Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. Escif: Greenpeace, For a Sustainable City. 2. Street Art in 2020 3. Mathieu Libman: The Moon’s Is Not That Great
BSA Special Feature: Escif: Greenpeace, For a Sustainable City.
Street Art in 2020
Doug Gillen of FifthWall TV reflects on the world of street art in the year of 2020.
Mathieu Libman: The Moon’s Is Not That Great
After an astronaut returns from her lunar mission to find that the public lost all interest in the moon, the stories of the astronaut, a film director, and a bear intersect.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. Doug Gillen/Fifth Wall TV: Is New Brighton a future model for the British Sea Side Town? 2. Lidia Cao. Tribute to Dolores Medio. Parees Fest 2020 3. INDECLINE: On Second Thought. A reflection on gun violence in collaboration with artist David Fay.
BSA Special Feature: Visit a Sea Side Town with Doug Gillen
You can’t really send out a gilded invitation to your cousin Gentrification to come visit and be surprised when his emotionally draining wife and video-game playing snot-nosed kids are in the car with him. When you use words like “platform” to describe art-washing of a town, and your organization has a “brand director”, there won’t be much surprise when the moneyed professionals complain that music at the curated-bar across the street is keeping their new baby awake at night.
Doug at Fifth Wall is more surreptitiously stealthy than ever, gradually upping his stealthy-stealthitude as he lets this story basically tell itself while posing as a merely curious art-fan.
The story is literally everywhere you look right now, and apolitical, non-confrontational Street Art and murals are almost always intercedent. A small town is sucked dry after decades of neo-liberal economics and back-room political deals, leaving a godless lot feeling listless and depressed without prospects for the future. Broad strokes, but you’ve undoubtedly heard the concept proffered by real estate investors that comes next.
“Yes there’s a commercial side to it but there is also very much a community element to what we’ve been doing,” says one male voice as the camera scans some run-down architecture with good bones and historical character. They’ve been buying up properties and “introducing a new independent concept into them”.
You predict what comes in this chapter; small portions of fussy food, art galleries, street art, vinyl!, kooky cafes with drip coffee and cold brew, clever grandma-anti-fashion fashion, artisanal cheeses, greater police presence and the occasional night-time social cleansing of hardscrabble types pushed into other neighborhoods.
Next step, edgy
lifestyle brands will need some quirky space to set up shop.
“We’re
trying to keep the big boys out of our little part of town.”
“2020 is a year calling out for change,” says Doug in his wrap-up, but he knows this particular model is not at all new. It’s still a reaction to the devastation, and we all seem to be trapped in it. Even so, this can be a kind of rejuvenation that many small towns would ache for and there is reason to think that the formula can be configured to be more just to those who will get displaced – if you’re dedicated to it.
And your cousin Gentrification could be cool to hang out with, even if his very classy wife gently insults your wife and the décor of your home and the food you eat and the music you listen to.
Doug Gillen/Fifth Wall TV: Is New Brighton a future model for the British Sea Side Town?
Lidia Cao. Tribute to Dolores Medio. Parees Fest 2020
Lidia Cao paints a portrait of Dolores Medio, the Spanish writer, teacher, and journalist for the Parees Festival in Spain in this short video by Titi Muñoz.
INDECLINE: On Second Thought. A reflection on gun violence in collaboration with artist David Fay.
600 decommissioned weapons were
combed over and refashioned by Las Vegas based artist David Fay into this
semi-kinectic sculpture that recalls Rodin’s “The Thinker”. In an America that
is fascinated by weapons, at least in movies and television, this sculpture may
make people think, or not.
From their press release: “The
piece stands just over 6 feet tall and weighs approximately 250 pounds. It took
David Fay 4 months and over 750 man-hours to complete the piece.”
Void Projects. “Homeless” Miami, 2019. (photo still from the video by Doug Gillen/FWTV)
“The aim is to create quality shows outside of the conventional art scene, cutting the middlemen, galleries or institutions,” says Axel Void’s mission statement for “Homeless.”
When his Instagram following gets big enough, will he add art websites and magazines to that list of superfluous middlemen/women?
Void Projects. “Homeless” Miami, 2019. (photo still from the video by Doug Gillen/FWTV)
In the meantime, here’s London based filmmaker/vlogger and Radio Juxtapoz co-host Doug Gillen with his take on the “residency” that Void (Alejandro Dorda) hosted this year in Miami during Art Basel. As his craft evolves, more of his subjects are emerging; his languorous takes are fulsome, his pacing creating space.
It’s
a meditation on what “home” means for 15 or so artists who are in Void’s house “to
eat, sleep and create together”. The construction of that phrase suddenly makes
this residency sound a LOT more interesting.
Void Projects. “Homeless” Miami, 2019. (photo still from the video by Doug Gillen/FWTV)
For Axel Voids’ project, the location is North Miami and the temperature is 75 degrees Fahrenheit and the architectural era in the 1920s. From the looks on the face of this crew of international painters, “home” has a lovely barefoot-in-the-grass quality, a sun-drenched smokey Arkestra of soul and silliness.
When you look at these paintings and these people and think of this environment you may ask yourself, “What is home?”
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. Gross Domestic Product – Banksy 2. New Stop Animation Project from Caledonia Curry AKA Swoon. 3. Henry Chalfant “Art vs Transit 1977-1987” Bronx Museum of the Arts 4. Street Art Summer Round-Up – 2019 from Fifth Wall TV / Doug Gillen
BSA Special Feature: Gross Domestic Product – Banksy
The doublespeak of Banksy very effectively demanded a whirlwind of media attention in the art/Street Art world once again this week. The anti-capitalist launched a full street-side exhibition while his personal/anonymous brand benefitted by the new record auction price of 9.9 million pounds with fees for one of his works depicting a “Devolved Parliament” full of apes – precisely during the height of inpending Brexit hysteria.
Gross Domestic Product / Banksy Installation. Video Courtesy Ash Versus
New Stop Animation Project from Caledonia Curry AKA Swoon.
Street Artist Swoon (Caledonia Curry) has been pushing her creative limits in a medium she is not known for, and the results are exhilarating.
Facing a backlog of fears and eager to go out of her comfort zones of that include linotype printing and wheat-pasting on the street – and the many projects building community – her last two years of study in stop animation are ready to be seen. Present her narrative practice and character in a surprising new way, Swoon takes chances bravely, and is ready to share her new work.
Her new exhibition with Jeffery Deitch is coming up in New York – but today we offer a sneak peek of what the deep diving Swoon has discovered.
Henry Chalfant “Art vs Transit 1977-1987” Bronx Museum of the Arts
Its here and the reviews have been glowing. One of the originals in documenting and providing platforms to artists and participants of art on the streets and trains, Henry Chalfant is please to present an impressive retrospective through next spring at Bronx Museum of the Arts.
Street Art Summer Round-Up – 2019 from Fifth Wall TV / Doug Gillen
Hop into the Doug soup of insight, mangled pronunciation and zealous fannery for projects and Street/public art concepts he wants you to remember from this summer.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. WK Interact in NYC by Fifth Wall 2. Rub Kandy & Biancoshock: “All the Lights” 3. Not Rented To Humans: Grip Face 4. Elrow’art: Kaos Garden with Okuda San Miguel and Paco Osuna
BSA Special Feature: WK Interact in NYC by Fifth Wall
“It was some sort of freedom,” says WK in this retrospective of NYC locations that he tries to recall with original photo in hand overlaying the original city spot. For some of us, the memories of all of these spots are sufficient, as the city was different then – perhaps more wild and dirty. For WK, the stories and the memories continue to evolve.
Well shot and edited, its a mature way to let the artist speak and evocative of his current manner.
Rub Kandy & Biancoshock: “All the Lights”
In the face of sexy new machine-learning and Artificial Intelligence
– and the auxiliary tales related to art-making, perhaps this video is a way of
preserving the authentic feeling of human discovery in its unglamorous
basicness. Not to overplay this, but this conceptual piece is a meditation on
the underwhelming mechanized aspects of industry, a blatant taunt of banality
in the midst of high gloss unrealness.
Ladies and gentlemen, the conceptual mundanity of the
Italian urban artists Rub Kandy and Biancoshock,
who here demonstrate how to create electricity with a generator in an abandoned
industrial space. It’s a marvelously underwhelming demonstration of the means
of production. To “jazz” things up they throw in intermittent blasts of pop-star
banality as well, sprinkled with blinky graphics.
…Turn up the lights in here baby Extra bright, I want y’all to see this Turn up the lights in here, baby You know what I need Want you to see everything
Not Rented To Humans: Grip Face
First, they look like run down sheds, these new wooden
structures in high weeds – possibly stopped mid-construction, perhaps during
the last economic downturn. Here the missed opportunity of housing, suddenly
coupled with the found opportunity of art exhibition!
“There’s
something both bizarre and magical in abandoned places,” writes Grip Face in
the description of this video. “The course of time invades them, colonizes
them, makes it into its own. The invisible imprints impregnate the walls and
the experiential trace of past inhabitants slips through the cracks like winter
would through a badly insulated window.”
Elrow’art: Kaos Garden with Okuda San Miguel and Paco Osuna
A warmup video for
multi-disciplinary artist Okuda San Miguel and dj/producer Paco Osuna and their
creative intermingling of avant-garde aesthetics with electronic music to
create their vision of ‘The Garden of Delights’. The premiere of the artistic
partnership of Ink and Movement and elrow will be on September 28 at Amnesia
Ibiza. Here’s a taste of things to come!
People chased from their homes by wars in places like Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan are now part of a larger conversation in Europe as countries struggle to accept the massive numbers of refugees in the last decade. On the Greek island of Lesbos, the overcrowding of a camp named Moria has produced Olive Grove, a temporary place full of tents, but little nature.
With a goal of softening the hardship for people living here, Icy and Sot raised money through a print sale online and with the proceeds purchased fresh flowering plants to give away. “It was wonderful to see that actually put a smile on peoples’ faces for a moment,” they say in a press release.
While they have traveled around many international cities in the last five years creating site-specific interventions that contemplate issues of immigration, environmental degradation, and endangered species, the artists felt that the gravity of this place merited something more than just an art installation.
Working with a group calledMovement on the Ground and with Doug Gillen of Fifth Wall TV in tow, the two helped build raised gardens and planted vegetables, in addition to handing out many potted plants. Today we have images of persons in the camp from Icy & Sot along with the new video, one of Doug’s best.
It’s a simple act full of symbolism and invokes the power of the natural world in healing our many wounds. “We know this project didn’t really change anything for those people,” the say, “They come to Europe to be far from the dangers of war, far from hearing bomb explosions, for a better future for their kids. They have had an exhausting journey and they deserve better. They deserve our support.”
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. PHLEGM – Mausoleum of Giants – A Behind the Scenes View 2. Hamburger Eyes; A documentary by Aaron Rose 3. Conor Harrington / American Flag 4. Fujito Nakaya. Fog Sculpture #08025 (F.O.G.) 1998. Guggenheim Museum. Bilbao.
BSA Special Feature: PHLEGM – Mausoleum of Giants – A Behind the Scenes View
Delicious Clam Records, Bal Fashions Speakeasy, Plot 22...
How
long has this been going on?
According to Doug at Fifth Wall TV Sheffield has been in the thick of it as a cultural hotbed of music and art for quite some time – with artist collectives and installations like this new one in an old ironworks building by Street Artist Phlegm.
“All
of that combined means there is a really vibrant underground scene and we have
a lot of D.I.Y. stuff happening” says Steve of @CADS Sheff – the grassroots
formed team that activates spaces like this.
Don’t be a mardy bum then, let’s go and take a look at Phlegm shall we?
Hamburger Eyes
Street photography, when done well, can
summon euphoria and nausea. Rather like a chain restaurant hamburger.
Perhaps that is the inspiration for the name “Hamburger Eyes” for this eclectic
collection of photographers from the San Francisco Bay Area, who capture the
American fun and folly that you may have missed.
Just screened this month in New York at
Metrograph with a Q&A with Ray Potes and Clark Allen, its a documentary by
Aaron Rose (Beautiful Losers) that helps remind us why some people are drawn to
cities, while others avoid it like limburger. With interviews, stills, and
video the film brings to action the magazine by the same name that has just
celebrated its 18th birthday, yo. Watch out! Legal age!
The Irish Street Artist and muralist and painter has a go at the nationalism that blinds and could lead you to walk into traffic or off a cliff. We think.
Fujito Nakaya. Fog Sculpture #08025 (F.O.G.) 1998. Guggenheim Museum. Bilbao.
A foggy memory from standing outside the Guggenheim in Bilbao a few weeks ago. This fog sculpture is activated periodically, and if visiting school students are nearby, the excitement is multiplied! Video by Jaime Rojo.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. Escif: Magic Piano 2. Adele Renault: St+Art India. Lodhi Art Festival 2019 3. Jeff Koons at the Ashmolean Museum 4. OS Gemeos: Flying Steps at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin
BSA Special Feature: Escif: Magic Piano
Spanish Street Artist Escif creates a museum installation that uses irony, sarcasm, and deep truths that we’re not always ready to see.
By hi-jacking some of the current interactive nomenclature enabled by augmented/mixed realities and the normalizing of tablet use, he alerts viewers to the connection of age-old mineral mining that is just as contemporary as the hi-tech gadgetry many have embraced.
Since you can use the device to contemplate human suffering and make music, it is an indictment of modern attitudes that dehumanize and turn real stories into a video game.
From the artist:
“Coltan is a mineral, found specially in eastern Congo, used to make cells and computer chips. Violent rebel groups are exploiting coltan mining to help finance a bloody civil war which is now in its 12th year.
The link between the bloodshed and coltan is causing alarm among high-tec manufacturers slowly they are beginning to realise that their products may contain the tainted fruits of civil war. Since the outbreak of fighting in august 1998: an estimated 5.4 million people have died; 45.000 continue to die each month; Children account for 47% of these deaths.
Magic Piano is a music installation. With the help of a tablet (that obviously contains coltan) you will be able to play the piano. Use the device to navigate on the wall. When you pass on the screen over a charater, a sound will be activated. If you push the character with your finger a sound loop will be activated. You will also activate the animation of each character.”
Adele Renault: St+Art India. Lodhi Art Festival 2019
📺Lodhi Art Festival 2019 || Adele RenaultAdele's imprints are visible in the winged beauties that now adorn the walls at Lodhi. Laying on a main arterial road know the colony, her birds now peek through the trees and woo passersby.Watch the film to get a closer look into her creative process! 📽 Pranav Gohill & Jay NuEdited by Filterkaypee Festival supported by Asian Paints.#artforall #startindia #startdelhi #startdelhi2019 #asianpaints #lodhiartdistrict #lodhiartfestival2019
Posted by St+art India on Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Jeff Koons at the Ashmolean Museum
“It lacks all the give and the breath of fresh art,” the
bespectacled art critic intones with all the weight of a final damnation.
“We need haters out there. They are affirmations that we’re doing something right,” says the streetwise pop star with clever sunnies and sans big hat.
Taking a break from the Banksy beat, Doug appears to put forth that supposition that Jeff Koons is proving once again that as long as you are a white guy and you reference European art history you are 80% on your way as an artist whose work will be collected and exhibited.
OS Gemeos: Flying Steps at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin
A splendid hybrid that sends heartbeats racing, even
involuntarily, here is a trailer for Flying Steps and Os Gemeos as they interpret
Mussorgsky’s
“Pictures at an Exhibition”, the famous piano composition that has become a
showpiece for virtuoso pianists. Good to see museums of contemporary art truly
stretching, redefining the street and Street Art.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. 10 Year Challenge : Doug Gillen Takes It 2. Tavar Zawacki: Mixing Colors In A Parking Garage in Wynwood. 3. NUART 2018 / RE-CAP: Space is The Place
BSA Special Feature: Doug Gillen of FWTV takes the 10 Year Challenge:
Inspired by a meme (what else could be more 2019) Doug Gillen decides to to an inexact comparison of where selected Street Artists have changed and remained the same since 10 years ago. The big ones apparently are staying ahead by going bigger and perhaps developing entire marketing divisions, possibly in danger of being bloated. Elsewhere we see true evolution.
Tavar Zawacki: Mixing Colors In A Parking Garage in Wynwood. Video by Chop ’em Down Films.
Perhaps in a continued effort to bare it all, Tavar Zawacki (formerly Above) takes off his shirt in Miami and tells us about the importance of color to him.
NUART 2018 / RE-CAP: Space is The Place
“You can view it in a museum and it still feels like Street Art, but is the place of the museum the same as the space of the street,” Professor Alison Young from the University of Melbourne poses the question on the docks of Stavanger, Norway. In face, says Nuart, space is the place that determines the ultimate impact an artistic intervention can have.
As we draw closer to the new year we’ve asked a very special guest every day to take a moment to reflect on 2018 and to tell us about one photograph that best captures the year for them. It’s a box of treats to surprise you with every day – and conjure our hopes and wishes for 2019. This is our way of sharing the sweetness of the season and of saying ‘Thank You’ to you for inspiring us throughout the year.
Today’s special guest:
Doug Gillen, London-based Street Art scene documentor, commentator, lecturer, entertainer and host of his own program Fifth Wall TV (fifthwalltv.com).
The photo I’ve chosen is not street art but carries the composition, detail and expression of a renaissance painting and for me is unquestionably a piece of art. During intense clashes between the protestors of Gaza and the Israeli Defense Forces Mustafa Hassouna’s image of a shirtless man encapsulates the passion and weight of the fight they face on an almost daily basis.
The protestor, Abu Amro, takes his flag to the front line of the protests Monday to Friday every week, facing an opposition that is heavily armed, protected and extremely well funded. In the face of insurmountable odds he continues to stand his ground and fight. I believe in the face of the authoritarianism and bigotry that has ripped through the West this stands as a reminder that as we fight to make the world a better place, we do it knowing that we are not alone.
It’s BSA Film Friday! Now we present the best of the year, according to you. We bring you new videos each week – about 240 of them this year. The beauty of the experience is that it can feel quite random and exhilarating – rather like the serendipity of finding new Street Art.
You helped us decide who made it to the top 15 – and we feel proud to see some of these because we liked them too. When we take videos on the road to different cities and countries doing our BSA Film Friday LIVE we also like to share these in classrooms or theaters or lecture halls with locals, students, city leaders. Nothing can beat seeing faces light up, a person thrilled to finally get the sense of something, better understanding the scene, helping people with a new way to look at art in the streets.
The best part is many of these videos encourage you to create, to co-create, to actively participate in public space with meaning and intention. As a collection, these 15 are illuminating, elevating, riveting, strange, soaring, secretly otherworldly, and achingly beautifully human.
Special congratulations go out to artists/directors Kristina Borhes & Nazar Tymoshchuk who landed on the list two times this year, including the number 1 position. Their work is about the intersection of art and theory and life, how to create it, to see it, and how to re-see your world.
We hope you can take some time to enjoy some of the best Street Art videos from around the world and on BSA this year.
“Listen, my only request…. When you’re done doing your thing, do an Italian flag with my daughter’s name on it,” says a guy who is shouting up from the street to the roof where two Hungarian graff writers are preparing to hit a wall with a giant rat in Jersey. That rat looks fantastic as it basks in the blinking glow of the marquee for Vinny Italian Gourmet on the streets in the Newark night below.
That scene alone can stand as their American iconic moment for the US Tapes, but Fatheat and TransOne documented a number of golden moments on their trip this winter to New York, Wynwood, LA, and Las Vegas. Travel with them as they try to square the television mythology of modern America with the one they are encountering in all its ridiculous free-wheeling self satisfied unreflective emotional consumerist funkified freedom*. Standby for sonic blasts from the cultural pulp soundbook and prepare for a celebrity visit.
Slyly they observe and sample and taste and catalogue the insights by traversing the main stage and the margins, smartly not taking it too seriously, finding plenty of places for wide-eyed wonder and wiseguy sarcasm. Steeped in graffiti history with mad skillz themselves, this is all an adventure. Generous of heart, they also share it with you.
“And lost be the day to us in which a measure hath not been danced.”
~ from Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra
Every day since the shootings of artists and journalists at the Charlie Hebdo offices on January 14, 2015, dancer Nadia Vadori-Gauthier has made sure to dance for a minute or more. It sounds like a good idea.
“Without editing or effects, in the place and state of mind I find myself that day, with no special technique, staging, clothing, or makeup, nothing but what is there,” she says on her website.
“I dance inside or outside, in public or private places, alone or with others, strangers or people I know, sometimes friends.
I dance as protesters demonstrate, to effect a living poetry, to act through sensitivity against the violence of certain aspects of the world.
This is the solution I found: an action to my own measure, a concrete, repeated action that may redraw lines, disrupt the design, shake up the norms.”
Here she is in Paris on Esperance Street in front of a mural by Street Artist Seth.
All the subversive drama of a terrorist cell, all the color of Mardi Gras, all the pomp and ceremony of an Olympic triathlon. Wielding the long-handled roller like a javelin in the hands of Järvinen, weight lifting multiple backpacks full of paint cans, climbing and jumping walls with speed and dexterity, the 1UP team goes for the gold.
Debuting today on BSA is the flaming new 1UP crew video directed by the ingenious Selina. Slicing the streets with the drone camera like a hot knife through butter, she follows the unruly yet highly organized vandals from overhead in a manner more melodic than menacing as Miles lines up one shot after another in this instantly classic continuous thread of aerosol mayhem.
Passing the aerosol can like a baton, this relay race puts 1UP over the finish line while many rivals would have just blasted out of the blocks. But will those Olympian circles turn into golden handcuffs before the closing ceremony?
A quick overview to catch you up on the 7 most recent pieces attributed to Banksy in Paris. He’s said to be creating work more attuned to the plight of migration, but others have observed it is a return to the classic Banksy sarcastic sweetness that has characterized the clever sudden missives he has delivered since he began. See Butterfly Art News’ coverage here: Paris: Banksy for World Refugee Day
It’s an Italian movie directed by Luchino Visconti in 1960, yes. It is also the name of a crew of Berlin graffiti/installation artists whose satirical interventions play on issues propriety and property – and on social experiments that dupe the media, the public, and banks.
Did they really set up an apartment inside the subway? Is that really the tracks and wall of a metro inside a gallery? Is that Wagner playing in the mobile war arcade set up in the Christmas market? Are those hand grenades being lobbed by children? Is the bank facade blinking red every 20 seconds?
Rocco und seine Brüder (Rocco and His Brothers) have you engaged. Now you have to answer the questions.
The Uruguayan Street Artists/muralist Florencia Durán and Camilo Nuñez are “Colectivo Licuado” and here in the middle of Oviedo in Northern Spain to create a new mural for the Parees fest this September. As is their practice they study the culture that they are visiting and create an allegory that is familiar to the community, if still rather mystical.
In this case they visit Colectivo Licuado & Nun Tamos Toes for a visit of great cultural exchange – sharing sketches, songs, and learning the history of women’s roles in traditional Asturian culture. The resulting mural project is collaborative in nature and powerful in person.
“I pay attention to the intensity of the gaze and the posture, so the passerby is challenged and seeks to question the project.”
A sociological experiment and intervention on the streets by the French Street Artist YZ takes place in Abidjan and camera work in the crowds allows you to appreciate the action on the street. A city of 4.7 million people and the economic capital of Côte d’Ivoire, the city has a lively culture of street vending that is unregulated and often populated by children.
YZ speaks with the folks she meets who are vending, who she refers to as “girls” although many are women. Her goal is to better understand them, she says, and to create a Street Art campaign of their portraits.
“I realized that their situation was very different from the men. So I wanted to know more about them. So I started the project ‘Street Vendors’,” she says.
Chernobyl is a nuclear disaster that figures profoundly into the modern age – and for centuries into the future.
Today not so many people talk about this man-made horror that killed a Russian town and chased out its survivors in 1986 just 90 kilometers northeast of Kiev. Called the most disastrous nuclear accident in history, it evacuated 115,000 and spread a radioactive cloud around the Earth, with European neighbors like Scandinavia, Switzerland, Greece, Italy, France and the UK detecting the effects of radiation for years afterward. Three scientists at The New York Academy of Sciences have estimated that over time the number of people killed by effects from the meltdown was almost a million.
Because of the nature of radiation, Chernobyl has been estimated to not be safely habitable for about 20,000 years.
A short documentary today taking us through last autumns On October 7th in Marseille, France in collaboration with Galerie Saint Laurent and Spanish artist Gonzalo Borondo as they presented Matière Noire. A massive collection of individual installations that took over the top floor of an exhibition space normally used for shops, Borondo’s influence in the selections is throughout, a story told in three acts on Projection, Perception and Interpretation.
“When I was just a baby, my Mama told me, ‘Son, always be a good boy, don’t ever play with guns.’ But I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.” Johnny Cash sings with some bravado in Folsom Prison Blues on an album released 50 years ago this year. Street Artist Shepard Fairey honors the album and here in Sacramento, California to raise consciousness about the outrageously high rate of incarceration here. “The United States has 5% of the world’s population but 25% of it’s prisoners,” he says, making you question the system in the Land of the Free.
No. 5
MZM Projects – Kristina Borhes & Nazar Tymoshchuk/”Wasteland Wanderers”
This week we feature a couple of new film pieces from the Ukraine based duo of Kristina Borhes and Nazar Tymoschuk which fairly present an insightful treatise on a particular flavor of Post-Graffiti. Think of it as a two volume textbook and your professors will guide you through the darkness into the light.
A Dilogy.
“The place tells you what to do,” is a poetic and truthful phrase uttered in “Night” on the relationship a vandal has to an abandoned factory, school, home, medical facility; it is spacial and alchemical.
It is also personal, says the female narrator. “The presence of their absence,” is something that every Wasteland Wanderer will be familiar with, the knowledge and feeling that others have been there before you. The work is undeniably affected, even created in response.
“I’ve started a new series called ‘On the Road’ which looks at life behind the scenes in street art culture,” Doug Gillen tells us about this debut episode. Look forward to Doug’s unique perspective on Street Art festivals, art fairs, and studio visits as he expands to the world of urban contemporary.
Not typically who you think of as a Street Artist, here we see Add Fuel and Doug talk about his first book and you see examples of work from this tile maker who infuses traditional Portuguese techniques and pattern making with pop-modern cultural references and cartoon archetypes.
He has a hat, sunglasses, and he has been creating huge black and white photo installations of people wheat-pasted to the sides of buildings for how long? Surprising to us that Jetsonorama is not more of a household name in Street Art circles – his work is solidly tied to biography and human rights, uses his own photography, and routinely elevates humanity – and has been doing it for some time now.
Why isn’t he in huge museum exhibitions?
Today we have a new video giving you a good look at the work and the artist along with the genuine connection and presence that he has with community, taking the time to share their stories.
“The speed of ruin is just something else,” says Street Artist Vegan Flava, and it’s an exasperating realization. Extrapolated to thinking about the enormous war industry, and there is such a thing, you realize that pouring money year after year into ever more sophisticated and destructive weaponry only results in broken bridges, buildings, water systems, vital infrastructure, lives.
Construction, on the other hand, can be arduous and time consuming, takes vision, planning, collaboration, and fortitude. Like great societies.
How quickly they can be eroded, destroyed.
But since Vegan Flava is creating during this destructive enterprise, you get a glimpse into his creativity, and sense of humor. Similarly the psychographics of this story and how it is told reveal insights into the artist and larger themes.
“A drawing, an idea on a piece of paper, can swiftly grow into something larger, thoughts and actions leading to the next. But creating something is never as fast as to tear it to pieces. The speed of ruin is just something else,” he says.
No. 1
MZM Projects – Kristina Borhes & Nazar Tymoshchuk /”Aesthetic of Eas”
“We wanted everything to occur naturally in this movie. We wanted to achieve spontaneity,” say film makers Kristina Borhes and Nazar Tymoshchuk about their up close look at graffiti writer/abstract painter EAS. In this new film they have captured the creative spirit in action as unobtrusively as they could, allowing the artist to speak – in a way he never does, they say.
Today on BSA Film Friday we’re proud to debut this new portrait by three artists – one painter and two film makers – to encourage BSA readers to take a moment and observe, inside and outside.
SOS ! The Earth is increasingly sending out this message. And increasingly artists are answering the call As we near the end of 2018 we feel indebted to Street Artist / fine artist/ activist Ernest Zacharevic for what has been one of the most impactful and important art projects to raise awareness for other inhabitants of the planet. Here in Sumatra he raises awareness and proposes exact actions to protect the Sumatran Orangutan and the environment.
Today we sincerely thank filmmaker Doug Gillen, better known as the funny, entertaining and informative founder of FifthWall TV, who illustrates with his words the aerial image of Mr. Zacharevic’s distress signal:
By Doug Gillen
I often wonder if an artist has ever actually stopped a war by writing “stop wars” on a wall. I don’t have access to any hard empirical evidence to confirm or deny this, but I’ll go out on a limb here and say, probably not. Gauging the impact of art is tricky. All too often well-meaning messages of positivity become lost in the ether of narcissism and capitalist conquests that flood our Instagram news feeds.
Ernest Zacharevic. Splash & Burn. Sumtra, Indonesia. 2018. (photo courtesy of the artist)
Every so often though something pops up, a piece, a project, a stunt and it stops you in your tracks, because you know it’s the real deal. This happened for me back at the start of the year when Ernest Zacharevic came good on his ongoing battle with the Palm Oil industry.
For two years running the Lithuanian artist has been running a festival of sort in Indonesia. For Splash and Burn he invites several artists to the country he now resides in to engage publicly with the theme of palm oil deforestation. The likes of Issac Cordal, Vhils, and Mark Jenkins have all stepped up to the plate but for me the real home run came when Zacharevic revealed he had bought 52hectares of unnatural palm oil plantation to it repopulate it with naturally occurring trees, native to the region. As he tore down the palm oil trees, he carved out a large scale “SOS” into the land in what is one of the most visually captivating and symbolic statements of the year.
It should be said that this project was not done by one person. It was only made possible thanks to groups such as the Sumatran Orangutan Society (SOS), the cosmetic company LUSH and a swath of behind-the-scenes and front line cogs that brought it together.
There are many known problems with the palm oil industry; it’s contribution to climate change, the unregulated black market, the forests are uninhabitable for wildlife, the list goes on. The industry is wreaking havoc on the region, particularly on the island of Sumatra, where Splash and Burn takes place. This was a small, but vital push back but more so, it was an artist coming good on their ethos, taking their vision to the next level to play their role in making the world a better place.
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