Art: February 2008 Archives
Art on the internet. Some of it’s great, some of it’s instantly forgettable, but there’s no denying that it represents possibilities that artists only fifteen years ago could only have dreamed of, the kind of opportunities that Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar explore in the seemingly never ending We Feel Fine. Please, please, please check it out. It’s astonishing not just for the ambition of the idea, but for the slickness of the execution and, most of all, for the way it presents a snapshot of people’s emotions all over the world - on your screen!
Explore it HERE - click on 'Open We Feel Fine'. The Mission and Movement statements help to explain a little more about the project.
Art has an audience, a gallery and a purpose, but Jorge Rodriguez Gerada challenges our preconceptions of all these things in his urban murals that render common people in charcoal on giant town walls. They become local icons overnight. Each protagonist is taken from the streets of his or her own neighbourhood. Days later, their faces adorn one of its walls.
His art is not so much about the charcoal drawing as the process: the search for a city, a building, the person that not only represents the locality but is also happy to have his or her fifteen minutes of fame, and the deterioration of the charcoal because of time or rain. They become David to the Goliath of advertising, politics or even large scale commissioned art in public spaces.
A Cuban living in the U.S., Gerada is fascinated by the idea of personal identity. All his work concerns its fragility and the ease with which it can chop and change. But we won't try and interpret it any further. Instead, we'll leave it to the man himself:
So says Mike Snelle of East London art dealer Black Rat Press. But affordable to who exactly? Judging by the £1 million worth of fees accumulated during last week’s Bonhams ‘Urban Art’ auction, affordable to a minority, that’s who. Nick Walker (see below), a British artist, sold Moona Lisa, a spray-paint-on-canvas piece from 2006, for £54,000, more than ten times its upper estimate. Other lesser known artists sold pieces for similarly inflated prices. And no prizes for guessing who’s work sold for the highest . Yep, Banksy’s Laugh Now, a chimpanzee with a sandwich board over his shoulders, fetched £228,000. An upcoming exhibition of Banksy’s work at the Andipa Gallery, London, prices Banksy’s Bombing MIddle England at £300,000.
How strange to see works created for the street, for mass democratic viewing, being removed from their intended setting and placed in the hands of a private owner. Banksy argues that ‘street art’ shouldn’t be sold by auction houses and that any shows in established art galleries have nothing to do with him: “It’s all stuff they bought previously. I only ever mount shows in warehouses and war zones.” Street art for sale? An interesting paradox.
Elsewhere on his site, Banksy continues to list his influences with stories about the writers that inspired him. I don’t remember seeing any of these in an auction house; must have missed it...
"In 1974 a 33 year old man named George Davis was convicted of robbing the payroll of the London Electricity Board in Ilford. He was nailed on the evidence of cops who were outside the bank at the time of the robbery and was sent to prison for 20 years.
However, his friend Peter Chappell was convinced Davis was innocent and inspired by discrepancies in the police statements and the fact that none of the bloodstains at the scene matched with the defendant, started calling for Davis' release. Chappell enrolled some friends and embarked on one of the largest sustained graffiti campaigns Britain has ever seen. Over the following months 'G DAVIS IS INNOCENT' appeared on walls, bridges and tunnels from one side of London to the other, some of which are still visible today.
The vandalism culminated in Chappell and four others breaking into Headingley cricket ground in August 1975 the night before a test match between England and Australia. Using plastic cutlery from a service station they dug holes in the pitch, filled them with oil and painted 'Sorry it had to be done, but George Davis is innocent' in large white letters on the wall as they left. The match was postponed and Chappell got 18 months for criminal damage.
The campaign brought the case to the attention of the Home Secretary who after a police inquiry released Davis two years into his sentence using the highly exceptional and controversial Royal Prerogative of Mercy.
The fight to free George Davis was one of the most spectacular campaigns ever fought against injustice, an achievement only slightly marred when a year after his release Davis was found guilty of robbing the Bank of Cyprus for which he served six years, and three years after which he was caught red-handed robbing a mail train.
George Davis is now a free man and happily married to the daughter of a North London Chief Inspector of Police."
"I decided that I wasn't going to turn the camera away, or shut the door, or shoot from the waist up." LARRY CLARK
If that’s how you choose to shoot a film - if you opt for bare loins, incestuous abuse and teenage suicide - then, to get your film shown in the UK, punching, wrestling and attempting to throttle the man in charge of your distribution company - the one person with the power to say no - would probably be something worth avoiding. Unfortunately, Larry Clark (pictured in everyday dress above) punched, wrestled and throttled Hamish McAlpine, head of Metro Tartan, the UK distribution company for Clark’s controversial 2002 film, Ken Park.
The film was banned in the UK. Surely not. It was banned in Australia, too, and with no hint of a scuffle. Clark gets a bad press all too easily. Take that altercation with McAlpine: on the surface, it could be construed as a crazed act from an artist on the cusp of rejection; look a little deeper, though, and you discover that it was anything but - Clark’s assault had nothing to do with the film and everything to do with McAlpine voicing his support, in conversation with Clark, for Hamas terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians. And so it is with his work: loaded with potentially controversial content, but never simply for its own sake.
His own 38 minute entry for the Destricted Project, a 2006 feature film created to explore the increasingly merged boundaries between pornography and art through seven shorts from seven different artists, is a case in point. Despite the list of high-profile entrees (Matthew Barney, Marina Abramovic, Richard Prince, Sam Taylor-Wood and Gaspard Noé), Clark’s piece was the only one to escape widespread criticism, and it does it by extending the brief to incorporate prevalent social issues. Throughout his career, from his first photographic series, Tulsa (see above), through his feature films and right up to his current exhibition here in London, he has demonstrated a fascination with the youth of today, particularly those from impoverished backgrounds, and the real and present dangers impacting on their lives. Reality has been an ever present in his work. There was nothing fanciful about those early Tulsa pictures (1963-1971), nothing exaggerated, nothing artificial. Clark was simply documenting his own existence and, in doing so, revealing a dirty American underbelly that society was all to eager to sweep under the carpet: “I was coming out of the 1950s where everything was repressed. Back then in America there was no talk of drugs and things like that. It wasn't supposed to exist, but it did.”
It’s been the same with his films. The events in Kids, the film for which Clark is perhaps best known, were based almost entirely on real people and events witnessed during a three year period in which Clark immersed himself in the New York skate scene. The only thing not true in the film is the girl who gets AIDs from her first sexual encounter. Although people watching it might think it obscene and contrived, it was real people dealing with real problems. And that’s how he approached the Destricted Project, as an opportunity to investigate something more important than just sex as art. Clark views pornography as something negatively affecting young people today because of its widespread availability: “I’m curious about the fact that kids nowadays see it. I have a daughter of 21, a son of 24, and I’ve been taken aback by what they’re exposed to. The innocence I had as a kid just isn’t around anymore.” To investigate, he interviewed a bunch of young American men about their relationship with pornography. He then picked one who would be free to have sex with a female porn star of his own choosing. Clark filmed it. The resulting sequence, preceded by interviews, makes for sad and, at times, tragic viewing: young men psychologically confused by the pornographic stereotypes paraded as normal. Again, these are real problems affecting young people today - problems that most won't dare discuss.
Last week, I ended up - I’m not sure how - at the opening of Clark’s latest exhibition, Los Angeles 2003-2006, at the Simon Lee Gallery in London. The series of pictures follows a four year period in the life of Jonathan Velasquez (above), the young adolescent who inspired Clark’s last film, Wassup Rockers, and it's a series that once more reflects his enduring fascination with the marginalised youth of today. In following Velasquez so closely, and in placing hims so clearly in the context of an uneasy social environment, the pictures constitute an intriguing narrative in which we wonder just how the subject will turn out in the end. What will happen to him? Will he fall foul to some of the ills commonly affecting other young kids in South Central? Clark has followed Velasquez as he navigates his way through one of the most difficult periods of anyone’s life, a period during which people balk at nothing but rarely think about the consequences of their perceived omnipotence. When you’re young, you honestly think you can get away with anything; and rarely do you think about the significance of some of the choices you are forced to make.
This idea of choice is, for Clark and for us, an important one for people of all ages, but more so for younger generations who have most of their lives stretched out in front of them - entire lives at the mercy of a single moment of choice. One choice can change everything. This fragility of youth has formed a consistent backbone to Clark’s work of the last thirty-odd years, and it continues to fascinate him even today. To those that view films like Ken Park as immoral and needlessly obscene, he responds:
“There’s a moral centre to all the films. I think: consequences, you know? Since the Tulsa book I’ve been called many, many names: ‘pornographer’, ‘child pornographer’, ‘garbage’, ‘trash’, ‘he’s romanticising drugs’ and on and on and on. But there is a moral centre to all the work and the moral centre is ‘consequences’. The consequences of everything we do.”
The consequences of choice. Something worth remembering.
This chap is incredible. Most of his work is done using nothing but A4 paper - the stuff we use everyday without thinking - plus a knife and maybe a bit of glue to create incredibly fragile, beautiful, fun and in a wierd way quite tragic creations.
Over to the man himself, Peter Callesen: "I find this materialization of a flat piece of paper into a 3D form almost a magic process - or maybe one could call it obvious magic, because the process is obvious and the figures still stick to their origin, without the possibility of escaping. I find the A4 sheet of paper interesting to work with, because it probably still is the most common and consumed media and format for carrying information today, and in that sense it is something very loaded. This means that we rarely notice the actual materiality of the A4 paper"
For what it's worth, I think he's right. I love all his work but there is something particularly breathtaking about the stuff on A4. Anyway there are too many awesome pictures to show you so just have a look at his very user friendly website:
www.petercallesen.com
Your heart thuds like an analog kick drum, repeated over and over, quickening now and then, but always there, the only rhythm to a dark and silent night. You feel the heat of your breath brewing in the mask that covers your face, but you’ve observed the movements of the guards for days now so you hope you won’t need its protection. You also know it’s rarely that easy. You know you have ten minutes to get in, write and get out.
Similarly masked, a friend lifts the lid on the man hole and you drop inside, into the dark, into the underground.
This is the life of the underground writer, any graffiti artist who chooses to write on tube trains in major cities around the world. And it’s the life that Alex Fasko describes in Heavy Metal, a stunning photographic tribute to the writers that actually live those lives, day in, day out. The book is not simply a case of cold documentation. Instead, it brings to life a foreign existence, a life we really know nothing about. The hushed stillness of the night, the fear of being caught, the preparation, the speed and efficiency of the work, the determination required to succeed: we sense them all in Fasko’s pictures.
And in his commentary at the beginning of the book he provides some illuminating thoughts on the motivations and insights behind his work, issues that will resonate deeply with anyone involved with any kind of personal pursuit that others deem not normal:
“Introspection is no easy exercise, and it’s difficult finding words to describe the long path that brought life to this work. What direction had my thoughts taken?
Where was my creativity driving me throughout the slow and uncertain process of this book taking shape, like a newborn stream, from the very resistances and warnings of both friends (though supportive, at times they were skeptical) and enemies (chasing me day and night). I shall never forget the lights and smells of each shot: the flash popping among metallic dim neons, the pungent odour of acids and tints, my friends’ sweaters adrenaline-soaked by the excitement of capturing beauty. It wasn’t easy. Like that stream, this books is shaped by the stones of unexpected obstacles, by u-turns, sudden rushes, feverish research, and never ending nights of work. Diaphragm open, diaphragm closed, I have done it hundreds of times, bombarding trains, tunnels, human bodies in motion, capturing, fading, incriminating my subject on the spot, and then immediately forgiving. I have been searching for indisputable certainties among the darkest corners of our cities, and found that those corners are not dark at all: they are simply less illuminated.
One thing is sure: I believed in my work. Catching the action, I made it mine; mine forever, my lucid eternal conscience adding colour to the darkness of my nights. And now, holding this book in my hands, with my backpack full of images and stories, I recognise that old instinct of mine that kept me afloat beyond the outsiders’ line. People usually walk above tunnels and rarely venture into the cool breezy caverns that lie stretched underneath our homes. But there is an instinct, a need for resistance against the monochrome of the distant metropolis, a sometimes cruel, non-accepting society.
I wanted to be part of this resistance. I have resisted previous attempts to dissuade me from the future I had chosen for myself. I have resisted with the two weapons I know: my camera, and my never ending drive to capture hidden, underground realities, places of possible unmeasurable interest.
Places where your hopes and dreams find a name, and where colour emerges from the dark.”
In this era of customisation it seems like any product can be adapted to represent its owner. Individuality is currency and people want to be recognised as being unique. Some are braver than others, and for a certain few individuality is a way of life.
With people demanding that which no one else has, there has to be designers with the talent to deliver extraordinary, inimitable work and do it again and again. I caught wind of Rudey about a year ago having seen his work in a shop window, His talents had been spotted by a 'pooled resources' company representing designers, musicians and artists.
The style of Rudey's work is dazzling, and I wanted to know if custom clothing was his only focus. Making contact with him wasn't easy but once I did, I discovered that for him it wasn't so much about the clothes as the art. His work needed to be seen and what better way than for the people to become exhibits and to create a gallery on the streets.
"I had to figure out how to get my work seen, so I started painting on literally everything. I left a wake of colour pretty much everywhere I went. That decision brought a new style to my work which I like, so now I work on the kind of images that I grew up doing but at the same time I'll be painting a pile of trainers with some really unusual design requests."
The thing I love about Rudey's work is that has a really strong feeling of youthful, almost childlike exuberance. It's a riot of colour that takes cultural phenomena like graffiti and freestyle basketball out their hiding places and into the public eye. Refreshingly though it's not a contrived political statement, for Rudey it just is what it is:
"My work is all about fun, it consists of the colours I love and the doodles I doodle. A lot of it has an urban feel but it's very important to me that its not too serious. I stay true to that but sometimes its a fine line between keeping innocent and also expressing elements of darkness and surrealism that may be neccesary for a certain piece."
Rudey's clients range from Marvel Comics to UK Hip-Hop dance champions Diversity, and he always gets a buzz from the continued individual client work. To get an idea of the grassroots though, have a peep at www.rudeyarts.com For me this shows the real Rudey, a collection of images, doodles, clothing design and fine art that looks incredible whether its on a canvas, on a wall, on a cap or in a sketchbook.
