For our last studio task for Richard before our practical sessions begin, we must create a list of 5 designers that relate to each context of practice lecture we have had throughout first year on the programme. We have 9 topics; modernism, postmodernism, street art/graffiti, film, high culture vs. low culture, typography and the history of type, media specificity, advertising and communication.
Graffiti / Street Art
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Jean-Michel Basquiat (December 22, 1960 – August 12, 1988) was an American artists. He began as a graffiti artist in New York City in the late 1970s and evolved into a Neo-expressionist painter during the 1980s. In 1976, Basquiat and friends Al Diaz and Shannon Dawson began spray-painting graffiti on buildings in Lower Manhattan, working under the pseudonym SAMO. The designs featured inscribed messages such as "Plush safe he think.. SAMO" and "SAMO as an escape clause." On December 11, 1978, the Village Voice published an article about the graffiti. The SAMO project ended with the epitaph "SAMO IS DEAD," inscribed on the walls of SoHo buildings in 1979.
Continuing his activities as a graffiti artist, Basquiat often incorporated words into his paintings. Before his career as a painter began, he produced punk-inspired postcards for sale on the street, and became known for the political–poetical graffiti under the name of SAMO. On one occasion Basquiat painted his girlfriend's dress with the words "Little Shit Brown". He would often draw on random objects and surfaces, including other people's property.
The conjunction of various media is an integral element of Basquiat's art. His paintings are typically covered with text and codes of all kinds: words, letters, numerals, pictograms, logos, map symbols, diagrams and more.
A middle period from late 1982 to 1985 featured multi-panel paintings and individual canvases with exposed stretcher bars, the surface dense with writing, collage and imagery. The years 1984-85 were also the main period of the Basquiat–Warhol collaborations, even if, in general, they weren't very well received by the critics.Basquiat doodled often and some of his later pieces exhibited this; they were often colored pencil on paper with a loose, spontaneous, and dirty style much like his paintings. His work across all mediums display a child-like fascination with the process of creating.
http://basquiat.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Michel_Basquiat
http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/basquiat/street-to-studio/
http://www.basquiatbiography.com/
Keith Haring
Keith Haring (May 4, 1958 – February 16, 1990) was an artist and social activist whose work responded to the New York City street culture of the 1980s. At age 19, Haring moved to New York City, where he was inspired by graffiti art, and studied at the School of Visual Arts. He got to know Andy Warhol, who was the theme of several of Haring's pieces including "Andy Mouse." His friendship with Warhol would prove to be a decisive element in his eventual success, particularly after their deaths.
In 1988, Haring was diagnosed with AIDS. He established the Keith Haring Foundation in 1989, its mandate being to provide funding and imagery to AIDS organizations and children's programs, and to expand the audience for Haring’s work through exhibitions, publications and the licensing of his images. Haring enlisted his imagery during the last years of his life to speak about his own illness and generate activism and awareness about AIDS.
By expressing concepts of birth, death, love, sex and war, Haring's imagery has become a widely recognized visual language of the 20th century.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Haring
http://www.haring.com/
http://www.pop-shop.com/
http://www.haringkids.com/
John Fekner
John Fekner (born in New York City) is an innovative artist who created hundreds of environmental and conceptual outdoor works consisting of stenciled words, symbols, dates and icons spray painted in New York, Sweden, Canada, England and Germany in the 1970s and 1980s. A seminal figure in the Street Art movement, Fekner participated in recent urban art exhibitions such as Wooster Collective's 11 Spring Street Project in 2006. Working with Don Leicht, their latest outdoor project, entitled "The Stanley Cup is missing" is currently part of the annual BLK River street art festival in Vienna, Austria.
In 1968, Fekner painted the words Itchycoo Park in large white letters on an empty building in Gorman Park, New York, and in 1978 he curated the Detective Show at the same outdoor location in Queens which included the words street museum on the invitational card. In reaction to the desolation of the abandoned burnt-out buildings of the South Bronx, Fekner stenciled Last Hope in large letters above one crumbling structure so that every time you passed it you couldn’t block it out of your vision. Now you know you can’t change the world, but you can’t sit back and watch it implode either, so you’ll do your part, have your own little victory, and so will the next guy and the next, and maybe things will start to change.
Fekner's output includes paintings, cast paper reliefs, video, audio and performance works, sculpture, photography and computer-generated work. Fekner creates multiple versions of work in entirely different media and will use whatever means are necessary to communicate a vision or message, and whose work changes as that vision expands. Throughout his entire career in the arts, Fekner has made a commitment within his work by consistently addressing issues that demonstrate an interest involving concepts of perception and transformation, as well as specific environmental and sociological concerns such as urban decay, greed, chemical pollutants, mass media and Native American Indians. Fekner's stencil Wheels Over Indian Trails greeted motorists and international travelers arriving in New York City at the Pulaski Bridge Queens Midtown Tunnel from 1979-1990. The message remained untouched for eleven years, until Earth Day 1990, when Mr. Fekner, feeling the piece had run its course, painted over it.
http://www.johnfekner.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Fekner
http://myweb.cwpost.liu.edu/jfekner/
Shepard Fairey
Frank Shepard Fairey (born February 15, 1970) is an American contemporary graphic designer, and illustrator who emerged from the skateboarding scene. His work became more widely known in the 2008 UD president election, specifically his Barrack Obama "Hope" poster. The Institute of contemporary Art, Boston calls him one of today's best known and most influential street artists. His work is included in the collections at The Smithsonian, the Los Angeles County museum of Art, the Museum of modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the National portrait gallery in Washington, and the Victoria Albert Museum in London.
Fairey's first art museum exhibition, aptly named Supply & Demand alongside his book, was in Boston at the Institute of contemporary Art in the summer of 2009. The exhibition featured over 250 works in a wide variety of media: screen prints, stencils, stickers, rubylith illustrations, collages, and works on wood, metal and canvas. As a complement to the ICA exhibition, Fairey created public art works around Boston. The artist explains his driving motivation: "The real message behind most of my work is 'question everything."
http://www.seditionart.com/shepard_fairey
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_Fairey
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/shepard-fairey/street-art-and-politics-i_b_926802.html
Banksy
Banksy is a pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, film director, and painter.
His satirical street art and subversive epigrams combine irreverent dark humour with graffiti done in a distinctive stencilling technique. Such artistic works of political and social commentary have been featured on streets, walls, and bridges of cities throughout the world.
Banksy's work was born out of the Bristol Underground Scene which involved collaborations between artists and musicians.Known for his contempt for the government in labeling graffiti as vandalism, Banksy displays his art on public surfaces such as walls and even going as far as to build physical prop pieces. Banksy does not sell photos of street graffiti directly himself; however, art auctioneers have been known to attempt to sell his street art on location and leave the problem of its removal in the hands of the winning bidder.
The son of a photocopier technician, he trained as a butcher but became involved in graffiti during the great Bristol aerosol boom of the late 1980s."
Banksy began as a freehand graffiti artist 1990–1994 as one of Bristol's DryBreadZ Crew (DBZ), with Kato and Tes. He was inspired by local artists and his work was part of the larger Bristol Underground Scene with Nick Walker, Inkie and 3D. From the start he used stencils as elements of his freehand pieces, too. By 2000 he had turned to the art of stencilling after realizing how much less time it took to complete a piece. He claims he changed to stencilling whilst he was hiding from the police under a rubbish lorry, when he noticed the stencilled serial number and by employing this technique, he soon became more widely noticed for his art around Bristol and London.
Banksy's stencils feature striking and humorous images occasionally combined with slogans. The message is usually anti-war, anti-capitalist or anti-establishment. Subjects often include rats, apes, policemen, soldiers, children, and the elderly.
Banksy, along with Shepard Fairey, Dmote and others created work at a warehouse exhibition in Alexandria, Sydney for Semi-Permanent in 2003. Approximately 1,500 people attended.
In August 2004, Banksy produced a quantity of spoof British £10 notes substituting the picture of the Queen's head with Diana princess of Wales head and changing the text "Bank of England" to "Banksy of England." Someone threw a large wad of these into a crowd at Notting Hill Carnival that year, which some recipients then tried to spend in local shops. These notes were also given with invitations to a Santa's Ghetto exhibition by Pictures on Walls. The individual notes have since been selling on eBay for about £200 each. A wad of the notes were also thrown over a fence and into the crowd near the NME signing tent at The Reading Festival. A limited run of 50 signed posters containing ten uncut notes were also produced and sold by Pictures on Walls for £100 each to commemorate the death of Princess Diana. One of these sold in October 2007 at Bonhams auction house in London for £24,000.
In May 2011 Banksy released a lithographic print which showed a smoking petrol bomb contained in a 'Tesco Value' bottle. This followed a long running campaign by locals against the opening of a Tesco Express supermarket in Banksy's home city of Bristol. Violent clashes had taken place between police and demonstrators in the Stokes Croft area. Banksy produced the poster ostensibly to raise money for local groups in the Stokes Croft area and to raise money for the legal defence of those arrested during the riots. The posters were sold exclusively at the Bristol Anarchists Bookfair in Stokes Croft for £5 each.
http://www.banksy.co.uk/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banksy
http://www.artofthestate.co.uk/banksy/banksy.htm
http://www.banksy.org.uk/
Graffiti/Street Art Imagery: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, John Fekner, Shepard Fairey and Banksy.
