C2NY Graffiti Artwork Creation Event

The Movement of Graffiti Art presents a day at five points with Benj Gershman from LookAtLife.com, graffiti artist Meres One, and one of the largest and growing collections of public graffiti art. This clip was a summary of some of the highpoints of the day as well as showing off the artistic integrity of high-level graffiti art. C2NY, Lookatlife.com and MOGA themoga.com are all working hard to educate the masses of the merits and benefits of this relatively new and emerging social artform.

Is Graffiti An Urban Art Form?

You can travel almost anywhere in the world, and you will probably see graffiti. Although graffiti art is usually more common in big cities, the reality is that it can occur in almost any community, big or small.

The problem with graffiti art is the question of whether it ’s really art, or just plain vandalism. This isn’t always an easy question to answer, simply because there are so many different types of graffiti. Some is simply a monochrome collection of letters, known as a tag, with little artistic merit. Because it ’s quick to produce and small, it is one of the most widespread and prevalent forms of graffiti.

Although tagging is the most common type of graffiti, there are bigger, more accomplished examples that appear on larger spaces, such as walls. These are often multicolored and complex in design, and so start to push the boundary of whether they should really be defined as graffiti art.

If it wasn’t for the fact that most graffiti is placed on private property without the owner ’s permission, then it might be more recognized as a legitimate form of art. Most graffiti art, however, is only an annoyance to the property owner, who is more likely to paint over it or remove it than applaud its artistic merit.

Many solutions have been put into practice around the world, with varying degrees of success. Paints have been developed that basically cause graffiti paint to dissolve when applied, or else make it quick and easy to remove. Community groups and government departments coordinate graffiti removal teams.

In some places you can’t buy spray paint unless you’re over 18. Cans of spray paint are locked away in display cases. In a nearby area the local council employs someone to go around and repaint any fences defaced by graffiti. A friend of mine has had his fence repainted 7 times at least, and it took him a while to find out why it was happening! Certainly the amount of graffiti in my local area has dropped substantially in the last year or two, so it appears these methods are working to a great extent.

But is removing the graffiti doing a disservice to the artistic community? Maybe if some of the people behind the graffiti art were taken in hand and trained, they could use their artistic skills in more productive ways. It hardly makes sense to encourage these artists to deface public property, and so commit a crime. But perhaps there are other ways to cooperate with the graffiti artists rather than just opposing them. Graffiti artists can create sanctioned murals for private property owners and get paid for it.

Maybe we need to start at a very basic level, and find a way to encourage the creation of graffiti art on paper or canvas, rather than walls. After all, who would remember Monet or Picasso if they’d created their masterpieces on walls, only to have them painted over the next day? Finding a solution to such a complex situation is never going to be easy, but as more graffiti art is being recognized in galleries around the world, we do need to try.

Author: Steve Dolan loves art in various forms and mediums. Find out more about graffiti as an art form at Graffiti and Urban Art and if you have art that needs framing visit Picture Frames.

Article Source: Content for Reprint

Writing On The Wall – A Look Into The World Of Graffiti Art

Graffiti has always been given a negative connotation as it is seen as a defacement of a piece of property with the used of paint and other items. It has also been inextricably linked with the hip hop culture and has become one of the main elements of the movement. Despite the negativity that some people feel towards graffiti, it has slowly become one of the foremost art forms in modern society.

Graffiti Art History

Despite seeming to be an all too modern art form, graffiti has always been around even in ancient times. Remains and relics from the ancient Roman city Pompeii reveal a world where people expressed their thoughts emotions by writing on walls and on other public and private items. Everything from poems to various drawings were found preserved in the ancient walls. This kind of society in ancient Rome is beautifully depicted in the introductory scenes of the HBO series Rome. The animators of the two season TV series depicted Roman streets and walls covered with graffiti that ranged from the obscene and sexually explicit to depictions that were political in nature.

Rome wasn’t the only place where ancient graffiti was found. The Egyptians were also known to write on the walls aside from their highly celebrated hieroglyphics. In Saudi Arabia, it is widely recognized that a form of ancient Arabic language called Safaitic was only found scratched into boulders and rocks in the Syrian and Jordanian deserts.

During war eras and choppy political periods in the United States, people have also seen various forms of graffiti from World War Two’s “Kilroy Was Here” to Dick Nixon “Before He Dicks You” during the 1970s. Another famous graffiti are the immortal words “Clapton is God” found in the London Underground.

Modern Day Graffiti Art

Modern day graffiti is mostly associated with the Hip Hop Culture. There are various forms of graffiti art as well as a multitude of artists that leave tags on their work. Notable is TAKI 183 and Julio 204. These individuals and a lot of others left their stamps in public walls and also in the heart of modern day art. Graffiti as it is found today has become very elaborate and have evolved from simple images to more elaborate slogans, images and other spray paint creations.

Graffiti tributes are a common occurrence all over the streets of New York and on the prominent cities in the United States. These are often tributes given to people of prominence that have passed away. Most notable are the hip hop legends that have died like Tupac, B.I.G, Jam Master Jay, Big L and Big Pun. Other than Hip Hop legends, “greats” like Princess Diana and Mother Teresa were also immortalized in graffiti artwork.

Graffiti Art – From The Streets To Galleries

In 2006 graffiti art found its way into the halls of the Brooklyn Museum. Here, artists like Lady Pink, Crash and others were officially celebrated as great artists. The curator of the Museum hoped that by this process, the negative view that people had about graffiti will change for the better.

All over the world, graffiti is slowly getting the recognition that it deserves. Though it is still not a generally accepted art form and is still often viewed as a form of vandalism, people are slowly changing their ideas about graffiti and soon consider it to be an official art form.

Author: Benedict Hunter | Article Source: Ezine Articles

Art Prints and Photos on Canvas are available to buy from GetCanvas.co.uk. Benedict is a freelance article writer for Dolphin Promotions SEO Company.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1984.

Jean-Michel Basquiat (December 22, 1960 – August 12, 1988) was an American artist. He gained popularity first as a graffiti artist in New York City, and then as a successful 1980s-era Neo-expressionist artist. Basquiat’s paintings continue to influence modern day artists and command high prices.

Biography

Basquiat was born in Brooklyn, New York City in 1960. His mother, Matilde, was Puerto Rican and his father, Gerard Jean-Baptiste, is of Haitian origin and a former Haitian Minister of the Interior. Because of his parents’ nationalities, Basquiat was fluent in French, Spanish, and English and often read Symbolist poetry, mythology, history and medical texts, particularly Gray’s Anatomy in those languages. At an early age, Basquiat displayed an aptitude for art and was encouraged by his mother to draw, paint, and to participate in other art-related activities. In 1977, when he was 17, Basquiat and his friend Al Diaz started spray-painting graffiti art on slum buildings in lower Manhattan, adding the infamous signature of “SAMO” or “SAMO shit” (i.e., “same ol’ shit”). The graphics were pithy messages such as “Plush safe he think; SAMO” and “SAMO is an escape clause”. In December 1978, the Village Voice published an article about the writings. The SAMO project ended with the epitaph SAMO IS DEAD written on the walls of SoHo buildings.

In 1978, Basquiat dropped out of high school and left home, a year before graduating. He moved into the city and lived with friends, surviving by selling T-shirts and postcards on the street, and working in the Unique Clothing Warehouse on Broadway. By 1979, however, Basquiat had gained a certain celebrity status amidst the thriving art scene of Manhattan’s East Village through his regular appearances on Glenn O’Brien’s live public-access cable show, TV Party. In the late 1970s, Basquiat formed a band called Gray, with the then-unknown musician and actor Vincent Gallo. Gray played at clubs such as Max’s Kansas City, CBGB, Hurrahs, and the Mudd Club. Basquiat worked with Gallo again in a film Downtown 81 (a.k.a New York Beat Movie) which featured some of Gray’s rare recordings on its soundtrack. He also appeared in Blondie’s video “Rapture” as a replacement for DJ Grandmaster Flash when he was a no-show.

Basquiat first started to gain recognition as an artist in June 1980, when he participated in The Times Square Show, a multi-artist exhibition, sponsored by Collaborative Projects Incorporated (Colab). In 1981, poet, art critic and cultural provocateur Rene Ricard published “The Radiant Child” in Artforum magazine, helping to launch Basquiat’s career to an international stage. During the next few years, he continued exhibiting his works around New York alongside artists such as Keith Haring, Barbara Kruger, as well as internationally, promoted by such gallery owners and patrons as Annina Nosei, Vrej Baghoomian, Larry Gagosian, Mary Boone and Bruno Bischofberger.

By 1982, Basquiat was showing regularly alongside Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Francesco Clemente and Enzo Cucchi, thus becoming part of a loose-knit group that art-writers, curators, and collectors would soon be calling the Neo-expressionist movement. He started dating an aspiring and then-unknown performer named Madonna in the fall of 1982. That same year, Basquiat met Andy Warhol, with whom he collaborated extensively, eventually forging a close, if strained, friendship. He was also briefly involved with artist David Bowes.

By 1984, many of Basquiat’s friends were concerned about his excessive drug use and increasingly erratic behavior, including signs of paranoia. Basquiat had developed a frequent heroin habit by this point, starting from his early years living among the junkies and street artists in New York’s underground. On February 10, 1985, Basquiat appeared on the cover of The New York Times Magazine in a feature entitled “New Art, New Money: The Marketing of an American Artist”. As Basquiat’s international success heightened, his works were shown in solo exhibitions across major European capitals.

Basquiat died of mixed-drug toxicity (he had been combining cocaine and heroin, known as “speedballing”) at his 57 Great Jones Street loft/studio in 1988 several days before what would have been Basquiat’s second trip to the Côte d’Ivoire. After his death, a film biography titled Basquiat was made, directed by Julian Schnabel, with actor Jeffrey Wright playing Basquiat.

Artistic Activities

Basquiat’s art career is known for his three broad, though overlapping styles. In the earliest period, from 1980 to late 1982, Basquiat used painterly gestures on canvas, often depicting skeletal figures and mask-like faces that expressed his obsession with mortality. Other frequently depicted imagery such as automobiles, buildings, police, children’s sidewalk games, and graffiti came from his experience painting on the city streets. A middle period from late 1982 to 1985 featured multipanel paintings and individual canvases with exposed stretcher bars, the surface dense with writing, collage and seemingly unrelated imagery.

These works reveal a strong interest in Basquiat’s black identity and his identification with historical and contemporary black figures and events. On one occasion Basquiat painted his girlfriend’s dress, with his words, a “Little Shit Brown”. The final period, from about 1986 to Basquiat’s death in 1988, displays a new type of figurative depiction, in a new style with different symbols and content from new sources. This period seems to have also had a profound impact on the styles of artists who admired Basquiat’s work. Basquiat’s lasting creative influence is immediately recognizable in the work of subsequent and self-taught generational artists such as Mark Gonzales, Kelly D. Williams, chinghalle and Raymond Morris.

In 1982, Basquiat became friends with pop artist Andy Warhol and the two made a number of collaborative works. They also painted together, influencing each others’ work. Some speculated that Andy Warhol was merely using Basquiat for some of his techniques and insight. Their relationship continued until Warhol’s death in 1987. Warhol’s death was very distressing for Basquiat, and it is speculated by Phoebe Hoban, in Basquiat, her 1998 biography on the artist, that Warhol’s death was a turning point for Basquiat, and that afterwards his drug addiction and depression began to spiral.

Up until 2002, the highest mark that was paid for an original work of Basquiat’s was $3,302,500 (set on 12 November 1998). On 14 May 2002 Basquiat’s “Profit I” (a large piece of art measuring 86.5″ by 157.5″), owned by heavy metal band Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, was put up for auction at Christie’s. It was there that the highest mark for a work of Basquiat’s was set when “Profit I” sold for $5,509,500. The proceedings of the auction are documented in the film Some Kind of Monster. On 15 May 2007, an untitled Basquiat work from 1981 smashed his previous record, selling at Sotheby’s in New York for $14.6 million.

Source: Wikipedia

Radical And Political Graffiti Use

Graffiti often has a reputation as part of a subculture that rebels against authority, although the considerations of the practitioners often diverge and can relate to a wide range of attitudes. It can express a political practice and can form just one tool in an array of resistance techniques. One early example includes the anarcho-punk band Crass, who conducted a campaign of stenciling anti-war, anarchist, feminist and anti-consumerist messages around the London Underground system during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

In Amsterdam graffiti was a major part of the punk scene. The city was covered with names as ‘De Zoot’, ‘Vendex’ and ‘Dr Rat’. To document the graffiti a punk magazine was started called Gallery Anus. So when hip hop came to Europe in the early 1980s there already was a vibrant graffiti culture.

The developments of graffiti art which took place in art galleries and colleges as well as “on the street” or “underground”, contributed to the resurfacing in the 1990s of a far more overtly politicized art form in the subvertising, culture jamming or tactical media movements. These movements or styles tend to classify the artists by their relationship to their social and economic contexts, since, in most countries, graffiti art remains illegal in many forms except when using non-permanent paint. Since the 1990s a growing number of artists are switching to non-permanent paints for a variety of reasons — but primarily because is it difficult for the police to apprehend and for the courts to sentence or even convict a person for a protest that is as fleeting and less intrusive than marching in the streets. In some communities, such impermanent works survive longer than works created with permanent paints because the community views the work in the same vein as that of the civil protestor who marches in the street — such protest are impermanent but effective nevertheless.

In some areas where a number of artist share the impermance ideal, there grows an informal competition. That is, the length of time that a work escapes destruction is related to the amount of respect the work garners in the community. A crude work that deserves little respect would invariably be removed immediately. The most talented artist might have works last for days.

Artists whose primary object is to assert contol over property — and not primarily to create of an expressive work of art, political or otherwise — resist switching to impermanent paints.

Contemporary practitioners, accordingly, have varied and often conflicting practices. Some individuals, such as Alexander Brener, have used the medium to politicize other art forms, and have used the prison sentences forced onto them as a means of further protest.

The practices of anonymous groups and individuals also vary widely, and practitioners by no means always agree with each others’ practices. Anti-capitalist art group the Space Hijackers, for example, did a piece in 2004 about the contradiction between the capitalistic elements of Banksy and his use of political imagery.

On top of the political aspect of graffiti as a movement, political groups and individuals may also use graffiti as a tool to spread their point of view. This practice, due to its illegality, has generally become favoured by groups excluded from the political mainstream (e.g. far-left or far-right groups) who justify their activity by pointing out that they do not have the money – or sometimes the desire – to buy advertising to get their message across, and that a “ruling class” or “establishment” control the mainstream press, systematically excluding the radical/alternative point of view. This type of graffiti can seem crude; for example fascist supporters often scrawl swastikas and other Nazi images.

One innovative form of graffiti that emerged in the UK in the 1970s was devised by the Money Liberation Front (MLF), essentially a loose affiliation of underground press writers such as the poet and playwright Heathcote Williams and magazine editor and playwright Jay Jeff Jones. They initiated the use of paper currency as a medium for counterculture propaganda, overprinting banknotes, usually with a John Bull printing set. Although short lived the MLF was representative of London’s Ladbroke Grove centered alternative and literary community of the period. The area was also a scene of considerable anti-establishment and humorous street graffiti much of it also produced by Williams.

Both sides of the conflict in Northern Ireland produce political graffiti. As well as slogans, Northern Irish political graffiti include large wall paintings, referred to as murals. Along with the flying of flags and the painting of kerb stones, the murals serve a territorial purpose. Artists paint them mostly on house gables or on the Peace Lines, high walls that separate different communities. The murals often develop over an extended period and tend to stylisation, with a strong symbolic or iconographic content. Loyalist murals often refer to historical events dating from the war between James II and William III in the late 17th century, whereas Republican murals usually refer to the more recent troubles.

Source: Wikipedia

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