All the Rage | Graffiti Made of Plants, Not Paint

In recent years, city walls have become fertile artistic ground — quite literally — for a new wave of graffiti art that uses live plants instead of paint. Many such artists borrow their secretive practices from tagger tradition, jealously guarding their walls and rarely revealing their locations. But as in the spray-can graffiti world, many also accept commissions from public or private organizations to spruce up the streetscape.

Last week, the Brooklyn-based artist Edina Tokodi installed moss graffiti in the shapes of a penguin and a polar bear — two species threatened by climate change — on walls in Gowanus. A decade ago, Tokodi started Mosstika Urban Greenery, a collective of eco-minded street artists, in her native Hungary, when she moved from the countryside to Budapest to attend art school. She missed the meditative quality of green spaces, and started covering existing structures with moss. “City dwellers often have no relation to animals or greenery,” Tokodi says. “If we don’t cultivate our knowledge about nature, our life becomes unworthy, too.” Since 2008, she has been tagging subway windows and interiors with moss and wheatgrass stencils.

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Movie : Style Wars

Bombing Modernism: Graffiti and its relationship to the (built) environment – Amos Klausner

The curse of modernism

The search for truth can take us to the most unlikely places. As post-war domesticity and prosperity settled over much of America, the growing rift between haves and have-nots exposed serious doubts about the promise of modernism and a modern life. An honest appraisal of a deteriorating American condition didn’t come from the cloistered towers of celebrated universities or intellectual cafés thick with smoke. It came from the heart of the ghetto where new voices were quick to take up arms against the status quo. Holstered with felt tip markers and spray cans, truth was recognized in a colorful show of force and bravado. For graffiti artists, manipulating letters became lifeblood and fighting back meant getting ill, and ill-legible.

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Graffiti and Street Art – Anna Waclawek

Graffiti World : Street Art from Five Continents – Nicholas Ganz

JR’s Artist Statement

28 Millimeters, Women Are Heroes Action dans la Favela Morro da Providência, Favela de Jour, Rio de Janeiro, Brésil, 2008

JR owns the biggest art gallery in the world.

He exhibits freely in the streets of the world, catching the attention of people who are not typical museum visitors. His work mixes Art and Act, talks about commitment, freedom, identity and limit.

After he found a camera in the Paris subway, he did a tour of European Street Art, tracking the people who communicate messages via the walls. Then, he started to work on the vertical limits, watching the people and the passage of life from the forbidden undergrounds and roofs of Paris.

In 2006, he achieved Portrait of a Generation, portraits of the suburban “thugs” that he posted, in huge formats, in the bourgeois districts of Paris. This illegal project became “official” when the Paris City Hall wrapped its building with JR’s photos.

In 2007, with Marco, he did Face 2 Face, the biggest illegal exhibition ever. JR posted huge portraits of Israelis and Palestinians face to face in eight Palestinian and Israeli cities, and on the both sides of the Security fence / Separation wall. The experts said it would be impossible. Still, he did it.

In 2008, he embarked for a long international trip for Women Are Heroes, a project in which he underlined the dignity of women who are often the targets of conflicts.

At the same time, he created the project The Wrinkles of the City. The actions of this project aim to show the history and memory of a country through its inhabitants’ wrinkles. The artist chose cities that have experienced great change such as Cartagena in Spain, Shanghai or Los Angeles.

In 2010, his film Women Are Heroes was presented at Cannes in competition for the Camera d’Or.

In 2011, he received the Ted Prize, which offered him the opportunity to make “A wish to change the world”. He created Inside Out, an international participatory art project that allows people worldwide to get their picture and paste it to support an idea, a project, an action and share their experience.

JR creates “Pervasive Art” that spreads uninvited on the buildings of the slums around Paris, on the walls in the Middle-East, on the broken bridges in Africa or the favelas in Brazil. People who often live with the bare minimum discover something absolutely unnecessary. And they don’t just see it, they make it. Some elderly women become models for a day; some kids turn artists for a week. In that Art scene, there is no stage to separate the actors from the spectators.

After these local exhibitions, the images are transported to London, New York, Berlin or Amsterdam where people interpret them in the light of their own personal experience.

As he remains anonymous and doesn’t explain his huge full frame portraits of people making faces, JR leaves the space empty for an encounter between the subject/protagonist and the passer-by/interpreter.

This is what JR’s work is about. Raising questions…

Resource : http://www.jr-art.net/

Vocab of the day : Silhouette

Balloon Debate, Banksy

Silhouette

sil-oo-et

noun

• a two-dimensional representation of the outline of an object, as a cutout or configurational drawing, uniformly filled in with black, especially a black-paper, miniature cutout of the outlines of a famous person’s face.
• also used in fashion design to describe the shape or outline of a garment.

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” Painted totally in black, as if a silhouette or shadow, Balloon Debate shows a young girl, hoping for the other side but only able to do so by letting balloons take her away. Again, Banksy uses a child to depict innocence against the true hostility of the area and what the wall came from. “

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Resource : http://banksyworld.blogspot.com/

Banksy: Israeli Wall Art Work

West Bank Guard, Banksy

Banksy, a quasi anonymous graffiti artist from Bristol England, has been making a name for himself on the British and international circuit. Some view his artwork merely as graffiti while others consider his work to be a comment on present-day society, politics, and life in general. Banksy graffiti in Palestine is the latest addition to his ever expanding global presence, and what a perfect place to make statements about political strife via urban work.

Israeli West Bank Wall

Since Israel became a nation, a constant state of unrest or even armed conflict has become the norm between Israel and Palestine. What better place could Banksy choose to offer societal and political statements than on one of the most famous walls in the world, the Palestinian Wall, more commonly called the Israeli West Bank Barrier? This wall serves as a political symbol and functions to separate the two conflicting opponents. Some Israelis claim that the wall gives protection against possible terrorism from Palestine, but even more see the wall as a separation between two cultures and religions. After a disagreement in 2002, Israel began construction of what will one day be a 430-mile long wall. Ninety percent of the wall consists of fence work and trenches, while the other 10 percent is concrete. The concrete portion of the wall on the Palestinian side is where Banksy chose to make his artistic statement.

Banksy Israeli Wall Art Work

In typical graffiti fashion, the work was discovered by passersby after the famous artist has left the scene. Bansky used the wall to paint his sometimes subversive artwork in 2005. The Palestinian art collection, a total of 9 pieces, was cataloged before counter graffiti artists began painting over the work. This made it difficult to account for all nine pieces by name and date of completion. Some of the paintings were never given official names but are merely described by the art content itself. Some want to include additional paintings on nearby Palestinian and Israeli walls and buildings as part of Banksy’s Palestinian work. Whether there are simply nine or more, all serve the point of bringing notice to the often less than popular wall and its plight.

Resource : http://banksyworld.blogspot.com/