Our weekly interview with the streets also wanders into a few Art Fairs this week as many Street Artists were in town showing studio work and getting up on walls. It was great to meet so many people who are on fire about this grassroots, interactive, DIY, in-your-eyeballs world of street art and to talk about where it is going. While there were a slew of Street Artists banging a luan wall at Fountain, we also got to see some peeps at Scope and Volta.
So here we go with shots of Andy Piedilato, Dalek, DFace, How Nosm, Mark Jenkins, Ron English, Tes One, Tristan Eaton, TrustoCorp, and Typoe.
You are invited to The Top of The Standard (442 West 13th Street), this Saturday, March 5th, where JoséParlá will be signing his new monograph from 6 PM to 9 PM. This event is open to the public.
Junkerade, a London collective on Flickr, has posted images of a new campaign accusing Red Bulls’ new site that uses Google’s “Street View” technology of hijacking street art culture. With some simple handwritten posters they have begun a visual street backlash to encourage other discontents to mess with the messaging, including the posted piece above.
According to Junkerade, “Red Bull want to use it to flog their products without asking … to make them seem down and edgy. Let ’em know what you think, let them know they have no right to take our culture and try and sell it back to us in the form of a sugary drink”. It’s hard to predict how this will go down, but other Iphone and Android apps introduced over the last couple of years have struggled to populate their databases with relevant, accurate, good quality images and contributors. In a sweeping commercial gesture like this toward what many see as a grassroots movement, it is easy to question the company’s motives. Social media has a way of determining the rendering a decision, and so does the street.
And Now Some Levity with Devo and a Singing Unicorn!
And an ad for gum at the end that has nothing to do with us.
Comrade Luna Park charges through the streets camera in hand with panther-like determination and captures the wild (and wildstyle) on the urban safari. Monday you can get a chance to see her images and listen to her talk about her adventures in photography – or as she tells us,
“I’ll be telling the unlikely story of how a thirtysomething librarian fell into street art and became hopelessly addicted to graffiti along the way.”
“Street art is the fastest visual conductor out there. It compels people to think and question, react and connect, not just to the artist’s work but with the real issues that we battle each and every day. I believe for art to succeed it’s all about the experience and not about the possession. Art in the streets is an immediate communicator. It beats out advertising, text-based social media and even video. In this type of window presentation we are reducing the value of an art object to that of a shared visual experience for the general public and passerby without an admission fee.
The Donnell library was always known as the art library in the city. For the artists to respond to ‘a sense of place’ is like a location shot in a movie; you attempt to transcend that specific space to become something bigger than it originally was.
Street projects such as the upcoming Pantheon installation allow artists to modify, update and change their work to reflect what is happening in the real world. Try putting up a different painting in a gallery or museum exhibition. It’s not going to happen”.
VOLTA NY is an invitational show of solo artist’s projects, it is the American incarnation of the successful young fair founded in Basel in 2005. VOLTA NY was conceived by art critic and fair director Amanda Coulson to continue the original mandate to create a tightly-focused, boutique event that is a place for discovery and a showcase for current art production and relevant contemporary positions — regardless of the artist or gallery’s age.
By putting the focus back on artists through exclusively featuring solo projects, VOLTA NY promotes a deep exploration of the work of its selected projects, an opportunity for discoveries that move beyond those afforded by a traditional art fair.
A platform for challenging, often complimentary, sometimes competing ideas about contemporary art, the strictly solo format is what gives the New York fair its unique character with visitors positively comparing VOLTA NY to doing a series of intense studio visits.