Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening :
1. Street Artist GAIA, Super Modernity in Italy, Austria, Turkey
2. JR: RIVAGES a film by Guillaume Cagniard
3. Curiot at the Mexico City’s Youth Institute
BSA Special Feature: Street Artist GAIA, Super Modernity in Italy, Austria, Turkey
“Traversing places in order to respond to place, what an absurd proposition.”
And yet, that is what Street Artist Gaia has been doing for the last 3 years or so. In route he has been seeing many other artists doing the same thing, and has been feeling super modern about it.
While Street Art grew out of the graffiti tradition of tagging your local city with your name and your artwork and calling it a day, few are satisfied with that audience today. True fame happens via the Internet and mural festivals, and Gaia has made it one of his goals to study the history and culture of his host city and the resulting art works have been affected by his self-education and observation.
In this new video mini-treatise, an existential examination of his own journey to this point, Gaia poses questions while cleverly jabbing at the roving rootless lifestyle that has arrested many artists in the Street Art scene; reveling in its benefits — possibly counting its costs.
The petite piece is scored by Max Muffler in a postmodern electronic timber, evoking the charging swing of perpetual cross-cultural travel that can be rich and repetitively banal.
Sounds like the beginning of a larger work to come.
There are SO many avid and creative fans of Banksy on Instagram it’s pretty astounding. If you look through all of the feeds from the folks who tagged #BSABlackFriday on Instagram you will find some serious fans of Street Art, and a few artists as well. It was great to learn more about you and the stuff you take shots of, where you like to go – and it is generally gratifying to see the BSA community in all your splendor. Makes us love you more!
Thank you to every person who tagged their own Banksy photos for the BSA Black Friday Giveaway – it was seriously difficult to pick the best and we wish we could have picked more. We basically looked for the personal story and a good shot.
Here are the winners – go check them out on Instagram.
If you won, send us an email so we know where to send your book. Thank you sincerely to EVERYONE who participated – BSA peeps are the best.
The new extended hardcover edition of Banksy In New York, by Ray Mock with introduction by BSA’s Steven P. Harrington and Jaime Rojo is also available now at CarnageNYC.com.
“Banksy Does New York”, a new documentary by director Chris Moukarbel, meticulously culls and artfully arranges the play and the actors for you in just over an hour with new revelations popping up every few minutes – and you may not believe what you actually missed. But don’t feel bad; everyone missed something during the one-month “Better Out Than In” residency of the Brisol-based street artist during October, 2013. Luckily Moukarbel has done the hard work of sifting through the thousands of Instagram posts, Tweets, YouTube videos, and Banksy’s own digital clues to deftly tell you the story, or rather, stories.
The latest HBO documentary, which airs November 17th, confronts the conventions of typical documentary making by compiling user-generated digital content, or crowd-sourcing the thousands of individual perspectives that occurred in tandem as the new works were unveiled on the streets of New York’s five boroughs. (Full disclosure: We are both interviewed in it.)
“There’s no way we could have gotten cameras everywhere even if we were trying and if we wanted to,” said Moukarbel at a special screening in Manhattan at HBO’s offices last week for many of the “content creators” whose work is woven together to reveal the larger narratives arising from the events.
“No one really knew what Banksy was doing. No one had put a frame around it,” says Chris as he describes the process of allowing the stories to tell him and producer Jack Turner what actually happened. “I mean he so expertly used social media,” says Turner, “Having an Instagram account from the first day — he invented a way for communicating his work and created a following for it and created an event that is a work itself.”
Aside from the mechanics of the unfolding dramas, “Banksy Does New York” attempts to give many of the actors center stage here where other film makers would have relegated them to the roles of extras. Out of town vloggers drive into the city to record their daily discoveries, bonafide Banksy hunters who pool their clues in real time virtually and race to discover the new piece before it is stolen or vandalized, neighborhood entrepreneurs who charge a fee to onlookers for peeking at the paintings, and even the human stories behind the public heist and subsequent art sale that is arranged for one of the sculptures.
Somehow the elusive street artist pulling strings behind the scenes comes off as a sardonic populist everyman although he probably really is just a flagrant [insert your personal projection here]. By removing himself from the show, everyone else is revealed.
And they are nearly all here too. Like the fictional nightlife doyen Stefon Zolesky on Saturday Night Live might say, “This club has everything”; artists, fans, intellectuals, court jesters, minstrels, charlatans, sideshows, soldiers, police, politicians, a priest, dogs, passion, sweetness, sarcasm, irony, jealousy, chicanery, a Greek chorus, car chases, a few fights, a couple of heartfelt speeches, some arrests, bleating lambs being lead to slaughter.
… And a winking wizard somewhere behind the curtain.
Like we said last year as the month drew to a close in an article entitled Banksy’s Final Trick, “No longer asking, ‘Who is Banksy’, many strolling New Yorkers this October were only half-kidding when they would point to nearly any scene or object on the street and ask each other, ‘Is that a Banksy?’”
We turned the interview tables on director Chris Moukarbel and producer Jack Turner to see how they developed their story for “Banksy Does New York”.
Brooklyn Street Art:They say that a documentary filmmaker can’t really have a story in mind going in to the project – because the story reveals itself as you go. Did you see the story developing as you met people and looked at video? Chris Moukarbel: No one had really looked at the residency in its entirety so we felt like archeologists piecing together all these bits of information and trying to create a complete vision of what went down that month. Certain themes began to emerge and it was interesting to find where the work was actually pointing. The locations of each piece appeared random and actually were incredibly important to how you were supposed to see the work. Sometimes you realized that the work itself only served to bring peoples attention to the significance of the location.
Brooklyn Street Art:There are so many moving parts in this story – the enigmatic artist, the illegal nature of the work, the intersection with social media, the unpredictable nature of the responses. Was this a story that was difficult to get your hands around? Jack Turner: Good question…the basic idea from the start was simply to relive that month-long circus for those people who were not aware, not in NYC or just missed it. To be honest, we originally thought that a sequential catalogue of the work would feel repetitive – but as we did more research, we found that each of the works created vastly different reactions from the public and they helped us explore all of these themes. We can only draw our own meaning from some of the work but that is when the public reaction becomes part of the work itself – which is why public art, street art and graffiti exist.
Brooklyn Street Art:Had you had much exposure to the Street Art and graffiti worlds previous to taking on this project? What surprised you about it that you wouldn’t have expected? Chris Moukarbel: I was never a part of the street art world but I have an art background and a lot of my work was site specific. I would create pieces that were meant to live online or on public access TV, as well as street pieces. It was interesting to get to know more about an art world with its own language – available in plain view of New Yorkers.
Brooklyn Street Art:What element first attracted your interest in the Banksy story when you heard that he had executed this residency in New York? Chris Moukarbel: When HBO approached us about making the film I felt like it could be a great archive of an artists work and also a snapshot of the Internet for one month. I love public art and I was interested in the way that Banksy was using the Internet and social media as if it were the street.
Brooklyn Street Art:After seeing “Exit Through the Gift Shop” many people reported feeling like they were more confused than before about Banksy and his story. How would you like people to feel after “Banksy Does New York?” Jack Turner: Banksy is an incredibly prolific artist and this film covers only one of the many chapters in his career. By remaining anonymous, Banksy takes the focus away from the artist or the source and he puts the focus on the statement and the work. There is a reason that he is the most infamous artist working today, he represents an idea that many people identify with…and he is really funny! I think this film, more than anything, highlights how well he uses social media to his disposal.
Brooklyn Street Art:You must have imagined what a response might be from Banksy to your film. What do you think he will think of this piece? Jack Turner: It is extremely important in any project that Chris or I do to make sure that we present the whole story in a truthful way. That is why we have had such success accessing user-generated footage. We went from having a one camera crew, as documentaries are often made, to having a thousand cameras throughout the city – each giving us footage that reflects what really happened. Maybe Banksy will love it, maybe he will hate it – but the most important thing to us is that he feels like it is a true reflection of what happened over the course of that month.
Brooklyn Street Art:As producers and the director, do you think of yourselves as artists, reporters, sociologists, detectives? Jack Turner: A couple years ago a friend of mine said that making a documentary is like getting paid (very little) to learn an enormous amount about something. I’ll take that. Chris Moukarbel: I think of myself as a storyteller. In a way, I was still a storyteller when I was making fine art but now I’m using a popular medium that reaches a wider audience.
Banksy Does New York airs November 17 on HBO and is available now on HBO GO.
Director: Chris Moukarbel
Producers: Chris Moukarbel, Jack Turner
Executive producer: Sheila Nevins
Directors of photography: Mai Iskander, Karim Raoul
Editor: Jennifer Harrington
Production companies: Matador Content, Permanent Wave, Home Box Office
Two things in the news today about Street Art man of mystery, Banksy:
Thing 1: He was not arrested, cuffed and covered with a shroud yesterday as reported and re-Tweeted throughout the street-art-isphere, but that hoax was excellent! (Also, don’t you think he must be older than 35 by now?) See video at end.
Thing 2: It looks like he has just created a new piece referencing a 350 year old painting by the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer that uses a pearl earring for a focal point. In Banksy’s case, it is golden ADT security alarm box.
“Girl With the Pierced Ear” in this new image just released online, appears to be Banksy’s monochromatic take on the oil master Vermeer, below.
Johannes Vermeer. Girl With a Pearl Earring, Oil on canvas, 1865.
A lovely cafe from which you can enjoy some chips and a refreshment while gazing upon the new masterpiece by Banksy.
We start this weeks images of the week with a postering campaign by nice, friendly, educated photo-journalists who illegally put up wheatpastes of their artistry this week in many parts of the city. “We’re not trying to vandalize,” says a member of #Dysturb in an article published yesterday by The New York Times, “It’s pure journalism”. Following on the heels of the arrest of wheatpaster COST the week before, you have to wonder if these folks, whose full names are given in the Times piece, will gather praise or condemnation for doing essentially the same thing.
Or is there a difference? Not quite Street Art, not quite a campaign for a concert or a perfume or shampoo, these folks use the same techniques as many others on the streets and say it is for high-minded purposes. Similarly, there are a number of Street Artists who address social and political themes which we all could agree on are honorable in some way or another. Gentrification, child slavery, sexual harassment, racism, the housing crisis, indigenous peoples issues, human trafficking, environmental issues – all of these have been addressed on the streets in the last handful of years by artists whose work we follow and present here daily. The waters are invariably muddy when it comes to this form of expression.
On a related side note: It is interesting that in published articles about COST and #Dysturb, we learn what kind of ride they each have; Porshe versus Cadillac. We totally have to up our game next time we rent a Zipcar to go on a studio visit.
Meanwhile, here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring #Dysturb, Clint Mario, Crummy Gummy, James Bullough, ME, Myth, Pyramid Oracle, Ramiro Davros-Coma, Sexer, She Wolf, Smarty, Smeller, and Thievin’ Stephen.
Politically themed Street Art or murals have a long tradition – as long as people have had something to advocate for or against. The modern Street Art movement may trace its roots to political postering that came with the printing press or 20th century Mexican muralism or the 1968 student demonstrations around the world, especially in Paris – but artists have used and been used to communicate ideas and opinions in the public sphere much longer than this.
Today, whether it is the Arab Spring or the Occupy movement or simply a personal campaign to combat harassment by cat-callers or the economic violence of local gentrification, politically charged speech of one sort or another takes place on the street when artists give it voice.
“Decolonizing Street Art”, a festival an project that took place in August in Canada, convened with the idea that carrying issues directly to the public can affect opinions and possibly produce positive change for people whom the organizers would like to give voice to.
Since the high profile and increasingly moneyed version of the current Street Art festival scene is populated worldwide primarily by men with characteristics of the dominant culture, the organizers and participants of “Decolonizing Street Art” may also be commenting on that backdrop as well. Whatever the motivation, these are voices that not many hear or see.
Hosted in and programmed “on unceded territory, in so-called Montreal”, this handful of artists speak of the indigenous people of the planet and the history of colonialism, the Arab/Israeli conflict, the poisoning of the environment and its effect on humans and animals, and the rights of many marginalized categories of people.
With a concentrated effort this first entry into a still-forming circuit of Street Art festivals and programs worldwide, Decolonizing Street Art makes a formal statement about making space for more radical views comparatively than one typically sees. Whether it is native communities or disenfranchised poor or disappeared women, this effort aims to bring more voices to the street to speak their truth.
School’s back in session, the Jews just celebrated a new year, Kobra painted new portraits of Warhol and Basquiat in Williamsburg, and if you were at Brooklyn Museum last night you got to see Street Artist and muralist Don Rimx and us live – and us with markers in our hands looking completely lost.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring $howta, Apples on Pictures, Conor Harrington, Dain, EKG, Funky13, Jack the Beard, Jeff Huntington, Jesse James, Matthew Reid, Mr. Prvrt, Os Gemeos, Pyramid Oracle, Ramiro Davaros-Coma, Sam3, Square, Stikman, and What Is Adam.
““I think that the courage to confront evil and turn it by dint of will into something applicable to the development of our evolution, individually and collectively, is exciting, honorable.” ~ Maya Angelou ~
As we hear of the sudden appearance of a new Banksy in southeast England we recall that it was exactly a year ago today that the international Street Art man of mystery grabbed New York by the mobiles and invited everyone to a month-long exhibition of painting, sculpture, installation, performance and real life detective games on our own streets.
To commemorate Banksy’s very successful offering to the city and the excitement that ensued with its inhabitants we decided to put together a series of messages left out for him on walls, doors, trucks and fences. Not all the messages are demonstrations of love (indeed some are hostile) but all them are an indication of his clever ability to move people with wit and indicate a certain feeling of familiarity that people have with the anonymous Street Artist.
We’ve all recovered quite well of course from the month-long treasure hunt, and for many it was enough of a jarring public works project/ anthropological experiment / hype campaign to merit a year of examination and reflection. And now, the commemorations: This fall we know of at least one book (Banksy in New York) and one documentary (Banksy Does New York) that will mark the anniversary of the “Better Out Than In” residency and many New Yorkers will remember their own keen behaviors on social media and crowded sidewalks chasing after the near-daily revelations – and a few may possibly experience joy or a twinge of awkward discomfort in retrospect.
We think the biggest takeaway for us was that whether it was man or marketing team, Banksy helped New Yorkers to re-examine nearly everything in the man-made environment and to consider that it may actually be a piece of art.
For the guys and gals who make up the graffiti/ Street Art scene in New York of course, not everyone was gob-smacked by this peer, this charming and wisecracking Brit who monopolized the mindshare of fans of art in the streets. Almost from Day 1 the buffs, the side busting, the cross-outs, and the free-flowing entreaties addressing our visiting jester were alternately ringing of respect, bemusement, longing after, semi-passive xenophobia, or full-on red-faced insults. And of course there were those just along for the coat-tail ride.
It’s all really just part of the ongoing conversation that always exists on the street, and while you may not have caught all the action last October a look at these images will inform you that Banksy’s impact was felt by many.
In what could be charitably described as a sign that Street Art has entered a new phase of cultural acceptance and appropriation, some creators of art in the public sphere are attempting to lay legal claim to the profit-making that they didn’t necessarily sign on to. In just the last few months a handful of artists from New York, Los Angeles, and Buenos Aires have discovered their murals have been used in fashion, music, and cinema to great effect, but sadly, they say, without their knowledge or permission.
Of course this sort of inspiration/appropriation has been going on for years – if you want to meet models on the sidewalk just move to Bushwick, Brooklyn and you’ll probably accidentally end up in a fashion spread yourself. Here is where countless fashion shoots, video shoots, movie scenes all happen continuously and money is exchanging hands to make it happen – just not for the artists. Usually they are essentially unpaid, uncredited backdrop artists for the edgy “street” fantasies of stylists.
The courts ultimately will have to decide the relevance of these recent claims but the topic does raise fascinating questions about public space, intellectual property, copyright, and the reasonable expectations of the artists once their work is set free into the streets. In these cases the artists had permission and encouragement to create their works and perhaps thousands of images of the works are in existence since the work is made public. The concern here is raised once those images are privatized or pass into the purely commercial world of selling product.
More interesting will be to see if these lawsuits will extend in the future to include the unsanctioned, un-permissioned, acts of vandalism that appear on private property as well. Will artists seek protection from a legal system they actively transgressed? Can the pieces of art placed illegally be re-claimed by the artist when the work is found printed on a lycra bodysuit or embossed on a wallet? If so, how will the artist claim ownership?
Here are just three recent examples of lawsuits reportedly being filed by artists laying claim to the benefits of their work.
Maya Hayuk
Street Artist and fine artist Maya Hiyuk is reportedly suing pop star Sara Bareilles, Sony, and Coach for using her Houston Street wall in New York as a back drop to sell their products.
Hayuk on the left, the wall used in a campaign on the right (Screenshot from New York Post, Page Six)
MSK crew members Revok, Reyes and Steel have filed a claim saying that designer Roberto Cavalli was a little more than just inspired by their collaborative mural in San Francisco when designing a line for his “Graffiti Girls” collection sold through the website. A quick Google search shows that the line extends to clothing, accessories, sneakers, even a phone case and is sold at stores like Nordstom,Neiman Marcus, and online giant Amazon.
Worse, says the claim, “Sometimes, Cavalli added what appears to be a signature, creating the false impression that Roberto Cavalli himself was the artist.”
Street Artists and muralists Jaz, Ever, and Other are suing for copyright infringement because the newest Terry Gilliam (Twelve Monkeys, Brazil) film The Zero Theorem allegedly featured a mural that looks startlingly similar to one they painted together in Buenos Aires about four years ago.
You can actually still see a number of stills from it it on The Zero Theorem Facebook page right now if you like.
Before the summer ends New York is still happily awash in myriad public festivals, concerts, street fairs, free Shakespeare in the park, stoop sales, fire hydrant fountains, rooftop parties and of course tourists who would like to scale a bridge. Last week our August dog days extended to welcome one of Street Art’s bigger names to swing through with a new mural that drew small crowds with a decidedly optimistic message.
Shepard Fairey doesn’t really do small. It has to be a vast designed and balanced swath of red, black and ochre that takes over an entire wall or it is nothing. Well, maybe he’ll slap up a couple of stickers on lamp posts while you’re not looking.
He also doesn’t appear to do fake. When that extended crane lift finally lowers him to the ground he makes time to say hello to admirers, artists, and the occasional antagonist and to sign his name, shake a hand, listen to a story and offer a thoughtful opinion. In this age of quickly spreading news across social media, word of Fairey’s new mural on Bowery and Broome didn’t take long to ricochet across phones and before you knew it there were people on the sidewalk and dangling off roofs to get a good view.
Not strictly Street Art and not strictly in Little Italy, the new work is part of a commercial neighborhood improvement initiative that has brought pleasing murals by Street Artists to the tourist frequented area of Little Italy over the past two years. Over the course of three days the socially conscious Fairey and his brand Obey scored one wall for a symbol of peace during a summer that has pounded in our ears with war drums in Ukraine, Russia, Syria, Libya, Israel, Palestine, and Iraq, among other sites of strife on the world stage.
A slogan at the bottom of the banner says “Transform Our World With Creative Response”; a nebulous enough sentiment that may be interpreted a few ways, and somewhat ironic on this island that is no longer open to young struggling creatives unless they can pay the $5K monthly rents this neighborhood often demands. But the burning fire in the chest of the dove – we’ll just take a chance and say that it stands for our collective yearning for peace and freedom.
Let’s hope Fairey sees something in the future many of us are missing.
“In our city of Reggio Emilia in Italy there is a very big factory named Officine Reggiane that is completely abandoned. It was famous in Italy for its metal work production (they made the Orient Express train, the crane used for the Costa Concordia, and then there was the longest occupation of a factory in the history of Italy here).
Now this is a major venue for graffiti and a refuge for homeless people. We began going to the factory more that two years ago and some of the people living there became our friends; in particular a man named Abidi, who we named “the boss of the Officine Reggiane”.
So a few weeks ago Abidi announced to us that he is leaving the factory to go back to Tunisia: he had found a wife! So, we thought about a gift we could give him. We are poor, very poor, we just had the paint, so one night we went in the factory (usually we go during the day) and we painted a big portrait of Abidi in the principal part of the place. It’s a gift for Abidi but also for us and for our memories of the Officine Reggiane.”
“It’s nice to install photo-based portraits that have permanency,” Toronto based Street Artist Fauxreel, otherwise known as Dan Bergeron, tells us. In his new series of works in the public sphere you’ll agree that it isn’t strictly Street Art since it is an approved and organized installation, but even so it retains the markings of a D.I.Y. conceptualized series that follows the vision of one artist. The subjects here are residents from the area who come to Grange Park in the morning to do Tai Chi exercises and possibly to glance upward at the Ontario College of Art and Design’s Sharp Centre that hovers above like a black and white checkered Memphis-Milano tabletop on multi-colored stilts. These new series of works were commissioned as part of StreetART Toronto.
This isn’t Fauxreel’s first project with the residents of this area. BSA first covered him in 2008 when we first met him after seeing his work on New York streets (see Regent of the People for Real). Bergeron’s work with the community is given a more durable quality this time than his earlier large wheatpastes and wood cut silhouettes of people on the street, mounted as they are on tiles but similar to his earlier works, they focus on populations within the community.
The human forms and various poses are grounding from a human point of view. They also appear to hover above the ground in a spirit-like manner as if astute talismen and erudite taliswomen for the neighborhood. Ironically, the models are posed in front of facades that have been hit up with various aerosol tags, yet the neighborhood they are hung in is as clean as Disney World.
While clearly this is public art, it retains some of the influences we have experienced with the sudden and immediate interaction one can have with photographic unilateral installations done by freethinkers and rebels on the Street Art scene. Let’s see how long these pieces run before being defaced or added to by those more traditional practitioners. Who knows? – maybe they will remain untouched.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
