing street art, but he’s been at this for a few years and he definitely turns heads.
Photos by Don’t Fret
Adam Clark’s Billboard Bandits: Outlaw Artists in the Sky, published this year, is 208 pages of photos, entry level information on graffiti culture (i.e. What are throw-ups, pieces, and billboard backs?), profiles and personal anecdotes in the vernacular of true writers (which includes explicit language).
The book is divided into two sections by graffiti and street art, with “Billboard bombing” representing the graffiti camp of billboard interference, which seems to be a bit looser in definition given that many of the pieces were not on the ads directly, but above, below, on the walls behind, or on the backs of billboards. The street art portion, entitled “Billboard Liberation”, is a lot more limited in coverage but profiles some street art favorites like Ron English and Billboard Liberation Front. Clark’s distinction between the two subcultures is a necessary one for this topic since the motivation behind hitting billboards is entirely different: graffiti artists use billboards as a highly-visible platforms to proliferate their names, whereas street artists tend to utilize the space to express ideas. The common thread between both is the drive to deemphasize, interfere with, or eliminate the ubiquitous power of adverts.
The content is fit for a niche audience of LA graffiti heads, with featured West Coast writers such as AM7 Crew, Augor MSK, Bleek CBS Mayhem, Fuct AL LGF, Jeloe US BKF CF, Naut One, Pharoe LCF SOB, Pysa MSK LTS, and Silencer. For those people who would truly appreciate seeing these artists, I think the content in this book would be better published in the form of a regularly-updated blog. Works on a billboard are typically short lived, so the book can show recent and past works by artists but can’t update readers on how long the pieces lasted which is one of the interesting part of ad disruptions.
You can get a copy of Billboard Bandits here.
Photos courtesy of Art Crimes: Graffiti News and Events
I am loving this piece by Luzinterruptus, a little Christmas gift for the citizens of Madrid. Here’s what they have to say about their latest intervention…
This Christmas, we asked Santa Claus to fix some things that are wrong with our city for us, a seemingly endless list that keeps on growing as the crisis becomes more serious and politicians reveal their worst intentions to us.
Santa told us that he couldn’t perform miracles, that is the jurisdiction of another union, but that he would work on our behalf so that one of our petitions would be granted.
Therefore, after Christmas day, the surveillance cameras in the center of Madrid were covered with illuminated hats that prevented them from recording what was happening before them.
Madrid is a city, in which, despite the existing rules, in practice, there is no real control over the monitoring devices installed on its streets and the citizens don’t have the possibility of accessing the record of what these cameras record 24 hours a day in the places where they are situated.
In 2007 it was suggested that there were more than 20.000 cameras looking out for our safety, but today, there are no devices capable of controlling those who control us, and while politicians don’t care about that they record and use images of common citizens, it seems that they have many drawbacks in that “they record and disseminate images of security agents in the exercise of their functions… if you put their person or the operation on which they are working at risk…”.
The action Merry Christmas to those who watch us took place on the night of December 26th and to carry it out, we used 20 cameras installed in the center of Madrid, mainly those that monitor the streets, other located on public buildings and some on private property.
We hope that our anonymous friends behind the cameras, appreciated the warm flashes of Christmas light which we presented them with on their surveillance monitors.
Photos by Luzinterruptus
