City as Canvas Graffiti Art From the Martin Wong Collectionn at Museum of the City of New York
Art Review
Writing Was on the Wall, and Some Still Remains
Some of my most vivid memories from occasional visits to New York in the late 1970s and early on '80s are of the graffiti-covered trains roaring through the urban center'due south subway organisation. With their giant, pneumatic, spray-painted letters spelling names like Crash and Daze against apocalyptic backgrounds, those unauthorized moving murals amazed me. I thought they were beautiful and inspiring.
It was the golden age of New York graffiti. Never earlier or since has that illegal art class flourished so wonderfully.
As told by the Museum of the Metropolis of New York's exhibition "City as Canvas: Graffiti Art From the Martin Wong Drove" and its catalog, the story of New York graffiti's rising and autumn is fascinating. It involves enough diverse players to populate a fat novel by Tom Wolfe. From the teenage "writers" — the preferred term of graffiti artists — who started it all in the early '70s, to the high-cease fine art sophisticates who embraced it and tried to profit from information technology, to the authorities regime who eventually crushed it in the early '80s, the cast of characters was as colorful as graffiti itself.
Image
"Metropolis every bit Canvass" views the movement through a relatively narrow just revealing window. Organized by Sean Corcoran, the museum's curator of prints and photographs, it relies on a collection of graffiti-related materials assembled by the creative person Martin Wong from 1978 to 1994.
Not a graffitist, Mr. Wong made a name for himself in the 1980s with paintings of gritty urban scenes rendered in a funky, magic-realist manner. While working at the art supply store Pearl Paint in Lower Manhattan early in that decade, he got to know and befriend a number of immature graffiti writers, and he began to collect their drawings, paintings and sketchbooks.
In 1989, Mr. Wong founded his Museum of American Graffiti on the top flooring of a townhouse in the East Village, merely real manor complications concluded that venture after only vi months. In 1994, suffering from AIDS, Mr. Wong donated his collection to the Museum of the City of New York and returned to his hometown, San Francisco, where he died in 1999.
Image
"Urban center as Sail" crams almost 150 paintings, drawings, sketchbooks and documentary photographs into a single gallery the size of a basketball game courtroom. Most of the stars of '70s and '80s New York graffiti are represented, including Daze (whose given proper noun is Christopher Ellis), Dondi (Donald White), Futura 2000 (Leonard McGurr) and Lady Pink (Sandra Fabara), one of the few women to achieve recognition in a mainly boy'due south society.
The exhibition'south congestion works well as a reflection of graffiti'south exuberant profligacy. It captures the communal spirit animative the artists, who like hip-hop musicians of the '80s, oft collaborated, hung out together, competed with ane another and collectively developed a kind of deliriously complicated calligraphy known as wild style.
The crowding too helps in that it discourages focusing on ane thing at a time, which conventional art exhibitions tend to foster. Few works in "City as Canvas" hold up to such extended scrutiny. These artists were more than oriented to the commercial aesthetics of graphic blueprint and analogy, and it shows in facile technique and the prevalence of extroverted mode over personal substance.
Image
That's not to say there aren't numerous arresting pieces. One is Lee Quiñones's re-cosmos on canvas of his late-'70s spray-painted mural in which the comic book grapheme Howard the Duck uses a garbage can lid to shield himself from a splattery explosion around jagged messages spelling "LEE." Another is Lady Pink's "The Death of Graffiti" (1982): In a mode recalling 1930s Social Realism, information technology envisions the artist herself naked and standing on a pile of spray-paint cans. She points to a subway train, 1 of whose cars is resplendently covered in graffiti and another, auguring the future, is white and clean.
After a flurry of interest from galleries, critics and collectors in the early 1980s, the loftier art world lost interest in graffiti. Some of the artists went on to lucrative careers in the design earth. Cey Adams, for example, became the art director for Def Jam records. But of all the artists associated with the move, just Keith Haring, who's in the show, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, who'due south non, achieved lasting, mainstream visibility.
Information technology'due south in the nature of graffiti that it can't exist contained past whatever established institution, commercial or educational. Equally a site-specific art form, it dies when separated from the where and when of its creation. Also, its energy comes from the artist's cocky-identification every bit an aesthetic and social outlaw. The great graffiti works, some of which are documented in the prove in photographs past Charlie Ahearn, Henry Chalfant, Martha Cooper and Jon Naar, were triumphal assertions of selfhood by youngsters non otherwise accorded much significance by the globe.
The closest you go to graffiti'due south living spirit hither is in the artists' black, hardcover sketchbooks. In them you meet the writers Bract, Daze, Crash, Precipitous and others developing their signature styles and practicing their graphic skills. In that location's more than freshness and joyful discovery in these books than almost any of the evidence's finished works.
Graffiti thrived in the 1970s and early '80s because the nearly bankrupt city government lacked the resources to terminate information technology. With the city'due south return to solvency the golden age ended, and it'south probably just as well that it did. It was jump to flag as the original writers anile. I'yard probably not the only New Yorker thankful for today's clean, unmarked subway cars. Just I still treasure my recollections of the time when graffiti roiled the town.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/07/arts/design/graffiti-art-at-the-museum-of-the-city-of-new-york.html
0 Response to "City as Canvas Graffiti Art From the Martin Wong Collectionn at Museum of the City of New York"
Post a Comment