street art, Banksy - film - 2009 - Banksy's Coming For Dinner

Banksy's Coming to Dinner
Ivan Massow
Circus Road Films
2009
71 minutes

Banksy’s Coming for Dinner is a mockumentary depicting a dinner party hosted by Joan Collins (an actress?) and her husband, on their aristocratic estate, where they entertain a small group of guests including the trendy and mysterious street artist, Banksy. The film is a play on celebrity and art, and particularly the notion that an individual can become a celebrity while remaining withdrawn from the public.

Banksy is an enigma, not simply because he’s anonymous - most street artists do what they can to conceal their identities - but because through some unknown alchemical process, he gets to be the graffiti artist who ascends to superstar. His work means more than other graffiti works and he has people who generally have no interest in graffiti and street art defending it as art rather than vandalism, and great art rather than good art. Banksy thus becomes a brand name for quality graffiti for people who wouldn’t know the difference, and this brand is produced through media, the circulation of reputations, and an art market rooted in contemporary consumerist practices based on shock, novelty, appropriation, and the exploitation of subcultures.

Massow’s film is a documentary featuring a dinner party with Banksy in attendance. The mockumentary is a prank upon the people who’ve caught the Banksy fever and are hoping to learn a little or just see the face of the artist in this film, as Massow leads his audience to believe that the film is an authentic dinner party, rather than a staged farce. Banksy appears as a pathetic man-child who attends the dinner with his mother, who drives him and makes sure that the ride is well-stocked with plenty of treats. Banksy is largely a source of pointless statements through the dinner, which is pretty much the extent of his presense in thhis film. This is obviously a fictionalized Banksy, and Massow is exploiting the artist’s anonymous status as a way of making fun of him and his admirers. Art is not really a topic in the film, but rather the magnetic draw of the celebrity - of celebrities towards one another, and of an audience so enraptured with an anonymous, heavily hyped artist, that they would watch a film where he eats dinner, just to catch a glimpse.

defaced piece by Banksy

defaced Banksy - Toronto

street art - book - 2008 - Going Postal: Mailing Label Street Art

Going Postal: Mailing Label Street Art
Martha Cooper
Mark Batty Publisher
2008
99 pages

Martha Cooper is a photographer with a long-standing interest in urban culture and particularly in graffiti art.  Her work has been published in a variety of periodical publications (including National Geographic) and of her books, almost all relate to hip-hop culture and most of those pertain to graffiti, including her most famous work, Subway Art (published in 1984).  She was also interviewed by Cedar Lewisohn in Street Art: The Graffiti Revolution, and is generally considered a pioneer in the representation of graffiti art.

One of Cooper’s talents has been to identify types of street art and capture as many different photographic representations of this type as she can.  Books like Subway Art are categorical archives of a peculiar graffiti form, and within this form sub-categories are perceived.  Cooper’s influence can be seen in books like Stencil Graffiti by Tristan Manco, where the author aggregates as many examples of one particular form into a single volume.  The graffiti form Cooper collected into the book Going Postal is the mailing label image.  Street artists use labels of various sizes as a medium to carry their art.  Many of the label-works are writer’s tags, drawings-by-hand, and some are printed images.  The obvious advantage of the use of the mailing label is that the act of creation is separated from the act of vandalism, thereby reducing risk of detection to the artist.  The other advantage is that the United States Postal Service gives away its labels for free.

Going Postal contains hundreds of photos of mailing label graffiti in its 99 pages.  After a brief introductory essay by the author, in which she describes her discovery of sticker art and her apprehension of different forms of its content, the book is devoted strictly to images.  Cooper does contain numerous examples of each kind of content, from tags to amusing drawings, to political messages.  These images are not grouped in any way and aside from a list of credits at the end of the book, there is very little information attached to the works.  A reader may begin to take for granted that the images are all from the United States because USPS logos are left exposed on many of the works, but some images are drawn on German labels too.  Cooper appears to give priority to the wide array of creative possibilities that these labels have opened for street artists.  Information such as placement locations is not included, which is typical of street art books.

Going Postal is published by Mark Batty Publisher, a recently established book publishing company that appears to routinely release new books on street art. 

shepard fairey - book - 2011 - Mayday: The Art of Shepard Fairey

Mayday: The Art of Shepard Fairey
Jeffrey Deitch and Antonino D’Ambrosio
Gingko Press (in association with Obey Giant)
2011
133 pages

Recently the artist Shepard Fairey was beaten up by anarchists in Copenhagen, Denmark over a misunderstanding regarding the status of one of his public pieces.  Fairey put a mural up on the side of a building that overlooks the demolition site for the ‘youth house’, a Copenhagen punk venue and activist meeting place that existed from 1982 to 2007.  Fairey’s original mural looked like this:

Although according to news reports, it was vandalized by angry punks almost immediately and now looks like this (according to recent photos):

Furthermore, Shepard Fairey entered into dialogue with angry locals, in which he recieved a black eye:

The anti-Fairey activists felt that his mural was a city-sanctioned gesture to make amends to them over the loss of their meeting space via the work of a well-known American artist.  Undoubtedly, European anarchists best know Fairey as the creator of this iconic image of president Barack Obama:

and therefore interpret the artist as little more than a propagandist for American power.  According to Fairey, one of the street-toughs called him “Obama Illuminati”.  The whole episode is unfortunate because Fairey was paying tribute to the house and local figures (who, according to Shepard, knew better) claimed that the artist was working in collaboration with the city as part of a strategy to erase ongoing conflict with the punks.  

There are two ways in which this story links back to the content of the book Mayday: The Art of Shepard Fairey.  The first is with regards to the defacement of the mural, the second is with regards to the intention to pay tribute.  Mayday is the record of an exhibition (it’s not quite an exhibition catalogue) of Fairey’s work which was also the last of the Deitch Projects (a series of art exhibitions curated by Jeffrey Deitch).  It is also a collection of Fairey’s recent works, from 2010, as well as numerous images of street art including new photos of publicly placed Giant posters and stickers.  What dominates Mayday (a title that evokes a distress call, and the annual day of celebration for radical labour) are the portraits and images of tribute to Fairey’s influences.

Many of Fairey’s 2010 works, represented in Mayday, are portraits of revolutionary figures from art, music, politics and academia.  Using the method of appropriating iconic images of images that served him well in the past (with the Obey Giant campaign and more recently with his ‘Hope’ image of President Obama) Fairey creates monochromatic (but vibrant) representations of his idols, including Iggy Pop, Cornell West, Neil Young, Debbie Harry, Grandmaster Flash, Keith Harring, Jasper Johns, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Woody Guthrie, Robert Rauschenberg, Nico, and a number of others.  

Not all the images are portraits, however Fairey has found novel ways to pay tribute to his influences.  First, the book’s cover image is one of many Flag pieces, paintings of the American flag, by the artist, which can, perhaps, be read as the artist’s reinterpretation of Jasper John’s famous flag works.  One of Fairey’s flags is ‘MAYDAY Flag White’,

is a direct reference to John’s 1955 ‘White Flag’.  

Another of Fairey’s flags, ‘MAYDAY Flag Black’ also refers back to Johns, but also to Black Flag, an LA hardcore band of the late 70s/early 80s that Fairey makes reference to on his blog posts and in other works.  Most notable of these works is ‘Rise Above Control’ a bleak image of what may be an office or industrial building with the first line of this song:

printed on it.

All of Fairey’s gallery pieces are represented in the book as full colour images, and are often full page representations to render the detail of the collaged backgrounds legible.  Much of Fairey’s post-Giant work has foregrounded symbolic imagery against a background of wallpaper or textile-esque patterns (with his Giant Obey signs embedded into them somewhere).  In the Mayday works, he has also included fragments of newspaper headlines, and printed matter from other sources as well as, on the portraits, subtle references to the subject.  Example: the portrait of Keith Harring includes his ‘radiating baby’ symbol,

and the Woodie Guthrie portrait includes collaged depression-era headlines.  While Fairey flattens his subject matter through his design aesthetic, he brings depth to each image through his use of collage and background symbols.  

I have mostly focused on the canvas paintings of Mayday, although the book contains works done in a variety of media, including stencil works, decorated leather jackets, posters, and street murals.  What interests me about the murals that appear in this book is that he simulates the effect that they are images that have been layered on top of one another and then torn in parts to reveal different levels of imagery.  

These murals evoke the registered structure of James Rosenquist’s large 1970s paintings, but in their simulated torn-ness they also evoke the work of Raymond Hains, Mimmo Rotella et al. and their ‘decollage’ technique of producing images from torn-up public posters.

In creating a sense of the layered and damaged images in many of his street murals, Fairey’s works acknowledge the public wall image as a site that accumulates new forms and therefore new meanings.  The above mural is a Fairey collaboration with notorious graffiti artist COPE2, and the result appears as though COPE2 is painting over an existing image. Painting over is a gesture of disrespect in the graffiti subculture but with this piece it is actually the opposite.  Still, this mural creates the appearance of such street-art communication, but other works of his accumulate other forms, and many of the photos in Mayday of Fairey’s ‘Giant’ posters show that they have been defaced in a number of ways, and images of a large mural painted by him show that they had parts painted over by other artists.

street art - book - 2008 - Street Art: The Graffiti Revolution

Street Art: The Graffiti Revolution
Cedar Lewisohn
Tate Publishing
2008
160 pages
 

Cedar Lewisohn, a curator at Tate Modern gallery in London, U.K. has written an insightful study of the international phenomena known as graffiti and street art.  Street Art is, by my estimation, far more substantive than such publications as the already profiled Stencil Graffiti or Graffiti NYC.  Lewisohn’s book attempts to theorize the differences between graffiti and the new, emerging forms it inspires, which he refers to as ‘street art’ proper.  Furthermore, Lewisohn’s text comprises an attempt, which has already been seen in Tristan Manco’s Stencil Graffiti, to formulate a canon of street artists.  

This book was released to coincide with a Lewisohn-curated Street Art exhibition held at the Tate Modern from 23 May – 25 August 2008.  I am often skeptical of the relevance of graffiti or street art gallery exhibitions because I believe the loss of the ‘street’ setting empties such works of much of their essence.   Lewisohn’s show was accompanied by a walking tour lead by a number of practicing street artists, thus returning the street to the academic discourse on the cultural form.  In Street Art, the author makes calls for academic and high-art institutions to recognize street art and in particular he requests that museums begin including such works in their collections.  While Lewisohn’s arguments are more nuanced and articulate than the simplistic griping about lack of recognition done by Hugo Martinez in Graffiti NYC, the call for graffiti to appear museums still sounds problematic to me.  The transposition from street to gallery for a work of art creates for it a radical change of status, because graffiti/street art is not simply imagery and its street setting is of critical importance to its value.  

Graffiti and Street art (its questionable whether or not people who are not hip to the scene differentiate between the two the way Lewisohn does) normally exist in a tension between the street artists and the city officials who believe that nothing can improve upon the appearance of an unadorned concrete wall.  Spectators play in the balance, choosing their level of engagement with the art as they move through the city, and making evaluations as they proceed.  Combining a gallery exhibition of street art with a walking tour is perhaps a strategy for attempting to reconcile the transposition of street art into the gallery, with the original experience of viewing such art in the street.

As has already been stated, Lewisohn’s book operates in a manner different from many other street art texts, and this is first evidenced in the images he uses.  While Stencil Graffiti and Graffiti NYC often displayed closely cropped images (with some exceptions) of street art, Street Art often displays a work of graffiti surrounded by a number of other markings, tags, stickers, etc.  The images in the book display the hypergraphic reality that works of street art exist in.  They are seldom discreet graphic objects and are almost always on a surface with a myriad of other ‘works’ of similar art.  

Another aspect to Lewisohn’s text that makes it an interesting book in the graffiti art literature is its construction of a history for the craft.  Lewisohn operates along two lines of history, the first is with regards to the art, which he grounds in NYC graffiti of the 1970s and 1980s as well as practices by the “high-art” artists who used the street as a showplace, including Jenny Holzer, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, John Fekner, and some others.  Lewisohn reaches as far back as Brassai, a photographer of mid-20th-century streetlife and his photos of children’s scratchings on the sides of Parisian buildings.  Lewisohn’s history of the art draws on both folk and fine art traditions, radical politics, and desires for illegal thrills, which lead into his descriptions of the most reputable contemporary practitioners of street art.  Street Art, for Lewisohn, is the culmination of the convergence of all of these traditions.  The canon of contemporary street artists includes Blek Le Rat, Banksy, Judith Supine, Lady Pink, Shepard Fairey, and Miss Van.  The author's prehistory of street is varied and comprehensive and it is fitting that Lewisohn's list of currently relevant artists is also varied in terms of location, style, motivations, and materials.  

The other history Lewisohn presents is that of the documentation and theory about graffiti and street art.  Lewisohn includes discussions with Henry Chalfant (author of early books about graffiti and director of the 1984 graffiti documentary film, Style Wars).  He also includes photographs and discussions with Martha Cooper who produced the 1988 book Subway Art a seminal photobook of the era of NYC subway graffiti.  Numerous references are made throughout the book to seminal writings on the art form, including Norman Mailer’s text The Faith of Graffiti, and French postmodernist Jean Baudrillard’s discussion of NYC tagging in Symbolic Exchange and Death.  Interspersed with Lewisohn’s profiles of the most reputable members of the international street artist scene are some notes considering specific cultural influences such as punk culture or the formative art-school environment.  Lewisohn’s text and innovative 2008 exhibition has placed himself as a recent figure in the field of graffiti research, and his book is as much about the history of graffiti history as it is about the emerging street art scene.  It should also go without saying but this Tate publication is filled with full colour images of examples of the art Lewisohn finds to be such a vital form of modern expression.

 

street art - book - 2002 - Stencil Graffiti

Stencil Graffiti
Tristan Manco
Thames and Hudson
2002
112 pages

Hello friends in the Cybertubes!  I borrowed Stencil Graffiti by Tristan Manco from the Toronto Public Library.

Tristan Manco is a graphic designer based in Bristol, UK.  He is possibly best known as designer of the art for many Real World Records releases.  Manco has also written and edited a number of books on graffiti and street art, with this as his first.  Stencil Graffiti is primarily a collection of images (405 in total, with 400 colour images) of stencil based street art, although it also includes representations of some non-stencil art by some of the best known of the Stencil artists.  The images of the book comprise a survey of street art produced with stencils, and some insights into why some street artists choose stencils to produce their art.

Manco’s book is good for displaying the creative potential of the stencil as a tool in the production of street art, but it contains many of the same issues as other street art books, such as Graffiti NYC.  It’s images are mostly decontextualized from their street street and represented in the same way images are represented in a catalogue raisonné.  With street art, a work’s urban context is intrinsically relevant to the work, and I would like to see graffiti books better represent that aspect somehow.  Like many street art books, Stencil Graffiti attempts to make an argument for its subject matter to be elevated to a similar status as gallery art, and perhaps it is part of a strategy for achieving such an ascension that almost all of the the book’s images are closely cropped and could just as easily be imagined on a gallery wall.  

While the book adopts the mode of representation used most often in books displaying gallery art, a form of display which effaces the works of their original ‘street’ placement.  Stencil Graffiti still relies on a notion of the street, as a site of everyday life, to invest the images with vitality.  The book contains a tension that is, perhaps, irreconcilable.  The representation of stencil pieces used by Marco flattens out their vitality derived from their original context, but still Marco tries to maintain a referent to the original context it as a means of discerning what, exactly, is unique about these images.

Manco’s book contains many images, and its primary value is in displaying the array of possibilities for the stencil on city walls.   Most of the book is divided into a number of sections based on image content.  There is a literary section, for example, displays a stenciled wall piece of William S Burroughs, while a music section displays a number of musicians.  The conundrum with many of these graffiti books is that their readers probably already live in urban settings where these works of art are an ever present part of their daily environment. These books, in essence,  condense an aspect of the reader’s daily life and reflect it back to them after emptying it of most of its meaning.  Stencil Graffiti makes no effort to propose a history of stencil art, discuss the legitimate uses of stencils on walls to which the art may be contrasted, why the stencil pieces are primarily pop culture references, etc.  As a basic overview of the potential and possibilities of stencil graffiti, Manco’s book is adequate.  Manco may simply be trying to find some examples of a form of art that he can present to other designers.  For any deeper research needs, however, other books should be sought.  I would suggest a careful observation of city walls in a downtown core during a walk would be just as fruitful, if not moreso, than reading a book like this.  

In the final section of Stencil Graffiti, Manco profiles a handful of well-known stencil artists.  This section of the book is interesting as it denotes an effort to form of a canon for the medium.  Blek le Rat, Banksy, Shepard Fairey, and others are profiled, without Manco creating a clear sense of why these artists are superior to the anonymous who invented this art form.  Such profiles lead me to hope for a book that examines the relationships between street art and the gallery/art market systems in a rigorous manner. 

street art - book - 2006 - Graffiti NYC

Graffiti NYC
Hugo Martinez
2006
Prestel

Ahoy out there in the webnetland!  I borrowed Graffiti NYC from the Toronto Public Library.  

In recent years there have been a large number of books published about street art.  Unfortunately, many of these published works are simply photo books, with nothing to say about their subject matter.  The fact that so many of these books offer little insight into graffiti leaves these books without much value because in the contemporary urban environment, graffiti is ubiquitous.  I love graf and street art, and I do not need books to show it to me.  Nor does anyone who has a casual or minor interest in it.  I live in a city and I can see at least a couple examples of it any time I take a walk, no matter which direction I take when I leave home. For this reason, I think, a book about graffiti must offer something other than photographs of a few examples of it, which is unfortunately all that Graffiti NYC presents to its readers.  This book fails to offer an angle on its material other than what its title suggests, that is, it displays some of the graffiti that has appeared in New York City over some period of time.    

Aside from walking around an urban centre, the Internet is the best source for finding examples of graffiti art.  The Art Crimes website has been in operation since 1994, documenting and archiving a huge amount of graffiti images from around the world.  The Wooster Collective manages a popular blog that features the work of street artists that often disavow the tendencies of traditional graffiti.  There are many other websites that feature graffiti and street art, and in their speed of capture and representation of recent art they are superior to any book publishing effort.  

With regards to graffiti books, most that I have read try to offer some particular line of thought on their subject matter.  Graffiti Kings by Jack Stewart serves as a history of early subway art in NYC and analyzed the style and practices of the burgeoning artists.  Susan Philips’ Wallbangin’ explored the uses of graffiti particular to LA gang culture.  Mascots and Mugs by David "Chino" Villorente and Todd "Reas" James, examines the appropriation of comic book characters by graffiti artists.  Graffiti NYC offers no insight into a particular aspect of graffiti art, nor does it survey any tendency in graffiti practice in depth.  Instead, it provides a series of shots of some art from new york city from some time.  

Graffiti art is omnipresent in the urban environment, and all Graffiti NYC seems to suggest is that the graffiti in New York is no different or superior to the graffiti in Toronto and Ottawa.  A couple of years ago a zine was published that featured a series of building doorways from San Francisco where the doors were covered in stickers and tags.  The implication of the zine was that this was a unique feature of San Francisco graffiti.  Doorways in every city are marked up in the same manner.  There’s no call for a literature that ahistorically and acritically presents a folk art that exists in every urban environment, and then make a claim that there’s something unique being captured between those book covers.

Many of Graffiti NYC’s pages are colour photos of painted walls, truncated to display a picture of an individual, presumably an artist.  The pages are unnumbered and there is no textual information attached to the images on the pages.  I suspect that, because graffiti resists gallery display, the editors of this book felt that the injustice of the high art world ignoring the graffiti subculture could be corrected by setting images of graffiti in an interesting format.  This does the images a disservice, however, not only are they liberated from their original urban context, there’s no effort by the editors to provide information to help a reader contextualize the images.  Some data pertaining to the images appears in an appendix in the back, however the pages are mostly unnumbered which makes connecting a piece of data to a particular image an incredible strain on the reader’s patience.

Graffiti NYC expresses an insecurity about graffiti’s status, and also a certain moral narcissism.  The introduction decries the high art world’s ignorance of graffiti.  What an injustice!  Not only was current art-star (and street artist) Banksy popular in 2006, but long before then graffiti had had an influence on high artists and other manifestations of high culture.  A character in novelist John DeLillo’s highly regarded 1997 novel Underworld was a prominent graffiti artist.  Furthermore, post-modern philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote quite a bit about NYC graffiti in his important cultural theory text, Symbolic Exchange and Death.  Style Wars is a well known Graffiti documentary that has been re-released in an anniversary edition, which features a number of graf artists forming a union to work with NY’s gallery system.  Finally, two of the best known (New York) artists of the 1980s, Keith Harring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, were graffiti artists.  And while Basquat and Harring transcended graffiti styles, street artists like Lady Pink gained reknown beyond the graffiti subculture for her graffiti skills.  Does the high art world have to acknowledge graffiti?  It appears as though it already has, so then what form of acknowledgment would satisfy the editors of this book?  Graffiti is the illegal art found on other people’s property.  When the art is legal, it changes state, and isn’t truly graffiti although it may retain a style developed by the graffiti subculture.

Finally, Graffiti NYC, demonstrates a kind of moral narcissism.  It’s authors put the word crime in quotations, as though crime and art are genuinely counterpoised, and if the struggle to call graffiti art can just succeed, then no one will consider it crime anymore.  This is an infantile attitude that carries through the book.  The text in the book is sparse, only a four page introduction and three interludes from the images in which quotes are taken from graffiti artists where they express their attitudes in brief statements about graffiti related issues.  While many other books on graffiti contain detailed insights into the craft, or lengthy interviews with experienced artists (such as All City: The Book About Taking Space by Paul103), Graffiti NYC reduces the artists to short quotations where some artists revel in graffiti’s crime status, and others whine about how it may be illegal, but there’s worse crimes out there; thus creating a confused and mangled sense of what the book is trying to express.