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Guest BROWNer

...i don't think there's any definitive website or a book yet.

pbs has a little thing on their website, plus a show feature on him on art21 with margaret k.(rip)...

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  • 1 year later...

Street Market

 

i always been wondering htf they got the truck for the show,its some truck from the seaport shop,do they rent them or was it just trash,i wonder where i gather my picts,at least its totally impossible to find something related to the DIetch project on the web!! ima call 911

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Guest Dr. Drew

Re: Street Market

 

Originally posted by demknoboutme

i always been wondering htf they got the truck for the show,its some truck from the seaport shop,do they rent them or was it just trash,i wonder where i gather my picts,at least its totally impossible to find something related to the DIetch project on the web!! ima call 911

 

he was saying in the Giant Robot interview that the galleries will go to a junkyard for him, take digital photos of a bunch of trucks, email hte pictures, then he picks which one he wants. the gallery people then go back to the junk yard and buy it for his show. the article had a picture of truck turned upside-down with a dope Amaze bomb on it.

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Guest railroadjerk
Originally posted by anal bandit

i just read a new magazine with a twist interview in it he has the cover.i cant remember the name ,its something robot some like asian pop culture mag.

 

giant robot

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Re: Re: Street Market

 

Originally posted by Dr. Drew

he was saying in the Giant Robot interview that the galleries will go to a junkyard for him, take digital photos of a bunch of trucks, email hte pictures, then he picks which one he wants. the gallery people then go back to the junk yard and buy it for his show. the article had a picture of truck turned upside-down with a dope Amaze bomb on it.

 

i really appreciate the enlightment Dr Drew,an really feel the same way as you bout the 'turned upside-down truck',i saw the shots in the book,and it impressed me a lot..i might be boring but my next question (since i didnt get a chance to check the show)will be :

do the truck where still being used in the final installation?

 

(picts anyone or link?)

 

ima try to find that mag..

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there are two barry mcgee books out, 'the buddy system' and an expensive-ish monograph. both came out (in this country) in 2002. i've not had a chance to look at them yet, just seen them at magmabooks.com. i've no idea if they're available in other countries...

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Yeah,today i saw the book you talking about (at least both) and one got the shot from the show,some of the truck where upside down,all got throwie on dem,that shit looks very hot,that book got numerous page and a lot of real dope shot,haha some kid got funny hairdo when they run bike!!

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  • 4 weeks later...

new issue of GIANT ROBOT. twist JUXTAPOZ issue. ART 21 (pbs's documentary on 20th century art... has in-depth features on twist and margaret kilgalen). STREET MARKET. SEX SELLS magazine. .... and there are several gallery books that are floating around that are similar to street market...

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  • 2 weeks later...

text alex klein images courtesy of Deitch Projects

 

Walking into Street Market at Deitch Projects was like walking into an urban “Alice Through the Looking Glass.” As the viewer walks through the gallery doors, the outside world is presented inside-out with the inversion of power structures and the vitality of an amusement park. This past fall, gallery goers were treated to a fanciful installation by artists Todd James, a.k.a. Reas; Barry McGee, a.k.a. Twist; and Stephen Powers, a.k.a. Espo. The show is mapped out, as its name would suggest, as a mini urban street market. Composed of bodegas selling “street cred,” a suit of armor made out of Olde E, and a mini graffiti Hall of Fame complete with trophy cases of the artists’ sneakers and writing gear, the show provides a dose of humor to treat the artists’ overwhelming ego trips to a needed twist of reality. However, more than a street market, the show is ultimately a marketing of the street. Parodying the strategies of artists and advertisers alike, Espo, Twist, and Reas propose a world in which the individual conquers a society driven by the mainstream market. Street Market is compelling not only in terms of its successful translation of graffiti into a gallery art, but also as a herald of the integration of a new wave of graffiti into the visual language of the everyday.

 

Inside the warehouse-type space, two tagged, overturned trucks greet the viewer on the left, while on the right, a row of corner stores provide lottery tickets and beepers. Inside the buildings are the products of an over-marketed hip-hop culture. Behind the glamour of “vapors,” the cult/aura of celebrity, lies the residue of inner city decay - porn, cigarette ashes, uninviting furnishings, an old television with poor reception, dirt and grime. The show is an intricate maze of colorful bursts of signage: a pinball machine, framed found images, briefcases brimming with cheap gold watches, stands with cute mimicry of hip hop albums, sneakers hanging from telephone wires, and ready-mades of found sidings of buildings with their tags from North Philly still intact. Twist’s now signature droopy-faced caricatures loom over the viewer, while Espo’s and Reas’ signs grin overhead. It is a display of stereotypes as much as it was a show of individual markings. This is a show that insists on the glitz that adorns urban gloom.

 

Since its inception, graffiti has fed on the visual language of advertisements, comics, the Pop art of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, as well as the art of the 80’s that initially attempted to appropriate it. The new generation of writers works with both of the Duchampian ready-made and off of the practices of the early 80’s East Village art scene (e.g. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s SAMO slogans and Haring’s gallery murals). Their work also fuses something between the immediacy of the graffiti created in the lay-ups, where trains sleep when not in use, and the calculation of sculptural “graffiti” and the Revs/Cost posters that once plastered New York. Products of both the art establishment and the advertising industry, the Street Market artists are simultaneously the embodiment and the antithesis of corporate America. Both Powers and McGee are graduates of art school,and James’ work can be seen everywhere from the Source to the Cartoon Network. They are hybrids of their artistic identities and their tags.

 

At this stage in the game, graffiti has a solid history in the New York gallery world. Almost 30 years ago, in 1972, the United Graffiti Artists broke new ground with their exhibition at City College. With such masters such as Co-Co, Snake I, Stich I, Bama, Phase II, and the other legendary artists in the UGA, graffiti began attempting to bomb the system from within the system. The New York art world’s initial fascination with graffiti was sparked by the magnificent trains that penetrated the quotidian life of New Yorkers. This led to showcases in which writers would demonstrate their talents in front of wealthy collectors and curious individuals. By the early 1980’s, the art world had officially collided with graffiti culture. The East Village scene was hopping, and a new breed of artists, such as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, were ready to ride the graffiti wave.

 

With the gradual elimination of the subway as a public canvas, however, came the fall of the art world’s intense interest in graffiti. The Metropolitan Transit Authority’s increasing success in graffiti removal led to the art world’s abandonment of its urban darlings. As the saying goes, “out of sight, out of mind”; the present wilted into nostalgia. In New York, where the graffiti was quickly disappearing from the subways, graffiti inspired works dwindled from the galleries to a select few. While in Europe, where the trains were still running, graffiti inspired works continued to show in galleries on a consistent basis. In New York, it was ultimately only a select few artists such as Haring who enjoyed official prolonged art world success that would include significant representation in museums meanwhile the writers who had initially inspired the graffiti craze were pilfered for what they were worth.

 

In 1983, the Sindey-Janis Gallery tried to pin down the graffiti-inspired works in the galleries by calling them Post-Graffiti. To do so was a death wish. Graffiti is of the moment and in the moment. Despite the fact that a graffiti-inspired work hanging on the white-walled institution of a gallery ceases to be graffiti, it does not nullify its relationship to graffiti. What many in the art world did not initially understand, or attempt to convey was the marvelous realm of the graffiti world itself. The art establishment tried to appropriate and categorize something that was not its own. As the painted trains began to disappear from active duty, the blood was slowly drained out of the veins of its institutional display.

 

Graffiti did not die with its removal from the subway. In 1989, the MTA put the last graffiti covered train out of active service. The physical movement was eradicated from public display, but the mobility of graffiti remained alive and well. As the subway cars began to disappear one by one, writers began to find alternate surfaces and venues for their work. Literally taking a dive further into the underground, graffiti continued to flourish in tunnels and graffiti museums/halls of fame. Furthermore, the mobility of the train was replaced by a new kind of mobility, the graffiti zine. Founded in 1984, the International Graffiti Times (which later refuted the use of the very word “graffiti” in favor of “Aerosol Culture”) began spreading the word not only from coast to coast, but all over the world. In later years, this dialogue continued with the internet. To this date, there are thousands of websites devoted to graffiti. The internet, in a sense, has become a new train with the capacity to spread itself all over the globe instantaneously.

 

In Street Market, the massive overturned trucks, the most obvious indications of the elimination of locomotion, highlight the alternative surfaces that graffiti artists increasingly were forced to utilize. The new generation of graffiti artists are a little older and more art world savvy. While the artists in this show, notably Reas, have substantial NYC subway cred that spans back to the early 80’s, for most of the new writers, the subway never has, and never will be an option due to the MTA’s strict graffiti policies and tighter security. Today, graffiti penetrates our consciousness in a different way from the subway cars of the 1970’s and 80’s. Instead of piercing the environment on a moving subway train, it surrounds us. Seeping out from walls and surprising urban citizens from impossible rooftops, the tags of writers continue to return from the wrath of the Kochs and Giulianis with a vengeance. The tags on the street are now part of our consciousness. For a society now well used to graffiti - although no more accepting of its intrusion - the viewer cannot remember the surface before it was painted. Now there only appears before the viewer’s eyes an infinite, magnificent after.

 

At the very least, the show at Deitch demonstrates the power of our own environments. In the era of the advertisement, signs shout out at us, and yet habituation to their presence has practically made them inconspicuous. The signs in Street Market are a mixture of real and found signs, e.g. of Dunkin’ Donuts, and of signs that proclaim “Reas” and “Espo” in bold lettering and bright colors. The signs become signatures. They point to the dialogue between advertisers and their adversaries, the duality between the proper name in the art world, the artist’s given name/signature, and the mark of the individual on the street, the self-given tag. The show is the epitome of the idea of the advertisement of the self. The signs in the gallery range in price from $2000 to 3000. However, like the street, the painted walls in the gallery are not for sale and cannot be sold. Perhaps the show is too convincing. On the night of the show’s opening, Todd James, a.k.a. Reas, was arrested at Deitch on previous graffiti charges. As proof of the potency between the art and its referent, the police did not appear to draw a line between the street and its gallery mockup, the street’s reflection in the gallery.

 

In the land of Twist, Espo, and Reas, the emphasis is on the mark of the individual. In turn, they make us want to leave our marks. Graffiti is a record, and furthermore it is a story of who we are and where we have been. Not only does it proclaim that we were here, but more importantly, that we are here. The show insists that one take notice of the visuals of the urban street. As you leave the gallery you are confronted with a parking lot filled with prime throwups and mini-pieces. Looking up, Amaze, one of the artist’s West Coast compadres, looks down on you from a neighboring building. There is so much to see that is hidden above our heads on rooftops, beneath our feet in tunnels, or even around the corner in schoolyards and parking lots. Part of graffiti’s charm is that it does not tell us how it got there. Its incredible feats are for us to decipher, and if we so dare, to challenge. It is a mark of art, of energy, and of provocation. By the last day of the show at Deitch, the show had evolved. Sporting more tags on its surfaces, despite strict policing by the gallery attendant, visitors to the gallery had left their own marks.

 

The original name of this show, first exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia as part of its Wall Power exhibition in the Spring of 2000, was Indelible Market. Perhaps this was better suited to the empowering nature of the exhibition than the banal moniker, Street Market. For, upon entering the gallery, the impermanent indeed becomes and insists upon the indelible. Whereas most of what a graffiti writer normally produces is up to the fate of the law and the natural elements that daily attack his/her work, many of the objects in this show will most likely end up in a private art collection. However, it is not just the illicit markings of the graffiti writer’s hand that are given a sense of permanence by the new location, but a reference to the home of graffiti itself. In the midst of ever-gentrifying cities, Indelible Market is a statement about the insistence of a culture and of a society that will not be subsumed by the industry that continuously exploits and markets it. It reminds the SoHo gallery hopper that across the street the markings are real. Graffiti, although technically impermanent, lives on in the stories that are passed down from generation to generation. Indelible Market / Street Market reaffirms the steadfastness of a seemingly transient set of practices. The artists in the Deitch show have taken control of the situation, and in the gallery, at least, the street belongs eternally to them.

 

http://www.theblowup.com/street_market/

 

they mention REAS arrested,i guess it was Espo,mistaking or?

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Guest LizzyMcGyver

theres plenty of info out there about him....you just gotta know where to look.

 

i'd reccomend the SMALL CRIMES book, STREET MARKET, the PRADA book, and theres actually a few others you can look up on your own. It's no fun having everything HANDED to you.

 

P.S. stop by the san francisco art institute, and sit in barry's chair in the lecture hall. its got a twist scribe on it and you can find PLENTY of twist tags and stuff scattered around the building. AND if you know the right people there, they might even show you the boatloads of twish stuff that is only out in japan.

 

best of luck.

 

 

 

LIZZY McGYVER.

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Originally posted by LizzyMcGyver

theres plenty of info out there about him....you just gotta know where to look.

 

i'd reccomend the SMALL CRIMES book, STREET MARKET, the PRADA book, and theres actually a few others you can look up on your own. It's no fun having everything HANDED to you.

 

P.S. stop by the san francisco art institute, and sit in barry's chair in the lecture hall. its got a twist scribe on it and you can find PLENTY of twist tags and stuff scattered around the building. AND if you know the right people there, they might even show you the boatloads of twish stuff that is only out in japan.

 

best of luck.

 

 

 

LIZZY McGYVER.

 

CAN YOU GIVE MORE INFO ON SMALL CRIME Like ISNB or something..

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  • 4 weeks later...

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