Hasta La Ideas

“Beyond the Street: The 100 Leading Figures in Urban Art” is a behemoth of a book loaded with a who’s-who of the contemporary urban art scene edited by Patrick Nguyen and Stuart. Surveying the work from figureheads such as Aaron Rose, Wooster Collective, Deitch Projects, Stephan Doitschinoff, Faile, Brad Downey and Swoon, in-depth interviews supplement loads of color images and artist biographies to create a 400-page tome of information.

Below, Cool Hunting gets an exclusive preview of the book (it comes out in the U.S. on 20 May 2010) with this interview excerpt conducted by Nguyen with New York-based artist Steve Powers, a.k.a. ESPO.

Londoners can catch the U.K. book launch party the Friday, 7 May 2010, from 6-9 pm at Phillips de Pury & Company on Howick Place. For those in New York, the event takes place Thursday, 27 May 2010, from 6-9 pm at Deitch Projects.

Pick up the book from Gestalten or pre-order from Amazon.

What led you to become an artist in the first place?

It was just raw, desperate hunger for attention. Because I grew up in a household with a lot of other children, drawing was a way to separate myself from the pack. So I got into it as a three-year-old and have been a compulsive drawer ever since.

Is it true that you were an art school dropout? If so, why did you quit?

Yeah, I dropped out of two different art schools. I just had a sneaking suspicion as I was handing over my tuition that you probably didn’t need anything they were teaching at art school to be an artist. Like being a musician, either you have it or you don’t. If you have the talent and you put in the hours and you get lucky, art school’s not going to help you anyway.

When did you start doing graffiti?

I was doing graffiti as a teenager, basically as a sophomore in high school in the suburbs of Philadelphia. It was something new to me. It was just brutally breaking out of the neighborhoods of New York and Philadelphia and starting to go national with “Style Wars” and “Subway Art.” And it had everything I wanted in art: color, design, line, it was illegal, but not that illegal—all the things that captivate teenagers. Typically in those days, in the mid-eighties in Philadelphia and New York, it was really a young person’s game. They’d start at 12 and were done at 18. I started a little late at 16, and I didn’t really finish until I was 30.

Continue reading and see more images after the jump.

Could you describe some of the background to the ESPO tags you used to do on storefront grates in New York?

At a New Year’s party in 1997, I got in an argument with a graffiti video director/producer. I basically laid out the theory that I could paint anywhere in New York any time I wanted, and get over without getting arrested for it. He said, “Absolutely not. It can’t be done.” It was something I’d been thinking about for a while. At the time, Mayor Giuliani wanted people to be responsible for the graffiti on their own properties and for owners to be fined if they didn’t remove it. Well, the property owners in New York are an extremely powerful group of people, so that never really came to pass. But I liked the idea of doing something so fundamentally benign like painting over graffiti and then turning it into graffiti at the last minute. I didn’t anticipate the reaction it would get, but once I’d done it a couple of times, I decided to keep going and ended up doing around 75 grates. The rule of thumb in New York is that if you’re doing something new, you can’t just do it once or twice; otherwise, the next person’s going to pick it up and take all the credit for it. So in doing it as many times as I could, I really held on to the idea for myself.

When did you stop painting illegally and become a “respectable member of society?”

I stopped doing graffiti in ’99. I’d been painting for 15 years by that point and had done everything two or three times over. I really just wanted to focus on making art. To me, the term graffiti art is an oxymoron. Graffiti does its own thing; it doesn’t need to aspire to anything more than graffiti. It’s cool if it does, but I think calling yourself a graffiti artist places an unnecessary burden on you. You’re probably not going to make that good graffiti, and you’re probably not going to make that good art if you’re trying to do both at the same time.

Humorous and provocative, the much-anticipated film Exit Through the Gift Shop by the U.K.’s leading street artist Banksy is impressively on par with his captivating artworks. After its surprise premiere at Sundance last year, the well-edited movie opens in select cities across the U.S. on 16 April 2010.

Don’t expect to watch a revelatory documentary on the elusive British artist. Instead, the film revolves around French-born L.A. resident Thierry Guetta, or Mr. Brainwash— an obsessive vintage store owner whose preoccupation with filming street artists in the late ’90s led him to a chance friendship with Banksy through the equally legendary street artist Shepard Fairey.

In an exclusive interview Fairey discussed with CH how his relationship with Guetta has changed since his breakthrough show in L.A., which Fairey subsequently criticized. “I think it’s important to be honest, because I know he respects me and I’m not just a hater. I think he has potential to evolve into a good artist if he takes some of this constructive criticism to heart. He came out with a big bang without the same sort of period of gestation that other artists have. It’s not an open and closed thing. Everyone has the potential to evolve if they work at it.”

Much of the film’s footage comes from Guetta, who was planning on creating his own documentary chronicling the history of graffiti. From accompanying Fairey and Guetta’s cousin Space Invader as they put up their pieces in the middle of the night to becoming Banksy’s right-hand man in L.A. and helping him pull off the infamous stunt at Disneyland, Guetta filmed it all. When Banksy saw the finished film, however, he took all 10,000 hours of footage, re-edited it, and shifted the focus on Guetta himself.

In his typical extreme style, Guetta set about mounting a show as loud and hyped—if not more, even—than Banksy’s own “Barely Legal” in the abandoned CBS Studios in L.A. in 2008, propelling him into the spotlight overnight.

Most of the film’s commentary is by Fairey and Banksy himself, who discuss Guetta’s artistic merit in a dry manner. Without spoiling the ending, we will tell you that there is a twisted conclusion about street art as a whole that will have you contemplating the medium for days.

Fairey, whose new show “May Day” opens at Deitch Projects 1 May 2010, explains “People now look at street art as a legitimate form of expression and a good way to get attention. Even if the artwork is pointless, the medium is still a pretty powerful message.”

Los Angeles, NYC, San Francisco, Berkeley and Palo Alto will see the film first, followed by Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago and Seattle on 23 April 2010. Check banksyfilm.com for dates in other cities.

Currently on display at L.A.’s Carmichael Gallery, Nina Pandolfo‘s “Life’s Flavor” marks the first solo show for the successful contemporary street artist. Known for depicting wide-eyed, stocking-clad girls, the Brazilian explains that the title of the show reflects her view on life, “sometimes it is sweet and some times it is spicy and sometimes a combination of the two.”

Sculptures and paintings of the girls, often wearing little more than Brazilian-cut underwear and knee-highs, with their cute kitties, dolls, toys, jelly beans and hot peppers float and fly through the gallery space. Pandolfo described to CH how she purposefully sequenced four paintings together to tell the story of a special world where “everything is possible—it can even rain fish!”

In the first piece a girl looks out of a cuckoo clock window as she eats red hot chili peppers with little fairies hovering, while in the next, another girl falls downward surrounded by dolls, cats and fairies as she tries to catch the cuckoo clock. Following that, a canvas shows two girls lying on a cushion eating candy, watching as the second girl falls past them. The last painting depicts two girls getting dolled-up with some familiar socks peeking out from the edge.

Seeing Pandolfo’s work in person reveals many little details and textures that don’t show up in photos. Using spray paint as a base, she creates richly-detailed images that have the effect of water colors, pencils, glitter, jewelry and even appliqué—seriously magical art.

Life’s Flavor runs through 18 April 2010.