FEB
The street artist Evol, who works in Germany, is on to something with his compelling stencilled interventions. That he uses images of an anonymous and generally unattractive kind of architecture on items of street furniture that, in themselves are anonymous, makes us think about both the architecture, and our propensity to clutter-up our streets with unattractive services enclosures.
Evol breaks society’s tacit agreement to overlook ugliness providing the object remains useful.
JAN
The Dutch artist and designer Roeland Otten has taken it upon himself to intervene when he finds ugly street furniture such as supply boxes and service enclosures. His installations might be seen as camouflage or, as I prefer the Star Trek explanation, “cloaking devices”.
The peculiar thing is that these installations actually draw attention to the object being masked, although they cause them to … disappear!
JUL
It is not often that building owners encourage graffiti to the walls of their house, but at the instigation of Metaform Architecture, the architects for this apartment building in Cessange, Luxumbourg, the graffiti artist Sumo was paid to ply his trade.
What is interesting is that the art is not simply applied to the architecture, like the hanging of a painting, but it is conceptually more integrated. Graffiti usually occurs on building surfaces that are forgotten or architecturally irrelevant. Here those surfaces are elevated aesthetically and conceptually and are used to dress the forms of the architecture, or as the architect puts it to stage the architecture.
The building’s decorative features are really a side show to the dark powerful architectural form. This is almost always the case for graffiti artists working in a society that usually disparages their work. The artist’s frustration with the imposed constrictions is palpable in the use of such bright, garish colours that contrasts with the dark cladding of the building. used. Read more
JUN
Visiting Bexhill, a sleepy town on the south coast of England this weekend gone, I began to think the town might be dead. After wandering around for a couple of hours, desperation had set in when I came across a jam biscuit installation pressed on to the glass of a bus stop.
In Shoreditch, a fashionable and arty quarter of London where I work, such an installation would be buzzing with photographers the second it appeared, and there would be a good chance that it would be reported on the national news that evening as the work of an important street artist. Naturally, my chest swelled with pride that I might be able to bring it to the attention of the readers of this blog before anybody else.
I pondered the biscuit installation for sometime wondering who the artist might be, but I could not recognize a discernible style. Read more
MAR
Manhattan, like most modern cities, is built on oil. It gushes in massive fountains and strange forms, but not in its liquid manifestation of course. In wealth, power, pollution, architecture and transport oil is at the cultural root of our age. The artist Josephine Meckseper sponsored by the Art Production Fund explores this idea in her thought provoking installation the Manhattan Oil Project. Read more
