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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.
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.
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.
It was no statue, no monument, no model. It was flesh and bone: 18 hands of taut muscle and sculpted flanks, such was the way this horse moved. Yet, flicking his tail and twitching his ears as if troubled by flies, this was a horse made of wood, a fragile and skeletal cane frame, bent round plywood and bound by twine. It could trot and gallop, bolt and rear, and, with aluminium spinal structures, it could comfortably carry a man as well. But it wasn’t just that he (a stallion named Joey) could do all these things which enthralled; it was how he did them, how he breathed, how he shivered with fear, bent down to feed, and kicked against the stable with his hind legs when cornered by men he did not trust. Operated by three puppeteers, two inside moving the main body and legs with another outside overseeing the head and neck, the audience was invited to fill in the gaps, to forget the wood, and instead fall heart first into a story of a young boy separated from his horse by The War. That’s the thing with puppets. In communicating ideas and stories that real people and animals can’t touch, those watching are forced to turn to their own imaginations to complete what they see. And in the imagination, what we see and feel can be so much more moving than any black and white tale that allows for no interpretation whatsoever. You feel involved, a part of the action.
To even imagine, in the first place, bringing Michel Morpurgo’s classic children’s tale, War Horse, to the stage would be one thing; going ahead with it and pulling it off as the Handspring Puppet Company have done with the National Theatre is quite another.
If you can find tickets, go. If not, try again.
And while on the subject of puppets, perhaps some of you missed this extraordinary piece of puppetry from the Royal de Luxe theatre company last year:
Now that magenta is safe, we thought it time for a bit more colour chat. According to the futurists over at the Future Laboratory, Pantone 395C will rise in 2008 to become the undisputed, all singing, all dancing king of colour. Yes, the greeny yellow you see on the end of that banana you eat every day - the bit you rip through - is set for a big year:
“This jaunty tone is one of the key colours for 2008 and beyond. Yellow will see an increased use in advertising and communication, conveying notions of immediacy, action and emotional warmth. Expect complex tones rather than straightforward brights.”
I’m not sure I like being told what colours to like but hey, these guys need to make a living. Time will tell if they’re right or not. Watch this space in twelve months time...
Nowhere else in the world will you find such a burgeoning street art scene than you do in Buenos Aires. Why though? Perhaps it’s to do with a politically involved population. BA is the social and political centre of Argentina so it’s inevitable that political commentaries be played out on the walls of its many streets; in Buenos Aires, there is much to say. Take the Dirty War of 1977, six years of military dictatorship and state-sponsored violence against activists, radicals, students and anyone with remotely left wing views. In 1976, a year before the violence began in earnest, one general made a sinister prediction: “We’re going to have to kill 50,000 people: 25,000 subversives, 20,000 sympathisers, and we will make 5,000 mistakes.” In reality, the number of deaths was nearer 30,000. They were known then, and still are, as ‘The Disappeared’, taken from their homes, their bodies thrown like lifeless sacks into the Rio de la Plata. Their families (mostly the mothers) met every Thursday at the Plaza de Mayo; they became known as Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo, and many still meet today in the hope of being reunited with their children. Around the square itself, images of their white scarves (symbols of their plight) have been painted on the tiles (see above). It’s disturbing stories such as these that inform much of the art you see around you when walking the streets of Buenos Aires.
But not all the street art there is overtly political. DOMA, an Argentine collective of artists who emerged during the now defining year for Argentinean street art, 1998, are not so interested in a turbulent political past as they are in the present, the here and now. Since ‘98, they’ve set out to interfere in all the information channels available to us in today’s media saturated environment (Argentina is widely considered to be the most European city in South America), specialising in motion graphics, animation, filming, VJing and toy design. They move all over the world, intent on studying people’s reactions to their works. After all, what is the point of art if there’s no reaction, no interaction? “We could write a book about reactions,” they say. It’s what interests them most. They put their Giant Dummy (pictured) downtown in Buenos Aires and the way most people reacted to it was, I believe, a little sad, if not entirely predictable. On their way to work, briefcase in one hand, papers in the other, people walked by as if it wasn’t even there. Most didn’t even look at it. Some people, or rather most people, just aren’t interested in anything remotely creative, imaginative or just plain fun. They haven’t the time; there are serious matters to attend to. I often think that about people in this country. People walk the streets with eyes trained on the ground in front of them. They notice nothing, stopping only when pedestrian lights tell them to, on a one man mission to nowhere. Of course, it was the younger generations that fell in love with the Giant Dummy, perhaps the ones who haven’t yet surrendered to the pressure to conform.
I know people living in Buenos Aires at the moment. All I hear is good things, snapshots in my inbox of a place where anything goes, a city regalvanised by its thriving culture, whose city walls are but great canvases to the imagination.
Read about DOMA’s views on corporate sponsorship of street artists and graffiti, their love of Nintendo, their analog appreciation of the world, and recent collaborations with Kidrobot in a great little interview here; and be sure to check their own website here.
And for "trends, innovations and inspirations about Buenos Aires - a true map of the city", this will do the trick.
“Even graffiti, if you see it in a different way, can be celebratory. I don’t think it and these buildings always need to be associated with violence. They are quite grand structuresin their own way.” DAVID HEPHER
Or, at least, they were once grand. They were once modernist symbols of regeneration and great concrete odes to Le Corbusier’s infatuation with “breton brut”. In the UKin particular, this strain of modernism, the one that spawned structures such as The British Film Institute and The National Theatre on the Southbank, became known as Brutalism, and it accounted for many concrete high rise housing blocks like those we encounter in Hepher’s pictures. Structures like Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower in West London once represented modernism’s last stand. Goldfinger himself lived on the top floor of a similar building to try and demonstrate the benefits of high rise living to a cynical public; tall buildings served a worthy function at a time when local councils were still reeling from war damage. But then came tales of women raped in the elevators and children robbed by heroin addicts, and so the buildings earned a reputation. Today, these tall, dank buildings, once upon a time built for the good of society, are seen as towering symbols of inner city angst.
Hepher, it seems, wants to remind us of a more illustrious past. His pictures are not intended, as I presumed, as social commentary or doom-laden depictions of degeneration. They aren’t as predictable as that, and that’s why I like them. Painted on canvases of concrete, making them both of the city and about it, Hepher combines graffiti and photographs of these buildings to try and shift people’s opinions about objects they uniformly condemn as ugly or dangerous. He sees beauty where others don’t.
The conservative view puts both graffiti and tower block living in the same hat as gun crime and gang culture, but Hepher, a man of 72 years no less, uses his creativity to show us that this isn’t necessarily the case.
Peter Schneider’s superb novel, The Wall Jumper, reminds us that, even in difficult times - in this case a city gripped by the effects of the Berlin Wall - there’s plenty room for a little imagination, creativity and determination. This excerpt makes the point, albeit with a decent helping of irony...
“In the early sixties a circus acrobat had used a high-tension wire as a tightrope to walk into the West. And hadn’t a pole-vaulting champion used the Wall as a bar and cleared it with room to spare? There was no end to the list, and on the basis of sheer imagination, it would be difficult to select candidates for a hall of fame (of wall jumping).
The suppression in the DDR of sports that might lead to border crossing - ballooning and scuba-diving, for instance - had loosed a tide of fantasy and produced a generation of inventors. Snorkels, diving masks, and oxygen tanks had hardly disappeared from the stores before hobbyists of all kinds began fashioning replacements out of bicycle inner tubes, home heating gas containers, and rubber aprons. Where in a hall of fame would one place the auto mechanic who developed a miniature motor to pull him across the Baltic under water? And how would one rank the engineer who, after searching the specialty bookstores in vain for textbooks on aerodynamics, rediscovered the principal of the hot air balloon?
The one sure thing - and here the dialogue on the Wall could take a philosophical turn - was that every improvement in the border system had spurred the creative drive to find a new loophole. The urge to master the Wall didn’t differ in substance, perhaps, from the impulse to climb K2: the Wall, like the mountain, was there; and the challenge would persist as long as the Wall remained standing.”
“In the early sixties a circus acrobat had used a high-tension wire as a tightrope to walk into the West. And hadn’t a pole-vaulting champion used the Wall as a bar and cleared it with room to spare? There was no end to the list, and on the basis of sheer imagination, it would be difficult to select candidates for a hall of fame (of wall jumping).
The suppression in the DDR of sports that might lead to border crossing - ballooning and scuba-diving, for instance - had loosed a tide of fantasy and produced a generation of inventors. Snorkels, diving masks, and oxygen tanks had hardly disappeared from the stores before hobbyists of all kinds began fashioning replacements out of bicycle inner tubes, home heating gas containers, and rubber aprons. Where in a hall of fame would one place the auto mechanic who developed a miniature motor to pull him across the Baltic under water? And how would one rank the engineer who, after searching the specialty bookstores in vain for textbooks on aerodynamics, rediscovered the principal of the hot air balloon?
The one sure thing - and here the dialogue on the Wall could take a philosophical turn - was that every improvement in the border system had spurred the creative drive to find a new loophole. The urge to master the Wall didn’t differ in substance, perhaps, from the impulse to climb K2: the Wall, like the mountain, was there; and the challenge would persist as long as the Wall remained standing.”
Lego. Oh how I used to love it. If you’re a guy, you probably did too. And if you’re a girl, then you’ll remember swallowing a few of your brother’s bricks.
Darren Neave and John Cake, AKA The Little Artists, still do love Lego, and they use it rather mischievously to question what it means to be an artist in today’s commodity-driven and throwaway culture by recreating famous artworks (particularly those of the YBA artists of the early 90s) with Lego bricks and people. No glue, no painting on the figures. Pure Lego. In themselves, the works are imaginative, creative and, more than anything, amusing.
But I think there’s more to them than that. Lego has always placed great emphasis on encouraging creativity in young children by getting them to dream something up in their minds before making those dreams happen with the tools (the little bricks) they supply. Neave and Cake’s works are, in effect, a silent homage to that Lego aesthetic: little bricks that, with a little imagination and creativity, as well as a great deal of determination, eventually became art.
We’re not sure if they did this, but it’s worth a look anyway.
Darren Neave and John Cake, AKA The Little Artists, still do love Lego, and they use it rather mischievously to question what it means to be an artist in today’s commodity-driven and throwaway culture by recreating famous artworks (particularly those of the YBA artists of the early 90s) with Lego bricks and people. No glue, no painting on the figures. Pure Lego. In themselves, the works are imaginative, creative and, more than anything, amusing.
But I think there’s more to them than that. Lego has always placed great emphasis on encouraging creativity in young children by getting them to dream something up in their minds before making those dreams happen with the tools (the little bricks) they supply. Neave and Cake’s works are, in effect, a silent homage to that Lego aesthetic: little bricks that, with a little imagination and creativity, as well as a great deal of determination, eventually became art.We’re not sure if they did this, but it’s worth a look anyway.
