You may never know for sure who or what will influence the work of a Street Artist, but sometimes you know instantly. As we mark this month the 25th anniversary of his death, it could easily be said that the single most influential artist on the work of this generation is 20th century pop art superstar Andy Warhol. His aesthetic sensibility and merging of commercial advertising with fine art continues to appear in new work daily.
Street Artist LUDO is currently in frozen Rotterdam where he is installing his own Warhol-inspired Del Monte cans wheat pastes in bitter cold that has dipped to -15°C. Rather than elevating the pedestrian to art status as Warhol did, LUDOs somewhat darker work has a more serious mission of drawing attention to modern methods of food production and the legacy of our scientific manipulation of the natural world. The large wheat pastes feature food items merged with symbols of death and bathed in his signature acid green wash.
When in Los Angeles last August to participate in the BSA “Street Art Stories” show he toured the MoCA museum while attending our panel discussion at the museum and he says at that moment he gained some new appreciation for the can.
Says the artist, “Funny because the first time I really saw the Warhol Campbell cans, it was when I went to the MOCA panel this August with you – there was some kind of retrospective. Then I thought I would do mine, ‘Del Monte Cans’.”
NEW ART – FORMERLY KNOWN AS: NEW ART
Urban artists paying homage to innovators from the history of art
Opening: January 20, 7 – 9 PM
In this exhibition, artists from all over the world take reference to some ground breaking artists of the past. An homage to the spirit of innovation, non-conformity and alternative thinking of the older days.
Judith Supine / Christian Awe / Jonathan Yeo / Helle Mardahl / XOOOOX / Kevin Earl Taylor / Anton Unai / Jaybo Monk / Adriana Ciudad / Stefan Strumbel / Marco “Pho” Grassi
VS.
Gustav Klimt, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Pablo Picasso, Damien Hirst, Andy Warhol, Pierre Soulages, Henri Matisse, Théodore Géricault, James Ensor
Art looks back on a history that is as multi-faceted and fascinating as our own time. Among the illustrators, designers, sculptors, painters, calligraphers, fashion designers and architects of the past centuries, new avant-gardes have constantly emerged, establishing themselves to be replaced soon enough by the next generation craving innovation.
A process of creation that naturally builds upon preceding aesthetics, concepts and techniques that deconstructs them in order to create a contemporary art-remix. Many artists eschew this conscious connection to history. Freely and radically, they create new approaches: the new art.
Together with new neighbors and old friends from back in the city Thundercut are steadily creating a cultural festival built around one of their first loves: Street Art.
The Street Art couple known as Thundercut are not the first Brooklyn artists to head to Beacon, New York, a picturesque phoenix on the Hudson River 59 miles north of Grand Central Station. Kalene Rivers and Dan Weise are just two of the most visionary and fun to talk with.
Once a town known for it’s hat making, Beacon (pop. 16,000) had a reputation as a sketchy drug and crime ridden place when Dan and Kalene were growing up in the Hudson Valley during the 80s and 90s. When the Dia Arts Foundation (also of Dia:Chelsea in Manhattan) renovated a 34,000 sf former factory in Beacon to create Dia:Beacon and to house a collection of Warhol paintings, hulking Richard Serra sculptures, and fluorescent Dan Flavin monuments, among other post 1960 art, interest grew in the town and an artist community largely from New York began to blossom. Many of the original artists who had brought a bohemian caché to rundown neighborhoods like Williamsburg, Greenpoint, and Red Hook in Brooklyn relocated to Beacon as their neighborhoods blanded in the mid 2000s. Much like those original artist enclaves, Beacon has become home to artist collectives, house parties, and experimentation.
Tina Darling poses in front of her work at Electric Windows (all photos courtesy and copyright of Thundercut)
While DIA was an important catalyst when it opened in 2003, Dan says the new residents brought a creative community that grew organically in it’s own direction.
“The people that have moved here have a very DIY spirit and have created something very special that continues to reinvent itself each year,” says Dan. In addition to Dan and Kalene opening their own gallery, Open Space, which shows fine art by many friends and artists in the street art scene, they recount inititiatives by neighbors who organize live concerts, have annual open studio events, host drawing nights at home, and began non-art related groups like soccer and ping pong clubs. Open Space itself has hosted a series of comedy nights that play to packed houses.
Says Dan, “If someone sees something missing in the community, they try to make it happen.”
Begun as a place to house their graphic design business, Open Space took root as a gallery and a community gathering spot. Explains Kalene, “We are both very passionate about giving something back to the community, from bringing new artists to show in the gallery, to organizing events like Electric Windows, these are things that we think are great and we are excited to share them with the town.”
Which brings us to the third year of Electric Windows, a project that fills the eyes of a moribund electric blanket factory with new canvasses painted live on the street by artists while the public mills about. Now in it’s third year, with thirty artists, three buildings and live performances, EW is organized with their neighbors Jon Miles, Jeff Ashey and Nicole Romano. With support from the mayor, a grant from the county arts council, donations from businesses of supplies and money, and even neighbors who are opening their homes to house the visiting artists, Electric Windows is thoroughly a community celebrating the creative spirit and the talent of Street Artists. The artists are traveling from Australia, Portland, San Francisco, St Louis, Milwaukee, New Jersey, and of course, Brooklyn without compensation and are all doing it for the love of the project.
Brooklyn Street Art: How did the Electric Windows project first develop?
Dan Weise: The Electric Windows building is what we see when we look out of the windows of Open Space. It is a beautiful turn-of-the-century factory building which, when we first got the space, still had the partially broken glass windows in the frames. It was a postcard for urban decay and having just moved up from Brooklyn, felt like home. Shortly after we opened the gallery, the owner removed all the glass and installed grey plywood window protection in its place. This was far from an improvement in our opinion, so we started discussing what could be done to bring life back to the building. This is when we began seriously talking about the idea of “Electric Windows”.
Our neighbors at the time, an art store named Burlock Home, really loved the idea and were on board to help make it happen. The four of us teamed up and put the whole project together in three months.
BSA: This year features 3 buildings, instead of one. Do you have enough artists?
Kalene Rivers: We are excited about expanding the project to include more locations in the same area and all surfaces are accounted for. Everyday we think about how lucky we are to know so many incredibly talented artists and we just keep meeting more and more. Not only are they talented but they are amazing friends willing to donate their time and talents to events like Electric Windows for the love of making art and supporting positive projects.
BSA: Street Art is normally associated with large metropolitan areas. How does Beacon fit in to the equation?
Dan: Historically, Beacon was a town of manufacturing and the evidence still remains. There are some really phenomenal factories here in town, some vacant, some in the process of renovations and others like the Nabisco Factory, which now houses DIA, have been transformed into something new. I think this helps bring a bit of an urban feel to a quaint little upstate town. Also, when we moved up here we realized that not many people even knew about Street Art. This being the something that we are both very passionate about we wanted to open the gallery and share this world with people beyond the Bronx. Open Space Gallery was formed, Electric Windows was conceived, and slowly the infiltration has begun!
BSA: Would you say most of these artists are Street Artists? Or are there also graffiti artists, fine artists….
Kalene: I would say that most of the artists are Street Artists but there certainly is a good group of graffiti and fine artists in the mix. Of course the first people we think to invite to the project are friends. Being involved in the Street Art scene for seven years means that these are the people we know best. However, it is wonderful to work with a variety of people from different backgrounds. The artists have to be able to paint big and fast so our selection of qualified participants is pretty limited to a certain kind of artist.
BSA: What’s your favorite part of the event?
Dan: Well, after we stress out for months planning and trying to take care of all the details, it is great to look up and see it all in action. Music filling the air, fumes wafting by, people admiring the amazing murals being created, children laughing and dancing. That is when it feels like it has all been worth it. But the event is just the beginning once the crowds leave and the art has been installed the projects gives back to the community, to visitors and to us each and every day.
Returning Artists for Electric Windows: Buxtonia, BoogieRez, Chris Stain, Depoe, Elbow Toe, Mr Kiji, Michael De Feo, Peat Wollaeger, Rick Price, Ron English
New Artists for 2010: Big Foot, Cern, Chor Boogie, Chris Yormick, Elia Gurna, Erick Otto, Eugene Good, Faust, Gaia, Joe Iurato, Kid Zoom, Logan Hicks, Lotem & Aviv, Paper Monster, Ryan Bubnis, Ryan Williams, Skewville, Thundercut
This year’s event, which includes two days of preparation by the artists, a one-day exhibition and street fair, music and dancing by M*POWER ELITE TEAM, live screen printing by Buxtonia, and an Open Space after-party, is expected to draw approximately 5,000 people to Beacon’s Main Street corridor.
The line-up of live music at ELECTRIC WINDOWS includes: Ben Neill, Aabaraki, Hart Costa, DJ Birds in the Building, DJ Bobby Collins, DJ Krisis, Dr. Ambassador, Gold Monkey, and Scambler Seequill.
See Chor Boogie’s “Romanticism” and other works by Electric Windows artists at Open Space online by clicking this picture.
Their recent New York contemporary auction sold this silk screen called 200 One Dollar Bills for $43.8 million to an anonymous bidder.
You see! You CAN buy me that XBox 360 for Christmas!
“I think Warhol’s prices have held steady because he is considered the most influential postwar artist. He forged the path of being a creative director who invented rather than expressed himself and was acutely aware of both the business and kind of media resonance of his art.” said Sarah Thornton of The Economist
I’ll have a Blue Blue Blue Blue Blue Blue Blue Blue Christmaaaaas, without youuuuu – “8 Elvises” sold for 100 million dollars. That’s like twelve and a half per
“Unlike most of Warhol’s other pieces, which are screen prints made by his assembly line of assistants in his infamous NYC Factory, this Warhol Elvis piece is unique. Warhol only made one of the work he called Eight Elvises.”
A quarter of a century since falling in love with New York, WK looks at his route.
WK Interact was 8 years old, spending hours drawing on old floor plans. On the job with his father, even then he buried himself in his work while Dad rushed around giving orders at his interior design worksites in the south of France. A few years later, his drawings came alive with movement as he hung out all day in dance schools watching young bodies fly across the floor. Once more his style catapulted forward the day he discovered how to stretch and animate a figure just by dragging it across the glass of a photocopier. Action. Captured.
Without question, his love of the street, of art, and wild motion fully materialized and went on steroids when WK first laid eyes on monstrous, convulsing New York City. He was 16. He was blown away, frightened, and excited. Two years later, he gave into the magnetic pull of New York’s raw power.
“I remember I went downstairs and I said to my parents, ‘You know what, I am going to New York’, and my parents said ‘But why, what for? Are you going to be able to get a good job? Why do you have to go to a place where you don’t even speak English?’,” he remembers. A great struggle took place but he left for the United States anyway, alone for the first time. That’s when WK’s war began, almost a quarter of a century ago, on these streets. And he won.
(image WK Interact)
If his work on the street is an indication, it has been a constant state of war. Look at these images and themes that reappear in WK’s work since he first came to New York; Ever-present fear, violence, anxiety, overheated sex-play, fishnets & firearms, contorted figures racing, martial arts kicks to the head, hand-to-hand combat, boxers swinging, prisoners tied and bound, hooded figures snapping heads of bound businessmen, terrifying escapes in progress, maniacal twined and twisted forms and faces, propaganda, undercover spies, official seals, gun assembly diagrams, digitized labels, ID fingerprints, cameras, surveillance, camouflage, radioactive symbols, streaming codes and bureaucratic text passages, black military choppers hovering overhead, contorted soldiers screaming “bring me back”, a permanent state of survivalism… All of these hellacious visions collide and collapse and expand in continuous motion and interaction almost exclusively in black and white in wheat pastes, paintings, screen prints, photographs, sculpture, and performance installations on the street.
(image WK Interact)
You may think that some of this work is vaguely autobiographical, but for WK, all of this work is simply a reflection of the city he chose and the atmosphere here. “New York is extremely demanding and challenging”, he says, “If you do something sexy in the street in New York you are in trouble. If you do something violent, people will give you the thumbs up!”
In other words, he’s playing to the audience in this particular city and unfortunately it may give an inaccurate impression of WK, the person, “I’ll just say this; My work, the people always see one thing – fear, attack, violence. They have absolutely no clue of the other side. I don’t think they are ignorant. My work is very black, it’s very bold, it’s very graphic, it’s very strong. There is nothing really friendly like a little bird flying around or a pink piglet… it’s totally not that. But I live in New York City and I am responding to that kind of contrast. The weather is very strong, very hot and very cold. All the traffic is heavy, the structure of this city is almost like a double bladed knife. I wanted to adapt myself as a New Yorker and adapt my mind as an artist. I’m always fascinated by this fear, and the people who want to ignore it.”
It was the mid-1980’s and there was not such a thing as “Street Art” yet, but “Low-brow” was in full effect, with graffiti as a new darling in the booming art market. The City had just pulled out of a deep recession, Wall Street wall was flush, newly minted “Yuppies” were ordering sushi and flashing their Swatches, Run DMC was rocking a tricky rhyme, and graffiti had been nearly scrubbed from all the subway cars. Kenny Scharf took his cartoons into the Tunnel, Richard Hambleton was doing shadows on the street walls in the Village, Keith Haring was doing his thing in the subways, and Warhol was fixating on Basquiat.
Image of Richard Hambleton shadow work by photographer Allan Molho
WK Interact knew very little about all of this activity, but he gradually learned. 18 year old WK looked for work as a graphic artist but because he spoke little English and had few connections, doors slammed in his face quickly one after another. Eventually he got work as a carpenter and painter, living in a tiny room on Houston in Alphabet City.
The Lower East Side was his first real school; “I was like a student. I was not that good in school, and all of that work, work, work to get a diploma! That diploma was absolutely no help to me. My own diploma was my own dream, it was my own need. It was not proving anything to anybody, just me.” What followed was the “School of Hard Knocks”; occasional opportunities, a lot of drawing and time alone observing city life and street life, experimenting with his work on the street, and missteps that included a period actually living on the street in a box. Socially, he wasn’t able to connect with other artists and couldn’t really understand how to navigate the city and street culture world he had thrust himself into. He spent a lot of time feeling a deep sense of alienation.
A younger WK on the Williamsburg Bridge (image WK Interact)
“When I started to do my stuff I was so ‘not there’. I was so different and without an understanding of the art, the graffiti, the branding. Nobody really understood me; I was a bit early to be put in this category so I created myself just to be “this guy”. There were groups there, but I was on my own. And it was very, very difficult to believe in myself. It was so difficult not to be a part of a group. It was so difficult not to be able to speak English. I used go seek artists because I liked their work, and they never replied, or never wrote back.”
While WK still values those hard years because his inner strength and knowledge of humanity and inhumanity was greatly broadened, not to mention his development as an artist, he wouldn’t recommend them to you as a friend, as those years haunt him today. Coupled with feelings of rejection from his parents, this sense of alienation made him a lone wolf in a hostile town.
Prince and Lafette (image WK Interact)
A turning point for WK may have been the literal turning point of the corner of Prince and Lafayette streets in Soho, a garage and mechanics business. WK liked the multiple surfaces and angles of the lot, as well as their industrial rawness and he inquired about who owned it. After cajoling the owner of the garage to allow him do a piece on the wall, he eventually went on to “run” that whole corner that was a mechanic’s garage for a number of years. He likes to say no one noticed the racing, leaping, landing, crashing, chasing, panicked people in black and white on that block for many years, but in fact many New Yorkers around at that time still remember the sudden surprise of those images on the buildings and began to look forward to checking them out in when they passed through Soho.
Alek and WK (image WK Interact)
A piece on it’s larger overhead walls one time featured model Alek Well – a bicephalous blur portrait of gut-busting joy and ebullience as one head is tossed back to the left and one slightly forward to the right, anchored by solid shoulders. The scenes and players changed but usually the entire space was a spooked by hair-raising scenarios which you may or may not want to understand more clearly.
Similarly many people remember as “classic” the view of WK’s iconic 2-story speeding rollerblader racing along a building on the southwest side of Houston street to jump across Broadway. To hit one of his spots in it’s context is to experience a sudden pick-up in pulse, or skip in the beat, and a little bit of confusion that sharply torques the wild energy of the urban environment. No one else endeavors to shake you like this. It’s safe to say that you admire the mind of the artist who brought you this jolt.
(image WK Interact)
He lived frugally in a tiny studio and brought home left-over paint from his day jobs. It was pretty early in his career that he decided black and white paint was the best way to portray New York and it’s brutal contrasts. “If I go back to my country I will begin to paint blue and pink,” he explains.
Suffice to say, it’s been a long, arduous climb and not one he likes to speak about for a long time, understandably, but eventually WK Interact found his way in New York, and London, and Paris, and Italy, and Sydney, and Japan…. With labor, persistence and luck one opportunity turned another. He doesn’t appear unduly proud that his work today is in demand. He is thankful that he shows in respected galleries, is featured in articles, videos, and he is continuously on the move.
(image WK Interact)
When looking at the rough times, he says, “Those limitations created what I did. That made me want to reverse it, to upgrade it – so I made myself do more. You can see the force in my work, that constant motion, the face. It is on the move, you can see the actual thing vibrating, and this has been my position, and it has been like this for the last 23 years. As far as what happened to me coming to the States, I don’t wish this for anybody. I think this was painful, and it will always be painful.”
Nothing will stir up the ire of artists and their fans than another artist’s appropriation of style or technique. It’s considered “lame”.
And nothing will produce audible cries from artists, art historians, collectors, publishers, fans, and armchair lawyers about copyright infringement and utter lack of creativity than when wholesale appropriation is at hand. Of course sometimes it doesn’t hurt your market value to roil them all at once. Miss Bugs has “the touch” right now.
You’ll remember the Joe Black and Miss Bugs show at Brooklynite this spring, where Ms. Bugs opened the eyes of many with wide swipes of fairly newly minted pop imagery into the poppy pieces.
Obama by Fairey sliced across Kate’s breast (Miss Bugs) (photo Steven P. Harrington)
In promoting the show the term “2 Many Artists” was bandied about as a reference to the snip and clip musical mashup/bootleg pioneers of 2 Many DJ’s, who would be analogous to another hairy white guy named GirlTalk today.
A Mondrianic grid of transparency (Miss Bugs) (photo Steven P. Harrington)
This month a very large street art piece in Brighton, England by Miss Bugs has enlivened the debate about any number of things, including copyright issues, right down to the amount of imagination of the artist may possess.
Miss Bugs in Brighton
What seems to have gotten street art fans in a froth is that Miss Bugs is not using old campy print advertisements or bits of classic paintings as reference; rather, it is that the work is using very recent and pretty well-known pieces of STREET ART in the STREET ART.
In fact, barring Mr. Brainwash (MBW), Miss Bugs may be the first to appropriate images so historically quickly, so frequently, and so enormously.
Miss Bugs in a big way.
But then, that’s exactly what entertains others, “to me Miss Bugs is not so much appropriating, but b**ching up modern art, Hirst, Daffy Duck, Fairey, King Kong, Munch, Koons, DFace, Banksy whatever – it’s graffitin’ graffiti, vandalising vandalism…,” says a poster on a well regarded online forum.
Brooklyn hometown heroes Faile may have lifted their images from lesser-known sources, and thus the images quickly became associated with them and “owned” by Faile in the minds of fans (photo Jaime Rojo)
Miss Bugs doesn’t so much adapt the original Faile image as adopt it wholesale.
This calls into question the creativity of the artist in the minds of some. In fact, you may hear cries of “Emperor’s New Clothes” more often than during an Orange Alert in the “War-On-Terror” Bush years.
A dab o’ O’ for your mural? (Miss Bugs)
And then there’s the Holy Grail of Modern Street Art Imagery. Shep Fairey takes his hits, most of them because of his public stature, but chopping up an Obama “Hope” image and splaying it across the wall as a collaging effect makes the Fairey Faithful pale and weak from disbelief.
In the heart of Brooklyn street art circa 2008 (photo Jaime Rojo)
On this side of the pond we have some troubles this summer with what street parlance calls “Haterz” – those folks who are looking to shred the first year president at every turn, most likely because of our sad history of racism. To the supporters of Obama, seeing this iconic street art image so quickly mutilated only adds to the sting of the horrible epithets that are hurled from the neanderthals.
Oh, let’s see. There’s Picasso, Warhol, and Haring and I haven’t left her chest. What about the Munchy Mickey Mouse ears? Now those could get you in trouble. And the Rakkoon eyes? (Miss Bugs) (photo Jaime Rojo)
But let’s not all get our wheat-pastes in a wad.
Either you support free expression or you don’t, and frankly, this mixing of High with Low, Touchstones with The Banal, has been a fabulous feature of “the modern” now since Pop became Popular. Perhaps this willful free-association appropriation is simply a harbinger of what’s to come – or what is already happening elsewhere. Every piece of recorded history is now reduced to 1’s and 0’s and used as easily as paint from the tube.
Rae McGrath, owner of Brooklynite, speaking in reference to Miss Bug’s techniques, says, “I think they are remixing things to make them their own, but because the images they are using are current they get more scrutiny. (It’s an) Interesting debate that you can obvious take the side you feel strongly about.”
Miss Bugs continues to work.
Or maybe it’s not about the art at all. As one collector remarked to another on a forum online recently, “People do get testy once the (Miss Bugs) prints are market price, don’t they, Bob?”
Take a look at the GirlTalk video below and tell us about all the cultural “Sacred Cows” you’re going to defend and preserve.
Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Richard Hambleton, Robert Indiana, Dennis Oppenheim, Ray Johnson, Todd James, Eric Haze, Bast, Elbow Toe, AIKO, Kenji Hirata, Greg Lamarche, Aakash Nihalani, Erik Foss, Deven Marriner, Michael De Feo, Logan Hicks, Judith Supine, Dan Witz, Maya Hayuk, Daniel Joseph, Ripo, Skewville, Brandon Friend, Dark Cloud, MOMO, Dan Funderburgh, Ellis Gallagher, Matt Siren, The Clayton Brothers, and MORE!
Gallery Exhibition:
December 17 – January 24
opening reception:
December 17th, 7 – 10PM
Exhibition Description
Anonymous Gallery is proud to combine three generations of prolific artists whose work has been influenced by, or has directly influenced popular culture, design, and the urban environment. The Piece Process will unite relevant artists with their contemporary counterparts through artwork that serves as a reference or an impetus to something larger or more complete. Anonymous Gallery will exhibit unique pieces of art in the form of sketchbook drawings and original works on paper or found objects from over 30 established and emerging artists exhibiting in New York. The exhibition intends to create discourse in regard to artists who have not only influenced one another, but society through their use of iconography, collage, pen, paint, and print.
In conjunction with the exhibition, Anonymous Gallery, will also be hosting weekly workshops for children. Artists Todd James, Leon Reid, Michael De Feo, Maya Hayuk, Ellis Gallagher, among others, will teach the workshops.
In the spirit of giving, portions of the proceeds raised will go to benefit Public Art for Public Schools http://schools.nyc.gov/Offices/SCA/Programs/PAPS/default.htm. For additional information, workshop schedules, or to make a reservation, please contact – events[at]anonymousgallery[dot]com
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