reading: business cards – the art of saying hello
Tag Archives: Graffiti
reading: kerstin finger – tape: an excursion through the world of adhesive tapes
the art of obliteration
Reblogging from We need money not art, the subtle, unintentional, council-approved art of erasing graffiti through semi-regular monotone blocks of paint.
The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal 清除街头涂鸦的艺术潜意识
9月2号电子艺术的主题是走进乡村。来到圣奥古斯丁的乡间，一个在Canons Regular 叫St. Florian Monastery的地方。
如果你喜欢阴沉沉的建筑，没完没了的排队等候食物，在拥挤的房间里为了听人家的谈话被挤成沙丁鱼，那么你会认为这是享受。尽管很吵闹，还是非常欣赏像素空间小组的谈话（至少是他们中的一些成员）。
最后，小组成员Maren Richter给大家放了一段2001年的纪录片。
Matt McCormick导演的这部纪录片叫清除街头涂鸦的艺术潜意识, 记录了清除街头涂鸦的平凡工作。把环卫工人为了清除涂鸦而抹上的油漆与抽象大师们的画作作了诙谐的对比，比如 Mark Rothko, Kazimir Malevich 和 Robert Rauschenberg的作品。并把清除工作分成了几个类别：重像的，对称的，以及激进的。
更新：Reevo 通知在flickr上有一个很大的叫作秘密艺术清除涂鸦的团体，如果你想了解更多的相关信息
图片来自Ward-o-matic.
zhang dali – chinese offspring
One thing missing in China is the pervasive graffiti of tags, pieces, hip-hop art which you can see in almost any city of the world. Near my old apartment in an abandoned building site, there was some very amateur attempts, but that was about it, other than the phone numbers scrawled on every pavement and wall like mold.
The there’s artist Zhang Dali, whose graffiti and art is among the most political in China. He is currently exhibiting works from AK-47 and Chinese Offspring in London at the Chinese Contemporary gallery.
Their ankles are tethered with ropes. There is some thin, red over-painting down the backs, and around the genital areas; other figures clasp their hands behind their heads. All are painfully thin, suspended in this white gallery space like carcasses in an old-fashioned butcher’s shop. Their collective title is Chinese Offspring.
These are body casts made from some of China’s marginalised people: migrant workers who come into the cities in pursuit of a living; prostitutes. “I would say that of all the younger Chinese artists alive today,” says Julia Coleman, an art historian, “Zhang Dali’s work perhaps comes the closest to being an attack on [the] official policy of rebuilding Beijing and the disintegration of the welfare system that has allowed the creation of the migrant welfare class.”
How have artists who live in China responded to the tumultuous eradication of the past? Zhang first came to notice in the late 1990s when walls of buildings all over Beijing began to be covered with a human profile in graffiti, simplified, close to cartooning. This was the artist’s own profile, his mark of protest. In the process he became Beijing’s leading graffiti artist – and perhaps its first. He made his mark in the old hutong, ancient alleys or lanes, just before they were flattened by the bulldozers; then he turned his attention to the new high-rises. It was at this moment that the authorities came after him and he dis- appeared from view for a while.
“The changes are too quick,” he wrote in 2002. “The Chinese environment is like a meat-mincer, crushing policy, economy and culture.” Now Zhang is tolerated but he is not exactly embraced – some of his hanging-body sculptures were first shown on the fringe of the first Beijing Biennial last year. The point is this: they were on the fringe.
