Hasta La Ideas

Parisian street artist brings his gritty vision of Oz to NYC

As rebels against not just art world norms but against conventions for public space, many see graffiti as by definition disagreeable. Artists like Ugly-Kid Gumo embrace that position, providing commentary through art that originated on the street. Gumo’s raw, emotional figures and faces draw attention to the flaws and fallacies in our urbanized society by literally and figuratively staring straight at them.

The 30-year-old Parisian street artist Nicholas-Gumo first became involved in underground public art while he was still in high school. Going on to graduate with a degree in fine arts from Paris’ Ecole Supérieure des Arts Appliqués, since then he has taught art to children and dabbled in fashion design before turning back to graphic arts.

Gumo’s work emphasizes the cruelty of life in the city. “It’s a constant questioning and reinterpreting the brutal code of the city, again, especially in the suburbs—its plasticity, or rather the abstract figurative aspect of it,” he explains, continuing, “it depends on the moment, it depends on the music in the MP3. It’s brutal, romantic as a dinner with black light.”

Often the urban environment itself becomes the medium (like in his graffiti paint chips series, pictured top and below) with materials varying based on his location. When in Paris, the artist works mainly on the streets of the city, but while in NYC most of his process takes place in his studio location—even bringing in chunks of plaster from Paris to pursue his passion in the remote location.

Oz, the mythical city created by L. Frank Baum and perpetuated by Judy Garland, figures as a driving force in Gumo’s work. According to Gumo, attempting to understand the world around us is comparable to making sense of Oz. “These stories are actually metaphors for the social problems that plague the American society but which are transferable to every corner of the world or human lives. Oz is never far from us,” he suggests.

The mythical city is the only recurring thread in Gumo’s work, as he prefers to work organically from a feeling, rather than basing it on an abstract idea. “When people ask me to describe my work, to explain which wave I’m close to, I just want to answer: I don’t know. I’m honest. I don’t have a strategy or a project study, only maybe with OZ. I was too bored at school because we needed to justify our reasons and explain our influences. I find nothing more annoying. The important thing is that we’re here and together.”

New York got a preview of Gumo’s collection,”Oz, le visage du mal,” in a one-day gallery showing last fall, but his first solo show at Dorian Grey Gallery, curated by Marianne Nems opens tonight. It includes a wide variety of Gumo’s work, ranging from spray paint on paper and acrylics on canvas to cardboard and mixed media. The reception tonight from 6-7pm will have a live performance, “Mask,” by performance artist Blizard, and the show runs through 24 July 2011.

Nokia a fait appel à l’agence JWT Paris pour leur dernière campagne pour le SMARTour project. Sur une vidéo réalisée par Elroy, Vincent (Colagene) peint un graffiti sur un van représentant le slogan ainsi que l’esprit “Connecting People” de la marque.

Previously on Fubiz

• El Mac in Vietnam
• Smart Fortwo – A Big Idea
• Nike – Paint with your Feet

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Created from a mix of vintage Super-8 footage and abstract effects, San Francisco artist Alex Kopps’ ‘Displacement’ documents an obscure surf subculture that emerged in the 70s, as well as the aesthetic culture that accompanied. Watch the trailer after the jump.

A little background on the film: The ‘subculture’ that Kopps documents was resultant of/inspired by the surfboard designs of George Greenough, which were later refined by Greg Liddle. Back in the 60s, when longboards were the standard, Greenough instead designed and rode short kneeboards. Beyond ‘Displacement’, Kopps has created a diverse body of work ranging from more short films to paintings and books. See more on his site.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A guerilla art campaign giving the public curatorial power

The move by Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art director Jeffrey Deitch to remove commissioned street artist Blu’s artwork from the institution’s exterior was polemic—not to mention ironic—being that it happened just a few months shy of its blockbuster “Art in the Streets” show, which opens later this month. However, surprisingly, it wasn’t issues of censorship nor irony that drove private organization MOCA-latte to launch its Red Sticker Campaign. Giving ordinary citizens the opportunity to stand in Deitch’s shoes, the project’s purposes are to ultimately point out the power behind a sole individual’s opinion, as well as to bring the public closer to the discussion of public art.

Angelenos are being encouraged to sign up through the website to receive a free packet of red stickers emblazoned with the word “Approved” or “Disapproved.” The idea is to put the public in the role of curator, allowing them to signify their thumbs up or down of a public artwork they encounter, and then send in a photo of the piece to the website for inclusion in its gallery. The stickers will be distributed via stores as well.

So far the online gallery shows street art and graffiti from Venice to The Valley, and MOCA-latte suggests removing the stickers after participants take photos to preserve the original artwork.

A massive new book on the world’s most notoriously underground artform

Not all graffiti books are created equally, but a behemoth like the forthcoming “History of American Graffiti” shows how meaningful collections of photos and information on the subject can be when edited with a careful eye. Co-authors Roger Gastman (co-curator of the eMoCA “Art in the Streets” show and co-publisher of the late Swindle Magazine) and Book of Awesome author Caleb Neelon had not just the eye but the expertise to pull off the 400-page tome too.

Inherently ephemeral—whether buffed out, painted over or otherwise disappearing over time before its full impact can be understood—documenting significant works is a challenge that makes a book of this scale so rare.

An obvious amount of effort went into researching and writing the book. When asked where they found all of the photos, Neelon described the process as “searching through the shoe boxes and albums of more than 200 contributors from around the country.”

The ambitious book starts with the statement that, “Humans write graffiti,” and follows with what amounts to a vast archive of the visual expressions that have surfaced around the world, how each country has contributed to the overall aesthetic and similarities or differences among regional styles. One example, the popular U.S. WWII slogan “Kilroy Was Here,” is seen around the globe, but in Britain it’s called Mr. Chad, and in Australia the same cartoon of a bald man peeping over a fence accompanies the phrase “Foo was here.”

Profiles on key writers like San Francisco’s Twist (aka Barry McGee) and others like Washington D.C.’s Cool “Disco” Dan—who wrote in the ’80s and ’90s—offer further insight on graffiti as a universal culture. Gastman and Neelon remark, “what we’re really pleased about with the book is its breadth of coverage. Not just the obvious media centers of NYC/LA/SF but lots of amazing and untold local stories from the origins of scenes in all the other big cities around the United States. Miami, Boston, Seattle, Denver, Albuquerque and on.” Hawaii and Pittsburgh are even represented as hotbeds of creative activity.

The “History of American Graffiti” is available for pre-order from Amazon.