Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. RUN: Bye Bye Dolphin
2. RERO: Installation in situ – Desert d’Agafay – Montresso Art Foundation
3. Street Atelier: L’Atlas
4. Street Atelier: DOES
BSA Special Feature: RUN: Bye Bye Dolphin!
“Where’s my dolphin?”
“The dolphin is gone,” says street artist RUN on this London wall as school kids run and roll past him.
You wonder when you see these murals that we publish week after week what it must be like for a Street Artist to interact with the public while painting. The truth is, it varies from city to city – people can be quite timid. Or blithely disinterested. Or loquacious, opinionated, even invasive.
Not only do you have to orchestrate your idea, plan the logistics, and execute your vision, you have to be this agreeable sociologist who takes all commentary in stride and even occasionally have a meaningful exchange. It’s up to you. And its up to the street.
In this new video by RUN we have the opportunity to see the interactions of people on the street with the artist in London, and it can be very illuminating.
RERO: Installation in situ – Desert d’Agafay – Montresso Art Foundation
Ahh, to gaze upon the Atlas mountains across the desert in Marakesh in April. Anything but stressful. Yet..
French Street Artist and conceptual artist RERO can as easily be inside as outside, urban and, as you can see here, rural.
Balancing the image negation of his text based works, these installations with Montresso Foundation and Jardin Rouge show how the artist defines the space, adapting and adopting the context as actor.
Here are a couple of insightful, high quality videos from ILoveGraffiti.de and their web series STREET ATELIER in cooperation with ARTE CREATIVE, featuring the artists L’Atlas and DOES.
We start here with a fresh paste-up directly from Iran. It depicts the entrance to a mosque bathed in a jewel reddish haze. The lower half of the door contains a cryptic message in the three-dimensional wildstyle graffiti that captured the imagination of New Yorkers, Europeans, and Middle Easterners over time. Descending the stairs and coming out to the street it reads, “Nothing”.
“If they would paste this in Iran,” says the Berlin Paste-Up Festival organizer Moritz Tonn from the artists collective Wandelism. “It would probably be considered blasphemy and the government would most likely go after the artist”. Here in the so-called “western” world the ability to criticize all institutions, including religious ones, is still officially preserved and honored – so it is interesting that a theocracy could judge this as possibly flammable piece and it has to stay anonymous here inside very permissive Berlin.
And that is only one of the reasons why exhibits like this are so crucially important to the dialogue on the street and to our collective awareness. Political, social, comic, pop, photographic, illustrative, painted, drawn, copied, figurative, immature, sarcastic,international, local, cryptic, explicit, inventive, verging on profound- these are the vox populi from many cities around the world stuck alongside one another. The mix is unusual, even odd. But the sound of the voices can be quite clarion.
“We got submissions from 130 artists, one to five paste-ups each,” says Moritz. “We have run out of room so we asked some of the the artists if we could put their art in the streets elsewhere around the neighborhood.”
Truthfully, there is a lot of space here that hasn’t been slapped with stickers or slathered with wheatpaste, and you can imagine that with time there will be a lot of organic growth in the massive piece that will bring the walls to full maturity/immaturity.
If one really is interested on experiencing the full scope of what’s happening with art in the streets one really must pay special attention to the artists whose practice is small. At the moment it may be that stickers and paste-ups are getting lost amidst the hurricane of mural festivals – But big murals don’t paint the whole picture.
The small stickers, the stencils, the wheat pasted posters attached to walls in back alleys, on post lamps and street furniture are a fundamental component of this truly democratic art movement. So we’re satisfied to see a large spot like this one solely dedicated to paste-ups in all their glorious incarnations.
You’ve packed your sandwiches, rolled out your tropically themed beach towel on the sand, applied sun block liberally, sipped your margarita from your thermos, and are finally laying down to daze at the seagulls circling in the blue sky.
Suddenly someone spots with their binoculars the sight of refugees swimming toward shore from their overburdened, partially submerged boat, escaping from an oil war that has devastated their home.
Italian Street Artist and muralist RUN shares with BSA readers his new beach reverie painted in Hackney, and with some closer inspection you’ll see that the politically charged scene is rather dark for a sunny day.
“I wanted to represent a normal, crowded beach-side scene where joyful people who suddenly witness a boat of immigrants in the distance,” he explains.
“They are trying to reach the shore. Some of them make it some others don’t. It is sad but it’s the daily reality.”
He plays with that normality of his figures behaviors and gestures among a privileged society, whose casual gaze out to sea at first only catches view what they must think is an athletic diver enjoying their leisure.
This is the second of two recent murals, and he has something to say in each.
“I have given a political edge to both of my recent murals,” RUN says, as he shows you a busy character who is checking his clock and going through some sort of chaotic time machine.
The artists dim view of the human race at the moment is reflected in the scene of gradual devolution. “The figure is going back to the sapiens and monkey stages,” he says, “caged in a small space, hypnotized by an electronic device.”
Documenting the Street Art scene has always been important to BSA and we know it is important to many of our readers as well. This year BSA brought you a number of reviews of Street Art related books that we have run across during the year. It’s not an exhaustive list but now that it is Christmas / Hannukah / Kwaanza / Solstice / New Year time we thought you would like our brief roundup of some of the best books of 2017. Enjoy!
Contested space is a term accurately describing the Street Artists’ relationship with the world outside your door; a place where the aesthetics are up for grabs, autonomously determined, willfully exploited.
Drawing upon twenty years of empirical observation, scholarly study, and interviews with artists and experts throughout a constellation of cities where this art-making has flourished, “Street Art World” by Alison Young examines this contested space from every angle to present a balanced assessment for understanding our moment.
A professor of criminology at University of Melbourne, Young delivers her fourth volume on the topic of Street Art with a confidence and unique perspective that few can claim thanks to extensive travel and periodic, repeated and ongoing tracking of an evolving family of practice.
Alison Young Street Art World was published by Reaktion Books Ltd. London, UK. 2016. Click HERE for more about this book.
Carlo McCormick writes in his essay, “We honor Shoe as the great cross-pollinator who came to New York City as a kid to meet the graffiti master Dondi and brought Wild Style back to Europe, but his strength remains just how far he can still can carry this immoderate load.” Based on his path and his evolution, we’ll consider this beautiful monster to be in a mid-career retrospective and some of his most masterful work is yet to come.
Niels Shoe Meulman “Shoe Is My Middle Name” was published by Lebowski Publishers / Overamstel. Amsterdam, 2016. Click HERE for more about this book.
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“Time Traveller Artist Man”, Giacomo Bufarini AKA RUN
The founder of analytical psychology would have looked at the hands of RUN and perhaps understood more about his lifelong psychological process than the average intellect, and yet seeing RUN’s carefully formed people on the street captivates your imagination as well.
These are the dreams he creates with his expressive hands, conscious or unconscious features that over time have developed into archetypes to be combined, adorned, alone, and recombined. Not surprisingly, his people often have a grasp, a hold, a flair for the five fingered gesture as well.
RUN Time Traveller Artist Man is published by Unicorn Publishing Group. London, UK. 2016. Click HERE for more about this book.
Since the early 70s Lonely Planet publishing has made guidebooks for travelers of the world, enabling people to gain a greater understanding and to appreciate localities, cultures, and histories. Ed Bartlett now adds to this vast compendium of understanding a concise and varied survey of Street Art from his vantage point as an avid bicyclist, traveler, and expert on Street Art.
Ed Bartlett’s “Street Art” Was published by Lonely Planet Publishers. UK, April 2017. Click HERE for more about this book.
It’s unusual to see his work in New York (or in this case New Jersey) since after leaving Upstate New York nearly two decades ago this fine artist/commercial illustrator has been dancing in the arms of San Francisco. You think we’re being poetic about his West Coast cred, but he literally illustrated 100 drawings in SF City Hall over 100 days, was awarded with his own “Jeremy Fish” day by the city, might have the record for the most shows at Upper Playground Gallery, and has even collaborated with a cannabis company to create a branded oil and vape pen.
Jeremy Fish “Happily Ever After: The Artwork of Jeremy Fish”. Click HERE for more about this book.
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“The Art Of Writing Your Name”, Patrick Hartl & Christian Hundertmark
Born of many late night talks and collaborative painting sessions together, merging Christian’s abstract graphics and collage with Patrick’s calligraphy and tagging, the two slowly discovered a mutual collection of writers and artists whose work they both admired, a book slowly taking form in their minds. “Our late night sessions also implied long conversations about the evolution of Graffiti to Street Art to urban calligraphy,” the authors say in their preface.
The Art Of Writing Your Name: Contemporary Urban Calligraphy and Beyond by Patrick Hartl & Christian Hundertmark. Publikat Verlags – und Handels GmbH & Co. KG. Mainaschaff, Germany, 2017. Click HERE for more about this book.
A direct link to his childhood and the televised cartoons of Saturday morning, where the majority of cartoons were relegated to appear in the 1970s and 1980s, Street Artist Jerkface recreates and multiplies his associations of happy times full of adventure, mysteries easily solved, crimes categorically punished.
His new book “Saturday Morning” collects the recognizable works of other artists and removes the emotional expressions found in facial features, recombining their other characteristics and playing with their associated resonance.
Jerface “Saturday Morning”. Published by Over The Influence. December 2016. Click HERE for more about this book.
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“Street Art In Sicilia”, Mauro Filippi, Marco Mondino & Luisa Tuttolomondo
A serious undertaking that documents 31 urban centers that vary widely in distinctive personality, more than two hundred artists are captured and carefully, succinctly described for a wide audience of tourists, Street Art fans, students, even academics. With three authors who collectively have studied architecture, semiotics, sociology and photography, you get a mapping that reveals not only physical location but a describes a cultural one as well.
Street Art in Sicilia – Guida ai luoghi e alle opere
Mauro Filippi, Marco Mondino, Luisa Tuttolomondo
Dario Flaccovio Editore, 2017. Click HERE for more about this book.
“The whole thing is a metaphor,” he says at one point when describing a particular piece, but you realize that the statement applies to the show as well. A metaphor for the evolutions that an artist must go through to keep alive; a recreation, a metamorphosis, however bold or subtle, that can push him or her into a new direction.
He sits on a window sill and pulls back the sleeve of his t-shirt to reveal a tattooed sleeve that moves from densely inked pattern to bare skin. The finespun graduated marking is repeated on the books’ cover, designed by Kelly Jewell.
“I’m really interested in gradients as well because it’s a slow transition – when you can see the tattoo and the cover of the book; it’s like with each circle, if you look at it compared to the neighboring one, you won’t see a big difference. But over time and with effort you can keep going forward, day by day.”
Tavar Zawacki. “Metamorphosis” Published by Urban Spree Gallery. Berlin. September 2017. Click HERE for more about this book.
Absent worries that the banks and oligarchs are poised to crash our economy into the ground and that the privatized profiteering war machine wants Trump to start WWIII its been a fantastic and sunny and crisp warm week in New York. Of course the city is a little more somber since the Yankees missed their chance at the World Series last night. In the spirit of sportspersonship we wish the best to the Astros.
Speaking of Pantone, the two walls he did this week were strong and optically dizzying/thrilling as you would expect – while the subtley more sophisticated walls were inside for Planned Iridescence near by at the GR Gallery on Bowery. The big wall done with The L.I.S.A. Project presented several technical and material difficulties which the artist eventually solved but not without having to spend a whole lot more of time on it than originally estimated: a remarkable feat, even if the wall itself isn’t a large one compared to many others he’s executed around the world. Sure enough it got the New York welcome from a graffiti artist who took the liberty to vandalize it under the cover of darkness and on the very same night of the opening party for his show.
We have grown accustomed to see the artworks by Street Artists and muralists in public vandalized, disrespected and gone over. We don’t know what justification or reasons a graffiti writer has when tagging a well executed wall and the so-called “rules” on the street depend on who’s telling them. It is interesting that the color fits right into the palette, almost as if the tagger found an unspent can that had been left on the sidewalk nearby.
Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring Arrex Skulls, Bunny M, City Kitty, D7606, Dain, Felipe Pantone, Fintan Magee, Gods in Love, Megzany, RUN, Stikman, Stray Ones, and Thrashbird.
The Street Artist who goes by the name Gods in Love did this mural in the San Samuele district of Cerignola, Italy last month. He says that this part of the city is called “Fort Apache” by the locals – an indirect reference to the 1981 movie (and 1976 book) about a crime-ridden neighborhood in the Bronx during the 1960s-70s. The Native American tribe named The Apache that preceded the European’s arrival who lived/live in the mid-western part of this continent were known for being fierce warriors – thus the connotation with a violent proud, yet financially destitute, neighborhood in The Bronx, New York.
“A totem is a natural or supernatural entity that has a particular symbolic meaning for a person or tribe, and to whom it feels bound throughout life,” explains the artist. The term derives from the word ototeman used by the Native American people Ojibway. My choice of working on this figure arises from the need to create an image that can be symbolic of belonging to a neighborhood to a group, a symbol of belonging to the protection of the offspring and therefore of the future, a need for legality and correctness to fight or understand, integrating and accepting it, the illness stemmed from the discomfort of life in a changing neighborhood, willing to redeem. Mine is a metaphor, a symbol in which the neighborhood can fully recognize.”
“Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.”
Carl Jung
Giacomo Bufarini AKA RUN Time Traveller Artist Man Unicorn Publishing Group. London. UK. 2016
The founder of analytical psychology would have looked at the hands of RUN and perhaps understood more about his lifelong psychological process than the average intellect, and yet seeing RUN’s carefully formed people on the street captivates your imagination as well.
These are the dreams he creates with his expressive hands, conscious or unconscious features that over time have developed into archetypes to be combined, adorned, alone, and recombined. Not surprisingly, his people often have a grasp, a hold, a flair for the five fingered gesture as well.
Giacomo Bufarini AKA RUN Time Traveller Artist Man Unicorn Publishing Group. London. UK. 2016
His graffiti days as a teen in the 1990s were formative, not least because after tagging he discovered his passion for the figurative and his enthralling respect for the materials of art making. It also helps that his outgoing personality helped him mix easily with peers on multiple secretive artistic escapades.
When you see the list of his compatriots it occurs to you that RUN had no choice but to be astounding. It also occurs to you that Italy has produced many of the best quality and imaginative, innovative Street Artists. “At the beginning of 2000 we started a sort of Italian school of underground muralism,” he says of his colleagues Blu, Ericailcane, Dem, Hitnes, Allegra Corbo, 2501, Basik and Moneyless. The muralism continues, and some of these names are possibly walking toward canonical.
Giacomo Bufarini AKA RUN Time Traveller Artist Man Unicorn Publishing Group. London. UK. 2016
The writer and Street Art authority Tristan Manco helps capture the significance of this person’s journey;
“Part travelling diary, part monograph, Time Traveller Artist Man charts the triumphs and tribulations of an imaginative soul with a passion for travel, whose worldwide voyages have become a catalyst to create art that is elemental and playful, with the ultimate goal of engaging with people from all walks of life.”
On the occasion of his first serious monograph, the artist has taken the time to point you to his studies abroad in a solid tome published by Unicorn. In studio you contemplate the tools, in the street you contemplate the technique.
Giacomo Bufarini AKA RUN Time Traveller Artist Man Unicorn Publishing Group. London. UK. 2016
In his wall painting travels, which include The Gambia, Senegal, UK, Poland, Shenzhen, Croatia, Morocco, and many cities in his home country you see the nature and the wisdom of Giacomo Bufarini’s people – and his regard for them lies in the pattern, the abstraction, the gesture.
He cannot stay still for long, his subconscious and his dreams are full of movement. Thus, RUN. There is too much to see, too much to think about, too much to respect and explore. Rather than talk about it, his hands will tell you all you need to know.
Giacomo Bufarini AKA RUN Time Traveller Artist Man Unicorn Publishing Group. London. UK. 2016
Giacomo Bufarini AKA RUN Time Traveller Artist Man Unicorn Publishing Group. London. UK. 2016
Giacomo Bufarini AKA RUN Time Traveller Artist Man Unicorn Publishing Group. London. UK. 2016
Giacomo Bufarini AKA RUN Time Traveller Artist Man Unicorn Publishing Group. London, UK. 2016
“It does not suffice in all cases to elucidate only the conceptual context of a dream content.
Often it is necessary to clarify a vague content by giving it a visible form.
This can be done by drawing, painting, or modeling. Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.”
Carl Jung
The Moscow Manege Hosts International and Local Street Artists for a Biennale
Moscow presents a Street Artist’s exhibition, but the streets have almost none.
When Street Art and it’s associated cousins move inside the possible outcomes are many. With exhibitions like this you are seeing urban becoming very contemporary.
The Artmossphere Biennale jump-starts the debate for many about how to best present the work of Street Artists and organizers here in Moscow chose a broad selection of curators from across a spectrum of private, commercial, academic and civically-inspired perspectives to present a solid range of artists from the graffiti and Street Art world inside a formal hall.
To be clear, unless it is illegal and on the street, it is not graffiti nor Street Art. That is the prevailing opinion about these terms among experts and scholars of various stripes and it is one we’re comfortable with. But then there are the commercial and cultural influences of the art world and the design industries, with their power to reshape and loosen terms from their moorings. Probably because these associated art movements are happening and taking shape before our eyes and not ensconced in centuries of scholarship we can expect that we will continue to witness the morphing our language and terminologies, sometimes changing things in translation.
Definitions aside, when you think of more organic Street Art scenes which are always re-generating themselves in the run-down abandoned sectors of cities like Sao Paulo, New York, Melbourne, Paris, Mexico City, London, and Berlin, it is interesting to consider that this event takes place nearly on the grounds of the Kremlin under museum like security.
An international capital that ensures cleanly buffed walls within hours of the appearance of any unapproved Street Art or graffiti, Moscow also boasts a growing contingent of art collectors who are young enough to appreciate the cultural currency of this continuously mutating hybrid of graffiti, hip hop, DIY, muralism, and art-school headiness. The night clubs and fashionable kids here are fans of events like hip-hop and graffiti jams, sometimes presented as theater and other times as “learning workshops” and the like.
Plugging into this idea of street and youth culture is not a singular fascination – there is perhaps an association with the rebellious anti-authoritarian nature of unregulated art in the streets that fuels the interest of many. With graffiti and hip-hop culture adoption as a template, newer expressions of Street Art culture are attractive as well with high profile artists with rebel reputations are as familiar in name here as in many cities. New festivals and events sometimes leverage this renegade free-spirit currency for selling tourism and brands and real estate, but here there also appears to be an acute appreciation for its fine art expression – urban contemporary art.
MOSCOW’S MANEGE AND “DEGENERATE ART”
So ardent is the support for Artmossphere here that a combination of public and private endorsements and financial backing have brought it to be showcased in a place associated with high-culture and counter-culture known as the Moscow Manege (Мане́ж). The location somehow fits the rebellious spirit that launched these artists even if its appearance wouldn’t lead you to think that.
The 19th century neo-classical exhibition hall stands grandly adjacent to Red Square and was built as an indoor riding school large enough to house a battalion of 2,000 soldiers during the 1800s. It later became host to many art exhibitions in the 20th century including a famous avant-garde show in 1962 that Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev famously derided as displaying ‘degenerate’ art.
One of the artists whose work was criticized, painter and sculptor Ernst Neizvestny, challenged the label defiantly and won accolades afterward during his five decade career that followed, including receiving many awards and his work being collected worldwide by museums. Russian President Vladimir Putin is quoted as calling him “a recognised master and one of the best contemporary sculptors”. In January of this year at the age of 90, Neizvestny’s return to Menage featured an extensive exhibition. He passed away August 9th (The Moscow Times), only weeks before Artmossphere opened.
In some kindred spirit many of these artists at Artmossphere have done actual illegal work on the streets around the world during their respective creative evolutions, and graffiti and Street Art as a practice have both at various times been demonized, derided, dismissed and labeled by critics in terms synonymous with “degenerate”.
A CLEAN CITY
“Moscow is mostly very clean,” says Artmossphere co-founder and Creative Director Sabine Chagina, who walks with guests during a sunny afternoon in a busy downtown area just after the opening. “But we do have some good graffiti crews,” she says as we round the corner from the famous Bolshoi Theater and soon pass Givenchy and Chanel and high-end luxury fashion stores. Shortly we see a mural nearby by French artist Nelio, who painted a lateral abstracted geometric, possibly cubist, piece on the side of a building here in 2013 as part of the LGZ Festival.
If there was graffiti here in Moscow, it was not on full display very readily in this part of town. In driving tours, rides on the extensive metro train system, and in street hikes across the city a visitor may find that much of the illegal street art and graffiti common to other global capitals is illusive due to a general distaste for it and a dedicated adherence to buffing it out quickly.
For a pedestrian tourist Moscow appears in many ways as fully contemporary and architecturally rich as any international world-class metropolis. One of the cleanest places you’ll visit, the metro is almost museum-like in some instances; the historic districts spotless, public fountains, famed statues of important historical figures. All is efficiently ordered and – a welcome surprise – most public space is free of advertisements interrupting your view and your thoughts.
Come to think of it, the sense of commercial-celebrity media saturation that is present in other cities doesn’t appear to permeate the artists psyche here at the Biennale – so there’s not much of the ironic Disney-Marilyn-supermodel-Kardashian-skewering of consumerism and shallowness in this exhibition that you may find in other Urban Art events.
Also, unlike a Street Art-splattered show in London for example that may rudely mock Queen Elizabeth or art in New York streets that present Donald Trump styled as a pile of poo and Hillary Clinton as Heath Ledger’s Joker, we didn’t see over-the-top Putin satires either. So personality politics don’t seem directly addressed in this milieu. According to some residents there was an outcropping of huge festival murals by Street Artists here just a few years ago but more recently they have been painted over with patriotic or other inspiring murals, while others have been claimed for commercial interests.
Starved for some gritty street scenes, it is all the more interesting to see the one live mural painting that we were able to catch – a 6-story red-lined op-art tag by the French graffiti writer L’Atlas. Far from Manege, placed opposite a cineplex in what appears to be a shopping mall situated far from the city’s historical and modern centers, our guide tells us half-jokingly that he is not sure that we are still in Moscow.
Here L’Atlas says that he has painted his bar-code-like and cryptic nom-de-plume with an assistant on a cherry picker for a few days and he says that no one has stopped to ask him about it, neither to comment or criticize. Actually one man early one morning returning home from a disco did engage him briefly, but it was difficult to tell what he was talking about as he may have had a few drinks.
This lack of public commentary is mainly notable because in other cities the comments from passersby can be so ubiquitous that artists deliberately wear stereo headphones to prevent interruption and to be more productive. Sometimes the headphones are not actually playing music.
This Street Art Biennale nonetheless is gaining a higher profile among Urban Art collectors and its associated art dealers and the opening and later auction reaches directly to this audience. Included this year with the primary “Invisible Walls” exhibition are satellite events in association with local RuArts Gallery, Tsekh Belogo at Winzavod, and the Optika Pavilion (No. 64) at VDNKh.
The opening night event itself is wide and welcoming, a mostly youthful and populist affair with celebratory speeches and loosely organized group photos and an open bar. Added together with a press conference, a live DJ, virtual reality headsets, interactive artworks, major private business sponsors, government grants, ministers of culture, gallerists, and quirkily fashionable art fans, this is a polished presentation of a global culture that is filtered through the wide lense of the street.
Perhaps because the exhibition hall is a cavernous rectangle with exposed beams on the ceiling and many of the constructed white walls that mimic vendor booths, it has the air of an art fair. There are thankfully no salespeople pacing back and forth watching your level of interest. People tend to cluster before installations and talk, laugh, share a story, pose for a selfie.
The theme seems very appropriately topical as geopolitical, trade-related, social, digital, and actual walls appear to be falling down rapidly today while the foundations of new ones are taking shape. Catalyzed perhaps by the concept and practices of so-called “globalization” – with its easy flow of capital and restricted flow of humans, we are all examining the walls that are shaping our lives.
With 60+ international artists working simultaneously throughout this massive hall, newly built walls are the imperative for displaying art, supporting it, dividing it. These are the visible ones. With so many players and countries represented here, one can only imagine that there are a number of invisible walls present as well.
The theme has opened countless interpretations in flat and sculptural ways, often expressed in the vernacular of fine art with arguable nods to mid-20th century modernists, folk art, fantasy, representational art, abstract, conceptual, computer/digital art, and good old traditional graffiti tagging. Effectively it appears that when Street Art and graffiti artists pass the precipice into a multi-disciplinary exhibition such as this, one can reframe Urban/Street as important tributaries to contemporary art – but will they re-direct the flow or be subsumed within it?
The work often can be so far removed from street practice that you don’t recognize it as related.
Aside from putting work up in contested public space without permission and under cover, an average visitor may not see a common thread. These works run aesthetic to the conceptual, painterly to the sculptural, pure joy and pure politics. But then, that is we began to see in the streets as well when the century turned to the 21st and art students in large numbers in cities like New York and London and Berlin skipped the gatekeepers, taking their art directly to the public.
Perhaps beneath the surface or just above it, there is a certain anarchistic defiance, a critique of social, economic, political issues, a healthy skepticism toward everyone and everything that reeks of hypocritical patriarchal power structures. Perhaps we’re just projecting.
Looking over the 60+ list of names, it may be striking to some that very few are people of color, especially in view of the origins of the graffiti scene. Similarly, the percentage of women represented is quite small. We are familiar with this observation about Urban Art in general today, and this show mirrors the European and American scene primarily, with notable exceptions such as Instagrafite’s home-based Brazilian crew of 4 artists. As only one such sampling of a wide and dispersed scene, it is not perhaps fair to judge it by artists race, gender, or background, but while we speak of invisible walls it is worth keeping our eyes on as this “scene” is adopted into galleries, museums, and private collections.
Following are some of the artists on view at Artmossphere:
ASKE
Certainly Moscow native ASKE is gently mocking our mutated modern practices of communicating with his outsized blocked abstraction of a close couple riveted to their respective electronic devices, even unaware of one another.
Warsaw based NeSpoon creates a sculpture of another couple. Heroically presenting her vision of what she calls the iconic “Graffiti Writer” and “Street Art Girl”, they face the future with art instruments in hand ready to make their respective marks. She says her work is emblematic of a permanent financial insecurity for a generation she calls the “PRECARIAT”.
“ ‘Precariat’ is the name of the new emerging social class,” says curator, organizer, and NeSpoon’s partner Marcin Rutkiewicz when talking about the piece during the press conference. “These are young people living without a predictable future, without good jobs, without social security. It’s a class in the making and probably these people don’t have any consciousness or global unity of interest. But they are the engines of protest for people all over the world – like Occupy Wall Street, Gezi Park in Turkey, or the Arab Spring.”
The artist developed the sculpture specifically for this exhibition and planned it over the course of a year or so. Born of a social movement in Poland by the same name, the sculpture and its sticker campaign on the street represent “a kind of protest against building walls between people who are under the same economical and social situation all over the world,” says Rutkiewicz.
LI-HILL
Artist Li-Hill says his piece “Guns, Germs, and Steel” directly relates to the divisions between civilizations due to a completely uneven playing field perpetuated through generations. Inspired by the 1997 trans-disciplinary non-fiction book by Jared Diamond, Li-Hill says the Russian sculptural group called “The Horse Tamers” represents mankind’s “ability to harness power of the natural world and to be able to manipulate it for its advantage.”
“The horse is one of the largest signifiers and is a catalyst for advancement in society because it has been for military use, for agriculture, for transportation,” he says. “It was the most versatile of the animals and the most powerful.” Here he painted a mirror image, balanced over a potential microbial disaster symbol, and he and the team are building a mirrored floor to “give it this kind of infinite emblem status.”
Afloat in the middle of some of these walled areas M-City from Poland is choosing to be more direct thematically in his three dimensional installation of plywood, plaster, aerosol and bucket paint, and machine blown insulation.
“It is an anti-war piece,” he says, and he speaks about the walls between nations and a losing battle of dominance that ensures everyone will be victim.”
“It’s kind of a monster who destroys arms,” he says of this temporary sculpture with a lording figure crushing tanks below.
“He is destroying the tanks but at the same time he is also a destroyer – so it’s a big circle. Nothing is positive that can come out of this. There is always someone bigger.” He says the piece is inspired by the political situations in Europe today and the world at large.
HOTTEA
Minneapolis based HOTTEA usually does very colorful yarn installations transforming a huge public space, but for Artmossphere he is taking the conceptual route. The walk-in room based on the Whack-A-Mole game presents holes which a visitor can walk under and rise above.
Visitors/participants will experience the physical separation of space, and perhaps contemplate facing one another and interacting or ignoring one another. It is something he says he hopes will draw attention to how many walls we have allowed ourselves to distract from human interactions.
Englands’ Sick Boy calls his project The Rewards System, where guests are invited to climb a ladder over a brick wall and descend down a slide into a darkened house, setting off a series of sensors that activate a variety of multisensory lights and tantalizing patterns. After landing and being rewarded the visitor is forced to exit on hands and knees through a too-small square door.
“The concept of the show is about invisible walls so I was thinking about there being barriers in your life and I thought about the reward of endorphins one experiences for achieving a task – a small amount of endorphins. So I thought I would build a house that signifies the reward system,” he explains.
Atlanta/Seattle based Derek Bruno reached back to the Leonid Brezhnev years and into Moscow’s Gorky Park for his series of site specific installations based on Soviet Cement Fence type PO-2. The iconic fence was re-created in a nearby studio and Bruno shot photographs of his 10-15 minute “interventions” in the park itself, revisiting a field of design called “technical aesthetics.”
In a statement Bruno explains “Since the end of the Soviet Union, the iconic fence has become a persistent and ever present reminder of former delineations of space; while new forms of boundaries shape the digital and sociopolitical landscapes. “
REMI ROUGH
Remi Rough is known for his smartly soaring abstract geometry in painted murals and smaller scale works, and for Moscow he wanted to strip it back to the basics, approaching a white box with one undulating graphic composition.
“My idea was that Moscow’s a bit ‘over the top’,” he says, and he decided to strip back the audacity and go for simplicity, which actually takes courage.
“I said ‘you know what?’ – I want to do something with the cheapest materials you can possibly get. These two pieces literally cost 3000 rubles ($50). It’s made of felt, it’s like a lambs wool. I think they use it for flooring for construction.” Depending on the angle, the pink blotted material may translate as a swath of otherworldly terrain or a metaphorical bold vision with all the hot air let out.
“I wanted to do something peaceful and calming and use natural materials – something that’s different from what I usually do – but I use the folds in the fabric and the pink color – two things that I usually use a lot.”
ALEXEY LUKA
Moscow’s Alexey Luka is also challenging himself to stretch creatively by taking his wall collage installations of found wood and converting them into free-standing sculptures.
“For this biennale I tried to make something different so now I am going from the assemblages to 3-D.” The constructed media is warm and ordered, reserved but not without whimsy.
“My work is made from found wood – I use it with what I found on the street and my shapes and my graphics – so it’s kind of an experiment with three dimensions,” and he confirms that most of this wood is sourced here in Moscow.
We ask him about the number of eyes that peer out from his installation. Perhaps these eyes are those of Muscovites? “They are just like observers,” he says.
Torino’s Mimmo recreated the Moscow Olympic Village from the 1980 games in miniature presented as on a plainly brutalist platform. The sculpture is austere in detail on the hulking towers save for the tiny graffiti tags, throwies, rollers, extinguisher tags, and the like at the bases and on the roofs.
Curator Christian Omodeo tells us that Mimmo recreated the massive village based on his direct study of the site as it stands today; a housing project that has hundreds of families — and a hip-hop / graffiti scene as well.
It is striking that the scale reduces the impact of the graffiti – yet when experienced at eye-level it retains a potency. Even so, by recasting the relationship between viewer and mark-making, this graffiti actually seems “cute” because of its relative size to the viewer.
BRAD DOWNEY
Brad Downey and Alexander Petrelli hi-jacked the opening of the Biennale by circulating within the exhibit as a gallery with artworks for sale. With Downey performing as a street-huckster pushing his own art products, Mr. Patrelli showcased new Downey photo collages and drawings inside his mobile “Overcoat Gallery”
A charming Moscow art star / gallerist / performance artist, Mr. Patrelli is also a perennial character at openings and events in the city, by one account having appeared at 460 or so events since 1992 with his flashing overcoat. The artworks also feature Patrelli, completing a self-referential meta cycle that continued to circle the guests at the exhibition.
International artists participating in the Artmossphere Biennale 2016 include: Akacorleone, Alex Senna, Brad Downey, Chu (Doma), Orilo (Doma), Claudio Ethos, Demsky, Christopher Derek Bruno, Filippo Minelli, Finok, Galo, Gola Hundun, Hot Tea, Jaz, Jessie and Katey, Johannes Mundinger, L’Atlas, LiHill, LX One, M-city, TC, Mario Mankey, Martha Cooper, Miss Van, Nespoon, Millo, Pablo Benzo, Pastel, Paulo Ito, Proembrion, Remed, Remi Rough, Rub Kandy, Run, Sepe, Sickboy, Smash 137, Sozyone Gonsales, SpY, The London Police, Trek Matthews, Wes 21.
This article is a result of a Brooklyn Street Art partnership with Urban Nation Museum For Urban Contemporary Art in Berlin and was originally published at Urban Nation Museum For Urban Contemporary Art
The influence of Street Art and graffiti continues to disperse through cities, towns and the countryside of many regions in the form of mural festivals. The village of Penelles in Catalonia asks residents if they would like to hand over the walls of their houses to be painted by contemporary artists and many say yes, gladly.
It is a far cry from the responses of landlords in large cities where the association in the minds of many is graffiti and vandalism. According to a posting on Facebook, the challenge for attendees of a recent mural festival here was to gather enough money to rent a bus and drive people around to see the new artworks!
GarGar, the festival held in the third week of May, also featured live music, food trucks, beer, workshops, and people milling around taking photos of the artists while they worked and discussing the new pieces. Perhaps taking as a model the same concept as the Spanish town of Fanzara, Penelles is a small sleepy town that is being revitalized with urban art.
Photographer Luis Olive Bulbena tells us that the town, which is located around 130 km northwest of Barcelona, has about 500 inhabitants and “basically the whole of the municipality revolves around agriculture.”
We thank Mr. Bulbena for sharing these new images with BSA readers.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening :
1. TOOFLY in Miami 2. 8 Artists, One Day in La Perla
3. UNO in Bolonga, Italy 4. Phlegm / Run / Christiaan Nagel in London
5. Surplus Candy
BSA Special Feature: TOOFLY in Miami
“There is a different dynamic that takes place when women get together and paint or build or create something,” explains Queens born Toofly as she scales the ladder in Miami during Art Basel this year. The short by Alexandra Henry gives voice to the artist, designer and organizer as she describes coming up in the 1990s wall painting surrounded primarily by dudes. Now as she moves to a different stage and embraces her Ecuadorean roots, Toofly is joined by a new generation of women who are laying claim to the street and adding their voices to the conversation.
8 Artists, One Day in La Perla
An overcast day in Old San Juan is still better than a sunny one inside an office cubicle, ya herd? Here’s a gently rolling survey of a community called La Perla, who in one day received new gifts bestowed from Alexis Diaz, Faith47, Axel Void, Filio, Inti, Conor Harrington, Poteleche, and Franco Jaz. Captured by Tost Fims, it is free of so many of the video making conventions of Street Art film-making that it may be pulling the genre in a new direction.
UNO in Bolonga, Italy
UNO and Matteo Talone take wheatpasting to a new very long expanse in Bologna, hand coloring meters and meters of pop inspired black and white image/text patterning for the Cheap Festival.
Phlegm / Run / Christiaan Nagel in London
A teaser for a series of films (Last Breath) that will be made documenting the beautification of soon-to-be demolished buildings in London. Touring the remains of structural decrepitude is not new, but doing so artfully like this is.
Surplus Candy
A new video from Nick Heller features a tour from the recent abandoned house takeover on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
A Foot in the Door
A FOOT IN THE DOOR:
RUN and Dscreet
Street Art London
11 – 6pm daily, 28th June – 25th July 2013
Private View Thursday 4th July
Cock ‘n’ Bull Gallery
Tramshed, 32 Rivington Street London EC2A 3EQ
From 28th June to 25th July, the Cock ‘n’ Bull gallery and Street Art London will host a major collaboration between world-renowned street artists RUN and Dscreet. A Foot in the Door: RUN and Dscreet will juxtapose wall paintings with drawings, painting and sculpture, leading the viewer to reassess the role of environment and context in contemporary art.
RUN is a London based Italian street artist whose works can be seen adorning street cor- ners from China to Senegal. His recognisable style shows a level of detail and complexity rarely seen in street art today, evidenced through his vivid rendering of interlocking hands and faces in bright, arresting colours. RUN is interested in street art as a language of communication, creating playful characters that speak to diverse audiences on multiple levels. The expansive scale of his works captivates the viewer, affecting a renaissance of muralism that reaches beyond the boundaries of street art.
Dscreet is an Australian street artist whose signature owl characters have been a mainstay on the London street art scene for years. Transitioning from the graffiti scene, his artistic alter ego is inspired by cartoon and comic imagery. On a deeper level, he explores the owl as a symbol of perception that lends itself to multifarious interpretations in many different cultures worldwide. Dscreet is also a talented filmmaker, and will exhibit a new film in the gallery during the show.
Initially brought together to work on the outer doors of Tramshed, RUN and Dscreet have come together once more to reframe their work and explore ideas of interiority and exteriority in the art world today. Questioning how street art is perceived by bringing their work into the gallery, they play with the concept of the door as a literal means of crossing from one space into another and as a metaphor for changing perceptions. Turning their practice inside out, their work leads a viewer to see beyond the surface.
At the entrance to the exhibition is a door on which RUN and Dscreet have collaborated. Framing the exhibition and marking the transition from the exterior to interior space, this door invites viewers to walk through to the other side, entering into a thought provoking space where paintings collide with murals.
A Foot in the Door: RUN and Dscreet has been organised and curated by Richard Howard- Griffin and Hannah Zafiropoulos of Street Art London. The exhibition will also include two new limited edition screen print editions from the artists that will be on sale in the gallery and through Salted Prints.
On the 27th July, the exhibition becomes the backdrop for a totally unique experience. Diners will gather in the gallery, where the art comes out of the frame, off the walls and onto the plate. HIX LIX art dinners allow diners to enjoy a four course bespoke menu created by Mark Hix and his team in reflection of the work on display. This is a new, exciting way to engage with art and food; an opportunity to do something out of the ordinary.
London is looking alive and on top of things at mid-winter, with a great variety of materials and techniques, imaginative styles and of course varying results, according to your tastes. During a quick trip on a somewhat blizzardish day, photographer Geoff Hargadon found “tough conditions: snowy, cold as f***, and a camera battery that refused to stay charged.” Tough going for the intrepid Street Art photog you see. Of course the upside of inclement weather is that no one is outside to obscure your shot. Except the falling snow, that is.
From the comfort of you warmly glowing flatscreen, this selection of pieces looks like Street Art in London is largely mural based, right now, as much of the scene continues to be. The players are more or less familiar to your eyeballs, with a few newbies on the scene.
Enjoy these exclusive shots just for BSA readers. And special thanks to Geoff for his heroism and for sharing these scenes with us.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
