Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. SOFLES: Layers
BSA Special Feature: SOFLES: Layers
Without the pomposity and subtle class-conscious signaling that those Youtube ads for MasterClass use to coat their appeal with, here is Australia’s master of myriad graffiti styles, SOFLES, giving you the inside look at tools and techniques for his craft with confidence and flair.
Yes, he’s spraying and showing you the right caps to use, but if this hadn’t been abundantly clear before, this discipline is as much about choreography and parry and thrust as it is anything involving paint and hue. Here are the details, the product of knowledge and history, his 10,000 hours.
Technology has enabled the ease of this conveyance of knowledge in a way that early graffiti writers couldn’t have dreamed, and the classroom here is amply captured and framed for you by director/editor/artist/instructor Colin Mckinnon (@profetsone), but it is also the mindset of a generation so far removed from graffiti’s roots that enables SOFLES to instruct us this way as well as his personal character.
Generous in his instinct to share with you, SOFLES gives all
to his gesture, his handstyling, his tracing of contour, his building of
volume, application of dimension and texture, his sweep, his footwork. Did he
just perform a pirouette?
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. AKUT: “Isolated”
BSA Special Feature: AKUT (plus 37) “ISOLATED”
A thrilling and educational flight through the private studio spaces of artists at home in isolation – what’s not to like? Guess which of your favorite artists studios are included?
“I worked on this film the past three weeks together with 37 artists from all over the globe,” says Street Artist AKUT. The call for response during his own family’s isolation resulted in an astounding 37 artists answering from all over the world.
AKUT, otherwise known as the urban contemporary artist and photographer Falk Lehmann – and founder of the legendary German graffiti collective Ma’Claim and half of the artistic duo Herakut – was suffering from isolation. Usually he’s out with the rest of the big name Street Artists going to exhibitions, festivals, working on commission.
Suddenly in March, stop us if you’ve heard this story, it all went “THUD”.
A social animal, AKUT says he loves the time home with his wife and three kids, but he felt locked out and detached from the adventures of painting that he had become so energized by.
“Those nice little (business) trips to locations at the end of the world, not for money, but for the place you would otherwise never have the chance to travel to, sound really awesome, don’t they?” he asks. “Even if the lift turns out to be a soul catcher, if the material arrives three days later and there was no giant tree in front of the wall on the photos you received beforehand and planed your project with. You start to appreciate the freedom to travel, to go far away from your daily duties at home… You meet colleagues and role models, old and new friends, who you share unforgettable experiences with.”
ISOLATED (part I), an infinite loop to despair
Here’s the idea with the 37 artists who joined in – please take a time laps shot through your studio, that is not longer than 4 seconds – but still challenging, because they had to move really slow and avoid vivid movements. Some artists took recording after recording and it still wasn’t optimal. However, in the end and after some long hours of editing and learnings the finished short film came out as a proof for the principle of mentalism. Sliding through the contrasting and inspiring studios as lively spaces in constant use by the respective artists felt refreshing and very comforting. It symbolizes the connection of all individuals being part of an universal infinite, living mind, in which you don’t necessarily need to check in physically. It’s always out there.
WE ARE ONE INFINITE, LIVING MIND (ISOLATED part II)
Credits
WE ARE ONE INFINITE, LIVING MIND (ISOLATED part II)
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. Kraftwerk: Pop Art, Remembering Florian Schneider
BSA Special Feature: Kraftwerk: Pop Art, Remembering Florian Schneider
They
predicted what music would sound like and what the world would look like, fifty
years before it happened. Merging man, machine and avant garde theatric
sensibilities, these where the young artists were at the forefront of imagining
and creating the future while residing inside a completely different one and
enduring the overconfident and snide dismissals – later to be followed by the
masses.
Florian Schneider, Karl Bartos, Wolfgang Flür and Ralf Hütter in Rotterdam. copyright Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns
Over
time, with critical embrace by the recognized academic and institutional
authorities who were finally catching on decades later, the group itself was
transformed in the eyes of global culture as a work of art.
Oh, the influence they have had; Karl Bartos, Wolfgang Flür, Ralph Hütter and Florian Schneider. Countless musicians in many genres point to their ground breaking sound for inspiration on thousands of pieces.
The Face Magazine, “The Werk Ethic” (Issue 23, March 1982)
Somewhere between the Black Forest and Cologne, the spirit of Kraftwerk swells and speeds and glides and calculates the upcoming curve up above on the Autobahn, this modern classicism sweeping minds and imaginations.
Our thoughts today to the family and friends of Kraftwerk co-founder Florian Schneider, who passed away recently at 73. May all our young men and women who are creating today reach this age, and may they inspire us to imagine a future one.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. Vegan Flava – Signs on the Surface
BSA Special Feature: Vegan Flava – “Signs on the Surface”
Yes, we just passed the Easter/Passover holidays, and many parts of the Northern Hemisphere have already burst into Spring.
In Sweden, it takes a little longer to get to seeing flowers and new grass.
Street Artist Vegan Flava shares with us the product of a full winter of communing with a frozen lake – and finding a way to bring his street art skillz to the ice. Today in one video we present a sizeable compilation of various installations he did when the water was frozen, piled with snow.
He calls them “direct actions”.
“In these pieces I’ve mostly used biodegradeable chalk spray,” he says, “a shovel and ash on the ice and snow.” It’s good to know that he is caring for the earth while making his mark upon it.
In an eerily familiar way, the experience of being out there feels like many people feel right now in quarantine – free with their expansive thoughts and ideas on a never-ending canvas, but not quite comforted. With each text message and skull rendering in the snow, these actually begin to look like graffiti tags, enormous hidden clues to a larger story.
HEAL – Human Earth Animal Liberation. It’s a big aspiration, writ large across this lake. This is just one of his texts, his poems, his urgent slogans.
“With
the winters’ first snowfall, billions of unique crystals fall in slow motion
and cover the landscape,” he says. “It looks like a gigantic sheet of paper. It
is beyond belief to be able to walk across the lake during the winter – the
same that we swim in during summer. If these phenomena weren’t real, I would
dream of things such as this and wish they existed.”
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. 2020 RPM / UNO
BSA Special Feature: 2020 RPM / UNO
An expert interconnector of textures and patterns of urban living and pop art sensibilities, the Italian Street Artist UNO captures the essence of his inside life during quarantine in a new brief video today.
A clicking time meter of life passing and the daily
benchmarks that give shape to one continuous life in captivity, it’s the
repetition that reveals the patterns, the subtle variations encoded in the DNA
of living.
Here’s UNO in Rome, spinning at 2,020 revolutions per
minute.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. Vermibus Makes a Small Book of His Own Studies
BSA Special Feature: Vermibus Makes a Small Book of His Own Studies
If you are stuck inside and are looking for new projects, this may be a perfect excuse to create a collection of your works into a book, or a collage, a photo album, or a slide show.
There are endless ways to show off your work digitally using programs or as a simple video – and guess what? Lots of people are stuck at home looking at their screens so they may well have an extra moment to see your work too.
For example take a look at Berlin-based Street Artist Vermibus, whose ad takeovers we have written about and presented in talks endlessly for a decade around the world. This little project is just as personal and impressive in this format as any of his large-format subvertizing work.
“It is a simple video but very intimate,” Vermibus tells us, “where I show the beginning of my work process and how this one work evolved in the first months of tests.”
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. Buff Covid-19
BSA Special Feature: Buff Out Covid-19
The only time most graffiti writers would love the buff; If it could wipe out this virus that is menacing the streets and hospitals of cities around the globe.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. Challenging The Status Quo With Street Art – Blanco
BSA Special Feature: Challenging The Status Quo With Street Art – Blanco
One could argue that the whole modus operandi of Street Art was originally to challenge the status quo, however that is defined. The fact that in recent years banal “Street Art” festivals have cooked that goose and various industry brands have adopted it for a perceived ‘edge’ appeal doesn’t really change our minds about what real Street Art was and is.
Of course the graffiti and Street Art “scene” itself is not free of its own status quo – the need to circle wagons, slamming doors, forming cliques, and keeping gates is perhaps an ironic hypocrisy in a counterculture that prizes itself for bucking these practices, but examples abound.
True to form, Blanco has not pursued slick stardom as a Street Artist per se, and you probably have not heard of him. That’s sort of the way he likes it.
Challenging The Status Quo With Street Art / Blanco / TEDx Coeurdalene
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. VHILS: Stories Told with Explosives, Chemicals, and Power Tools 2. Our Collective Responsibility – eL Seed in London 3. Tomokazu Matsuyama: What inspires him to create his art? 4. Teenagers interview Barry McGee at ICA Boston
BSA Special Feature: VHILS: Stories Told with Explosives, Chemicals, and Power Tools
Blasting, buzzing, chipping, revealing. Vhils gives a tour to you with his creative destruction, exploration – and a spirit of discovery. He is reflecting on the idea of identity, your dreams, expectations of life and how they are shaped.
Our Collective Responsibility – eL Seed – London
Its been five years since the philosophical Tunisian-French street artist and muralist eL Seed painted this wall in the Shoreditch neighborhood of London. Overwrought with stirred emotions at the time because of recent terror attacks in Tunisia and London, it was a meaningful moment and installation for eL Seed, who now can reflect on it even after it is gone. A well-paced interview about his experience, it is placed in context by an Arabic calligrapher and a Street Art cultural commentator.
Tomokazu Matsuyama: What inspires him to create his art?
Brooklyn’s own Tomokazu Matsuyama may have been born in Japan, but his musings on self-identity, diversity, and globalization can only arise from the cultural mélange that gives birth to these considerations such as these.
Question; what’s the difference between sampling and copying, appropriating and paying tribute? Obviously these are themes battled for centuries, even your cousin Melvin used to tell you “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”. He also told you that NSync was probably going to be regarded as the Beatles of the 1990s, so keep that in mind.
Teenagers Interview Barry McGee at ICA Boston
Teens at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston interview Barry McGee.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. “Offset” by Nevercrew at Urvanity in Madrid 2. Icy & Sot: “Our house is on fire” By COlabs / Marco Figueroa 3. Said Dokins on Cultura Colectiva
BSA Special Feature: “Offset” by Nevercrew at Urvanity in Madrid
Welcome to BSA Film Friday with a new mural from the Urvanity commercial art fair in Madrid that culls together 30 or so galleries and mounts a public art campaign during the same week. “Offset” by the Swiss muralists called Nevercrew presents a massive pile of bears, one stacked upon the other.
The manner of arrangement of the bears presents creatures of the wild as no more than commodities, in the same way that corporations and countries think they can “purchase” offsets through a surreal trading market where one purchases the right to pollute and kill our atmosphere. In a positive light, the title “Offset” may refer to the practice of biodiversity offsetting, where previous wrongs are righted following a mitigation hierarchy to produce “no net loss” of biodiversity.
Also, bears are really cute.
“Offset” NEVERCREW in Madrid for Urvanity Art Fair 2020
Icy & Sot: “Our house is on fire” By COlabs / Marco Figueroa
The pacing is quick, the reversal of the timeline adds a sense of mystery and mastery to the brothers’ fox-witted ability to communicate horror in a rather elegant way.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. Bernie Sand Art on NYC Street 2. Welcome to My Colorful World x Okuda San Miguel 3. “When Does Tribute Become Exploitation?” Kobe Murals and Fifth Wall 4. Michael Bloomberg Buys Media, DNC, Presidency. Enjoy! 5. Sorceror Robot Buttigieg Channels Obama Delightfully
BSA Special Feature: Bernie Sand Art on NYC Street
Sand Art is a barometer of populism on the street, so it seemed significant to find that this piece by Joe Mangrum of the Democratic frontrunner Bernie Sanders appeared in NYC in the spring of 2016. Now that Bernie is again polling the highest again against Trump, this little video keeps popping up in our feed for the 2020 race.
Joe Mangrum Creating sand art of Bernie Sanders in NYC’s Washington Square Park.
Welcome to My Colorful World x Okuda San Miguel
The Spanish Street Artist takes another public victory lap for his accomplishments in this new one from Okuda San Miguel.
“When Does Tribute Become Exploitation?” Kobe Murals and Fifth Wall
“Your grief, your pain, your anguish is completely side-stepped because this is a great opportunity,” says Doug Gillem as he imagines the wife and mother who has just lost two of her dearest family in an accident. These are relevant arguments made well by him in the Street Art observer’s newest video “When Does Tribute Become Exploitation.”
As long as we’re looking at politics this week, here are two stunning video pieces on two of the Democratic contenders. Well, actually only the billionaire is a contender anymore. The programmed robotic one, no chance this time.
Michael Bloomberg Buys Media, DNC, Presidency. Enjoy!
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. 5 Minutes with: Plotbot Ken via I Love Graffiti.de 2. Nadia Vadori-Gauthier: One Minute of Dance 3. Ron English: The Road To Heaven (Tribute to Daniel Johnston)
BSA Special Feature: 5 Minutes with: Plotbot Ken via I Love Graffiti.de
Plotbot Ken first caught our eye in the remnants of a factory full of environmental and personal hazards. His is an apocalyptic view of humanity and our shortsighted predilection for creating destruction and for poisoning the earth. But somehow he has made something positive from our dire idiocy. You don’t have to speak German to enjoy this video, or to understand the symbolism of his recurring gas mask motif, or his genius for placement.
Nadia Vadori-Gauthier: Une Minute De Danse Par Jour (One Minute of Dance Per Day)
In reaction to terrorist acts, dancer Nadia
Vadori-Gauthier began a program to dance for one minute a day.
I dance as one manifests, like a small but daily
one, to work for a living poetry, to act by the sensitive against the violence
of certain aspects of the world. It felt like a series of small acts that might
possibly prove to reconnect the disconnections in her own society. She sites
the wisdom of a Chinese proverb to talk about her repeating acts of expression
in the public sphere over many years: “Dripping water ends up going through
stone.”
This compilation of her works can help us see that
the aggregate of many small acts can indeed be phenomenal.
Ron English: The Road To Heaven (Tribute to Daniel Johnston)
Putting his thoughts and emotions in visual vocabulary, artist Ron English gives this personal offering as a moving tribute to the great singer/ songwriter Daniel Johnston, who passed away last autumn.
In her latest mural, Faring Purth delivers a powerful reflection on connection, continuity, and the complexity of evolving relationships—a true …Read More »
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
