Banksy is often the poster boy of all things street art

New York critic Ben Davis has penned a provocative slideshow essay over on Slate that includes the poignant tagline: “Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop is a poisoned valentine to the movement he made famous.”

I’m happy to see more contemporary art critics grappling with the ideas and contradictions of street art, which is a movement dominated (or suffocated, based on your perception) by fanboys who have no interest in being critical of their beloved art form. At the end of the day, street art has become just another aspect of contemporary art practice — though you wouldn’t know that by visiting this year’s Whitney Biennial.

The money shot:

Gallery art focuses, ultimately, on selling status symbols to rich people, but for this very reason it tends to maintain a certain distance from corporate design. Street art is hostile to established commercial art channels, but has been altogether more comfortable moving in and out of mass commercial culture.

Full disclosure: I’m quoted in the piece.

The stencil that was the topic of the comment (photos courtesy Citylights Projects, all rights reserved) (click to enlarge)

Lotus Johnson left this illuminating comment on Alison Young’s post “Art, Value & Banksy’s Rats in Melbourne,” which included an illustration of a stencil depicting a native Australian flower stabbing a Banksy signature animal, the rat:

From my point of view as a flower and graffiti photographer, the photo of Banksy being stabbed by a native Australian flower had me laugh so hard I just about fell off the chair, since the flower is a Banksia (looks like Banksia coccinea) first collected and brought to England by Sir Joseph Banks in 1770.

Banksia coccinea (via Wikipedia)

Wikipedia describes the Banksia this way:

These Australian wildflowers and popular garden plants are easily recognised by their characteristic flower spikes and fruiting “cones” and heads.

One of the great things about street art is that there are often levels of meaning that don’t emerge right away. In this case, the joke is all that much funnier when you realize that Banksy is being stabbed by his Australian “cousin.”

Gaia, “St. John” (2010)

There is nothing more universal than nature, but the meaning of what constitutes the term may lead to disagreement. That perceptual ambiguity attracts Gaia, who navigates the boundary between nature and artifice carefully and with apparent ease. His latest artistic mash-up in Baltimore’s Reservoir Hill neighborhood, combines the myths of the Christian saint St. John the Baptist, the Babylonian general Holofernes, and a cock.

Caravaggio, “Judith Beheading Holofernes” (1598-99)

Titled “St. John” (2010), the figural image is drawn and printed on two tones of newsprint. Gaia’s latest work continues his interest in animal imagery. Judging by his past work, the depiction of animals in the city seems to represent the feeling of isolation and dislocation while serving as a doppelgänger for the street artist as a lone wolf or cocky creator who brazenly uses the street as a canvas. The robed figure cradles the head of Holofernes, as depicted by the Italian Baroque painter Caravaggio in his masterpiece “Judith Beheading Holofernes” (1598-99). The Babylonian maintains the same shocked expression but his head is turned 180 degrees yet the eyes, like the original source, continue to look upward. In “St. John,” we are left to assume that the head’s reaction is the result of finding that from the neck up he has been replaced by a rooster. The head is cradled with gentleness and care, neither of which are emotions we usually associate with the tortured Holofernes, who is often depicted as a victim of bloody violence. In Biblical legend, the story of Judith represents the triumph of the Israelites over the powerful empire of Babylon. Here, there is no written source to illuminate its meaning.

Lucas Cranach, “Salome” (c. 1530)

While the obvious reference is to Judith and Holofernes, the image also evokes the myth of Salome, daughter of the ancient Roman governor of Palestine, Herodias, who reputedly demanded the head of John the Baptist after he refused her sexual advances. She traditionally appears in literature, opera and art, as a symbol of lust, female seduction, and folly. In Gaia’s composition, the arms of the figure frame the disembodied head much like a platter frames St. John the Baptist’s disembodied head in many works of Western art, including Lucas Cranach’s “Salome” (c. 1530).

“St. John” appears like an urban apparition … lonely, singular, and possibly lost as he wanders the streets. It is scaled larger than life like a figure on a billboard that remains even after its backdrop has long faded away. Scholarly research suggests that Caravaggio’s painting, which Gaia directly quotes from, may allude to two infamous executions during his time, including the tragedy of Beatrice Cenci. After being beheaded by a corrupt Catholic system uninterested in justice, Cenci, who was terrorized by a tyrannical father, who she eventually plotted to murder, became a Roman symbol of resistance against the prevailing authorities. Cenci’s legend grew after her martyrdom, and it is said that every year on the night before her death she returns to the bridge where she was executed carrying her severed head.

Yet, Gaia’s figure is clearly masculine, with no trace of the feminine, even though he clearly uses imagery most often associated with female domination and male submission. The rooster, in particular, is an animal with many symbolic associations in our culture, including the double meaning of its other name, cock, its association with cockfighting, and the romantic image of a crowing animal that is quick to mark its territory and authority. Gaia’s figure has no feet and the image begins, roughly under the knees. It appears to rise from the ground.

Open Metaphors

In the street, all images are multi-faceted, dependent on the viewer to unpack its meaning and its environment to frame any intended or communicated meaning. The interaction of man and animal is a narrative that appears again and again in Gaia’s art. Like in “St. John,” components are often mixed in uncommon configurations, like a mythical satyr or centaur. But in this case, the work’s clearly Christian title highlights the story of the forerunner of Jesus Christ, the Christian son of God. According to Christian legend, John the Baptist attempted to bring to the people of Palestine knowledge that they were unprepared to hear. Is there something that Gaia’s figure is eager to say that we are unwilling to hear?

An important component of this piece and all great street art is time, which differentiates the art from more conventional gallery work. As the image weathers and the two tones of newsprint used in the piece age at different rates, the human and animal forms will separate visually from one another. The tenuous unity here will slowly dissipate. Even when the image is fresh, the nuanced and hand-drawn lines of the human form are contrasted with the stark printed lines of the rooster head. The animal head shows the characteristic printing plate breaks that exist in all Gaia’s large linoleum prints. These cracks in unity humanize Gaia’s images and shatters any illusion of perfection. It is in these crevices between parts that humanity seeps in. It is the space in between that remains of interest. It is impossible to meditate on a flawless wall, Gaia seems to say, it is the flaws that allow us to focus and see new possibilities that were not obvious at first, and it is in these flaws that human nature, no matter how bizarre, is revealed.

Marc Quinn, “Self” (1991)

Returning to the question of the missing female figure, we can only assume that she has left the scene or is a surrogate for the artist himself. As the creator, executioner of Holofernes, remixer of nature, the artist is the female energy. With a name like Gaia, the artist in this case entertains large ambitions. His apparition appears like a poem on the streetscape, at once signing a song of loss and care, the rooster seems at the verge of lulling the head of Holofernes as he emerges from the ground.

In contrast to traditional associations, in contemporary art the disembodied head has different meanings but one of the most famous is by British artist Marc Quinn in his self-portrait “Self” (1991), which is created from 10 pints of the artist’s own blood. This form of grotesque self-portraiture also reveals a form of deep narcissism at work. One that feeds off self-referential games and navel gazing. Gaia’s figure looks beyond contemporary idioms, like Quinn’s depiction, to older forms in a form of artistic nostalgia that looks for meaning in myth and legend. In the transience of contemporary culture, Gaia’s search for meaning is a quest for purpose.

“St. John” is placed on the edge of a large wooden space and the empty space in front of him suggests that he has a way to go until his mission, whatever it is, is complete. My instinct tells me he’s attempting to return to nature, even if he seems unsure where that exists.

@hragv

Read the original PDF document (in color) here.

The "Art" of Crashing

Recently I was walking down Mercer Street to the F train at Broadway-Lafayette and a face popped out at me, with its beady eyes and subtle knowing grin. I was amazed by its detail: the arching lines above the eyes mimic expressive eyebrows; the concentrated dashes below the eyes give a sense of shading; the lines around the mouth depict facial structure and give the face character; and the large splotches of black evoke a tuft of hair at the top and a collar below.

The image is on an old metal shield that protects the side of the building from being scuffed by cars as they enter a garage. Misguided cars hit the yellow shield creating blemishes and grooves of varying depth. Each groove and scuff is the mark of an accident, a miscalculation. And the collective accident gives us a skilled image of a concentrated face. (And you thought New Yorkers couldn’t drive!)

Hundreds of fumbling hands contributed to the creation of this sketch, but it would be metaphorical at best to call it a collaborative artwork. For one thing, it’s not an artwork. Whatever artistic meaning it seems to have is clearly injected into the scuffs by our clever minds. At first I thought it looked like a Kabuki actor, but then it reminded me of an old sketch of Arthur Rimbaud by Frédéric-Auguste Cazals. (Just imagine if Rimbaud turned his head fifteen degrees to the left.) Then I realized it’s actually Keanu Reeves. Anyway, even if it were art, it couldn’t be a collaboration, properly speaking. For each contribution is made randomly and independently of the others. It’s just one mark after the next.

Left, Sketch of Arthur Rimbaud by Frédéric-Auguste Cazals, 1871; Right, Keanu Reeves looking both ways.

The concept of artistic collaboration is slippery. New York Magazine’s 31st reason to love New York City in 2009 is “Because Our Street Art is Collaborative.” They cite the increasingly cluttered wall on 22nd Street in Chelsea as an example. Street artists have a tendency to find little spots to inundate with their art. Places like Chelsea’s W. 22nd Street, or the “Candy Factory” on Wooster Street in Soho look like giant chaotic collages filled with art of various styles, influences, meanings, sizes, media, and skill levels.

From New York Magazine (photo: Billi Kid): 1. Fumero 2. Jason Mamarella 3. Stickman 4. JC2 5. Billi Kid 6. Judith Supine 7. Dick Chicken 8. FKDL 9. Shin Shin

But it is not clear that these street art mélanges are collaborative artworks any more than the “Keanu car creation” is. Sure, each artist is intentionally contributing her artwork to the pile, but not (normally) as part of a larger artwork — they’re just putting their piece up for its own sake in a place where there are tons of other pieces and (therefore) high visibility. That’s not to say that there aren’t any street art collaborations, or that none of these improvised art collections contain collaborative elements. It’s to suggest that these concentrations of art are not best understood as collaborative street artworks.

The problem is that these spaces become normalized as places where “street art” belongs. And when a particular location becomes the place where one puts (finds) street art, it paradoxically threatens the street artistic status of artworks that inhabit the spot. It threatens to transform the space into an outdoor art gallery. But if a spot becomes a generic place-for-art, then that place’s status as “the street” is threatened, which in turn threatens the street artistic status of the art that uses the space.

The Candy Factory, May 21, 2009

This sentiment is expressed, perhaps unwittingly, by a hilarious sign someone put up at the Candy Factory last May. Someone slapped a generic sign that says “street art” (in Helvetica font) right over a Shepard Fairey wheatpaste. In doing so they both make explicit the space’s status as a generic street art place and send a mean little message to Fairey, insinuating, “Your artvertisements don’t even belong in this generic place for street art.” The bald simplicity of the sign reflects the normalized status of the predictable place where Das Man puts his edgy art.

If these are collaborations, then they are not collaborations on an artwork, but on giving street art a bland home that threatens to strip it of its significance. These spots are better understood as regressive attempts to create gallery spaces in public. They are street art’s misguided version of the cluttered salons of 18th and 19th century Paris. If they are a “collaboration,” then these artists are working together on a messy project.

So let’s revise:

Reason #31.1 to love New York City in 2009: Because our street art is some of the world’s best, and our cars make images of Keanu Reeves.

New Orleans' Big Freedia and his booty bouncers send the audience into a feeding frenzy.

There is no way to prepare for the massive amounts of art that makes its way to Miami for the fairs. While the large fairs are the focal point of the week, there are also dozens of smaller venues and gatherings.

A collaboration by Deitch Projects and Goldman Properties, Wynwood Walls came onto my radar after a tip that a tranny rapper from New Orleans was performing that night — I couldn’t resist checking it out.

Swoon and Aiko (center) shake their groove thangs to the queerest NOLA music ever, Sissy Bounce (click to enlarge)

After a quick cab ride from South Beach, I stepped out to discover massive wall murals created by artists associated with Deitch Projects (Shepard Fairey, Swoon, Los Gêmeos … ). They were brash and graphic but more about that in a moment.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The main focus for my attention was Big Freedia, who is part of New Orleans’ Sissy Bounce music scene. What is Sissy Bounce? Imagine queercore rap mixed with hip hop and you can picture what I mean.

While the music was energetic and contagious, all eyes — including mine — were affixed to the curvaceous women who danced with the singer, their bountiful booties were a miracle to behold.

I looked around at the crowd to discover what I would expect to see at any street art event: culture punks, hipsters, new media types, and the people who love them. To my left was Jeffrey Deitch (pic), to my right was Swoon, Gaia, Aiko and a slew of other artists. I spotted Martha Cooper, who had fallen asleep in a chair by the entrance gate, but was nowhere to be seen after that point.

My first response to Big Freedia’s performance was negative. I thought it felt exploitative, but slowly my hesitation melted away and I started to read it as a queer restaging of the absurdity of the posturing characteristic of heterosexual male hip hop artists. Big Freedia didn’t come across as aggressive or egotistic but a little coy (she didn’t make a lot of eye contact with the crowd) and infused with a cosmopolitan sound. Highly recommended.

Deitch Murals

Worshiping at the temple of Fairey (click to enlarge)

The murals themselves were an impressive feat. Dietch has chosen a large compound in the center of the Wynwood district, which is adjacent to a popular neighborhood restaurant, Joe’s Italian.

Fairey’s wall was the most impressive visually. He’s obviously learned an effective monumental language but it did feel a little canned. The torn transitions between images is an old artistic technique that deadens the overall effect when it is overused — which it was.

Stelios Faitakis' contribution to Wynwood Walls was a showstopper (click to enlarge)

The biggest surprise was the mural by Stelios Faitakis. The Athens-based artist mines the language of Byzantine painting and uses it to render contemporary-ish scenes that look more metaphoric than narrative. The central action of this work is a siege at some city gates but the surrounding actions were less clear.

A detail of the wall by Os Gêmeos on NW 2 Ave (click to enlarge)

The mural by the Brazilian twins, Os Gêmeos, was on one of the most public walls on the compound (it appeared on the street). Filled with their characteristic figures and surrealist imagery, I thought the work showed more signs of Asian pop culture influence than I ever remember seeing in their work. Something about the work didn’t come together and I felt interested in elements of the composition but not the mural as a whole — it felt too sweet and sugary.

CORRECTED: A work by Ben Jones at one of Wynwood Walls' warehouse spaces.

Other murals were by Futura (which resembles a bad 1950s abstract painting), Aiko (more of the same), Kenny Scharf (rather clever but it looked unfinished), Nunca (quite nice) and others.

A work by Swoon in one of Wynwood Walls' main warehouse gallery

In the large warehouse spaces there was other art work by the same artists. A large piece by Swoon and another by Ben Jones (there were no labels by the works) stood out.

I have to admit that Wynwood Walls was a lucky find.

The scene is set for Art Burn 2009.

I arrived at Art Burn in the Wynwood section of Miami with a burning desire to see things go up in flames. As a I approached the venue, I spotted a tee-pee of art pitched at the corner of Las Tias’ parking lot.

Celso fans the flames.

A BBQ grill was neatly centered on a metal plate, which was slapped on the asphalt. The scene was framed by two black tiki torches that made it all look like some medieval ritual or a lost episode of “Survivor.”

Some spectators confessed to me that they expected a ginormous beach bonfire but I had few expectations, and I was pleasantly surprised. The mood was jovial and event organizer Celso approached the grill with the seriousness of someone who didn’t want to burn the block down.

Deeker & Skewville is offered up to the art gods.

I spotted art bloggers C-Monster, Sharon Butler, Joanne Mattera, and CocoLopez at the scene and artists William Powhida, Jen Dalton, Ellis G, Hargo (of Cash for Warhols/Banksy fame) and others also basking in the glow of burning art.

The fumes immediately felt toxic and a plume of black smoke shot into the sky and made us all step back. What we discovered that day was that art burns slowly, very very slowly.

After watching works by Skewville, Deeker, and others go up in flames, Ellis G took to the stage to demonstrate his unique brand of flammable graffiti (the graff, the burn), it provided the wow we were all waiting for.

It was a great feeling after a few days of art fairs to see art burn, it felt cleansing and cathartic, even if just for a moment.

That night I assume the art gods were happy for the gifts they were offered but I only hope they like street art.

A Stikman burns in the night.

View my photos from the event here.

Santiago Sierra’s "NO" Truck Takes Manhattan (photo by the author)

Last Saturday, I took the subway up to the United Nations building to hunt down a flatbed truck carrying giant black letters spelling the word NO — an artwork by Mexico City-based provocateur Santiago Sierra. “NO” is spreading its terse proclamation of dissent throughout the Western world at the moment with a one-day stopover in New York (as part of Performa 09) after stops all over Europe. It heads south next week for Art Basel Miami.

Sierra had arranged for a film crew to document “NO,” and I rode with them for the afternoon, observing the truck on its planned route around Manhattan. We set up across the street from the UN building, which looked stark and pearly in the setting sun. “NO” drove in front of the building very slowly (high security prevents parking) and the cameraman got some great pans of our global center of negotiation and diplomacy suddenly looking negated.

A few people walking by noticed the truck too, but they were notably charmed by the big letters. One mother said to her child “It’s like Sesame Street!” So much for political outrage.

Our next stop was on 44th Street near Times Square, where the National Debt Clock is located. Installed on the side of a building, the billboard-sized digital clock has tracked our rising national debt since 1989. The truck found a great parking space just below the Clock and we spent about half an hour there watching the numbers zoom upwards, while tourists posed for photos with the giant word. The Clock is currently at over 14 trillion dollars, and climbing by ten thousand dollars every second or so. Last September our debt broke $10 trillion, which the clock had not been equipped to display; it was modified to represent our shameful 14-digit burden. “NO,” says the truck, “N-O.”

Being near Times Square was also the perfect position for the word NO to hover between the skyrocketing debt behind it, and in the foreground, hordes of tourists loaded down with shopping bags. “NO!” I thought, “no one needs anything from the M&M store! Look at the clock!” This truck was getting to me.

Sierra describes his project with the following:

“NO expresses a response to the universally recognizable imposition. NO is the clearest exercise of the right to dissent before reality as a whole, its chaos, its future…”

I liked the idea that the entire realm of dissent could be distilled down to this single syllable. As Ghandi put it, “noncooperation with evil is as much a duty as cooperation with good.” In other words, the end of complacency and the beginning of revolution begins with NO.

A snapshot of the Hans Haacke photo in question. (photo by the author) (click to enlarge)

The truck’s next stop was in Chelsea, where there’s a lot to say no to. Yet, it seemed as though by going to Chelsea (and by going to Miami during Art Basel) the project lost some momentum. A lot of politically-oriented artworks tend to migrate back toward an art audience in order to get recognition, which is unfortunate because there are few audiences as politically monocultural. While they attempt to validate themselves as artworks, their impact fizzles.

We parked for a few minutes in front of the X Initiative, where I got to run through their new shows. On the top floor exhibit of Hans Haacke’s work, there is a large photograph of a bent beggar woman extending an outstretched hand in front of a huge white luxury yacht. The title of the work said it was taken during the opening days of the 2009 Venice Biennale. Satire and glaring inequality can make great photographs, but what was it doing here on display for an audience that probably wants to be on the A-list of that yacht, drinking champagne and discussing some great Santiago Sierra exhibit they just saw in Gothenburg? Something in me said NO, and wondered.

The same image by Peru Ana Ana Peru in (left) Brooklynite and (right) on the street.

Art that has so much vitality on the street often loses it when it moves indoors. It withers; its vibrant fur thins, depressed by the artificial environment. Some street artists rely so heavily on the street’s contribution to their work that the gallery setting seems to totally confound them (for a recent example, see Aakash Nihalani’s drab show “Tape and Mirrors” at Eastern District in Bushwick). Sometimes street artists move into the gallery and completely abandon the rich visual styles that made their work so intriguing in the first place. Peru Ana Ana Peru’s show at Brooklynite Gallery avoids these pitfalls and instructs us in new ways of understanding the relation between street and gallery art.

Portraits by Peru Ana... (left) indoors and (right) outdoors (click to enlarge)

Depending on how a street artist uses the street they may have something to lose by moving into a gallery space. Peru Ana Ana Peru, which is composed of two artists, use the street primarily as a way of making their striking and fantastical images even more so. We are struck by a colorful image or by a traditional picture frame on a signpost. We wonder what they’re doing there, so we investigate. But a closer inspection is unhelpful: An old portrait with the face scratched out? What does “Peru Ana Ana Peru” even mean? The content of the art is as perplexing as its context. By moving into the gallery, Peru Ana Ana Peru lose that special stage, and so their work risks losing the sense of not belonging that contributes to their work’s characteristic sense of aesthetic oddity.

Many of the images in their first solo show are very similar to images familiar to those who know their street work. We have seen the howling wolf, the smoking babies, the vandalized antique portraits, the parachutes, and the fuzzy heads. But at Brooklynite these images — absurd, whimsical, and psychedelic, with a touch of horror — are presented in full visual glory and, in some cases, integrated into complex installations, sculptures, and collage. Peru Ana Ana Peru are accomplished and devoted filmmakers, and some of the paintings and installations incorporate their work in film. The multi-media paintings left me wondering if I had ever seen anything like them.

Peru Ana's smoking babies (left) inside and (right) outside (click to enlarge)

The duo takes what the gallery setting has to offer — more time to create, more resources, a more focused audience — and master their work’s sense of absurd visual delight. Their work is more absurd, more dazzling, more horrific, fantastical, confusing, and more skilled. The gallery is yet another stage for their aesthetic provocations. In using the gallery essentially as they use the street, they avoid the whole question of whether they can “make the transition” into the gallery. They use both contexts to turn up the volume of their aesthetic screams, and we hear those screams loud and clear. The show, then, nicely demonstrates one way to use the street and the gallery in essentially the same way to great effect. Whether one likes that effect is another issue. And it is worth discussing whether and how other street artists have done this.

One might worry that a show involving such an astonishing array of skill – collage, appropriation, filmmaking, graffiti, drawing, craft, and more – would be all over the place. But these works are aesthetically focused and unified, which reinforces the already strong impression that these artists are seriously talented. Lurking behind all of this is the sense that we have yet to experience the full force of what Peru Ana Ana Peru have to offer.

Peru Ana Ana Peru’s exhibit, “…And Then We Jumpted Into the Abyss of Numbers: Memories in Absurdity from the Bowels of…PERU ANA ANA PERU” continues until November 14 at Brooklynite Gallery, 334 Malcolm X Blvd., Brooklyn, NY

Wednesday on Bedford Avenue (photo by Veken Gueyikian)

My husband was walking down Bedford Avenue on Wednesday, and he spotted someone pasting up posters on a wall which is almost always dominated by a giant Shepard Fairey poster, so frequently in fact that it might as well be his permanent ad space. It was lunchtime and no one stopped or cared. Knowing my love of street art, and what can sometimes be inane details, he quickly snapped a pic with his camera phone and emailed it to me with the message, “Someone covering up fairey [sic].”

What at first glance appeared to be a run of the mill “sniping” (i.e. illegal posting of corporate advertising), turned out to be a new street art campaign, iBlanket, though the artist prefers the term public art. The brain child of Bushwick artist Ann Oren, iBlanket riffs off the ubiquitous Apple “i” genre and turns our attention to the problems of homelessness just as the temperatures have started to plummet.

I caught up with the artist behind the project and she described the campaign this way:

iBlanket is a public art project that I created. The concept of the iBlanket was inspired by both our dependency on technology and the fact that laptop computers provide physical warmth when they are in use. This combination is taken by the iBlanket concept into an absurd realm with an advertisement for this impractical product. I would like to engage with the public and open a discussion about this problematic image, lead by anyone with insight on the concept. The posters invite the public to go to the site www.iBlanket.net and start a discussion or simply comment.

While the project began in Tel Aviv a little while ago, iBlanket hit the streets of New York this past Wednesday. Oren is working with various people to help her realize the project, “In every place the street posting situation is different so I find someone to assist me with local experience to mount them, in some locations I will post myself. At large this is a project I am running myself hoping to engage the public between the website and the posters.”

iBlanket (click to enlarge)

She targeted the Apple brand since, she say, “Everyone has ithis, ithat. It is familiar overindulgence.” She has hijacked the tech giant’s clean minimalist aesthetic and hacked it with a sketchy DIY style.

What I found particularly interesting is that she shies away from calling the project in any way related to street art, though in at least one instance it is being pasted (perhaps unknowingly) on top of a known street art spot. Oren says she sees it as a “public art project,” since she insists, “Street art is not where it is coming from. I think that because the project criticizes our dependency on technology, creating a street ad campaign out of it is an absurdly pragmatic way to call attention to it.” She is also using Facebook and Twitter to promote the project, which she says, works much more efficiently at spreading the message.

I can only assume that her unfamiliarity with street art in general makes her avoid the “street art” label, since her critique of power and inequalities seems perfectly aligned with the political nature of the genre. Also, I wonder if Facebook and Twitter are in fact more “efficient” since encountering a poster in person makes a much more powerful and lasting impression than a tweet or posted message.

I asked her what she would you like the project’s outcome to be. “It depends on the public, if they care enough to engage in the discussion on iBlanket.net. The public’s responses are what drive the project to expand or die. It will also determine its relevance,” she says.

As of Friday at noon, there were only 12 comments posted on the site and among them was one commenter, identified as HeadHoods, who took offense to the project’s liberty with a street art spot:

I think it’s pretty disrespectful that you covered over much more aesthetically pleasing and conceptual street art. Your istreetart is ipretty imeaningless and itouches iupon a iparody ithat is very itired this iday in age.

The response from the site’s webmaster was reasonable but suggested he or she didn’t realize that they have stepped into a scene that has its own etiquette. It is a scene that is dominated by “respect” for more senior and talented artists:

The nature of street art is that it is dynamic and changing, one work gets covered with another (or an ad), its life span depends on the people on the street. It is a “non curated” terrain. Some love it, some ignore it and some get infuriated by it. Thank you for your input.

I’m guessing that the street success of the project may come down to its ability to adapt or else the work may be quickly covered over by other artists perceiving it as a “diss.”

Normally a video artist, Oren tries not to restrict herself to that medium. What I found particularly interesting is how she describes the impetus for her idea, “This idea came about [during the] cold days in my studio when I was keeping myself warm by putting my laptop on my lap and my projector closer to me, it can get absurdly cozy.”

For more information, visit iBlanket.net.

The original stencil, c. March 2008 (via Wooster Collective)

When the New Museum for Contemporary Art’s new building opened to the public in December 2007, it was adorned with Ugo Rondinone’s enlivening “Hell, Yes!” (2001). As the New Museum describes Rondinone’s body of work, “it explores notions of emotional and psychic profundity found in the most banal elements of everyday life.” His work, then, attempts to transfigure or highlight the banal elements of daily life. It thereby highlights features that we wouldn’t normally appreciate. This is not exactly a new idea, but perhaps Rondinone does it in new ways. When the context forces one to apply the concept art to a Brillo pad shipping box, a toilet, or whatever, one will most certainly attend to features otherwise ignored in practice. Look how curvy and shiny the toilet is! Just like Brancusi! You’d say that in a museum before you said it in a public bathroom.

According to the New Museum, Rondinone’s “Hell, Yes!” celebrates the museum’s history as “the home of socially committed contemporary art.” How does “Hell, Yes!” achieve this? Your guess is as good as mine. Here’s mine: Rondinone is considered to be a “socially committed” artist; placing his work on the front of the museum gives it a quality it would otherwise lack – now it expresses the museum’s commitment to such work, namely, work that is “socially committed”. (An analogy: a rich person puts a flashy Warhol in his living room. Before, the painting expressed whatever it expressed. Now, it is also a status symbol – it symbolizes the rich man’s wealth.)

There’s a more pressing question about the New Museum’s claim: How is this contemporary art museum, in these times, the home of socially committed contemporary art? Again, your guess is as good as mine. But here I’m at a loss for guesses. One might suspect that whoever wrote this (and whoever endorses it) fails to appreciate street art and its commitment to social commentary; they therefore fail to appreciate a vast swath of contemporary art practice. This seems odd for a contemporary art institution that fancies itself the home of socially committed art. Yet again, it doesn’t.

Shortly after the New Museum opened, an anonymous black (colorless) stencil seemed to capture these sentiments perfectly. The simplicity of the stencil’s form is striking, but no less so than the complexity of its meaning. It was placed at the base of a street light post just across the street from the New Museum, on the northwest corner of Bowery and Prince.

"Hell, No!" stencil obscured by Ronzo sticker in front of the New Museum on the Bowery (photo courtesy the author)

Clearly a comment on “Hell, Yes!”, the anonymous “Hell, No!” stencil rejects Rondinone’s ambition to bring the “everyday” into the artworld. Street art, by contrast, brings art into the everyday, into the streets. By rejecting Rondinone’s piece, the stencil rejects the notion that a museum could be the home of socially committed art. A better home is the open public space of the society to which the art is committed. By using the street to say this, the stencil embodies its own message – it beautifully exemplifies the very qualities it promotes.

As I was walking down Bowery last weekend, I decided to check in on the stencil. I was shocked to see that something was obscuring it: a sticker. I tried to pull it off, but it was one of those obnoxious cheap paper stickers that leave a sticky paper residue. The stencil was destroyed, defaced by a cartoonish sticker.

It would be delightfully ironic, in a way, if the sticker were yet another corporate advertisement; understandable, if it belonged to an unknowing local band. As it happens, however, the sticker belongs to another street artist: the experienced Londoner Ronzo. And it’s not exactly Ronzo’s street art – it’s a sticker with a couple of characteristic images accompanied by his website’s URL. So what destroyed the beloved stencil was a message very different from that of “Hell, No!” Ronzo’s message is: Check me out! Come to my website!

So, I went to his website. What I found were various images of Ronzo’s street art, pictures of the “cute” cement sculptures he places in cities around the world. I even learned that I could buy the very toys with which Ronzo adorns the street. Right there on the website! Add 10 to my shopping cart for 1000 Pounds. This is quite a strategy: exploit the unique setting of street art to lure someone to your website. If you like what you saw on the streets, you can buy your very own. Get a T-shirt while you’re shopping!

If you really want to support this strategy make your way over to OBEY. Shepard Fairey has mastered this technique (in part by creating the context he exploits). It’s somewhat odd, if you think about it, that these people think they’re making street art. Here are the OBEY people attempting, pathetically, to explain what Fairey is up to:

“It is easy to see that in Shepard’s world the line between fine art, commercial art and street art have all [sic] been blurred to form the distinct style that is synonymous to [sic] OBEY.”[source]

Correct the grammar and you’re still left with nonsense. The style of an artwork is the way it is (or appears to be) made. The style of an artist, by extension, is the characteristic way an artist makes art. Commercial art can be done in the same style as street or gallery art (e.g., mass stenciling for film promotion); street art can be done in the style of some gallery art (e.g., MOMO’s abstract pieces); and gallery art can be done in the style of some commercial art [e.g., Warhol’s "Brillo Box" (1964)]. But one cannot create a style by offending distinctions between these categories of art. Street art is at odds with commercial and gallery art. Fairey has the resources to make very impressive ads in the style of street art, but it’s not street art. You can’t have your cake and eat it, too. Even if you’re really good at baking.

Street art is able to make claims that museum and commercial art cannot; the “Hell, No!” stencil carries a message that is well worth considering, and for that reason, preserving. What a shame that this stencil is now obscured by yet another advertisement.