Recently in Art Category
We put up those pics of some Blu pieces we snapped in Berlin, but check this. It's called 'Muto' (Mute).
In 1968, under the lights of his dentist’s chair, Philippe Petit got wind of a pair of giant towers under construction in New York City. An idea was born. “When I see three oranges, I juggle,” he once said. “And when I see two towers, I walk.”
Continue reading HIGH CRIME.
A friend returned from Berlin today bearing pictures of works by esteemed Italian artist Blu. They kind of speak for themselves.
This month, Adidas had two 15 foot Superstar trainers built: one for the left foot (of a giant) and another for the right. They then sent one to LA and one to NY and got an artist collective from East and West to represent their respective coastline: the East coast collective, Surface2Air, took care of the right shoe; and Upper Playground, from San Francisco, took care of the left. The whole process was recorded on film before the NY shoe was packed up and driven to Venice Beach where it was reunited with its long lost left-footed brother...
CHECK THE LINK BELOW FOR THE FULL VIDEO.
Continue reading THE LEFT RIGHT PROJECT.
In 2002, Canadian artist Melanie Coles won a trip to the U.S. with her high school courtesy of NASA, and, in a stadium filled with students, they watched a live photo of themselves beamed onto a big screen from a satellite camera in space. Now, though, those cameras won’t be looking for Melanie, but for Waldo, known here in the UK as the literary legend Wally of considerable Where’s Wally fame. From vinyl sheet, and with the help of her little team, she’s created a giant Wally that, when the Google cameras update, will show up on Google Earth. And so the whole planet becomes the latest update to the Wally books: Where’s Wally for the 21st Century.
Read more about it here or follow the link below for an interview with Wally himself.
Continue reading WHERE ON EARTH IS WALLY?.
Safe to say Barack owes writer Juse One a drink or two.
Aaron Rose has an interesting take on street art. It’s like Blues or Jazz, he says: initially frowned upon but increasingly understood. It’s a neat comparison, and right now, with the emergence of urban art auctions and the great celebrity of Banksy, it seems we’re in the midst of that mainstream acceptance. But Rose has been involved since the very beginning, since he was 19, when he found himself alone in New York having recently moved there from the San Fernando Valley in LA. A woman he met there offered him a rundown store space:
“It was very cheap in a bad area of town. The neighborhood was just heroin and crime etc. We opened this art gallery not knowing what we wanted to do. I never wanted to be an art dealer. I didn’t have any art world experience. I just had a space and so we started putting up shows and we called the gallery Alleged after these (alleged) good luck candles that they sold in the Puerto Rican grocery stores. It was an Alleged gallery, not a real gallery.”
Perhaps, were it still around, it might be considered a ‘real’ gallery today. There would be plenty of things to put in it, that’s for sure. Rose is clearly in love with creativity - in a head over heels kind of way. He’s always doing something, pushing something, helping someone, getting people to express themselves in whatever medium they like. His Beautiful Losers film just premiered in the States, he has a travelling exhibition that goes by the same name, and is one of the four co-editors of the wonderful ANP Quarterly, a magazine born of their own dissatisfaction with most of the titles available on shelves:
“Our goal is not to focus on current events or who’s hot but rather to bring forward people and phenomena that deserve acknowledgment and coverage regardless of their place in time. For as long as we can make it happen, this magazine will be completely free and without advertising. We are beholden to nobody, save our own conscience.”
That seems to have been the attitude that has guided Rose throughout his eclectic career from naive but exuberant gallery owner to editor and film director. He’s simply a tireless promoter of creative expression, and if he wants to do something, then he’ll just do it. Just do it eh? Yep, and he’s done loads of stuff for Nike.
“I’ve just kind of stumbled into stuff. I guess I have ideas and then just try to follow through with them. It looks far more impressive from afar!”
It certainly does.
Someone once asked OS GÊMEOS, the identical twin brothers and original pioneers of Brazilian graffiti, what makes them want to write. Why do what you do, was the question, and this their response:
“Hate and love, living in a country where you have to survive, the simple look of a child asking for money in the street, living in a country where the government doesn't care about you, where there are no laws, where people are paid miserable salaries and are still smiling, waking up sometimes and realising it was only a dream. Idolatry, lack of union, vanity, ego, jealousy, people who need others to be somebody, people who use the others. Love. We are proud to be Brazilians from São Paulo, to know that what we believe in exists, to write incorrectly in Portuguese, to live some moments that seem eternal, to use firecrackers in the street, to build fires in those streets, to tell lies to the police, to know that our family loves us, to do things without thinking, using latex and rollers, to paint in the street with out clothes dirty from the paint, to go up on a ladder without a shirt, to be from South America, to use the city, ugly things, to know we fly in the fog, and to float paper boats in the rain.”
Good enough for us.
Beautiful Losers is a new feature documentary film, just premiered in the States, that celebrates the independent and DIY spirit that unified a loose-knit group of American artists who emerged from the underground youth subcultures of skateboarding, graffiti, punk rock and hip hop - the likes of Ed Templeton (above), Shepard Fairey (whose art was recently shown in London - see below), Harmony Korine and Mike Mills. Directed by Joshua Leonard, it explores the remarkable impact that this group of influential outcasts have had on contemporary culture. How, for instance, does a young guy learning to skate become an internationally renowned photographer? They are imaginative doers, people united by an artistic independence who have somehow gone from here to there without really knowing what happened in between. “The real magic lies not only in the fact that we were acknowledged, but that, really, none of us were supposed to get there,” says Aaron Rose. “This is art created by a group of individuals who, in the eyes of society, were considered outcasts. When we started making our work it was never even an option to think of having a career.”
Perhaps the one guy who best encapsulates the kind of artistic success no one could have predicted is Ed Templeton (above), the non-smoking, teetotaling, vegan “hippie who hates hippies.” One of the first to take skateboarding beyond the bowls and pipes and out into the real world (street skating to you and I), Templeton turned to photography early on and, inspired by the brutal realism of the likes of Larry Clark, began to document his own life, firstly in skating but later in a far wider context: “I realised I was missing out on all this great subject matter that I was living around.” The shackles were off. There was so much more to say beyond skateboarding: “Every free moment I’m walking around the streets shooting photos of life in general. But I don’t stop there, I keep going, into my house.” And into the bedroom if his series of nude pictures of his wife Deanna are anything to go by...
Templeton wonders if he’ll be remembered when he’s gone, but if he isn’t, then he’s determined to ensure that his work is. “The thing I dislike is art that seems to have no craft. It’s just a clever idea and you have to have gone to years of art school to understand why it means anything. A fabricated blue cube on the wall says nothing to me, but a painting made by hand about subject dear to the artist says a lot more. Seriously documenting a certain time or group of people - that has a chance of going down in history as interesting.” That’s exactly what Beautiful Losers seems to have done: celebrating the people who, both as individuals and as a group, embody the boundless creative spirit that will always transcend what lesser people see only as limitations.
CHECK OUT OUR RECENT PIECE ON LARRY CLARK, THE PHOTOGRAPHER AND FILMMAKER WHO INSPIRED ED TEMPLETON, RIGHT HERE, AND ALSO ANP, THE BEAUTIFUL FREE-OF-CHARGE, FREE-OF-ADVERTISING ART MAGAZINE THAT HE NOW EDITS. A JACK OF ALL TRADES IN THE TRUEST SENSE...
You could write a thesis on the influence and significance of street art. But why not use film to tell the story. Better than that, documentary film in its purest form - a locked-off camera edited into a time-lapse piece. For over an hour, Jeremy Gibbs stood across the street from fresh work by Banksy on Essex Road, London, and filmed people who stopped to look and take photos.
The great thing about the film is that it captures the diversity of the audience. This isn’t about grubby kids vandalising for its own sake. It's about a blank canvas, and an artist with the determination to make his voice heard. The not so great thing about the film - the music. Sorry about that.
