Sabe KST officially has the best blackbook, and here it is…

Sabe

For me, one of the most interesting writers in contemporary graffiti is Sabe KST. I have to give Faust credit for really turning me to on Sabe’s work, although I doubt that Faust realized he was introducing me to a writer whose work perfectly matched up with what I’d been interested in seeing from contemporary graffiti.

Credit goes to Evan Roth for introducing me to the idea that graffiti is a series of hacks. Graffiti is about re-purposing tools as much as re-purposing space. But modern graffiti writers have access to 1000 tools custom-made for them. Sabe not only continues the art of hacking together your own graffiti implements, but he brings that same energy and ingenuity into his legal work. For his paintings and drawings, Sabe creates custom motorized tools that give him an aesthetic that other artists can’t match, because they don’t have the tools to do so.

With his latest project, Anime Blackbook, Sabe has combined old-school animation with digital art and video art, something else I love to see from writers and street artists. Just watch:

Is that not one of the best possible digital displays of tags? Anime Blackbook works for the same reason that INSA’s GIF-ITI is so popular. It’s an eye-catching way to activate graffiti in digital space of endless scrolling. Actually, Sabe should probably convert each tag into a GIF.

Of course, Anime Blackbook is reminiscent of Graffiti Markup Language (GML)/#000000book/KATSU’s FatTag Deluxe and associated projects from F.A.T. Lab. In fact, I was surprised to find out that Sabe hadn’t simply used GML to capture everyone’s tags for this project.

Regardless of the underlying technology, which is what those F.A.T. Projects were really about, Sabe’s video is a new favorite of mine. By simply adding some music and cool backgrounds, he captures the unique vibes of each writer in the video, something that a tag on a blank background can’t do unless you’re acutely attuned to the intricacies of graffiti. The pairings are perfect. For the writers I know, they make sense, and for the writers I don’t, they immediately tell me something extra about them. Pixote’s tag makes sense on a rocky cliff. Sabio’s tag means something different against a forest. Of course Faust’s tag is set against skyscrapers, and KAWS’ name appears on some ethereal starscape. The idea behind Anime Blackbook is relatively simple, but so many good ideas are. With this piece, Sabe has captured something about writing and the people who write, and any fan of graffiti should be able to appreciate that.

For more about Anime Blackbook, check out Animal’s brief interview with Sabe.

PS, the full list of writers included in the video is… JOZ, EASY, VEEFER, CES, SKUF, RIME, VIZIE, NEKST, WANE, JEST, SACER, ARK, NOV, SYE5, PIXOTE, SABIO, KADISM, RASAD, END, AMUSE126, SEGE, HOUND, KORN, DCEVE, SNOEMAN, CINIK, FAUST, YEAR, REHAB, AKS, REMO, NEMZ, FORES, SHAUN, GUESS, REAS, ESPO, KAWS, LEWY, ADEK, MALVO, KATSU, DAYS, GUNS, OPTIMIST, RESQ, BEGR, PEAR, ZOMBRA, PHAT2, UDON, NUNO, FANTA, TOM246, WANTO, QP, VERY, and SABEKST. Also, the film was produced by Sabe KST with animation direction by Celia Bulwinkel and a soundtrack by Trouble Andrew/Gucci Ghost.

Screenshot from Anime Blackbook by Sabe KST

Weekend link-o-rama

Paul Insect and Sweet Toof
Paul Insect and Sweet Toof (and Sope)

For me, school is back in session. Hopefully everyone else out there is still enjoying the tail end of the summer. Here’s some art to keep your weekend interesting:

  • Martha Cooper and I have announced our picks for the MOCAtv Upload More Art challenge. You uploaded your street art videos, and we selected our favorites. I used the opportunity to highlight videos of Enzo & Nio and A.CE. As you can probably guess when you watch me explain my picks, I made those picks during Illegal August, so those sorts of thoughts were on my mind. Martha Cooper also selected two videos to highlight.
  • Just because Colossal Media paints murals based on designs by people like KAWS and Faile doesn’t mean there should be any love for them. They paint advertisements. That is their business. If they paint some murals on the side, that doesn’t excuse billboards invading public space. Unless you think BP sponsoring art exhibits excuses oil spills and pollution…
  • Also what’s up with KAWS’ work being used for a mural (I hesitate to say he did a mural, since it appears all he did was license his imagery)? He’s spent the better part of this site’s existence distancing himself from street art and graffiti and his public art has consisted of sculptures and flyposted advertisements (if you consider that public art).
  • Maybe I’ll be able to ask KAWS about all this myself soon, since presumably he’ll be in Philadelphia for his show at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Arrested Motion has a bit of a preview, but I think the link really worth checking is PAFA’s website (and this archived version of the same page from mid-August) because of this section of the show description which has since been removed: “Placing KAWS’ sculptural works throughout PAFA’s historic galleries will further the ‘graffiti effect,'” and the edit of (emphasis added) “KAWS grew up in Jersey City, where he emerged as a graffiti artist in the early 1990s.” to “KAWS grew up in Jersey City, where he emerged as an artist in the early 1990s.” So that’s interesting.
  • I’ve never been a big fan of Elle’s work, but I do love this ad takeover.
  • And here are more ad takeovers, these from Jordan Seiler.
  • So many nice graffiti pieces on Ekosystem today.
  • I really like this new print from Shepard Fairey.
  • Pablo Delgado tiny pieces alway makes me smile.
  • Speak of small street art, here’s BSA’s take on the subject.
  • FAME Festival is no more, although ad hoc projects will continue to be organized in the town of Grottaglie, Italy by festival organizer Angelo Milano. It’s definitely sad news, but Angelo is always ahead of the times. Maybe this glut of street art festivals is just too much. Maybe it’s time for something different. Let’s hope Angelo figures it out. I can’t wait to see what he tries next.

Photo by Alex Ellison

Weekend link-o-rama

Buff Monster and Hoacs
Buff Monster and Hoacs

Enjoy the weekend:

Photo by Lois Stavsky

Weekend link-o-rama

ASVP for The L.I.S.A. Project
ASVP for The L.I.S.A. Project

It’s that time again. Enjoy the rest of the interwebs…

Photo by Wayne Rada

Weekend link-o-rama

Smells, Cash4, Don Pablo Pedro and Keely
Smells, Cash4, Don Pablo Pedro and Keely

Last class of the school year yesterday. Now for finals. Can’t wait… Here are some distractions in case you’re in a similar boat:

  • NoseGo has some new prints available today with Unit44. These are not giclee prints, but rather archival pigment prints, a significant step up in quality as I understand it.
  • The fantastic ceramic street artist Carrie Reichardt is organizing this show in London.
  • Great sculptural installation and indoor mural by Pixel Pancho in Mexico City.
  • Loving this collaboration between Kofie and El Mac.
  • S.butterfly has photos of the Bom.K show in Paris. Wish I could see this one in person.
  • And Kaws has a solo show in Tokyo at the moment. It’s Kaws, so feel free to check out the photos, but you pretty much knows what’s coming.
  • JR and José Parlá collaborated on a mural on the outside of Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, where they have a two-man show opening next week. Glad to see Parlá working outdoors, but it always strikes me as a bit odd since he tries to distance his work from graffiti. I guess when there’s a show to promote… Although to be fair, the show is about a series of collaborative murals that JR and Parlá made together in Cuba.
  • JR’s Inside Out project booth in Times Square is a huge hit. He’s been covering the street with photos of people who stop by his little photobooth, and it looks awesome. The billboards in Times Square were even (briefly) given over to JR for the project. The whole thing is a fight against outdoor ads and for public spaces for the public, but JR manages to make his point without beating people over the head with politics. Instead, JR just shows people a better world and makes them smile. I’m not a JR fanatic, but I absolutely love this project.

Photo by Hrag Vartanian

KAWS’ Companion sculpture and more in Philadelphia

Companion (Passing Through) at the Aldrich
Companion (Passing Through) at The Aldrich

KAWS’ 16-foot-tall sculpture Companion (Passing Through) is making a stop in Philadelphia soon thanks to The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA). The sculpture has already visited The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, The Standard Hotel in NYC, and other locations. From April 11th through May 14th, it will be on display at 30th Street Station, Philadelphia’s main train station.

Then, in October, KAWS will have two sculpture projects at PAFA. One, in a PAFA project inspired by the Fourth Plinth in London, will be a public sculpture placed outdoors atop the entrance to PAFA’s museum in Philadelphia. The other project, an exhibition of KAWS’ sculptures inside PAFA’s museum, will go on at same time.

Three KAWS projects in Philadelphia in one year, with two of them taking place outdoors. Good stuff. For more info, check out PAFA’s site.

PS, the following excerpt from PAFA’s blurb about these projects is hilarious:

The exhibition offers an exciting opportunity to engage in an artistic dialog about PAFA’s past and present, and to link the exterior of the Historic Landmark Building to the work on view inside. Placing KAWS’ sculptural works throughout PAFA’s historic galleries will further the ‘graffiti effect,’

Photo by Mike Simonds

Staying elusive in the streets

Banksy
Banksy. Photo by Klara Kim.

Being an elusive figure in the graffiti/street art world is slowly becoming obsolete. Artists find themselves making the transition from anonymity to the limelight, for what many think is solely for profit. The proliferation of social media has amplified the audience of street art, and led to increased exposure and opportunities for artists. But what motivates street artists to step away from their elusive lifestyles?

Recently, it seems many graffiti writers have cast away their incognito identities and made the transition towards becoming legitimate artists. What was once considered an act of vandalism is now commissioned by brands and displayed in art galleries around the world. But in order to market themselves as legitimate, recognizable artists they need to step away from their personas and present themselves not as vandals, but as artists.

At one point, street artists in question would mask their voices and hide their faces behind a blurred out lens in order to keep their identities hidden to the general public during interviews. Now, all that smoke and mirrors are gone. Personally, I used to love D*Face. He was strictly recognized by his moniker and nothing else, with his face always blurred during interviews. Then, seemingly overnight, it all changed. He began to create work and appear in interviews under his real name. Suddenly, D*Face became Dean Stockton. His work became mild and denotative. His mythical qualities as an artist were diminished. He just didn’t seem as interesting.

So why make that transition? Why not stay hidden and attempt to make a living while staying private? Artists such as Kaws and Shepard Fairey could easily have stayed elusive, but now they’re the biggest names in the street art world. When Kaws started hijacking billboards and bus shelter ads, no one knew who he was. They only knew him by his name. Now he’s making vinyl toys, taking part in the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade, and getting interviewed by Pharrell Williams. Similar tale with Fairey: he started out pasting up stickers around his local skate park, nobody knew what Obey meant, but it was everywhere, so it must have been important. Fairey stepped out of the shadows and now, a decade later has his own clothing line and his face is one of the most recognizable in the street art world. Why? Artists realize that in order to market their art, they need to market their persona first. Is this the process of selling out?

But then there are the ones that stay elusive, the purists of the street art world, artists like Dain and Bäst. Born and raised in Brooklyn, the elusive Dain creates sublime works of art the merges old Hollywood glam with new age colors in their composition. This, along with his roots in graffiti, creates a gritty yet delicate street art style that is all his own. There was a weird video that came out a while back about Dain, starring someone other than Dain portraying him. It followed around an old guy as he talked about his life and art and all of his inspirations while answering questions from the camera man. At this point, we know that Dain isn’t really the old man (notice his pasting skills), but one can only assume that the video was meant as a marketing tool, for people to get on the Dain bandwagon and spread his name out to the public without ever being seen. But apart from that video, Dain has never really been a public artist but his works will always be deemed as some of the best of our generation.

Dain. Photo by Sabeth718.
Dain. Photo by Sabeth718.

Bäst plays his part really well. Brooklyn-based artist Bäst has been wheat-pasting throughout New York’s urban landscape for over a decade now. Bäst has remained an elusive character that has rarely been seen in public and whose very existence has been debated. There are very few video interviews where you can hear Bäst talk. The only interview that comes to mind was for the Deluxx Fluxx collaboration with Faile (which is, in my opinion, one of the best street art based collaboration to have ever happened). Bäst manages to frequently collaborate with Faile, who are not anonymous artists, but apart from that, he’s a pretty elusive guy that keeps producing on a consistent basis. Sure, he had this weird, super small scale collaboration with an olive oil company, and the Marc Jacobs collaboration which confused pretty much everybody, since his art being displayed on a sweater for a highly lucrative brand could be seen as an uncharacteristic “sell out” move, but apart from that, he’s always stayed true to form and just stuck to street art.

I bring up Bäst and Dain not only because of the elusive nature, but because they are in fact brothers. One can only assume that some sort of pact was made between them to stay pretty much anonymous to most social groupings. Sure they might have ulterior motives, but as long as they stay elusive, we’ll really never know.

Bast. Photo by Sabeth718.
Bäst. Photo by Sabeth718.

And of course, one has to mention Banksy or as we know him now, most likely Robin Gunningham. Regardless of his moniker, he helped cement street art’s place in the established art world. Street art fans will forever have a love/hate relationship with Banksy. At this point, his work can come off as banal and obvious, but the fact that his identity was questioned for so long, in our surveillance culture, is pretty significant. He got his art up in the Met, or someone posing as him did. He got in and out of Disneyland without getting caught. Banksy’s evasiveness lends him a mystique and fascination, but he still manages to profit from his art.

These are the kind of question that people ask themselves when artists stay anonymous. We question everything about them, not knowing what they’ll do next. Suspense and curiosity will always play a part in their persona. Their anonymity is what keeps us interested; it plays a part in how we perceive them. Take these qualities away, and we realize that these artists are just like the rest. Would Banksy of reached this kind of popularity if he was just Robin Gunningham all along? Of course not. But he’s also a unique case; it’s hard to imagine a street artist will ever achieve what he has in our life time. So why stay elusive? Well, I guess it’s a question at the core of street art. Artists are supposed to be a hooded, hidden characters putting art up illegally, leading people to ask questions. How did it get there? Who did it? Why did they do it? When it comes to people like Kaws and Shepard Fairey, they answer these questions in the interviews that they partake in. But for others, maybe we’ll never know.

Photos By sabeth718 and Klara Kim

Weekend link-o-rama

Hyuro

Happy reminder that we’re less than a month from Christmas…

Photo by Hyuro

Weekend link-o-rama

Had a fantastic time in New York last weekend finishing up The Art of Comedy, but that meant missing out on a lot of news, so some of this week’s link-o-rama is a bit more dated than usual:

Photo by Luna Park

Weekend link-o-rama

Rothko from beyond the grave by Freddy Sam

Not much to say this week except of course that I’m pumped for The Art of Comedy. Not too much news either, but some important stories…

Photo by Faith47 and via Wooster Collective