For everything, there is a season. Now that autumn turns to winter we see the remainder of the leaves and the flowers succumbing to the cold temperatures and bitter winds. As an experiment this fall the Street Artist QRST began posting small paintings of flowers around Brooklyn and we were lucky enough to catch them as they charted the natural life cycle in slow motion. He told us that the project is about how ephemeral life is, and he thought the flowers illustrated his point well.
Following are the newest shots from this weekend of the flowers in final stages of decay. After that are a couple of series of images charting the evolution.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Aiko, City Kitty, Clet, Dain, Deekers, JB Rock, KCIN, LUC, Mr. One Teas, Obey, Peros, PX$H6XD, Shepard Fairey, Smells, Specter, Tank Petrol, and Tom Fruin.
Starting to think about what we are thankful for this week as we approach Thanksgiving. So many of our neighbors here in New York are going to be truly thankful that immigration reform, the first in about 28 years, will begin to protect many families and workers from the threat of arrest and being torn apart. For those doing the math, we are talking about probably hundreds of thousands of our neighbors who are sleeping tonight a little better, even if the economy is still pressing people down. “It’s fair to say that we have never seen anything quite like this before in terms of the scale,” said Peter J. Spiro, a Temple University law professor in a Times piece.
Meanwhile, we’re seeing new artists pop up on the Street Art scene, and witnessing some voices getting stronger. Honestly, with the everchanging feast on the streets, you can never get bored in New York. Actually that is still against the law as far as we know – getting bored in NYC.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring 2 Face, Icy & Sot, JB Rock, Jerk Face, L’Atlas, LUC, Madame Moustache, Nénão, Nerr, Rita MacDonald, Specter, SPQR, Stikman, Trap, Zed1.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Eelco Virus, Faith47, Jetsonorama, JJ Veronis, Monica Canilao, Mr. Prvrt, Pyramid Oracle, Rambo, Sean9Lugo, Seeone, She Wolf, and Vexta
It’s a free-for-all bag of mushrooms this week – or psychedelic toads to lick, in the case of Don’t Fret, who starts us off with a 2014 NYC tourist dressed head to toe in an Ebola suit. Naturally, he still has a fanny pack. Also notable are the new bus stop takeovers by Spector, who makes his new and subtly startling installations more contextual than you’ve seen before.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Borf, Bunny M, Cali Killa, Don’t Fret, Eelco Virus, Esteban Del Valle, Evoke Fym, Gold Dust, Matthew Reid, June, Knarf, Meer Sau, Not Your Police Dept, SAMO, Senz, Specter, The Broke MC, and This is Awkward.
“Banksy Does New York”, a new documentary by director Chris Moukarbel, meticulously culls and artfully arranges the play and the actors for you in just over an hour with new revelations popping up every few minutes – and you may not believe what you actually missed. But don’t feel bad; everyone missed something during the one-month “Better Out Than In” residency of the Brisol-based street artist during October, 2013. Luckily Moukarbel has done the hard work of sifting through the thousands of Instagram posts, Tweets, YouTube videos, and Banksy’s own digital clues to deftly tell you the story, or rather, stories.
The latest HBO documentary, which airs November 17th, confronts the conventions of typical documentary making by compiling user-generated digital content, or crowd-sourcing the thousands of individual perspectives that occurred in tandem as the new works were unveiled on the streets of New York’s five boroughs. (Full disclosure: We are both interviewed in it.)
“There’s no way we could have gotten cameras everywhere even if we were trying and if we wanted to,” said Moukarbel at a special screening in Manhattan at HBO’s offices last week for many of the “content creators” whose work is woven together to reveal the larger narratives arising from the events.
“No one really knew what Banksy was doing. No one had put a frame around it,” says Chris as he describes the process of allowing the stories to tell him and producer Jack Turner what actually happened. “I mean he so expertly used social media,” says Turner, “Having an Instagram account from the first day — he invented a way for communicating his work and created a following for it and created an event that is a work itself.”
Aside from the mechanics of the unfolding dramas, “Banksy Does New York” attempts to give many of the actors center stage here where other film makers would have relegated them to the roles of extras. Out of town vloggers drive into the city to record their daily discoveries, bonafide Banksy hunters who pool their clues in real time virtually and race to discover the new piece before it is stolen or vandalized, neighborhood entrepreneurs who charge a fee to onlookers for peeking at the paintings, and even the human stories behind the public heist and subsequent art sale that is arranged for one of the sculptures.
Somehow the elusive street artist pulling strings behind the scenes comes off as a sardonic populist everyman although he probably really is just a flagrant [insert your personal projection here]. By removing himself from the show, everyone else is revealed.
And they are nearly all here too. Like the fictional nightlife doyen Stefon Zolesky on Saturday Night Live might say, “This club has everything”; artists, fans, intellectuals, court jesters, minstrels, charlatans, sideshows, soldiers, police, politicians, a priest, dogs, passion, sweetness, sarcasm, irony, jealousy, chicanery, a Greek chorus, car chases, a few fights, a couple of heartfelt speeches, some arrests, bleating lambs being lead to slaughter.
… And a winking wizard somewhere behind the curtain.
Like we said last year as the month drew to a close in an article entitled Banksy’s Final Trick, “No longer asking, ‘Who is Banksy’, many strolling New Yorkers this October were only half-kidding when they would point to nearly any scene or object on the street and ask each other, ‘Is that a Banksy?’”
We turned the interview tables on director Chris Moukarbel and producer Jack Turner to see how they developed their story for “Banksy Does New York”.
Brooklyn Street Art:They say that a documentary filmmaker can’t really have a story in mind going in to the project – because the story reveals itself as you go. Did you see the story developing as you met people and looked at video? Chris Moukarbel: No one had really looked at the residency in its entirety so we felt like archeologists piecing together all these bits of information and trying to create a complete vision of what went down that month. Certain themes began to emerge and it was interesting to find where the work was actually pointing. The locations of each piece appeared random and actually were incredibly important to how you were supposed to see the work. Sometimes you realized that the work itself only served to bring peoples attention to the significance of the location.
Brooklyn Street Art:There are so many moving parts in this story – the enigmatic artist, the illegal nature of the work, the intersection with social media, the unpredictable nature of the responses. Was this a story that was difficult to get your hands around? Jack Turner: Good question…the basic idea from the start was simply to relive that month-long circus for those people who were not aware, not in NYC or just missed it. To be honest, we originally thought that a sequential catalogue of the work would feel repetitive – but as we did more research, we found that each of the works created vastly different reactions from the public and they helped us explore all of these themes. We can only draw our own meaning from some of the work but that is when the public reaction becomes part of the work itself – which is why public art, street art and graffiti exist.
Brooklyn Street Art:Had you had much exposure to the Street Art and graffiti worlds previous to taking on this project? What surprised you about it that you wouldn’t have expected? Chris Moukarbel: I was never a part of the street art world but I have an art background and a lot of my work was site specific. I would create pieces that were meant to live online or on public access TV, as well as street pieces. It was interesting to get to know more about an art world with its own language – available in plain view of New Yorkers.
Brooklyn Street Art:What element first attracted your interest in the Banksy story when you heard that he had executed this residency in New York? Chris Moukarbel: When HBO approached us about making the film I felt like it could be a great archive of an artists work and also a snapshot of the Internet for one month. I love public art and I was interested in the way that Banksy was using the Internet and social media as if it were the street.
Brooklyn Street Art:After seeing “Exit Through the Gift Shop” many people reported feeling like they were more confused than before about Banksy and his story. How would you like people to feel after “Banksy Does New York?” Jack Turner: Banksy is an incredibly prolific artist and this film covers only one of the many chapters in his career. By remaining anonymous, Banksy takes the focus away from the artist or the source and he puts the focus on the statement and the work. There is a reason that he is the most infamous artist working today, he represents an idea that many people identify with…and he is really funny! I think this film, more than anything, highlights how well he uses social media to his disposal.
Brooklyn Street Art:You must have imagined what a response might be from Banksy to your film. What do you think he will think of this piece? Jack Turner: It is extremely important in any project that Chris or I do to make sure that we present the whole story in a truthful way. That is why we have had such success accessing user-generated footage. We went from having a one camera crew, as documentaries are often made, to having a thousand cameras throughout the city – each giving us footage that reflects what really happened. Maybe Banksy will love it, maybe he will hate it – but the most important thing to us is that he feels like it is a true reflection of what happened over the course of that month.
Brooklyn Street Art:As producers and the director, do you think of yourselves as artists, reporters, sociologists, detectives? Jack Turner: A couple years ago a friend of mine said that making a documentary is like getting paid (very little) to learn an enormous amount about something. I’ll take that. Chris Moukarbel: I think of myself as a storyteller. In a way, I was still a storyteller when I was making fine art but now I’m using a popular medium that reaches a wider audience.
Banksy Does New York airs November 17 on HBO and is available now on HBO GO.
Director: Chris Moukarbel
Producers: Chris Moukarbel, Jack Turner
Executive producer: Sheila Nevins
Directors of photography: Mai Iskander, Karim Raoul
Editor: Jennifer Harrington
Production companies: Matador Content, Permanent Wave, Home Box Office
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring 2Face, Aine, Bifido, Caratoes, Cleon Peterson, Dal East, Dee Dee, Esteban Del Valle, Faring Purth, June, Kai June, Sean9Lugo, and Tara McPherson.
As New York is waving and weaving through two or three consecutive nights of Halloween costumery and roleplay, dipping into fantasy, fears, and frolicsome forays befitting otherworldly matters, we turn to artist Cern for a surrealist soft opera crowd-sourced from another magical kingdom.
A rather sweetly hazy view through a broken looking glass, or in one case, a broken fence from Cekis, the aerosol induced hallucinations feature many of Cern’s recurring characters cavorting and lounging placidly in one another’s company in a lush garden of possibility. Rising from the street, and perhaps from our dreams, in their midst is the idealized female form; inviting, comforting, understanding our troubles and our troubled minds.
The styles and references are many here as Cern’s multitudinous explorations on walls through the last years are gradually merging together into his one unique perspective on the here and the now; with an open public framing that only pretends to barely contain it all.
Boo! Halloween is tomorrow and you know your subway ride is going to have some Werewolves, Zombies, Sexy Nurses, and Mini Mouses (mice).
Also big fat hairy rats, but they are always there.
To help you get in the mood and for inspiration we have a lil’ selection of Street Art oddities and monsters that have popped up on the street in NYC. If you have not planned your costume yet, here are 40 costumes for lazy people. See you at the PARADE!
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Anser, BustArt, City Kitty, Dasic, Faring Purth, Flood, Gum Shoe, GWAD, Hot Tea, KIN, Labrona, Muse, Never Crew, Nick Walker, One Eye Mickey, and Spok Brillor.
“The Nevercrew and I are the first ever people from outside of Egypt who painted in downtown Cairo, which had its rise in Street Art during the last 4 years and during the revolution. The military is back in charge now and the art on the streets came to a stop since you will end up in prison when they stop you (we had permission for this.” – Bustart
The images are disturbing. Their methods of sharing them with passersby may be to some as well. But Dysturb says they are doing the educational work that the modern fourth Estate is refusing to do.
In yet one more twisting of what you thought was vandalism and what is justifiable speech in the public sphere, a new international club of wheat-pasters called Dysturb has just hit NYC with their consciousness-raising black and white photos of harrowing human scenes from around the world. Mimicking the calculated and costly campaigns of advertisers to promote their products and brands, this work of a handful of photo-journalists began hitting up walls throughout the city in mid-October while a small crowd of photographers shot their every move.
Begun by photojournalists Pierre Terdjman and his colleague Benjamin Girette, the group say their images from war-torn regions are not getting out through the large corporate broadcast, digital and print methods they once relied upon, so the dire circumstances and messages about the world they produce are simply not being seen. The often distressing and poignant scenes vary but are often of modern people suffering real life turmoil or otherwise capture transformative flashpoints of life, death, suffering and our time; refugees, the hunters, the hunted.
Each large scale monochrome image is stamped with the recurring brand name (and hashtag). Beneath it is a description of the image, the name of the photographer, and the URL where Dysturb can be reached. When you discover a piece like this, you spend longer studying it than a typical advertisement, and arguably you come away from it with a greater appreciation for the suffering of your fellow humans.
“NYC is full of insane and good ideas when you deal with media, photojournalism, and documentary photography,” says Girette of the groups experience wheat pasting and meeting people while in New York, which included being invited by the Magnum Foundation to present their project during a symposium on October 18th. “The energy is incredible and that’s something you’re looking for when you run a project like #Dysturb.”
The largely French contingent began planning this campaign back in the spring and they are reported to have wheatpasted in a number of cities internationally before last weeks’ New York campaign.
The images from around the world are stimulating and sometimes difficult and, while Dysturb says they are careful to present work that is appropriate to all ages (according to their website), most viewers will recognize the gravity of these scenes and many will have an appreciation for the assumed humanitarian goodwill that accompanies them. While understanding the journalistic intentions, you have to wonder if their openness in putting un-permissioned works up on public and private walls will backfire for these folks who are so openly transgressing local laws.
BSA asked Terdjman and Girette about their experiences in New York and found that neither were familiar with the local scene and they believe their work is somehow different from what other Street Artists do because of their rigid adherence to journalistic values or other systems of internalized rules. Naturally when we hear this we think of a number of Street Artists on the streets of NYC who follow their own sets of values for exhibiting work and who with their work also address important social/political issues such as the human slave trade, torture, indigenous peoples rights, gentrification, climate change, sexual harassment, militarization of society, the banking crisis, the housing crisis, drug addiction, and a variety of other topics of great weight. In view of Street Art’s long and recent history, clearly these photographs by Dysturb are not the first or only socially/politically relevant Street Art, nor will they be the last.
One other point that may raise eyebrows is a belief Dysturb states that using water based or otherwise simple-to-remove materials will exempt the act of wheat-pasting without permission from charges of illegality. This may come as news to a number of Street Artists who have spent long hours in jail here and have completed days of community service to satisfy a sentence – not to mention those international Street Artists who report that they have experienced difficulty re-entering the country presumably because of these violations. Clearly the members of Dysturb have not run into this possibility yet, and perhaps they won’t. Regardless, from the perspective of the casual passerby, the impact of this journalistic photography will be strong and impart something meaningful to the viewer.
Brooklyn Street Art:Were you familiar with any other street artists who are doing political or social or educational work on the street? Benjamin Girette: Not so many! A lot of street artists amaze me every day in Paris or elsewhere when I’m traveling. I’m interested in political or social or educational work so I use to take pics of their work for myself or for my Instagram account, but I don’t have names in mind.
Street artists have a complete freedom for what they draw or paint or paste. I do something different, with rules for how I make the pictures I do or paste. But we do something similar when raising questions or igniting debate about human right issues for example.
Brooklyn Street Art:How do you compare the illegal work that Dysturb is doing compared to the illegal wheat pasting that Street Artists are doing? Pierre Terdjman: We both use the same way to express something. Our goal is to get the people closer to the world we live in and as photojournalists we see with the view of reporters. We use soft wheat paste that can be taken down easily; We don’t vandalize. We try to use the urban space to show the pictures and we consider how the foot traffic will be in front of the pics. But again never in any way would we vandalize.
Brooklyn Street Art:How is this work different from the work of other artists who wheat paste their work without permission on walls? Benjamin Girette: Hmm… that’s an interesting question you ask! I respect a lot the work from different Street Artists that deals with human rights issues or global issues. In this case our work is similar… however:
1. We do not damage the wall we paste on. Water-based glue is used.
2. We have strong journalism ethics in the way we curate photographs and photographers whom we work with. That’s the only thing that #dysturb fights for, which is the nature of our job, is to to witness and relay the testimony of others with rules for how we make the pictures on field, and
3. We always sign the posters and never run from the police. Once again the fact that we do not damage walls is protecting us.
Brooklyn Street Art:Should the un-permissioned wheat-pasting of large photographic posters by Dysturb be viewed in a different way than posters from advertising campaigns? Pierre Terdjman: Advertisement campaigns are everywhere and nobody asks you, as a citizen, for the right to impose that upon you. All day you are confronted with advertisements. We take the space for something different. We are not political or militants; the goal is again to raise awareness about world issues and to educate people through journalism. This is a part of our project – bringing #dysturb into the school yards with a specific educational curriculum is something that we are already working on.
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