John Nack writes:The Graffiti Archaelogy project uses a Flash interface to let visitors navigate to different heavily tagged spots (links at left), then see the work at various stages (links at bottom). Using the M & N keys to cruise back and forth in time, I'm reminded of watching time lapses of plant life exploding on a surface, dying, and being reborn. [Via|Link]
Frustrated would-be patrons at a Pittsburgh lunch counter express themselves:
Masquerade is a group of graffiti knitters based in Stockholm, Sweden. Their work basically embraces the same cozy Dadaism as Seattle's Knitta group, but these people have some serious organizational skills. They have produced a tourist map of their creations. If you click the image below, you can download it in PDF format.
That's not all. Masquerade has a blog, folks, and that blog has a Platial MapKit.
Knitta doesn't have a blog. Knitta is on MySpace, which has a "blog." MySpace blogs are basically like LiveJournal blogs without the random acts of censorship but with a lot of features that are unfriendly to linking in or communicating via. But I mean no disrespect, and here's why: Late last year, when Knitta started getting some serious press, other knitters started talking about contributing to Knitta's work in other cities. Here's what someone at Knitta wrote in the first of the three MySpace blog posts the group has ever posted:
There's no monopoly on knitting or graffiti. Anyone, anywhere, can do these things. We've only elevated a new trend of combining those two activities and given ourselves street names. This is definitely open to the public. We'd love to see other people tagging with knitted items! We think that'd be great!Two weeks later, Masquerade put up their first blog post.
Here's the sticky part though... We'd like for you to tag under your own unique crew name and individual tags. We'd rather reserve the name "Knitta" and the phrase "Knitta, Please" for ourselves. That's our crew and our motto. Just like graffiti crews everywhere, they all paint, but they all have different names. I think it would be amazing to see different "crews" popping up all over the world, installing little knitted hugs across their cities. Now, when you get "discovered" and start getting press, it'd be great if you threw a wink and a nod in our direction for the inspiration. I think that's fair. We'll nod right back, in the form of posting tag photos and letters you send to us on our website (as soon as we actually go live!). We can even have a list of crew names and locations, complete with photos, on a page - just like graffiti sites.
Graffiti and advertising are kind of like cops and robbers: eerily similar to each other yet at complete opposition.And later:
What’s relatively new is not the selling of graffiti in and around the art world, such as Prigoff's "Spraycan Art" book or mod apparel lines, it is the selling of everyday products using the aesthetic of graffiti and street art, it’s that graffiti is culturally relevant enough that it can be used to sell deodorant, phones, food and cars.Read the full at the link.
Now online at the New Yorker. This stuff doesn't stay available forever, so go read it.
I have mixed feelings about the lack of originality in a lot of Banksy's art. But his persona and story are pure gold, and I have no problem with the lines he walks - financial success|rebellion, celebrity|anonymity. Favorite quote:
“I originally set out to try and save the world, but now I’m not sure I like it enough.”
The only truly deflating ending to this story (and it will end someday) would be if it turned out that Steve Lazarides, his agent/gallerist/spokesperson, really turned out to be him.
Hot on the heels of this great example of ambush advertising, the ad blog How Advertising Spoiled Me sent out a post via RSS last night showing this image:
But the post has since been removed from the blog. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess it was a fake and that someone - the airline? - fooled our friend Arvind. It's always fun to see something you're not supposed to (ever seen a retracted post from Think in Pictures?) but that wouldn't be enough to merit pointing it out, so bear with me. I think this incident highlights one of the most overlooked aspects of our current media age, in which the Internet has pushed progressive advertising methods to be almost entirely conceptual. The actual audience for the physical work is secondary to the virtual audience who will consume it in a manner dictated by those who document the product. And this is a big change. Let me elaborate.
I noted a while back that tone of the main benefits of the Internet for non-permission-based public artists (i.e. graffiti artists) is that ephemeral works can be documented and shared far beyond the place they are created:
Illicit art created in the physical world now has the power to reach vast audiences through its documentation and dissemination via the Internet, and while some of the pleasure of discovery may be missing - imagine stumbling across that row of tanks in Basel versus seeing it here - the objects' poached presence in the real world, and the knowledge that many others have stumbled upon them, and others have walked by them without noticing them, is no less delicious. This accessibility is, of course, wildly divergent from artwork's context in the real world; there, the piece will soon be discovered and likely removed, if this has not happened already. In rare cases, citizens lobby and win the right for a piece of illicit art to be adopted and "legalized," but this requires organization, speed, and open-minded governance. On the web, however, the piece is available to all for as long as it is of interest, and can be passed around among viewers, reinvigorated by new discussion, and take on a virtual life of its own. This is one of the wonderful ways in which the Internet is not like the "real" world: Everyone has a wall to tag, paint, or advertise on, and the strength and relevance of one's message plays a much greater role in its successful infiltration of a virtual visitor's life than any other form of visual or written communication.But while this development allows graffiti art to live on and be a part of a conversation far broader than the local and temporary effect it used to have, it also has the effect of reducing the significance of place, that is, of making the obviousness or accessibility of the graffiti site far less important, because so much of the work's audience is virtual. This means that good, effective public displays may actually be less accessible, less productive, less meaningful for the human beings who interact with the work in the "real world."
The balloon reads "The world can't take anymore [sic] CO2." When the car starts, it inflates, then bursts, surprising the automobile's driver and, presumably, briefly displaying its message to others before doing so. But as a live event, the action is an abject failure. Think about it:The most common critique, however, damns the guerrilla tactic as pointless, as it may be near impossible to read the message on the inflated balloon before it explodes. Given that the campaign has already generated a ton of media, discussion and debate, I think it's fair to say that these detractors have missed the point entirely...There is balance of power - akin to evolution, or to an arms race - between advertisers and their audiences that media critics rarely recognize. We do not simply absorb advertising, but critique, selectively acknowledge, and/or deflect it, and advertisers are always looking for new ways to work around or subvert audience barriers or defenses. I think what I find interesting about the developments in such "secondary" advertising methods (which have been around at least since the days of radio, but have been flourishing in the age of the Internet and digital photography) is that they are, in essence, advertising about advertising, and they utilize new forms of manipulation, against which audiences have not yet developed any successful defenses. As a result, we are all implicated and even enmeshed in these advertising efforts by our receptiveness to, or even our participation in creating, the fictional stories that complete them.
Probably executed using a projector from a fixed viewing point, then painting in the areas designated by the projection. More pictures at the link. The real question (for me, anyway) is does the project look its best when shown from fragments leading towards the whole, as my source blog chooses to present it, or is it better viewed from the whole into fragments? Which tells a better story? Obviously, fragments -> whole best represents a visitor's actual experience at the site. So why do I like seeing the whole first better?
Creator Leonardo Bonanni explains:i put up a bus schedule-looking framed piece of paper with my latest results on untimely deaths at mit. it was sparked by the obvious cover-ups and lies that make mit appear like it has normal suicide rates. then chris asked us to place a container in public, one that wouldn’t get taken down. after studying street signage, i settled on the discrete bus schedule format and built a frame for my spreadsheet. it seems to have worked! it’s still up, one week later. i guess if you carefully camouflage something controversial it can become public information without being torn down.More info and photos at the link.
Apparently Windows Vista ships with some pretty amusing bugs, one of them being an error message which reads "Error. The operation completed successfully." Microsoft will hear that one ringing in their ears for years. Anyway, someone turned this bug into a great bit of culture jamming in Prague...
What is the Absurd? It is, as may quite easily be seen, that I, a rational being, must act in a case where my reason, my powers of reflection, tell me: you can just as well do the one thing as the other, that is to say where my reason and reflection say: you cannot act and yet here is where I have to act... The Absurd, or to act by virtue of the absurd, is to act upon faith ... I must act, but reflection has closed the road so I take one of the possibilities and say: This is what I do, I cannot do otherwise because I am brought to a standstill by my powers of reflection.- Soren Kierkegaard, Journals (1849)
For Camus... People may create meaning in their own lives, which may not be the objective meaning of life, but still provides something for which to strive. However, he insisted that one must always maintain an ironic distance between this invented meaning and the knowledge of the absurd lest the fictitious meaning take the place of the absurd.- Wikipedia entry for "Absurdism"
The Wooster Collective reports on Stephen Brown's recent art project in Germany: "In front of the town's City Hall on the main square, Steven built a stone hearth each night for 10 days (Jan 14-23 2007). He simply built and burned a fire from sunset until midnight. Each night people stopped by and lingered and shared stories. There was no press and word spread the old-fashioned way. Slowly, there became a regular base of people who came every night to interact (and often bring the artist food and drink).""Light Criticism," inspired by the Bubble Project's "Abstractor" project.
[Link]
The Wooster Collective often rubs me the wrong way. From their refusal to critically discuss works of graffiti art to the deafening silence of readers in their comment-disabled blog, the efforts of the graffiti art movement's leading proponent in the blogosphere leave much to be desired. But Marc and Sara Schiller, the couple behind Wooster, have done an amazing thing. Here's hoping they do many more amazing things in the future.
It will be interesting to see how many of the future inhabitants of the condos of 11 Spring St. will recover/uncover the works the developer will be covering up in the renovations. I would be surprised if they could not find ways to sell units with sections of the artwork still intact and uncovered. This graffiti art has the makings of accent walls for the NYC glitterati - profoundly hip, and with a story to tell; a conversation piece about the history of contemporary New York.
I've seen some of Mark Jenkins' "Embedded" street series (see one of my favorite figures below) but have only now learned from his website how much more his work encompasses. The balance of political messages and absurdism is pitch-perfect for illicit public art - it confronts through engaging viewers' curiosity and imagination, and ultimately has opportunities to get people thinking where many graffiti messages only generate a combative response.
The wonderful graffiti hub Art Crimes has added links to my two posts on "Visualizing Dissent" (Graffiti As Art | Art As Graffiti) to the site's excellent Articles section. Susan Farrell's tireless work on this site has made it the best resource for writing about graffiti on the web, not to mention a great source for photographs of recent graffiti writing. I'm honored to have my voice added to the discussion there. Thanks, Art Crimes!
Knitta is a Houston-based group of knitting graffiti artists. I saw this piece at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle after seeing an interesting exhibit of Henry Darger's Vivian Girls drawings, and had a few thoughts on it.
The pieces seem to be generally made for standard-sized objects like this guardrail - they also make sleeves for car antennas, scarves for light poles, and hats for fire hydrants. The pieces are knitted in advance and zip-tied to their host objects.
On the simplest level, the artists are playing with the tension between the domestic connotations of knitting and the public perception of graffiti as an antisocial and radical act, and this may be the group's main purpose. The Stranger (a Seattle weekly, which I used to freelance for when I lived in Seattle) wrote a straightforward piece about Knitta's visit and basically took this position.
Personally, I think this work is a direct descendent of the '90s soft-punk movements (Riotgrrl, emo) and the subsequent '00s punk-craft movement, and in this sense is actually quite unsubversive - especially against the backdrop of a city like Seattle, which, along with Olympia, Portland, and the rest of the Northwest, gave birth to most of the above. For the casual viewer, it does not seem obvious that this should be compared to graffiti, and thus really challenges no one's assumptions. Ironically, their ingratiating and playful form exclude them from the class of objects they hope to parody, comment on, or contribute to, as far as the "audience" of non-graffiti-thinking folks is concerned, which is why I think the Stranger's view misses the point here.
The works are a little more subversive seen from the perspective of graffiti writers and their fans. Knitta's practices violate one guideline of the medium and highlights another in an interesting light.
In terms of contrasts, almost all graffiti is created on-site, and in that sense is both site-specific and a story of its own creation. Knitta's works, while carefully hand-crafted using methods that involve great skill (like good graffiti writing), are not created on-site and appear to be created as a stockpile of materials to be applied to found surfaces and objects. In this sense, Knitta's work is similar to the wheatpaste graffiti art movement, which uses pre-printed posters cut into the shapes of drawn creations, and which have faced challenges by some in the graffiti writing community as thus not qualifying as true graffiti writing, but as simple "tags" - marks that someone has been there and made their mark, but not in a thoughtful way. One argument has been that they do not demonstrate comparable skills, but I think it is equally important to recognize that most of them are not inspired by, that is, drawn out of, a space, but are applied to a space that meets the artwork's preestablished criteria. (Some of the best wheatpaste graffiti works are an exception to this rule, and are clearly site-specific.) In this sense, Knitta pieces suggest some of the strengths of each of these graffiti formats while being very different from each of them.
Wheatpastes also lack some of the excitement of painted graffiti writing because they are relatively quick to put up. A graffiti mural shows off the artist's willingness to take a substantial risk by hanging out somewhere and creating something complex in an illicit context. A wheatpaste takes as long to put up as a poster.
But knitted graffiti speaks to the medium in its acknowledgment of the fragility and short-lived nature of graffiti artworks. Murals are painted in depressed or inaccessible locations in hopes of lasting a while, but with the full knowledge that they might be painted over the next day. A viewer does not see this, however, and without a familiarity with this context the piece may suggest a permanence that it does not enjoy. Knitta's works, however, feel fragile and very temporary. They capture for a casual viewer something of the privilege of spotting something worth looking at, which clearly might not be there tomorrow or the next day. Anyone could come along with a pair of scissors and remove it.
The Stranger also reports that Knitta will be back in Seattle for the music fest Bumbershoot 2oo6:
Along with Knitta—who will be hitting some very big (think landmark-sized) Seattle targets on their Labor Day return—artists like Australia's Brett Alexander, London's Craig Fisher, and New Yorker Orly Cogan will confront preconceptions about the applied arts, via everything from subversive candy making to soft-sculpture weaponry. And on the evening of Saturday, September 2, the Knitta crew will host a workshop. The plan is to offer instructions for making some of their basic tags, like car antennae sleeves.I look forward to seeing some Christo-like knitted objects, but again, I bet it won't look like graffiti to casual viewers. Knitta, prove me wrong!
