Welcome to New York, where it is basically Halloween year-round when it comes to outlandish fashion on any given Wednesday on the D train or in the laundromat or at Fashion Week. Sometimes you may even think that the best costumers take Halloween off- leaving it to the amateurs. Honey, it’s all drag.
Here are some street art shots to help your mood for ’22.
In a sea of street art murals, the simplicity of a hand-rendered text piece may be deceptive sometimes because you may miss its complexity. It is also a brave move to rely upon the minimum of elements and lack of style to create something with weight, or humor.
Tuscany-based Elfo preempts your response in this new simple piece, purporting to be an advisory against graffiti. In the process, he draws attention to the fact that anti-graffiti signage on the street is large no different than graffiti. The spontaneity of graffiti is often the source of its power, however, and this hand-rendered piece is anticipatory and contradictory.
The best irony is that this is graffiti.
In this charming and historic little village in northern Italy called Isola de Cevo, a new art installation of placards in the streets must have townspeople a little puzzled.
If there were any people here to see it.
According to most accounts, this town’s population has dwindled to zero; a fate that many Italian towns have been victim of in the last two decades due to changing demographics and economics. If government initiatives are not successful at encouraging outsiders to repopulate, many of these viilages are destined to become ghost towns.
“During the installation we saw only two cars go by on the road,” says Elfo of the new installation he did with The Wa. They call the selection of opinions and bromides on sign posts, “THANK YOU ALL” – an absurdist act that may make you think of the former residents, the lives that once made this a village. “Me and The Wa had this idea that we wanted to search for an abandoned place for our ironic protest,” he says, and it is true that it makes little sense on the face of it.
An Italian and a Berlinian mounting a protest with no protesters in a place with no audience carrying messages with basically no message?
“Nonsense wins!” says Elfo.
Elfo’s furtive and artful wanderings can veer off into the neo-Dadaist fields at times, sometimes wittily so, and textually. The Italian graffiti writer and street artist uses the simplest of devices to capture attention, a reductive and deliberate strategy born of careful consideration girded by impulses to broadcast his view, to be seen and heard.
Here in Turin (Torino) the artist diagrams the messages in a butcherly way – a triangulation of views on class structures, the street-to-gallery continuum, and the tensions separating carnivores and herbivores. Oink!
He says it is “a new ironic artwork” and pays tribute to the late Italian artist and art collector G.A. Cavellini.
Many people in New York and around the world breathed a collective sigh of relief this week when our native son from Queens got on that helicopter with his immigrant wife and
A. left the White House and,
B. flew to Florida.
But for this week anyway, the streets are saying let’s give Biden and Harris and this new administration the congratulations and the honeymoon they deserve. We wish them (and us) the best!
Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring Anna is a toy, Bastard Bot, CRKSHNK, Elfo, Jason Naylor, Lunge Box, Praxis VGZ, and Queen Andrea.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week.
…and welcome to a December in New York City where shootings have risen 96% this year, the Sugarplum Fairy and Mouse King and The Nutcracker are not going to appear, 24 subway train cars were aerosol bombed in Queens, a Judge ordered the federal government to fully reinstate the DACA program, the Middle Collegiate Church has burned in the East Village in Manhattan, and Red Bull Arts – home of the awe-inspiring Rammellzee show a few years ago, has announced that it is closing in Manhattan.
Looking for a Christmas tree? An accurate barometer of the income gap perhaps, we found two vendors on the streets of Williamsburg who each told us a 6 foot tree this year starts at $150 this year. Later in the neighborhood of Bushwick we saw a collection of 6 foot tall trees for $60 each. In Soho or 5th Ave just double it, or quintuple it.
Also, as an entirely unrelated aside, have you noticed that Noam Chomsky is metamorphosing into Santa Claus? To be fair, Noam is rarely jolly.
Here is our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring City Kitty, Elfo, Exposure, Easy and Joz, Gak, Giani NYC, Kest, No Sleep, Quality Mending, Raw Raffe, Skewville, TV Head ATX, UFO907, Muk 123, Gen 2907, Oze108, and Unlok.
“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”
That’s the text of a cable sent by the writer Mark Twain from London to the press in the United States after his obituary had been mistakenly published, so the story goes.
Similarly, the “elite” of 2020 may be suitably surprised by this new text piece by street commentator ELFO on the streets of Verona, Italy. Since there are roughly four months remaining to the year, maybe this is a meant to be prophecy, but from what we all can see, the “elite” are getting richer and richer from this pandemic, as well as the custom-tailored “bail-outs” from the right- and left-wing politicians who write the bills.
“The CARES Act Sent You a $1,200 Check but Gave Millionaires and Billionaires Far More,” says this headline from Pro Publica about the rescue plan that helped the common people. This piece and many others say it was a bonanza for the “elite” in the US.
Any prediction for the HEALS act, which has a TRUST act inside it?
“This year because of the pandemic and protest situation I think the ‘elite’ is dying,” Elfo tells us. We’ll believe it when we see it.
Enough with all these damn murals!
Enough with these figurative studies, these needless sucklings of the romantic ego, these thick gilded frames, these meanderings of hue and saturation and volume and texture and drapery, these idyllic landscapes and soul-wrenching faces and kinetic geometries, these soaring flawed metaphors of grandiosity realized in succulent and fulsome lustful blood red, swollen and bruised purple, capacious blue, auspicious goldenrod.
In fact, death to aesthetics. In Florence, no less.
Elfo intends to scrawl upon the walls of the cityscape like a desperate inmate who has lost his will, peaking briefly upward to the wan grey, drained of all expression. His rant is gestural, harried and blunt.
All caps, it reads MORTE AL L’ ESTETICA!!!
The best translation is, I think, “F**k Aesthetics,” he tells us.
You’ve probably already seen this wall by Elfo so its probably a boring topic. But we also enjoy his self-deprecation – after all he is marketing this wall to us to display digitally. Who knows if it’s even real. It’s better than just another portrait of 2Pac.
Suppose it is not so insulting for someone to say that you tend to take a romanticized view of things. Frankly, the world could use a lot more romanticism, and less of the callous, obtuse, horror please.
ELFO may be projecting his rose tinted view upon this abandoned and degraded building in Florence, Italy, but then again his lo-fi naïve lettering tells us he is in on the joke too – he’s just playing with you.
And what a romantic view it is, don’t you think?
The last time we talked about the Italian artist Elfo he was playing with Duchamp and ranting about fake news – in his lo-fi anti-style text rolled across a wall. As is his style, the Italian text maker likes to leave cryptic witticisms on public and private property as he wends his way through the urban cityscape.
Looks like he found another wall to treat in a contemporary context, leaving one of his insider quips where few are likely to see it. Good thing we have a photo. Then again he’s negated the photo in this age of
The Italian textual conceptualist and urban/suburban public space instigator ELFO has lodged his complaint on a wall against the misinformation that forms our perceptions. The humorous one-off screed caught our attention so we asked him about this low-fi textwork that seems decidedly Duchampian, with a nod to Magritte’s pipe.
BSA: Duchamp challenged conceptions of the art world with his “readymade” pieces and many a critic called him a fake. Your commentary references the “fake news” meme favored by the right wing news and politicians. How did you make the connection?
ELFO: Currently my work is returning to this message. I want to speak of the world and the history of art in ironic and contemporary way using contemporary terms. I chose Duchamp because his artwork changed the world of art. Duchamp is perfect because he played with fake identity and the critic system rendered him as a fake. He changed the rules of art, for me and many artists.
BSA: What role should art play in this world of “fake news”?
ELFO: In this world of fake news, art probably is a big fake – if it does not reflect society as a mirror.
BSA: Do you think art should always reflect our society like a mirror?
ELFO: The problem is not fake news in this world – it’s the human brain. Art must speak about serious issues like pollution for example. This is the next subject I’ll address since I have been looking at it for a long time.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY