December 18th, 2009
I found these plaques attached to a few hydro poles on Esplanade Avenue between Bernard and Saint-Viateur. I like how the copper plate etchings are a mischievous response to the official Hydro-Québec plates that are normally found on the poles. The wood one is striking for the way it mimics the natural texture of the pole, right down to the staples. As street art moves beyond the conventional media of paint, posters and stickers, it will be interesting to see it take on more unusual forms like this.
More
Popularity: 1% [?]
December 15th, 2009
Macau
Popularity: 3% [?]
December 4th, 2009
A ground floor window, if it’s close enough to the sidewalk, is the perfect vehicle for self-expression. When I was growing up in Calgary, I would walk along 17th Avenue every day, passing by an apartment window that was festooned with anti-war posters, music stickers and various other countercultural emblems. In Montreal, at the corner of Napoleon and Hôtel de Ville, this window is filled with a much more eclectic array of things.
Popularity: 1% [?]
December 1st, 2009
Street art on Duluth and St. Viateur streets, Montreal
Popularity: 1% [?]
November 3rd, 2009
Montreal doesn’t seem to have been hit terribly hard by this latest crise économique, maybe because it has spent most of the recent past recovering from a string of much more substantial crises. At the very least, it has given us a break from the excesses of the previous years, a time to reflect on what had been going on. Some of the economic victims of the crisis, like the misguided Griffintown redevelopment project, are better off dead.
In any case, I enjoyed seeing the Berlin-based French artist SP-38’s “Vive la crise!” posters around town. (He’s also responsible for an earlier spate of posters that read “Vive la bourgeoisie!” and “Vive la poésie!”) It’s a childish, contrarian exclamation, but it rings true to our instincts that the current season of change and contemplation is maybe, in some ways, a bit better than the blind exuberance of before.
More
Popularity: 3% [?]
July 16th, 2009
When I wrote about the political and cultural importance of posters (not to mention their aesthetic contribution to the city by making it look messy and lived-in), I never considered that they could also have an environmental benefit. Luckily, two artists in Toronto, Eric Cheung and Sean Martindale, have demonstrated exactly how this can be done: they’ve turned lamppost posters into tiny planters.
How’d they do it? Spacing’s Jake Schabas has the answers. “First, they cut triangular shapes directly into the thick existing poster layers. Then they peeled back those layers, wrapping the outside edge of the cut-out posters back into the pole to form the cones.
“Only staples were needed to hold the cones in place and support the soil and flowers planted, with some cones needing extra poster paper wheat-pasted onto the underside. All of the cones have an aeration hole at the bottom and are placed in a corkscrew patter that allows water to flow from one plant to the next.”
More
Popularity: unranked [?]
July 15th, 2009
I spotted my first ghost bike — a memorial to a fallen bicyclist — on Second Avenue in the East Village, chained to a signpost sprouting from the quiet little park in front of the the old stone St. Mark’s-in-the-Bowery church. Perhaps that’s why it seemed both dissonant and appropriate — despite the proximity of the street, it seemed unlikely that the tranquil square could have been the site of so many bicyclists’ deaths. At the same time, it was wholly natural to memorialize them near an 18th century churchyard. A closer look revealed that may have been precisely the thinking behind this ghost bike, dedicated to all the New York bicyclists who had lost their lives on the streets over the last year.
The ghost bike movement began as the solo effort of San Francisco artist Jo Slota in 2003. By the next year, a full memorial project was underway in St. Louis. Several artists groups’ ghost bike initiatives coalesced into The New York City Street Memorial Project in 2007, one of 87 ghost bike projects documented in 14 countries worldwide. In New York, the memorials have an impressive geographic scope, spread from the southern tip of Staten Island to reaches of eastern Queens far beyond the end of most subway lines.
More
Popularity: unranked [?]
July 14th, 2009
Top left photo by John Batten; others by Christopher DeWolf
The brown leather chesterfield sits incongruously amid the parked buses, concrete paving and grey metal railings at the Tai Hang bus terminus. In the afternoon heat, a cat stretches over the length of the sofam but after sunset, it’s where bus drivers and passers-by sit and relax.
This kind of improvised street furniture is what arts writer and heritage activist John Batten calls vernacular or “nonchalant” art, an umbrella term for the everyday objects, street life and informal interventions in public spaces that are close to the heart of this city’s character.
“Hong Kong is a place that’s open to free expression, which is reflected in the clutter of our public spaces, our footbridges and ferry forecourts,” says Batten. “All of these bits of vernacular art and architecture are part of who we are. People overlook [such] simple things. But if you take them away, what are you left with?”
More
Popularity: unranked [?]
May 7th, 2009
More
Popularity: 1% [?]
April 2nd, 2009
One of the last remains of Tsang Tsou Choi’s work, now protected by a special coating and latex screen
During his lifetime, the King of Kowloon was seen by the Hong Kong government as little more than a nuisance. But that was before the Star Ferry incident raised public awareness about identity, culture and heritage issues. So in 2007, after the King—also known as Tsang Tsou Choi, the oldest graffiti writer in the world—passed away, the government promised to do everything it could to preserve what was left of his distinctive graffiti.
Turns out the government isn’t capable of doing much. Although it was quick to spray a protective coating on a prominent piece of Tsang’s work at the Tsim Sha Tsui Star Ferry pier, the South China Morning Post reveals that many other pieces, especially those near Tsang’s home in Kwun Tong, remain unprotected and vulnerable to decay and vandalism. (The SCMP article is locked behind a paywall, but you can see a short slideshow they produced about the remains of Tsang’s work, which I’ve embedded below.) Lau Kin Wai, an artist and friend of Tsang, hopes to draw attention to the matter by holding a protest this weekend at the Star Ferry pier.
In the Legislative Council, opposition lawmaker Alan Leong has made a fuss about the preservation of Tsang’s graffiti, which prompted a sheepish response from the Home Affairs Bureau yesterday. Maybe, it said, the government would simply take some photos of Tsang’s graffiti, rather than preserve its actual physical remains. If you ignore the fact that the government is trying to sidestep the fact that it broke its own promise—the remaining works should have been protected right after Tsang died—its position almost makes sense. Graffiti is, after all, a inherently ephemeral form of art. It isn’t meant to last. In most cases, I’d hesitate before throwing my support behind a government effort to preserve a piece of graffiti.
But this is a special case. Tsang was unique: he was making political statements, not artistic ones, and his graffiti stands alone for its distinctive form of Chinese calligraphy. Preserving his work will keep his spirit in the streets. Besides, Hong Kong doesn’t have a rich tradition of graffiti. Just a few neighbourhoods have street art of any note and none of it is particularly inventive or cutting-edge. By making a deliberate effort to include Tsang’s graffiti in the canon of Hong Kong heritage, the government will demonstrate that street art and public political statements remain a vital part of the city’s identity.
More
Popularity: unranked [?]
March 26th, 2009
Lowrise to parking lot conversion, Toronto, 2008
Popularity: 5% [?]
March 17th, 2009
I first passed by this paste-up late at night in Taipei’s Ximending district. When I happened to be nearby a couple of days later, I was doubly impressed: whoever made it knew that by placing it here, it would illuminated each afternoon by a thin sliver of light, a ready-made art space in an otherwise dark lane.
Popularity: unranked [?]
February 19th, 2009
Popularity: 1% [?]
January 11th, 2009
Photo by Jean-Pierre Caissie
“It’s a phenomenon unique to public art: the possibility of response,” wrote Jean-Pierre Caissie, the artistic director of Dare-Dare, on his blog last month. “Artistic expression is usually a one-way street. The artist expresses himself and the museum presents his work. A few attempts at responding to the artist have ended up in a court date. But street art, or ephemeral public art, offers the opportunity for passers-by to comment.”
Roaming from site to site around Montreal—first Viger Square, then the Park With No Name, and now Cabot Square—Dare-Dare specializes in ephemeral public art. I’ve been lucky enough to chat with Caissie about the various projects that Dare-Dare has helped curate and a common theme that keeps emerging is the opportunity for public interaction and response, something that isn’t normally possible in a gallery or a museum. Dare-Dare takes art from the gallery to the street and opens it up to the public.
What happens then is entirely unpredictable. In 2007, Chih-Chien Wang built a “nest” of cardboard boxes, illuminated from within, underneath the Van Horne Viaduct. People would come at night and drink nearby, but every so often, somebody would knock down all of the boxes, either deliberately or by accident. Each time, he rebuilt the nest in a slightly different way. Not long after, Caroline Dubois and Julie Favreau turned a long-vacant storefront into a space of perpetual construction and reconstruction. Many neighbours, surprised to see the shop doors open, stopped by to chat.
It’s not uncommon to pass by street art—stencils, graffiti, paste-ups and so on—that has been commented on. Caissie has a few examples, including one—a “raton voleur” that spills out from one of Franck Bragigand’s painted manhole covers on St. Viateur St.—that adds so much to the original work that I had always assumed it was painted by Bragigand himself. Two years ago, somebody pasted a long-form poem onto a laneway wall; “Too bad it’s not that good,” somebody scrawled underneath. Last spring, Fauxreel’s controversial Antlerheads were literally defaced by Zato, another street artist, who transformed their Vespa scooter heads into morbidly grinning moster faces.
Compare that to galleries, where any attempt to comment on art is considered vandalism rather than dialogue. Caissie points the way to a handful of news stories about people attacking, defacing and otherwise leaving a mark on various pieces of art.
Popularity: 5% [?]
Montreal Apartments