Micheal Krimper
>Present and yet uncannily absent
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Micheal Krimper on hidden graffiti in the New York City subway tunnels @ The Hydra.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Right now, somewhere underneath Manhattan in an abandoned subway station, is a hidden art project consisting of over a hundred murals painted by graffiti artists on dusty, moldy, concrete walls. PAC and Workhorse, two prolific NY vandals, discovered the hidden tunnel a few years back and decided to invite other graffiti adventurers to paint. And they painted, in the indigo dark, near the crack of dawn, all while avoiding the authorities. The discarded tunnel, an unfinished space abandoned nearly 100 years ago, provided a sphere of neutrality, removed from the now fairly marketed and predictable culture of street art on the city’s visible surface.
I was surprised, like many, to learn about the project’s existence from a NY Times article written by Jasper Rees on Underbelly’s unlikely origins. But be forewarned fellow explorer of the unearthly nether-regions beneath the crust of everyday humanity! Since the article was published, at least a couple urban explorers have purportedly been arrested in New York’s subway tunnels, searching for the mysterious, rhizomatic mural rooms. Why, then, did PAC and Workhorse want to let us know about the project? What’s the point of producing a huge gallery of underground (this time indeed really subterranean) street art, removed from the public eye, and then let the public know that it exists somewhere just beyond its grasp? Why would they even create an homepage for it? The story seems a bit maddening, if not, if you would allow me the indulgence, the least bit cruel.
>He brought the graffiti way of life to the studio
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Michael Krimper on the a new documentary about the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat @ The Hydra.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )For too many years I’ve been convinced of a ridiculous legend behind Jean-Michel Basquiat, street scribbler and painter, hustler and wandering youth. I would find myself cornered in louder than necessary conversations concerning weighty things like ‘the history of art’ and ‘dealing with the tradition.’ ”But what about Jean-Michel Basquiat?” I would say. He invented from a state of radical purity, tapped into the bestial imagination of a feral childhood, magnified the thunderous crashes and torrential past of black-America, channeled the ghosts and fossils underneath a New York on the brink of the apocalypse, a destitute horizon, haunted and monstrous, where giant steel carcasses were thrown into the littered streets next to bass heads and the new wave. Pause. I had no idea what I was talking about. A couple nights ago I watched Tamra Davis’ new documentary on Basquiat, Radiant Child, which successfully dispelled the last remnants of my illusions.
>Culture Remix
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Michael Krimper @ The Hydra considers a new book about art and originality.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Media writer and theorist Aram Seinrich just finished an intriguing new book, Mashed Up: Music, Technology, and the Rise of Configurable Culture. Influenced by the aesthetics of DJing and sample-based music production, Seinrich sketches an emerging, and still hazy concept of art at odds with the Romantic notion of the artist as a pure originator of a creative work. Sinnreich calls us to drop the notion of such an artist: the introspective and surely depressive genius who, in gathering waves of inspiration from within or without or whatever, produces a decidedly original — a wholly new — work of art. At first blush, this point seemed like a bit of a straw man to me; I mean, who really believes in the notion of the artist as absolute originator anymore? But then I realized there was one powerful force that still seems to rest on this outdated idea — and that’s really what Seinrich has beef with: copyright law.
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