Archive for the ‘Art, Street Art’ Category
Space Invaders at the National Gallery of Australia
Filed under: art, Art, Street Art | Tags: Ghostpatrol, Lister, National Gallery of Australia, Neils Oeltjen, Space Invaders, Street art, Vexta, Yok
Leave a comment This is the first of two posts about the opening of the exhibition, Space Invaders, at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.
Exhibition entrance, with work by Ghostpatrol
I’ve just returned from two days there, enjoying the opening festivities.
On Friday night there was a preview of the show prior to its October 30th opening, with a party in the museum’s Gandel Hall and forecourt. I’m told that hundreds of people bought tickets to come to the party (hopefully they also went to see the exhibition). Works from the show were projected on to the museum walls; here’s a selection of some of my favourites:
Anthony Lister
The Yok
Ghostpatrol
Meanwhile, upstairs in the Project Gallery, was the exhibition: a number of rooms containing a selection of the National Gallery of Australia’s large collection of street art (it has purchased over 350 works). The works are displayed with imagination and intelligence, organised according to themes such as ‘Neo-Pop’, ‘Connecting Crews’, ‘Politics and the Press’ and ‘The Return of the Hand’. There’s a display of zines (some of which you are able to read, as well as examine others in glass cases), and surfaces for stickering, with many of the visiting artists taking the opportunity to add their stickers to the display.
The works are displayed in a manner which evokes the street, clustering images together and dispersing others more randomly, with some exhibited high up on the wall and others placed at ground level. The evocation of the street isn’t tackily done, thankfully: it would have been easy for the museum to have strained after some embarassing sense of street credibility, but instead it has retained the look and feel of a gallery space at the same time as showing awareness of how the works would originally have been displayed on the streets.
Other events included artist signings for the show catalogue, the Everfresh Blackbook, and Street/ Studio, plus an artists’ talk, with the curator of the exhibition Jaklyn Babington putting questions to Vexta and Neils Oeltjen about their work in the show and their careers on and off the street.
One of Vexta’s best-known works, Welcome to Australia, is featured in the exhibition:
She and the curator talked about how this work was originally a site-specific piece produced for a show several years ago in a warehouse space in Melbourne. The work was destroyed after the show, and has been recreated on paper as a result of the NGA exhibition. This prompted an interesting discussion about how the exhibition functions as a sneak preview of a time capsule: many of the NGA works were made in the heyday of the stencil art boom in Melbourne in 2003-2004, and purchased soon after; since these works have long since been buffed, painted over, gone over, or faded permanently from the streets, the NGA collection represents a significant archive of works that otherwise would exist only in coffee table books and as digital photographs.
The conversation with Niels Oeltjen brought other issues to the fore as well, such as the politics of street art and its role in ‘city-building’. Neils’s work (like that of some others in the show, such as Miso, Meggs, Ghostpatrol and Lister) also points towards some of the more contemporary directions in street art, using drawing, painting, paper cut-outs, and collages to create work for the streets. Neils was invited to create a work specifically for the exhibition, a glorious confection of colour and shape:
Outside, in the museum forecourt, Everfresh spent the day painting a wall, while a happy crowd of friends, fellow artists and interested visitors sat around on the museum grass and watched:
Rone, Reka and Makatron at work on the wall
In order to acknowledge the importance of zine culture to street art, the museum had also given over its huge Gandel Hall to a zine fair for the whole of Saturday; plus, a short film made by artist Anthony Lister was also screening continuously at the entry to the gallery. The result was a nicely dispersed and variegated set of locations staged throughout the museum: the Project Gallery displaying the artworks, the Gandel Hall with its zine fair, the gift shop selling its catalogues, T shirts and books on street art, the Lister film on a continuous loop, and the outdoor live painting by Everfresh, meaning that visitors moved from inside to outside and back again, as if traversing from the outdoor spaces of the street into the more rarefied space of the gallery and back again…
To end this post, I’ll simply say that the show is well worth seeing. It’s on in Canberra until late February 2011, and will tour to other cities after that. And there’s a beautifully produced catalogue too (in the interests of complete disclosure, I should let you know that I wrote an essay for the catalogue – I was thrilled and honoured to be asked to do so). More about Space Invaders in a subsequent post…..
Space Invaders: The National Gallery of Australia’s exhibition of street art
Filed under: art, Art, Street Art, law | Tags: law, National Gallery of Australia, public space, Space Invaders, Street art
Comments (2) It’s never unproblematic when galleries and museums exhibit the work of street artists – some believe that street art is no longer ‘street art’ when it’s exhibited indoors in a gallery or museum space; others think that whatever constitutes the ‘street’ aspect of street art is more of a free-floating sensibility that pervades certain artworks whether they are installed inside or outside; still others believe that genuine ‘street art’ must be carried out illegally in public space and anything that doesn’t meet these criteria is rather a kind of site-specific artwork or is graphic design work or is even a form of advertising. These issues have been debated and argued over in many different fora (and the book that Miso, Ghostpatrol, Timba and I recently published, Street/Studio, is partly about the tensions – productive as well as constraining – that arise when artworks move between street and gallery).
Whatever your opinion of the street/studio relation and its implication for street art, there is, however, no denying the importance of a major cultural institution putting on a large-scale exhibition of street artwork – and such an exhibition is about to open at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. Its exhibition, Space Invaders, opens on 30 October (and runs until 27 February 2011, touring in 2011 to other cities). You can read here about the scope of the exhibition, which covers street art’s links to graffiti, its diversity of forms (including stickers, stencils, paste-ups, and so on), its connections to zine culture, the impact of pop culture upon the look of Australian street art, and its recent expansion into labour-intensive media involving drawn images.
I’m going to Canberra this weekend (along with a stellar bunch of some of Australia’s greatest street artists) for the opening festivities, and will be able to report next week on how the exhibition looks…. But it seems impossible to ignore the significance of this particular moment: Australia’s national gallery is putting on an exhibition dedicated to an art form which is often the product of activities deemed illegal by state governments and local councils in Australia, and many of the artists celebrated in the exhibition routinely risk fines or other punishments in order to make the artworks featured in the exhibition. Do we just chalk this up as being yet another instance when municipal and local governments are out of step with wider culture? Or is it time for local and state governments finally to admit that their persecution and prosecution of street artists and graffiti writers is just plain wrong?
‘Where is Mona? She’s long gone…’
Filed under: art, Art, Street Art, graffiti | Tags: buff, Fitzroy, graffiti removal, Melbourne, Mona, Street art, Toasters
Comments (2) So sings Nick Cave, in the opening line of the track ‘Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow’ on No More Shall We Part.
And this line jumped into my head this morning when I walked down a street in Fitzroy to find the Graffiti Removal guys busily washing a wall that I had photographed and posted about only last night (see the previous entry).
One of my favourite recent works, which seems to be signed ‘Mona’, was being buffed.
So if you are walking through the streets of Fitzroy looking for the artworks of Mona, as far as this partoicular site is concerned, ‘she’s long gone’, and what’s left is this:
I guess this must be one of those issues of personal taste. All the other recently added works nearby seemed to be still there; it’s only the ones on this house that have been buffed. Did the residents ask the council to remove it? Or did the council decide that this house should be buffed and not the others? The latter seems unlikely so I’m assuming it’s been done at the residents’ request.
To my mind, this raises lots of interesting issues. In my view, the residents are completely entitled to remove the work if they wish. If an artist puts work up without permission, then there’s always the risk that the person living or working inside the property may not appreciate the art, and wishes to remove it. It’s like if you give someone what you think is a cool T shirt or interesting book for their birthday, but they then ask if they can exchange it for something else – maybe you wish they wouldn’t, but hey, people are entitled to some autonomy about what they read and wear. Same with street art, I guess. If you don’t like it, I guess you can remove it (although many wish that removal wouldn’t happen quite so often or quite so speedily).
But the problem is that what’s left here really don’t look great, and so this raises the question of the technologies of graffiti removal. It’s like painting out graffiti but leaving a mismatched square of paint that just looks odd, or blasting off bill posters and leaving tattered strands of paper hanging from the wall. All of these techniques seem to be acceptable to many people, so it makes me wonder how aesthetics are being operationalised, such that blurry lines of faded paint, tattered paper or sloppily rollered paint looks ‘OK’ to those making the decisions about removal (whether these are council workers or residents). Perhaps these individuals would say that the ultimate solution is for artists not to put up work in the first place, thus obviating the need for removal, in all its imperfections.
I don’t agree. I think that it would be far more useful to have a debate about the aesthetics of the street, in which the effects of removal can be compared to the process of leaving a piece to weather and fade, or in which people can learn to appreciate that some streets are going to be modified in various ways as part of the culture of an area or a city, and in which artists can learn what types of image will work best on different kinds of surface…. I’d like to take part in such a debate, and I think others would too.
ADDENDUM:
By coincidence, Art of the State has a post about some magical stuff being done in London by the Toasters, in which they adapt those painted-out shapes and make them into new pieces of art…
ADDENDUM 2: Take a look at the link in the comment by Seldom which follows this entry – there’s a really interesting essay by ESPO (Steve Powers) about the pointlessness of painting over graffiti.
New works in Fitzroy….
Filed under: art, Art, Street Art | Tags: Fitzroy, Ghostpatrol, Melbourne, Miso, Street art
Comments (4) After a lot of travelling this year, it’s good to be home, and to be here to stay for a while (except for a weekend in Canberra that’s coming up, about which more later).
And it’s wonderful to be back in Fitzroy, where a lot of activity has been taking place on the streets.
Here are some of the things I’ve seen since returning:
Close up of a new work by Miso
Sticker by Miso
Ghostpatrol
There’s an interesting installation piece on Smith Street, involving boxes attached to poles, with text on mirrored surfaces:
As you can see, this one reads ‘thief’; there are others which read ‘liar’ and ‘loser’. Nice stuff. Since first posting about this, Vetti (of Live in Northcote) contacted me to let me know this installation is by Nick Ilton, and Nick himself has sent me a link to a little video which provides a nice summary of the guerilla sculptures he has been placing around Melbourne in recent weeks. Check it out here.
I’ve seen a lot of fresh paste-ups, such as these, outside the Sutton Gallery on Brunswick Street:
You can find these near Alimentari, where there’s been a lot of activity:
And this is pretty striking:
It’s nice to be home.
Burning Candy on film
Filed under: Art, Street Art | Tags: Burning Candy, Dots, film, London street art, Sweet Streets
Comments (6) Anyone living in London or who has visited London in the last few years would have to be aware of Burning Candy, the prolific graffiti crew who have made a speciality out of painting both on London’s walls and shutter doors and on top of its rooftops.
Check out the peg by Gold Peg and the monkey face by Mighty Mo, high above Oxford Street
It’s a large crew, both male and female writers, with a huge range of ages – as one commentator said, there aren’t many crews where some of the members are old enough to be the parents of other members… Each member has developed an idiosyncratic style, so that individual works are immediately recognisable: you can walk around London for hours and spot works by Mighty Mo, Dscreet, Cyclops, Cept, Gold Peg, Rowdy, Sweet Toof, Tek33, LL Brainwashed, . Each member has a particular icon or device that they repeat in their works – for example, crocodiles (Rowdy), teeth (Sweet Toof), owls (Dscreet), pegs (Goldpeg) and so on. The crew members also do works together, marrying their individual styles into huge pieces that have become iconic works in London street art culture.
Members of Burning Candy are being featured in a film called Dots, which is being made by the crew themselves, and as such is an intensely authentic piece of work. The premise behind the film is that each featured member travels to another country to discover links between their own art practices and the art practices in other cultures, often involving an investigation of the meaning of their chosen icon: thus Rowdy travels to Australia to discover the meaning of the crocodile in Australian indigenous culture; Cyclops travels to India to see his inspiration in situ (Indian street signs)…
I’ve been lucky enough to see a trailer for this film, and it’s clearly going to be an amazing piece of work. If you are heading to the Film Night of the Sweet Streets festival in Melbourne on 14 October, you’ll get to see some of Dots then. You can read more about the film on its official website here.
But Dots is still a work-in-progress, and funds are needed to complete it. It is being funded by the sales of a boxset of Burning Candy works – selling art (the prints) to support the making of art (the film). Purchasing a box set doesn’t just gain you an amazing collection of prints: it also gets you a co-producer credit and percentage in the film.
Images to Live By isn’t really intended for the promotion of particular exhibitions or books or artists: the line between promotion and commentary is a fluid and flexible one but I try to stay on the commentary side rather than get into the promotion of particular events or people. But I did want to mention the need for funding assistance for Dots because I think Burning Candy have had such an important impact on London street culture and have been such an inspiration for many other artists all over the world… The film looks like it will be fantastic and I hope that enough funds can be generated to help the guys finish it. Funding strategies such as these have been used by other artists and film-makers (for example Todd Chandler’s Flood Tide, which arose out of Swoon’s Swimming Cities projects, read more about that film here) and it seems like a great way to circumvent the strictures and constraints of conventional funding options. So if you are interested in street art and can consider purchasing a boxset, take a look at the website… If the boxset is out of your price range, there’s a cool T-Shirt too!
And whatever you do, don’t miss the chance to check out Dots at the Sweet Streets Film Night in Melbourne on the 14th.
Sweet Streets
Filed under: Art, Street Art | Tags: Melbourne, stencils, Street art, Sweet Streets, yarn bombing
Leave a comment I’m back in Melbourne, arrived a few days ago and still propping my eyelids open to combat the jetlag, but at least the weather this weekend is helping me get used to being in the southern hemisphere again – Melbourne looks its sparkling best, bathed in sunshine and with one of those amazing clear Australian blue skies….
But also helping me keep awake is the knowledge that Sweet Streets is on…. The erstwhile Melbourne Stencil Festival has been re-designed to take account of the huge range of street-based art activities that we find in Melbourne and in other cities, and the result is Sweet Streets. During the Festival, you can find exhibitions of some brilliant artwork, both local and from overseas; workshops on everything from stencil-making to yarn-bombing; and some film-based visual enjoyment too – the DVD of Exit Through the Gift Shop is being launched during the Festival, and there’s even a dedicated Film Night, showcasing some amazing looking documentaries.
Check out the Festival website for further details….
Bella Italia
Filed under: art, Art, Street Art | Tags: Italy, Padova, stencils, Street art, Venice
Comments (5) Not many posts recently, because I’ve been travelling through Europe. Sometimes there hasn’t been internet access; sometimes it’s just been too much of a holiday to do any blogging….
But here I am in Todi, an amazing hill village in Umbria, and there is wifi in the hotel room, so I thought I would dedicate a post to some of the fantastic street art I have seen so far on my trip.
I spent a couple of days in Venice, which is really one of the most fantastic cities in the world. And it was great to see work by C215, beautifully placed as always, against the fading Venetian stucco:
It’s also good to see that some street artists in Venice use boats to move around while getting up – I love the placement of this Swoon piece too, as though the figures are waiting to catch a vaporetto:
I also spent some time in Padova, which is a university town not far from Venice. There’s a huge amount of art on the walls there. I love it that people are still writing their thoughts on walls (something you don’t see so often in Australian cities like Melbourne these days): political comments, declarations of love, cryptic sayings, and a few words in Latin, too:
I also saw a lot of good stencil work, like this:
And many pieces which made use of the Padova’s gorgeous arcades to frame elegantly drawn figures like these:
I don’t know who the artist is – if anyone does, please let me know, I thought these works were excellent.
I’ll be in Rome soon. I’m looking forward to seeing the walls there…..
Berlin: name-writing
Filed under: art, Art, Street Art, graffiti | Tags: Berlin, Brad Downey, Charlie Isoe, Kripoe, PITR, Prost, stencils, Tagging, tags, xoooox
Comments (1) Berlin surfaces are written on to a degree I haven’t seen in many places… Tags, whether words or icons, are everywhere. The city’s lack of cash (Berlin is hugely in debt) means that graffiti, postering, stencils and so on are rarely removed, but simply layered over each other or gradually fading away. And so the walls (and many other surfaces too) are filled with images and words, many of them the names of the author or artist.
Lots of these are tags: tagging in Berlin has both an idiosyncratic history and quite distinctive contemporary forms. When reunification occurred after the taking down of the Berlin Wall in 1989, many in the former East wanted to participate in graffiti writing, and began to develop styles and tags. For many, however, it wasn’t an invented tag name that they initially practised: one artist showed me scans of pages from his black book from the early 90s, as an artist growing up in the newly unified, former East Germany, he wrote brand names, instead of tag names, before he developed his own tag (the notebook was filled with ‘Diesel’, ‘Reebok’, ‘Nike’ and so on). But then Berlin style developed very quickly (many artists looked to cities such as Prague for inspiration, after initially being influenced by Brooklyn, New York and so on) and huge block letter throw-ups developed in 90s, many of these still being done or fading but visible still, on train lines especially.
Right now, I’m told there’s a fashion for the so-called ‘ugly’ style of tagging, writing as if in a ‘toy’ style. Interestingly, many tags are very simple, but their significance lies in the prolific range of places that they have been written (this would apply to many, many artists, including Brad Downey, Charlie Isoe, PiTR, 6 and others); other tags are amazing because they have been placed on rooftops or high on walls. Some have developed beautiful forms and shapes (such as the stencilled tag of xoooox); others have used icons s a means to get up all over the city (especially someone like Kripoe).
There’s tons more that could be said about Berlin’s culture of obsessive name-writing, but for now, here is a selection of my favourites…
The insanely prolific tags of Brad Downey:
The equally prolific French artist, PiTR, whose tag features here in the toilet of a cafe on Kastanienallee:
Some nice placement here, low down to the ground (as were all the tags by Isoe that I saw):
Kripoe’s iconic fists, followed by his equally iconic rollerskate:
And the little face drawn by Prost (which means ‘cheers!’) all over Berlin (usually laughing, although sometimes angry. This shot shows the archetypical smiling Prost icon:
Here’s an elegant stencil showing xoooox’s tag:
The utter simplicity of a tag that’s reduced to one digit: 6’s tag, here done on paper and pasted high up on a wall:
And along with the memories of Paris provided by seeing PiTR’s tag all over Berlin, here’s the tag of one of my favourite French artists, L’Atlas:
Berlin: city of memories, city of history, city of names.
Berlin’s visitors….
Filed under: Art, Street Art, graffiti | Tags: Berlin, Blu, C215, Nelio, Orticanoodles, os gemeos, Roa, the London Police, Yz
Comments (1) As I mentioned before, I’ve recently been visiting Berlin. Like many cities with a reputation for interesting street art, Berlin attracts a wide range of artists who pass through the city for a short time and leave their work on the walls. So I thought I’d put up a selection of images by people who, like me, have been visitors to Berlin.
In the first few days that I was there, I went to see the Kunsthaus Tacheles, a massive building famed for its history as a squat and now as a centre for creative activity (although to me its atmosphere of hippie-chic cool seemed a little contrived and also somewhat dated…). On its external wall there’s a huge work by one of my favourite French artists, Yz (also known as Open Your Eyes) – and above it is the tag of one of Melbourne’s most prolific graffers, Bones (whose tag, along with those of other members of the 70K crew, I saw all over Berlin):
Here’s a small cat by C215, almost hidden in a corner to the rear of the building currently occupied by Kunstlerhaus Bethanien.
Bethanien is inextricably associated with Backjumps, the creative venture of Adrian Nabi, who over several years produced magazines and curated exhibitions and cultural events in Berlin, involving artists who work in public space. Over the years, artists such as Swoon, the London Police, Nomad, Brad Downey, Dave the Chimp and many other exhibited in Berlin under the Backjumps aegis. Part of the Backjumps events involved the curation of walls around the Kreuzberg area of Berlin for the display of works which would remain after the events were over. Here are a couple of examples, one from os gemeos and one from the London Police:
The area of Friedrichshain is also well known for its art on the streets, and the warren of bars, warehouses and skate park on Revaler Strasse contains hundreds of pieces, some commissioned, some added spontaneously. Amid a riot of tags, stencil, paste-ups and pieces near the Cassiopeia skate park I found a piece by Orticanoodles, with – once again – a tag by Bones accompanying it:
The River Spree constitutes a boundary between Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg, and as you travel over the Oberbaumbrucke (a wonderfully gothic looking bridge), the landscape is dominated by a massive piece by Blu, one of a number he has done in the city. Here’s a close up of the work:
Roa, the Belgian artist who has been achieving a lot of well-deserved attention recently, was in Berlin while I was there, and produced some fantastic work, such as this:
I also saw some old pieces in Kreuzberg by the French artist Nelio, whose work I admire greatly for its beautiful placement within any particular space (and which I’ve written about previously on this blog, see here). Here’s one:
And on my last night in Berlin, as I walked down Danen Strasse in Prenzlauer Berg to go back to my apartment, I discovered that Nelio must have been visiting Berlin once again, since a new piece had appeared:
It was nice to think that the phenomenon of artists making visits to this amazing city and contributing to the flux of images in public space was continuing, even as I was about to leave….
Travelling time….
As mentioned in the previous post, I’m travelling at the moment – in the Highlands of Scotland right now. I’ll be moving from place to place for a while, and sometimes won’t have much access to the internet. I’ll post when I can (there’s lots I want to say about Berlin, for example), but posts might be a bit irregular for a while. But please keep visiting the site – normal service will be resumed eventually!
Images to Live By 