Photo of the Day (4.5.09)

by Jeremy Kressmann on

I’m a sucker for great street art, so it’s only natural that Flickr user ohad*’s image from San Francisco’s Nob Hill neighborhood caught my eye. San Francisco tends to be quite the colorful city, especially in areas like the Mission District where street murals are plentiful. I particularly like the lettering of the word “COLD” in this mural – it almost seems to pop out at you in 3-D relief. That’s to say nothing of the bizarre fly-men hovering along the top. Pretty neat.

Have any travel photos of street art you’ve taken in San Francisco? Or maybe just some sculptures in Springfield, Illinois? Why not share them with our readers by adding them to the Gadling pool on Flickr? We might just pick one of yours as our Photo of the Day.

Tour the world’s vandalism

by Tom Johansmeyer on

Eyesore or art, graffiti is part of any culture’s public dialogue. Vandalism is visual profanity, and we all swear in our own f—ing ways. I’ve been drawn to these wall scrawls for a while, probably since I read Holden Caulfield‘s concerns about the subject in Catcher in the Rye. My fascination gained momentum while I was stationed in South Korea.

A soldiers’ bar in Tong Du Chon (the Peace Club, which is no longer there) was littered with attempted wit. “I used to believe in the common decency of main,” one drunken soldier-scholar printed at eye level. Another replied, “I still do.” Eight hours into a soju-induced haze, this stuff is profound.

Along the way, I’ve become a connoisseur of this crime, though only as an observer. I have seen social commentary and even debate. And, there’s even been a bit of meaningless paint spilled in the vain hope of making a point. I’ve soaked it all in and hit a few readers up for their tips, as well.

So, let’s take a tour of some of my favorite acts of defacement. Some reflect careful planning and show artistic talent. Others offer nothing more than layers upon layers of cries for attention and assertions of self-importance.In Iceland, I read in the local English language newspaper, the Reykjavik Grapevine, that an outbreak of graffiti was the result of building vacancies triggered by the weakened economy (and this was back in June). This was supported by the observations of the walking tour’s prophetic viking. Hell, the wall says it all.

The Parisians waxed political on the walls of metro stations. I was in town for the hotly contested presidential election of May 2007, and the ultimate winner, Nicolas Sarkozy, took a beating in the vandals’ press. This is nothing compared to the scratched-out eyes on campaign posters, though.

Translation: Sarko = Bush = Berlusconi = Shit. The tagger lumps the president of France with the now former president of the United States and the hotheaded former president of Italy … not to mention a steaming pile. Politics took center stage in Tallinn, Estonia, as well. Thankfully, the vandals worked in English, making it easy for me to take a stab at recreating the crime.

From what I could see, this is something of a public discussion. First, it seems, a disgruntled “activist” wrote “Fuck Fascism!” And, I have to admit, it’s hard to disagree with that. Next, a second person probably popped “anti” in front of fascism, before a third joined the spray-painted conversation by crossing out “fuck.” A fourth crossed out “anti,” and we’re left with fascism. But, the entire discourse supports the original position.

At least, that’s how I’d imagine the entire process unfolding.

The most compelling, however, was in Quebec. I found it fascinating that the retort to an assertion of independence was proffered in English.

Of course, my neighbors are far from innocent. Here on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, we seem to be waging a war on body image. Custo Barcelona, an upscale fashion retailer, has ads on the corner of W. 71st St. and Columbus Ave. The models, wearing about as much body fat as they are clothing, glare at me every time I walk to Gray’s Papaya for a hot dog, as if holding me in contempt for my substandard diet. Someone (not me, I promise) decided to comment.

Hey, New Yorkers can be brutal, even in my quiet, peace-loving corner of the city. This is but one example of how the poor Custo models, have suffered, though. Check out the photo gallery below to get a sense of how Upper West Siders feel about this bit of eye candy.

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And, this is just a taste of what I have collected. Take a look at the next photo gallery to see what our readers have submitted. Fortunately, their collections are a bit more high-minded than mine. The stories with each photos are in the readers’ own words (with some slight editing).

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A guidebook to New York Hip-Hop (Remixed)

by Jeremy Kressmann on

Though New York has given birth to any number of musical movements, it’s only the last 30 years that have given rise to Hip-Hop, arguably one of the more defining cultural movements of the late 20th and early 21st Century. Though Hip-Hop is alive and well in New York City, it’s not necessarily something that’s easy to pinpoint on a map for out-of-town visitors, especially not like the Empire State Building or Central Park.

Yet a new interactive online database, called Bronx Rhymes, promises to challenge this assumption. The new project takes a closer look at the Bronx, the Borough best known for jumpstarting the movement, categorizing some of the most famous places and people on an interactive map. A corresponding poster has been placed at the physical location of each map point in the Bronx, offering details of what happened there. Visitors can respond to the poster with their mobile phone by SMS, offering a comment on what they’ve read or providing a hip-hop “rhyme” of their own for inclusion in a database.

Anyone interested in learning more about hip-hop luminaries like Afrika Bambaataa, DJ Kool Herc or KRS-One can find the artists’ entries listed on the website, along with the text message comments of anyone who’s contributed. For instance, an entry for DJ Kool Herc reads, “he was kool like a king threw one two punches in the hip hop ring.” It’s an interesting and participatory approach to creating a tour guide, one that is just as dependent on the input of the visitors as it is on the project’s original designers. It works especially well for Hip-Hop, a movement that is highly dependent on the remixing and blending of sounds and voices for inspiration. And with high-powered mobile phones and Google Maps becoming ever-more pervasive, we can expect to see more of these type of tourist mash-ups coming soon to a vacation hotspot near you.

[Via PSFK]

The colorful murals of San Francisco’s Mission District

by Jeremy Kressmann on

San Francisco’s Mission District is a neighborhood with a number of faces. It is at once gritty and unique, increasingly filled with shiny new businesses yet still retaining the vibrant Latino immigrant culture and scruffy charm for which it has always been known. As one walks the area, it’s easy to get a feel for these differences – pungent taquerias and Quinceanera dress shops increasingly back up against indie booksellers and sleek furniture stores.

No matter the changes, The Mission remains the center of a thriving community of Mexican and Central American immigrants, which continues to give the neighborhood a distinctly south-of-the-border flair. This is especially true of The Mission’s vibrant street murals, a tradition that is evident just about anywhere you look.

Murals have a long tradition in Mexican art, particularly in the context of the Chicano movement, which represented the struggles of Mexican Americans for social and politcal rights. Mexican muralists like Diego Rivera played a large role in the movement, painting large scale public art in cities such as San Francisco which depicted a variety of social and political themes.

Though Diego Rivera is long gone, the legacy of his work lives on to this day in The Mission. The casual visitor will find the streets bordered by 16th to 24th and Mission to Valencia are packed with an assortment of wildly colorful murals. While some are strongly tied to the traditions of Mexican mural painting, others are thoroughly modern in scope, referencing themes as diverse as video games, 60’s Psychedelia, Hip-Hop and modern New York graffiti tagging.

During a recent visit to San Francisco we took a closer look at some of the many public murals dotting the area. Take a look at the gallery below for a tour of the murals of the Mission District.

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Undiscovered New York: Bombing the Bronx and the Graffiti of 5 Pointz

by Jeremy Kressmann on

As a resident of New York for just over five years, I frequently take for granted the “relative” cleanliness of my city. Sure, I could do without the many, pungent trash bag piles during summertime, but you quickly get accustomed to a certain level of grit and grime when you live in one of the world’s largest metropolises.

In fact, my version of New York circa-2008 is a utopia of clean compared to New York in the 1970’s and 80’s, when the town was literally coming apart at the seams. As the city suffered a massive financial crisis, crime ran rampant and public services like the subway system fell into decline. As tragic as this period was for residents, it also provided the background for some of the era’s most important cultural movements, including the rise of punk at clubs like CBGB, emerging artists like Basquiat and in particular, the first stirrings of the nascent culture of Hip-Hop and graffiti in the Bronx.

Graffiti is perhaps one of the most controversial artistic movements of the end of the 20th Century. As much as its detractors view the form as symptomatic of urban blight, its supporters just as forcefully embrace it as the stirrings of a wholely legitimate new art form. Though vandals have been defacing public buildings with their “art” since the ancient Greeks and Romans, the modern incarnation of graffiti took shape in New York City in the borough of the Bronx in the 1970’s. In that regard the current prominence of famous graffiti artists like Banksy owe their rise to the pioneers of the form here in New York several decades ago.

So if you’re visiting New York City in 2008, where do you go to see and learn more about graffiti firsthand? Click on through to find out more and learn where to go to find the art form still alive and kicking in the 5 boroughs.The rise of NYC graffiti was as much a result of civic neglect as it was a nascent cultural movement. With city police preoccupied with a huge crime wave, the city’s walls and subway cars became prime canvases for vandals, who began leaving their mark wherever they saw fit.

At first it was all about gaining notoriety. Early practitioners of the form like TAKI 183 would roam the city, leaving their ‘tag’ as a way to earn bragging rights throughout the huge city. Soon the movement gained steam, with other ‘taggers’ competing to see who could create the most ambitious pieces, evolving into elaborate, colorful works painted directly on the city’s subway cars. Due to the covert nature of their projects, many graffiti taggers began to describe their hit and run visits to the city’s subway rail depots as “bombing.” The style is perhaps best encapsulated by the 1983 documentary Style Wars, which documents New York’s thriving Hip-Hop, breakdancing and graffiti cultural scenes.

While graffiti on the New York City subway is a thing of the past, the spirit of the movement carries on today. A walk around downtown neighborhoods like the Lower East Side, East Village, Soho and parts of Brooklyn will reveal the art form is still alive and well. While there’s no one specific spot to check out, an afternoon stroll down the area’s many side streets will reveal a wealth of projects if you’re curious. Check out Wooster Collective and Streetsy, two of the best online street art websites, to get an idea of what’s out there. In the East Village, also make sure to check out the cheeky works of De La Vega at his shop on St. Mark’s Place.

But for the best place to go to learn more about this uniquely New York art form, your first stop should be Five Pointz, a large-scale artist project in Queens. This huge industrial building, located in Long Island City, is completely covered from floor to ceiling in a living, breathing mural of graffiti artwork. Artists both local and from around the world drop by on a regular basis to put up new pieces, resulting a building that has become a dynamic illustration of the art form’s continuing legacy and influence. While some works are more abstract, there’s plenty of great pieces that feature New York themes like Hip-Hop and many of the city’s famous landmarks. The building also has plenty of examples of wildstyle, an intricate form of lettering made famous by the original New York ‘taggers.’

If you want to check out Five Pointz, it’s easy enough to make a full day out of your trip to Queens. Just a short walk across the street is the art museum PS1, a contemporary art gallery which is an offshoot of the famous Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Just take the E or V trains to the 23rd Street/Ely Avenue stop or the 7 train 45th Road/Courthouse Square. The Five Pointz building is hard to miss – you’ll be able to the see the brightly-colored murals from up close as your train rumbles right past the building’s many murals.