Street Art Way Below the Street" By Jasper Rees (NYT)

I love how my vows of a writing return are promptly followed by an online disappearance.

Of course it's a super cool graffiti project that brings me back. You can read the New York Times article about the Underbelly Project which I've highlighted below, but it's probably more notable for pics of the space. Wish they had more pictures. You can also check the website online: http://theunderbellyproject.com/

Got more/better pics? Send 'em my way.

Highlights:

Known to its creators and participating artists as the Underbelly Project, the space, where all the show’s artworks remain, defies every norm of the gallery scene.

...

That’s because the exhibition has been mounted, illegally, in a long-abandoned subway station.

The difficult process of getting to the Underbelly space — which involves waiting at an active station’s platform until it’s empty, slipping from it into the damp and very dirty no man’s land beyond, and traversing that to get to the old station’s entrance — suggested to PAC and Workhorse how challenging the project would be. And the legal risks were obvious. Charles F. Seaton, a spokesman for New York City Transit, described such incursions as “trespassing, punishable by law,” and said “anyone caught defacing M.T.A. property is subject to arrest and fine.” Beyond that, Workhorse and PAC worried that given anxiety about terrorism in the subway, a large-scale, long-term project like theirs might even lead to more serious charges.

In early 2009 Workhorse and PAC began putting out feelers among street artists, seeking a mix of the established and the up and coming. (For security reasons they avoided “anyone more than a step away from someone we knew well,” Workhorse said.)

The scariest moment came around 1:30 one morning, just after Workhorse had left the site with a Moscow-based Australian artist known as Strafe (who spoke on condition that her real name not be used). They heard workers nearby and sprinted back in the dark, but once back on their platform, Strafe said, “I swung round and stepped into thin air, and literally fell onto my back on the track bed.” Too stunned to move, she looked at Workhorse, who had jumped down to join her with a flashlight. She said she saw a look of horror that said, “ ‘What are we going to do if she’s seriously injured?’ ” Eventually she was able to sit up, but they still had to wait until after 5 a.m. to leave.

After this reporter’s tour, the curators destroyed the equipment they had been using to get in and out of the site. “We’re not under the illusion that no one will ever see it,” Workhorse said. “But what we are trying to do is to discourage it as much as possible.” He stressed that any self-styled explorer who found the site and attempted to enter it would be taking a real risk.

“If you go in there and break your neck, nobody’s going to hear you scream,” he said — at least assuming there are no track workers around. “You’re just going to have to hope that someone is going to find you before you die.”

Reverse Graffiti

I thought I had written about this Reverse Graffiti artist Alexandre Orion in Sao Paulo Brazil, but I couldn't find the post (be sure to watch the video).

But now the reverse graffiti movement hits San Francisco and it's so cool.

Learn more about the Reverse Graffiti Project in San Francisco here.

Banksy Tunnel Exhibit

I think I officially qualify as a Banksy stalker now.

Article/Video

A disused road tunnel in south London has been turned into a giant exhibition space by graffiti artist Banksy.

Murals in the Bristol artist's famous stencil style appear with work by 29 other artists in a half-mile stretch of the tunnel in Leake Street, Waterloo.

The installations will be removed after the event but Banksy said he hoped the murals and graffiti would become permanent part of the tunnel.

Pictures

Via Visual Dhikr

3-D Graffiti

Pretty cool.



Via

Paintings/Graf from an Old Lithuanian Art School

I don't know details, because my source doesn't know details, and I failed to do the proper research for the assignment. But it's cool. The pictures are really nice; take time to note the detail (patterns on clothing, shadows, creases, etc).

Go look

Lost Art's 2007 (and 2006) Year in Pictures

Self explanatory.

WARNING: Nudity.

Watch 2007 Here

I enjoyed the pictures towards the middle/end more than the ones near the beginning. It's renewed my convictions to visit:
- Brazil (specifically for the graffiti)
- Italy
- Spain

And since I never put it up, apparently, check out Lost Art's 2006 Year In Pictures as well. Made Egypt a MUST VISIT location. Jordan (in general) and Prague seem notable.

(Apparently, when I first posted, I was a little behind the times)

Send A Message in Palestine

I love this idea. love love love.

Have you ever wanted to travel to Palestine just to write a message of love in graffiti for your sweetie? Or perhaps you wanted to tell that buddy of yours that he owes you $20 bucks and just wanted it to be visible on something as divisive as a wall to illustrate the rift the debt has caused between the two of you? Well now you can do both of those. At Send A Message you pay and Palestinians Spray! For a mere 30 Euros, you can have your message of love or debt collection spray painted on this 620 Kilometer fence (click here for image). In return, you get 3 digital photos to share with those who the message is aimed at.

All kidding aside, the wall is a great project, a collaboration between Dutch advertising professionals and creative Palestinian youth, each message posted reminds Palestinians trapped inside the Wall they have not been forgotten, helping to keep hope alive. The project also allows those inside those wall to send one single, simple message: “we are human beings, just like you, with sense of humor and lust for life.” That’s why they do this, and enjoy it.

The only concern I can think of at the moment is for the security of those who actually participate in the vandalism.

Send a Message from Here

Via Josh Spear

The Graffiti Project on Kelburn Castle

I adore well done graf. If it wasn't such an expensive medium (now I need a friggin castle too?! damn), I'd give it a shot myself. I'll have to stick to gel pens, thanks.

The idea is simple and original: take the vibrant and often transient art form of Brazilian graffiti out of its predominantly urban context and apply it to the ancient and permanent walls of an historic rural castle in Scotland.

http://www.thegraffitiproject.net

Highly highly recommended! I guess they wanted to be done by May 31st, 2007, but due Scotland's trademark rain, they're still going.

Check out the site, especially the videos and photographs. In one of the videos you can see them drawing a hijabi girl. I dunno why.

There's also a few previous works by the artists that are worth checking out. Farah approved :thumbup:

Banksy (revisted)

Article

A follow-up to an earlier Banksy post.

Small Exhibit of Pictures

(Extended) Highlights:

Banksy has parlayed his knack for reducing ideas to simple visual elements into what a critic recently termed "red nose rebellion." He is both a lefty and a tweaker of lefty pieties. At a London antiwar demonstration in 2003, he distributed signs that read "I Don't Believe In Anything. I'm Just Here for the Violence." Later, he produced revisionist oil paintings (Mona Lisa with a yellow smiley face, a pastoral landscape surrounded by crime-scene tape) and, disguised in a trenchcoat and fake beard, installed them, respectively, in the Louvre and the Tate.

and i looove what he did on the security wall in the west bank. love. heart.

Whoever he is, Banksy revels in the incongruities of his persona. "The art world is the biggest joke going," he has said. "It's a rest home for the overprivileged, the pretentious, and the weak." Although he once declared that "every other type of art compared to graffiti is a step down,"...

Last month, a painting titled "Space Girl and Bird" sold at Bonham's for five hundred and seventy-five thousand, a Banksy record. Ralph Taylor, a specialist in the Sotheby's contemporary-art department, said of Banksy, "He is the quickest-growing artist anyone has ever seen of all time." Banksy responded to the Sotheby's sale by posting a painting on his Web site. It featured an auctioneer presiding over a crowd of rapt bidders, with the caption "I can't believe you morons actually buy this shit."

While setting up the show in Los Angeles, Banksy ordered a pizza, ate it, and tossed the box in a Dumpster. Within weeks, the pizza box was sold on eBay, for a hundred and two dollars. The seller suggested that a few anchovies that had been left inside might yield traces of Banksy's DNA.

Rodents are a favorite motif. "Like most people, I have a fantasy that all the little powerless losers will gang up together," Banksy wrote in "Existencilism." "That all the vermin will get some good equipment and then the underground will go overground and tear this city apart." His most famous street paintings are a series of black-and-white stencilled rats, the majority of them slightly larger than life-size. Each is different, but they all possess an impish poignancy that made them an immediate hit with London pedestrians. One, a "gangster rat," painted on a wall near the Smithfield market, wears a peace-sign medallion and carries a sign that says "Welcome to Hell." Another pleads, "Please love me." Cheyenne Westphal, the chairman for contemporary art in Europe at Sotheby's, told me, "My first experience with him was in October, 2004, when he left a piece outside a party we were throwing for Damien Hirst." It was a rat, holding up a placard that read, "You lie." Banksy, typically, was flipping off the art world and begging it to notice him at the same time.

Banksy was displaying an eight-thousand-pound elephant named Tai, whose hide he had painted red and embellished with gold fleurs-de-lis, to match the wallpaper of a parlor he had constructed. (The elephant in the room, a handout proclaimed, was global poverty.) The activists said that the paint was toxic. Ed Boks, Los Angeles's general manager of animal services, said he regretted that his office had issued a permit and, after visiting the show, wrote on his blog that looking into the elephant's eyes "nearly brought me to tears." He eventually ordered the animal hosed down. The L.A. Times, which had not planned to review the show, published two stories. Al Jazeera reported on the controversy. Other people were angry about a large portrait of Mother Teresa overlaid with the words "I learnt a valuable lesson from this woman. Moisturise everyday." By Sunday, thirty thousand people, waiting in lines five blocks long, had seen the exhibition.

"Only when the last tree has been cut down and the last river has dried up will man realize that reciting red Indian proverbs makes you sound like a fucking muppet"

The gallery's motto is "Art by People," but its affiliates exhibit a caginess toward anyone outside their circle of trusted accomplices, many of whom work in semi-symbiosis. Banksy, for instance, illustrated the cover for "Think Tank," a 2003 album by the band Blur, of which Damon Albarn is a member. (Banksy later declared that he'd never do commercial work again.) Albarn went on to found Gorillaz, a band whose public face is represented by four animated characters. Remi Kabaka, who provides the voice for the band's drummer, works at the gallery as a sort of majordomo. At a recent party at a bar nearby, his name was the password for entry.

Graffiti aficionados like to say that the form is as ancient as cave drawing, and Banksy takes a similarly romantic view. "Imagine a city where graffiti wasn't illegal, a city where everybody could draw wherever they liked," he once wrote. "Where the street was awash with a million colors and little phrases. . . . A city that felt like a party where everyone was invited, not just the estate agents and barons of big business." Detractors of graffiti, however, can trace its spread as assiduously as epidemiologists mapping an outbreak of diphtheria.

"Fings have gone a little bit nuts lately," Steve Lazarides said, with the burry inflection of his native city. "Suddenly, it's become all right amongst the proper art world to collect street art."

Twirling a pen, he reported that walk-in traffic at the gallery had increased fifteenfold. "We've had a lot of youth, and we're not talking about well-heeled youth," he said. "A lot of street kids, the kids who sort of hang around and hang out and what have you. They're all very polite."

I'd heard that Banksy had become "increasingly paranoid," and I wondered whether the accusations of hypocrisy had worn on him, and whether he was able to enjoy his success. "I have been called a sellout, but I give away thousands of paintings for free, how many more do you want?" he wrote. "I think it was easier when I was the underdog, and I had a lot of practise at it. The money that my work fetches these days makes me a bit uncomfortable, but that's an easy problem to solve—you just stop whingeing and give it all away. I don't think it's possible to make art about world poverty and then trouser all the cash, that's an irony too far, even for me." He went on, "I love the way capitalism finds a place—even for its enemies. It's definitely boom time in the discontent industry. I mean, how many cakes does Michael Moore get through?"

"Why do you do what you do?" I asked.

Banksy replied, "I originally set out to try and save the world, but now I'm not sure I like it enough."

Banksy has always had a fatalistic streak: in one of his books, a pair of lovebirds is juxtaposed with the dictum "As soon as you meet someone, you know the reason you will leave them." In another, a little girl releases a heart-shaped red balloon: "When the time comes to leave, just walk away quietly and don't make any fuss."

after the article, i felt a bit depressed that everyone knows about him. :-/ sad.

Aerosol Arabic on USA 'Arts and Islam' Tour

i'm dumb for not having gotten this out earlier. sorry, kids :-/

If you're not aware of his work, it's pretty damn hot. i'm a huge fan. he's touring the US; check it out if you get a chance, if for no other reason than because his name is friggin "aerosol arabic"... c'mon! you know that's awesome.

The dates for the Arts and Islam USA programme are as follows:

Chicago:
11th-14th April
New York:
15th April – 19th April
Boston/Massachusetts:
20th April – 21st April

Aerosol Arabic's youtube videos

Banksy

banksy = graffiti artist in the UK, and he's pretty damn awesome. as far as i know, he has yet to be "caught," which is odd considering he has his own website.

http://www.banksy.co.uk/menu.html

check it out
f