Archive for the ‘Art, Street Art’ Category
More JR
Filed under: Art, Street Art | Tags: JR, photography, Street art
Leave a comment It will be clear from my earlier post (‘The power of vision’: JR and the women) that I am fascinated by the work of JR, the French street artist who works with portrait photography to make extremely interesting interventions around race, gender and violence.
I’ve been trying to find online clips from the film that I saw in London, which concerned the women of the favela Morra da Providencia in Rio de Janeiro. No luck so far, but what I have found is a brief excerpt from another part of the 28 Millimetres: Women project, described as a ‘trailer’ and called ‘Women Are Heroes’. JR travelled to a range of African countries which could variously be described as at best ‘post-conflict’ and at worst ‘at war’: Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Kenya among others. This little film shows many of the same cinematic devices used in the one I saw in London – the jittery camera work (used to a lesser degree here), the hypnotic, repetitive music, the telling of stories of violence and loss. It has its differences too: in this film, we hear JR himself narrating his intentions for the project, and it features a slightly more conventional, documentary-style telling of one woman’s story.
There are other films on YouTube showing different aspects of JR’s work (for example, in the housing projects on the outskirts of Paris), all of which are well worth watching too. But this one has an intensity that comes very close to the experience I had, sitting in the Lazarides gallery in London, with women’s faces pasted all over its ceiling, floor and walls, watching the women of Morro da Providencia on screen. If you do watch the little film I’ve included here, I should also give a bit of a warning: some of this film is very distressing.
Fade to grey
Filed under: Art, Street Art | Tags: Banksy, fading, JR, Miso, Street art
Comments (1) Recently I wrote about buffing, the different ways in which councils, governments and property owners seek to erase any graffiti or street art that has been added to a wall or surface.
For many works of street art, the buff represents their fate, sometimes far sooner than the artist would like. One day the image is there, next day it’s gone – painted over, scraped off.
But sometimes an image evades the buff and remains in place for a long, long time. Its longevity might derive from its being tucked away in a hard-to-notice spot, so that years go by and the work has actually only been seen by a few people. Or it might have been placed somewhere that’s hard to reach – hard for the artist who put it there, but also hard for any cleaning crew, which means that a work can stay up for years. And sometimes, even when a work is prominently visible, easy to access, and illegally located, it somehow escapes the buff, and just slowly and gradually disappears, fading back into the stone.
Within street art culture, there seems to be a lot of admiration, and often rightly so, for newly painted work: images that look glossy and shiny, which haven’t been weathered or degraded in any way (by the addition of tags or the application of posters on top, for example). And I’ve heard people say that work which is fading ‘looks old’, ‘tired’ and so on, and to a certain extent that’s true.
But some artists like to see the effects of these external forces and circumstances on their artworks. Miso, for example, is interested in the peeling and fraying that can arise when a pasted-up image experiences the effects of hot sun, rain, wind. And JR’s pasted-up photographic posters register the impact of the environment pretty fast – his work on the façade of the Tate Modern was repaired by the gallery after only a matter of weeks in place, thanks to a damp British summer. For these artists, though, the possibility of deterioration isn’t a problem, but is rather an integral part of their artistic practice – it’s something they actively invite.
Beyond this, though, I think it’s also worth looking at fading artworks, even when that gradual disappearance and deterioration isn’t part of the artist’s stated intentions. It takes quite a time for a painted work on stone to fade – usually months or even years, which means these greying images have a lifespan that’s quite remarkable given the frequency of buffing and going-over by other artists.
Here’s a fading Banksy. To see the remains of it, it’s best to click on the image to make it bigger. Look at the top step, where there are some words still faintly visible:
It reads ‘designated picnic area’ and is stencilled on the steps of an office building in a busy road in Shoreditch in London. It’s scarcely legible now, almost vanished back into the steps, its humour and incongruity about to depart the scene.
And take a look at this one:
It looks like a red smudge on the pavement, but it’s the remains of another Banksy. If you look more closely at the wall next to the smudge, you can see the traces of the two rats stencilled on the walls:
These rats were kitted out as waiters in a fancy restaurant, with the red smudge actually a red carpet. The rats have faded more than the red carpet, and you need to know what was there in order to make sense of what remains. I’m indebted in this respect to Martin Bull’s useful little book, Banksy Locations and Tours (details available from his website), which has a photograph of the work before it started to fade.
So how should we make sense of the fading artwork? Do we dismiss it as occupying some transitional zone between ‘freshness’ and oblivion? Do we paint over it so that new work can take its place? Does its faded nature mean that it is no longer worth noticing or thinking about?
In some ways, I think it’s the very ‘in between-ness’ of the fading image that makes it interesting. Not quite here and not quite gone, maybe having an almost historical value as a record of what was done in the past, but gradually relinquishing any claim on our attention amidst the visual hubbub of the contemporary city. So next time you walk through the streets, perhaps it’s worth paying homage to these fading images, these survivors who have, through chance or circumstance, escaped both the buff and the privileging of the new work of art.
‘The power of vision’: JR and the women
Filed under: Art, Street Art | Tags: art and violence, JR, Lazarides, photography, portraits, Street art
Leave a comment JR is a French photographer who used to paste up in the street the poster-sized printouts he had made of his photographs. Since he did this without the permission of the property owner on whose building he would stick the artwork, his art was, of course, illegal. JR has become one of the most internationally celebrated ‘street’ artists (have a look at his website to get a sense of his fantastic work). He is one of the six artists who were selected to exhibit their work on the front of the Tate Modern in London earlier this year (see the blog entry in October, ‘Street art and the museum’).
He has built this huge international reputation around a simple but clever artistic device. He makes portrait photos: head-and-shoulders shots, waist-upwards shots, extreme close-ups of faces or of facial features such as eyes. These photographs are then blown up. It’s through this simple device that JR has become famous – the photograph replicated and expanded in size, pasted up around the streets. These portraits were also made within the parameters of a political point of view. JR’s artworks draw the spectator’s attention to issues of race, ethnicity and poverty, all of which are crucial issues in a city such as Paris where JR began pasting up his work.
Over the years, it seems that JR’s images have become larger. While the scale of his artwork on the Tate was obviously determined by the size of the building, there were additional JR images around London during the northern summer that confirmed his ability to position a very large work in a really fascinating way. Have a look at this image:
What you can see is an image that is several storeys tall, situated on a building in Old Street in Shoreditch. The massive buildings next to it become simply part of the artwork’s frame. There’s also something of the trompe l’oeuil about the image: it’s black and white, it’s clearly not real, its perspective is all wrong for it to work as a straightforward in situ illusion, but there is something about the image – deriving from its nature as a photograph – which means that the spectator looks into it as well as at it. It is as though two separate worlds have been made to rub up against each other.
While in London in October, I saw JR’s show called 28 Millimetres: Women (it’s just a small part of his massive 28 Millimetres project much of which focuses on post-conflict societies in Africa, more details on JR’s website, and on this aspect of the project see this link).
JR took photographs of some of the inhabitants of Morro da Providencia, a favela in Rio de Janeiro. As is his usual practice, he blew up the photographs and turned them into massive posters which he pasted onto the sides of walls and buildings in the favela. He also used some of these to make some more conventional ‘fine’ artworks, and others were blown up to the enormous sized images which covered some buildings in the street outside. In addition, he made a film in the favela, which features the artworks he made for the buildings but which is also very much an artwork in its own right.
The show took place in the two Lazarides galleries (one in Greek Street, and the other on Charing Cross Road, both in Soho), and on Manette Street, a small street which runs between the two galleries (here’s a link to the Lazarides website and its information about the show). The Greek Street gallery contained the works which most conformed to the genre of the ‘fine’ artwork – that is, individual works, hung on the gallery walls.
These works were mainly photographs, sometimes small, sometimes blown up to considerable size (though nothing that could rival the building-sized images outside). Some work were pasted onto wooden panels, or sheets of rough wood, so that the face or figure in the image enters into a kind of relationship with the texture of the wooden surface, which in some works is fairly smooth but in others is very rough-hewn. The paper covering the wood is often scratched, as if it has been scored with a knife or sharp nails, and thus although the wooden backing and framing of the images seems to give them a sense of place, even though they have been detached from their original home, the images also seem to register an injury…
In Manette Street, some of JR’s massive artworks had been pasted onto the buildings:
In the Charing Cross Road gallery, the walls and ceiling of the exhibition space were covered with printed ‘contact sheets’ of JR’s portrait subjects, replicated over and over in a manner that mimicked the continuous run of celluloid film, as you can see in this photograph:
And on a screen at the rear of the Charing Cross Road gallery, showing on a continuous loop was a short film – for me, the most extraordinary work within this incredible, multi-layered show.
As I’ve mentioned, the film focuses on Morro da Providencia, a favela built on a steep hillside in Rio de Janeiro. As with the multiple levels in the exhibition as a whole, the film combines several elements: music (which is electronic, both urgent and plaintive), some archival news sources, the inclusion of voices speaking over the images (since they speak in Portuguese, the film is sub-titled in English), and a range of cinematographic techniques, including hand-held camera and time-lapse film. (I can’t say exactly how long it lasts – I watched this film several times over, on different days, and, although I tried to time its duration, each time I watched it I became so caught up in its narrative and its affect that I forgot to check my watch at its conclusion.)
The opening shows a news anchor relating a story about the shooting of some of the favela’s inhabitants, after the military opened fire on a public square. And this straightaway establishes the context for the film: the impact of militarised violence and torture inflicted upon a community. After this, the film shows, through time-lapse film, the installation of JR’s images throughout the favela, as they are pasted up on walls and outside houses. For this sequence, the camera is positioned quite a distance away and well below the favela, so that its entire upward sprawl can be seen, with the eyes, mouths, foreheads and faces of JR’s subjects now covering many of the vertical surfaces (there’s a still showing this on the Lazarides website).
But the film’s purpose is not (or not only) to record the installation of these works. JR’s objective is always portraiture, but here he produces a portrait which is multi-faceted enough to do justice both to the many individuals who face the video camera for JR and to the identity and space of the favela itself as a community dealing with the aftermath of police violence.
After the opening, the film is mainly composed of a series of sequences in which the camera races down alley ways and eventually halts in front of an individual – sometimes a woman, often a child, occasionally a man – or in which the camera follows someone through the interconnected rooms of their home, often ending up with that individual (child, woman or man) standing on the flat roof of their home with the favela rising and falling around them.
But although I say the camera ‘halts, or someone ‘ends up’, these words aren’t an accurate description of what the camera is doing, because they imply that some kind of even momentary stasis is reached. Instead, the camera is in constant motion, its film speeded up so that it fairly tears through the streets and alleys. Even when it is apparently at rest and in contemplation of an individual face, it is still recording at an accelerated speed, so that every single blink, glance or expression registers as a twitchy jitter in the subject’s face. In this way, what could have been a languid, leisurely excursus through the favela is rendered urgent, compelling (and fitting the film’s attempt to show how trauma registers within the everyday life of the community and its inhabitants).
And while the camera is building these jittery portraits of place and face, various voices speak (with sub-titled translations). At one point, a woman relates the experience of having to go to the garbage tip to search for pieces of her son’s body, after he had been taken away by soldiers and then killed. Her voice says: ‘it hurts your soul’. Another says: ‘I only give this interview because you are not from here and will take it far away, otherwise I wouldn’t, for I am afraid of the violence’. One boy narrates his witnessing the shooting of three children when the police started firing upon a demonstration in the public square. And another woman speaks of how Providencia had been neglected by artists, and how important JR’s intervention is for the community. She calls it ‘the power of vision’.
Many of the faces which constitute as the film’s jittery portraits are solemn, sombre or impassive. Occasionally a smiling face is shown – a young woman breastfeeding her baby, a little girl laughing. Many of the voices speak of how much they love Providencia, of how grateful they feel to have lived there. Such love, such gratitude, in the context of lives lived amid violence and loss, is amazing. The film completely succeeds in conveying the tension between a sense of the beautiful (the favela as a space of community and happiness) and the experience of violence (the faces whose camera-accelerated jitters seem to bespeak the pain they have undoubtedly suffered, and the favela as a site of loss).
And as such it is a text profoundly about trauma, about the inability to resolve such a contradiction. It is about witnessing violence, and about making art visible. It is about seeing the effects of violence, and about creating an artwork whose faces and eyes look outwards from the hillside towards the city whose police force has inflicted such harm. Through art, the houses are literally made to look, as walls and windows become eyes, faces, bodies. The film ends as night falls over Rio de Janeiro, and these faces, bodies and eyes fade into black, with the camera juddering the distant lights of Rio into a neon blur. Freeze frame, and then black. The film ends, but there is no ‘end’ to what we have seen.
‘All in the moment’ – revisited and illustrated!
Filed under: Art, Street Art | Tags: London Underground, sticker
Comments (1) Sometimes you are in the right place at the right time, as they say – and for me, this happened one night back in October when I happened to see a guy putting up a sticker in a London Underground carriage. You may recall my delight at this right-place-right-time happening from the previous entry on this blog, ‘All in the moment’.
Sometimes you are in the right place at the right time, but without a camera. That night I had been at the theatre with a friend, and I hadn’t taken my camera with me. I sat on the train watching this guy calmly and smoothly attach the sticker to the wall and I was unable to photograph the result. Argh!
In the blog post, I wrote about imagining someone catching sight of the sticker on a busy train, and smiling because of it.
Well, not only did that indeed take place, but the person also happened to have a camera with them and take a photograph of the sticker.
And not only THAT, but this person also happens to read this blog, and she has sent me the photograph. Thanks so much, Nadia! And here it is:
You can see in the photograph that the sticker is just starting to fray and peel a tiny bit (though not as much as the ‘official’ sticker above it). And let’s just admire what a great piece of work it is: the font, the layout, the wording, the white border, the shape and size. I wish I knew who this guy was. When I saw him put it up, I didn’t speak to him, because I somehow didn’t want to interrupt his performance: I didn’t want to be ‘the academic’, saying ‘excuse me, do you mind if I ask you why you are doing this and how long you have been doing it?’. Sometimes you just want to be the audience – admiring, appreciating, and enjoying. The consequence of that is of course that I may never know who he is or how many stickers he has put up on the Underground or elsewhere around London (imagine it! maybe he makes these ‘almost official’ stickers for loads of different sites – what a fantastic idea). But not knowing is somehow OK – I love the idea of this anonymous person carrying out this small act which beautifully resists what Nadia describes as ‘hyper-individualised and negative Tube culture’.
Thanks again for the photo, Nadia. Sometimes it almost felt like I had imagined the sticker, and it is so good to see it again.
The buff
Filed under: Art, Street Art | Tags: graffiti removal, London, San Francisco
Comments (1) Different cities, just as they have distinctive cultures of street art or graffiti, have different policies for removal of illicit images from urban spaces, and different methods of removing (buffing) graffiti and street art. Some councils employ cleaning crews who use water sprays, other paint over images. Graffiti removal is also big business – in Melbourne, there are many graffiti removal companies, such as Graffiti Eaters. Sometimes ‘concerned citizens’ get involved – Neighbourhood Watch groups, or organizations such as Graffiti Hurts Australia, or R.A.G.E. (Residents Against Graffiti Everywhere), or even individuals (such as ‘Guerilla Joe’, in Doug Pray’s fantastic documentary film Infamy).
On my travels this year, I’ve been interested to see different removal ‘regimes’ in action. In San Francisco, the city has put the onus of removal upon the property owner. If graffiti appears on your property, you are under an obligation to remove it within 30 days. If you don’t, the city’s attorneys will obtain a court order against you to allow city officials to remove the graffiti themselves, and you then have to pay the costs (at least $500 US, or $775 AUD). Here’s a photograph of a man in the Mission District of San Francisco who was busy painting over a tag on his wall:
But the law that obliges the property owner to remove the graffiti doesn’t specify that any effort should be made to match the paint that the graffiti sits on top of – the objective is to make people take action by painting out the graffiti, rather than attempt to create a particular result (like restoring the wall to the condition it was previously in). So what happens is this:
Here you can see a kind of patchwork effect, as people use just enough paint to cover a tag or stencil – and thus avoid being fined – but don’t worry about matching the paint in any way. Does it look better or worse than when the wall had a tag or stencil on it? Well, the answer to that may be in the eye of the beholder, but one thing is sure, the result is not a ‘clean’ or ‘blank’ wall…
Blank walls were what I found in many streets of London recently. In streets where, in July, there had been a lively ‘conversation’ (to use Russell Howze’s term – thanks, Russell) of stickers, tags, stencils, objects, paste-ups, by October many of them had been cleaned up, all over Shoreditch, and up and down Brick Lane. Turns out that the local councils (London Borough of Hackney and London Borough of Tower Hamlets) had decided it was time for a cleaning blitz, with the result that hundreds of images had been buffed.
I saw some of this in action:
And in terms of the overall differences in how these areas look, to compare the amount of work that was up on the walls in July with what was there in October, have a look at these images. Here’s a section of Brick Lane in July:
And here’s how it looked in October:
Here’s the start of a little alleyway in Shoreditch in July:
And here it is a few weeks ago in October:
But you can see that the Invader piece is still there on the wall: whoever painted over the wall has neatly painted around the tile…
And as for all the other blank walls, I’m guessing there might be a few folks who will look at them and say, ‘Fresh canvas – thanks very much!’
Street art and the museum
Filed under: Art, Street Art | Tags: museums, Street art, Tate Modern
Leave a comment In the northern summer of 2008, from 23 May to 25 August, the Tate Modern art gallery in London hosted an exhibition called Street Art, curated by Cedar Lewisohn. The exhibition involved the installation of works by six artists on the front façade of the museum, plus film screenings, a program of talks, a walking tour around the area showcasing works in the street (a further five artists were commissioned to create works especially for the designated sites), and a Street Art Information Tunnel in the museum forecourt, showing short films, providing information, and with a tagging wall (textas and marker pens provided). There’s information about the exhibition and the artists in the Tate’s archive here. Lewisohn also produced a book on street art, which constitutes an extremely interesting account, contextualising street art in a broader way than many other commentators – see here for more details of the book.
The artists who were selected to exhibit on the Tate’s massive outer wall were: os gemeos (Brazil), Blu (Italy), Faile (the United States), Nunca (Brazil), JR (France), and Sixeart (Spain). The artists who exhibited works for the walking tour were 3TTMan, Spok, Nano 4814, El Tono and Nurla.
For all its several component parts, the most significant part of the exhibition was certainly the outer wall, featuring the works by the six international artists. These works were massive, as befits the size of Tate Modern (a former power station). The six works could be seen from a great distance: many visitors approach the Tate Modern from the north side of the Thames, walking across the elegant Millenium Bridge to the museum. These visitors were treated to an incredible view of the images and were able to watch them increase in size with each step across the bridge. You can get a sense of this in the image below:
Once in the museum forecourt, visitors gazed upwards at the outer wall, able to see the detail in each work – especially interesting in the case of the image by Blu. In this first picture, you can see the work as a whole; the second one shows the amazing detail.
Proximity to each image of course changed the perspective on it: standing beneath each one, the spectator was towered over by each image. Some, like this Faile piece below, were enormously powerful and dominating in appearance.
Others seemed to incorporate a kind of pathos despite their monumentality – like the yellowing skin and skinny limbs of the os gemeos figure, as you can see here:
JR’s pasted up image of a young man wielding a video camera was already in peeling tatters (thanks to the rain and wind that you can get in a British summer). On the first day I visited, repair work was being done on the JR image. This actually helps to show the dominating scale of the works, since you can see how small the cherry picker looks next to the photograph:
And here’s what it looked like a few days later:
Quick glimpses of the other works:
It can’t be denied that it was amazing to see such works, and to see them on the wall of as august an institution as the Tate Modern. But I have just a couple of misgivings about the experience….
First of all, the scale of the images. The sheer size of these works (as you can see, they were of course done with the assistance of cherry pickers and so on) almost takes them out of the domain of street art and puts them into the realm of something else. The work is, literally, elevated – raised up off the street, placed high on the façade of the museum. Looking at these huge, amazing works raises the question, ‘what is “street” about ‘street art”?’ Is it work done on the street? If so, then these works would obviously be excluded from that definition. Is it work done with a particular sensibility on the part of the artist? Is it work with a particular ‘look’ to it, a specific aesthetic? Is it some combination of these?
Although all six of the works had the requisite sensibility (all of the artists are well known for their previous work on the streets, legal and illegal), and although all of the works variously participated in the aesthetic that seems to characterise street art (an engagement with pop culture, contemporary politics, an awareness of spatiality, a willingness to manipulate image and genre), it’s also worth considering what happens when ‘street’ art meets the museum.
The debate around the tensions between art that is made for the streets and then exhibited in gallery space is well-rehearsed. But I think that those tensions are multiplied when artworks that are at least in some way related to the space of the streets are then brought into the realm of the museum.
Small galleries (which is where the majority of street artists exhibit their work, if they exhibit at all) really are, oftentimes, small. Of course, they are driven by lots of imperatives, some of them commercial, some of them about cementing a particular reputation for themselves within the gallery scene. But they are less often trying to make a statement about capturing the artistic zeitgeist, or cataloguing artistic worth, or building representative collections. Museums, on the other hand, are driven by exactly those objectives. That’s one of the reasons why the National Gallery of Australia’s purchase of prints of stencil art by street artists had such political and cultural significance – as a museum, the NGA’s interest in street art lends a kind of institutional validation to street art and the artists (something that is important to remember when governments attempt to pour scorn on the cultural value of street art, as has recently been happening in Melbourne).
So what cultural value is generated by the interest of the Tate Modern in street art? Well, of course, you could say it recognises something that has become hugely important in many British cities (especially London) and something which has become of particular cultural importance to young people. You could say that Lewisohn’s assembling of these particular works demonstrates an outward-looking worldview that see beyond any limited self-image of London as the global centre of street art (in his selection of six non-British artists for the exhibition).
All of these things would be correct. But there’s something else worth thinking about, in this consideration of the cultural value of the Tate’s street art exhibition, and in the encounter between street art and museum space. When I first heard that the Tate was putting on an exhibition about street art, I emailed the museum for information, and in their response, I found it very interesting that they said: ‘there is no work in the building, only on the front and in the area’.
This comment was made as part of a helpful and detailed email from the Information Department, and I initially didn’t give it much thought. But after going to the Tate and looking at the façade, and doing the walking tour, and visiting the ‘Information Tunnel’, I was struck by the fact that the ‘street art’ stayed outside the museum. And then struck again, weeks later, when I heard that the works on the outer wall had been removed when the exhibition ended in August.
Ephemerality as part of street art – a recurrent theme in the writings on this blog, and of course a key part of street art culture. But ephemerality is what we expect (and accept) when works are on the street. When they are part of a museum exhibition, why can’t the works be permitted to stick around? No-one, of course, is going to go over or tag works on the front of the Tate Modern (given that cherry pickers were needed to install the images, it seems hard to imagine other artists seriously being able to have much impact on any of these even if they wanted to). But it turns out that the museum can buff the works. The outer wall now looks the same as it ever was…
Since no works made it inside the museum as part of the exhibition, and since the outside has now been returned to its ‘normal’ appearance, there’s little evidence that the Tate ever had an exhibition showcasing street art (except for the items for sale in the gift shop). And that seems – well, ‘wrong’ is too strong a word for it. But think about it: if the Tate Modern bought an artwork by Warhol or by Rothko and then, after a few months, destroyed it… wouldn’t that seem strange? Those works by Blu, Faile, os gemeos and the others were fantastic and wonderful, and are now gone. That the museum played a part in their disappearance somehow feels disappointing to me.
Nesting and dying….
Filed under: art, Art, Street Art | Tags: Miso and Ghostpatrol, Nesting and Dying
Comments (3) Miso and Ghostpatrol, as many of you reading this blog will know, are two artists living and working in Melbourne, and making images both on and off the street. They’re two of the most interesting artists in this city, for a whole range of reasons. For one thing, although they each work as solo artists, they also work together – and their collaborations reach the kind of intense symbiosis that I mentioned in an earlier post (‘Criminal damage?’).
If you are interested in seeing something of their work in a gallery context, they have a show on until 7 November 2008, at metro 5 gallery. The show is called ‘Nesting and Dying’, and in that title you can see some of Miso and Ghostpatrol’s preoccupations: the tension between life and death, the beauty that exists in both, and the need to represent both.
One thing that’s striking about the show is its creation of a distinctive world. The artists have installed the artworks along with a series of objects and contextual items so that the space not longer feels like just a gallery, but suggests itself as something else as well. As for what that ‘something else’ is, there is a lot of ambiguity. There are shelves with objects placed on them; there are stuffed animals in the midst of the floor. It’s hard to say what kind of place is being evoked – someone’s home? a scene from a fairytale? a fantasy?
The artworks themselves are fascinating. There are works by each individual artist. Ghostpatrol has created a number of images made by drawing on pencils. That’s not drawing with pencils, but drawing on pencils. The side of each pencil contains a fragment of a larger image; when the pencils are laid side by side, the fragments create the overall image. The result is something small (only the sum of several pencils, after all), but it represents itself as larger than its components… And it is an image made from the tools used to create images – a wonderful demonstration of reflexivity in an artwork. Along with these there are some lovely drawings, containing many of the figures characteristic of Ghostpatrol’s work. a person, a rabbit, a knife. Small figures in a forest. All drawn with great precision, all extremely appealing, yet at the same time slightly odd, slightly out of kilter.
And Miso’s work – well, there are some lovely, lovely images. I stood for a long time in front of one, a large piece on wooden board, which depicts a female figure – it’s shown on the gallery website, if you would like to take a look. The work contains so many different elements – cut out paper pasted onto the wood, a sketched drawing of part of the figure, decorative textures that suggest the figure’s clothing and which also flow into the wooden backdrop. Something in this image really resonated with me – perhaps it’s because the female figure seems to be both emerging out of and receding into the background. It’s technqiue like this that explains why Miso’s paste-ups can work so well on the street – the figures look both to be an integral part of the setting in which they appear and also separate enough from it to generate a fleeting conversation with it.
In addition to their solo works, the artists have created some images together. These are interesting because one can still see the ‘hand’ of each individual artist at work within them, while the two distinctive styles mesh together really well. And overall, it is fascinating to try and think through how and why their styles, even within the exhibition as a whole, produce this gorgeously resonant collaboration. There’s a shared palette of colours (browns, grey, black, bone), for one thing, and an interest in textures (wood, paper, stone). But more than this, there’s a strong sense of a shared sensibility of the image. In trying to capture what this is, I can’t do any better than quote the words of my partner, who came to the show with me. Looking around the gallery, he said that it was as if the works were illustrations in a book of fairytales in which the stories had not yet been written. And that’s it: these strange, evocative, heartfelt, uncanny images make visible for us – momentarily – the unwritten stories that animate them.
A moment of maternal pride…
On Saturday I was walking down Brunswick Street in Fitzroy with my daughter, when I spotted one of Miso and Ghostpatrol’s paste-ups – one of the ones depicting themselves in fox masks. The image was pasted up on the side of an airconditioner, positioned high outside a hairdresser’s.
Here’s a close-up of the work:
I said to my daughter, ‘Look – up there! Do you see what’s stuck up there?’ My daughter, in a very matter of fact voice, said, ‘Yes, yes, it’s by Miso and Ghostpatrol.’
In the midst of my embarassment at not realising how well-developed her awareness of street art is becoming, I felt a huge sense of delight and pride – both in her ability to recognize the artists who had made this artwork, and in her growing up with an interest in and appreciation of art in the street as well as in galleries and museums.
Mind you, knowing what happens when ‘teenage rebellion’ kicks in, she’ll probably join RAGE or something when she grows up. (Hope not!) But for now – all good!
What Banksy did next….
Filed under: Art, Street Art | Tags: Banksy, Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill
Comments (1) Banksy is the most famous street artist in the world at present – he is a household name in Britain and an inspiration to many artists. He’s a celebrity figure, with his work selling for huge sums of money, and there’s also something of a secondary Banksy industry completely separate to the artist himself (and, it has to be said, exploiting his fame): for example, Banksy birthday cards, Banksy T-Shirts, and prints of digital photos of his works are sold at dozens of shops and market stalls around London.
His own publications (such as Wall and Piece) have sold in massive numbers and his website (here) has got to be one of the most visited street art sites on the net. He organised and funded the Cans Festivals (which I have written about in this blog already) – a massively generous gesture which put the work of street artists and graffiti artists from around the world on display in a disused tunnel in London.
His own work is distinguished by some very recognizable characteristics and motifs – rats, the balloon girl, the Tesco supermarket bag, a certain mockery of the police (for example, his ‘snorting copper’, hoovering up a massive line of cocaine as he kneels on the ground) and a facility for snappy slogans (for example, ‘One Nation Under CCTV’).
And just when you might have been thinking that his work had settled into a format so recognizable that it might almost be in danger of becoming a brand, Banksy has managed to surprise everyone again, by staging what is simultaneously an artwork, an installataion and an event, in New York City.
The Banksy Village Pet Store & Charcoal Grill is situated in a former shopfront, displaying in cages what looks at first glance like animals, as you would expect in any pet shop. Closer inspection reveals mutant creatures, fast food items behaving like animals, and animals in contexts designed to provoke discomfort in the spectator about the uses we make of animals, such as testing cosmetics upon animals such as rabbits, or turning animals into hot dogs and burgers (the very title of the work shows Banksy’s interest in interrogating the link between a pet store, which is about our desire to domesticate animals as our pets, and a restaurant, which is about our desire to flame-grill them on hot coals and eat the result).
Many people have responded to this work with delight, but also with surprise, as if it’s a huge departure for Banksy. And in some ways it is – it’s a long way from a stencil on a wall to a moving hot dog in a display case. But it’s also worth recalling Banksy’s painted, living elephant, displayed in Los Angeles – an artwork constructed to undercut the well-worn phrase, ‘the elephant in the room’ (check it out here). That piece showed Banksy’s interest in the moving image (not cinema, but the image that literally moves). And perhaps since that work attracted some criticism (people asked if it was cruel to paint the elephant), in Banksy’s Village Pet Store & Charcoal Grill the creatures are animatronic creations, and far more uncanny as a result.
For those of you lucky enough to be in or near New York City, you can see these creatures ‘in the flesh’, as it were. Those of us elsewhere will have to make do with watching the many videos uploaded onto YouTube. Enjoy!
Superheroes forever…?
Filed under: Art, Street Art | Tags: Anthony Lister, D*Face, London, masculinity, Meggs, Melbourne, Superheroes
Comments (1) I’ve been thinking a lot about superheroes lately. This might sound odd, but they seem to be in the cultural (and political) air at the moment.
Superheroes have featured in recent shows by three artists: Anthony Lister, an artist from Brisbane who now lives and works in Brooklyn; D*Face, one of the mainstays of the London street art scene; and Meggs, based in Melbourne. All of them feature superhero figures in their work – and all of these superheroic figures are in some way twisted, or subverted, or undercut in the way they are depicted by the artists.
Lister has had two shows recently, one at Elms Lesters in London (with WK Interact), and ‘This Won’t Change Anything’ at metro 5 gallery in Melbourne. I only got the briefest glimpse of the Melbourne show, but I think there are some really interesting things going on in his work right now. The figures in his works emerge out of the paint, alluded to rather than rendered in explicit detail.. Colours are sometimes thin, pale or insubstantial, almost gauzy. The combination of these inchoate figures and Lister’s ethereal brushstrokes creates a superhero who is rather less than heroic – a fleeting character rather than one with the definitive qualities of the hero.
In D*Face’s current show ‘Apopcalypse’, at Black Rat Press in London, several works feature superheroes. In one, Batman is shown hanging by the neck from a noose; in another, part of Superman’s face has been replaced by a ghastly skull. These characters, usually associated with strength, invincibility and power, are in this show made problematic. Their presence seems less to do with ‘saving the world’ (as superheroes conventionally do) and more to do with (the evils of) capitalism.
Many of the works in this show take a swipe at the institutions of capitalism (see for example ‘American Depress’, an ‘altered’, expanded replica of the Amex credit card). What then should we make of an image such as Batman hanged by the neck? Is he the victim of a corrupt system? Or is he a part of that corruption? The link between superheroes and capitalism does not, in these strange times, seem at all strained: merchant bankers have previously shown, in their uncritical adoption of Tom Wolfe’s critical epithet ‘masters of the universe’, that they are not averse to viewing themselves as all-powerful superheroes. And I write this entry on a day when I read in the London newspapers that the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, is being described as ‘a superhero’ by European financiers for his bailout of the banks. Perhaps the current global financial crisis gives D*Face’s critique of capitalist superheroes an unexpectedly topical edge.
in Meggs’ recent work, the ‘Own Worst Enemy’ show at Dont Come gallery in Melbourne and which can be seen here, there’s no critique of capitalism, but it’s possible to read the works as a critique of powerful masculinity. The images draw heavily on comics and their rendition of the superhero, but rather than depicting singular characters (a ‘Batman’, a ‘Phantom’ and so on), these works feature a figure who is an uncomfortable hybrid of several superheroes. His costume sometimes shows the pointed ears of Batman, sometimes the purple colours of the Phantom, sometimes a winged helmet, sometimes the features of He-Man, and so on. In looking at the figures we recognize each of these as markers of the various superheroes, and thus subscribe to the idea that by means of such markers we can identify them – only to find that the figures resist easy identification, always presenting themselves as uncertain amalgamations and alternatives.
And ‘uncertain’ is a key word here. The figure embodies uncertainty. In a number of images his face grimaces in pain or distress; in others, he cowers away from an unseen threat or attacker. In one series (‘Don’t Know, Don’t Care’), he turns his head away, eyes closed, saying, ‘Don’t…’. The depiction of a superhero in postures of distress, uncertainty, powerlessness or injury radically undercuts the standard associations we have for such figures, converting them from figurs of salvation and rescue, into characters who may need rescue themselves.
Which means that, adapting the classic question ‘who guards the guards’, we should ask, ‘who is there to save a saviour?’. When ‘white knights’ and superheroes are incomplete, corruptible, or vulnerable, it may well be time to reconsider our cultural and political assumption that there will always be someone to rescue us.
Images to Live By 