Jenny Berry's Art Blog

"The Buffer" No, it's not a new TNT series. Yet.

Okay. The coolest thing just happened. A city buffer just walked into my studio... a buffer is a municipal graffiti remover paid for by our hard working tax dollars. "They make the world a beiger place to be" has always been my personal homage to them ;) — will I ever stop writing ad headlines? ack.

 
My all-time favorite Banksy piece here says it all. From his 'Cans' show in London earlier this year. Photo: NY Times.

Anyway... said buffer likes my art. He was referred to me by a mutual friend and fellow aficionado of fine street art. But here's the interesting part. He also likes a lot of the street art that he's paid to destroy... um... I mean... clean up.

He likes it a lot and he takes pictures of all of it before he paints over it. I love this guy!! He showed me the pics and they're absolutely amazing. I'm going to use some of his shots in my art for definite.

So the buffer (who shall at this point remain anonymous) and I start talking about how yes, some of it is obnoxious and a destruction of property and just plain old stoopid, dumb and ugly. granted. But some of it, even here in little old Albuquerque, is freakin amazing... and all the more poetic because of it's short life expectancy. 

But now here's our buffer taking pics of all this stuff because he KNOWS it's art and making a catalog because it's really bothering him that he has to destroy it to feed his family, jobs are scarcer than scarce here... and... I feel like Chili Palmer in Get Shorty pitching a screen play idea right now... and then he says to me that one night soon when he's going out on a call he's going to let me tag along and get pics and video of all this shit in like real time. this is amazing!! i'm so psyched. 

 
Photo courtesy of Halton Chemical in Canada, those folks that bring us all that beige paint we can't get enough of. You know what scares me... Monsanto and other chemical companies don't scare us... but graffiti does. That is truly scary.

I want to do an interview series with 'The Buff' too and see if we can get it published. An art book of destroyed modern masterpieces... have buffers from all over the country shoot stuff with their cell cams before they buff it. I'd put some resources behind that project. Maybe even a 'Buff-umentary' if you will... what? too much? If not a 'Spinal Tap' reference here, then where?

I'll post it all here first so stay tuned. I've been out with the artists/writers and it's always a blast... but always on legally appropriated walls so don't even start :) but this is like the other side of the coin and to find a storm trooper (he's well aware that this is how he's viewed) with empathy is almost too good to be true. 

The Buff is an amazingly compassionate and interesting person and I can't wait to do this series of articles and photo exposés with him. And we'll see where it leads. Maybe we can open some minds on both sides of the issue. 

Amazing street artist: Portugal's Mr. Dheo

Here's a very short video via Burning The Streets of Portugal's Mr. Dheo in action. This mural is called 'Barrio Theory.' Like that name :)

If you've never seen a street artist working a can of spray paint I think you'll find this very interesting. It's pretty amazing what they do and he's not using stencils here. Nothing wrong with stencils... just sayin.

Even if you don't relate to his subject matter it would be hard to miss the impact and importance of what he's (and other street artists) are doing with their art.

 

Mr. Dheo's starting to garner a lot of attention on the international street art scene. I love Banksy much as the next guy but it's nice to see someone making the medium his own at this point. Lotta that stuff's getting tired.

There's also some amazing work on his web site. 

mrdheo.com

David Foster Wallace takes a stab at irony

“Look, man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?” — DFW

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE by Philip Burke for The New Yorker 1991

Searching tonight for some large, dense blocks of text that i'm going to be using as 'meaningless' texture — symbolic... check... ironic, check — in some paintings this week (ie: choice excerpts from Joyce's Finnegan's Wake and Wallace's Infinite Jest) I came across the above quote from the Larry McCaffery interview with David Foster Wallace circa 1991.

RIP DFW and BTW, it is a good point and maybe I need to think about it. Wallace could not be called a Pollyanna by any one's standards so it made me stop and think. Art is the mirror of a culture okay, but as artists do we have some responsibility to uplift and redeem and all that too? 

According to D.T. Max, in a 2009 New Yorker article about DFW's unfinished body of work "... as Wallace saw it, irony could critique but it couldn’t nourish or redeem."

Most of what I do is ironic yet I can't help but see his point. Without redemption or some offer of resolution we're just mocking and that's just cheap and far too easy.

Maybe as artists, writers, film makers we do have some responsibility to offer more than that in our work? Maybe being a mirror for us to see, if we choose to look, how we really are isn't enough.

Really? Being the documentarians of darkness and stupidity isn't all that's required of us? Who knew?

Do we need to offer hope? Or does that just get sanctimonious? I don't know. I could make an argument either way but I don't have time now... those paintings aren't going to paint themselves :) 

Street Art now at the MOCA?

LA MOCA's been bombed — not literally, calm down the art is okay... bombed is a euphemism for street writers and artists gettin all up in there and blastin the *!#&* out of it... with spray paint — But this time it's legal and there's nothing the graffiti patrols with their bottomless vats of beige paint can do about it! So far the hoodlums in question haven't hurt anything but I'm sure they're being closely monitored. And the MOCA has, in my humble opinion, never looked better!

Is there anyone that really thinks the wall pictured above would look better beige... really? Thank god the art world is finally standing up to the bureaucrats and given these artists the credit and the venue they so badly deserve!

'Art In The Streets' opened on April 17th, the first ever major exhibition of all the biggest artists in the street art movement, past and present.

The exhibition will be at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in LA until August 8th. From there it'll be moved to The Brooklyn Museum where it will be on display March 30 - July 8, 2012.

Kenny Scharf painting at Art in The Streets. Photo by Gregory Bojorquez

Here's an awesome sneak preview of them setting up the show last month by Martha Cooper, a great photographer that has been documenting the movement since it's beginnings in the late 70's. 

And here's a direct link to Curve, MOCA's newsblog (All photos I've added here are courtesy of Curve). Some great info about the show and some absolutely amazing pictures of the opening and lots of pics and vids of the artists at work setting up their displays. I'll be posting my own take on the show when I get there. Can not wait!

As would be expected local police are reporting an increase in unauthorized tagging in the area. Culture Monster talked to MOCA director Jeffrey Dietch who said, "some of the young taggers who are anarchic.... It's a language of youth culture, and we can't stop it. It goes with the territory."

Deitch also told L.A. Weekly that the museum was helping with "tagging clean up" in the area.

And of course as with any sub-culture art/music movement going mainstream you've got your purists and cynics, some calling the show 'Street Art in a Museum'. While I do see their basic concern, that street art is by nature anti-establishment and in losing it's context and in turn anarchic nature, does it run the risk of now being co-opted by the very establishment it sought to rebel against? Listen to Johnny Cash talk about Nashville and The Grand Ole Opry. It's a very old struggle and a very old argument but none the less poignant for it's age.

True: The best way to silence an outsider is to bring them inside where it's comfortable and safe. Once they're in the inner circle they're usually more reluctant to bite the hand that feeds them. Yes, sometimes this kills an artists true inner voice, sometimes it makes their voice stronger. My answer in regard to street art going mainstream: Only time will tell. Enjoy it while you still can.

With Banksy's new movie release, to name only one major event in the movement recently, street art is enjoying a meteoric rise in mainstream popularity and thus, sadly, as to be expected, is starting to alienate it's core audience as it picks up a more mainstream following.

Nick Lempert of the Justseeds collective made some very good points in an op-ed piece on artinfo.com recently. Jeffrey Deitch, the new director of the MOCA commissioned Italian street artist Blu, to do a mural on the side of The Geffen Building as part of the Art In The Streets exhibit.

Blu painted the above mural of coffins draped in dollar bills instead of American flags. Deitch asked Blu to change it because of the risk of controversy (no complaints ever actually came in) and upsetting the neighboring community (Japanese-Americans mainly and veterans at a nearby VA hospital). Blu refused and Deitch beiged the thing over. 

Quite a bit has been written about the controversy but I think Henry Chalfant's (photographer/documentarian of the graffiti movement) statement to Hyperallergic sums it up best: "MOCA couldn't have left the mural there as an affront to the community who considered it sacred ground, and who, in no way, were the deserving targets for the mural's powerful message. With street art, context is all-important. I would have loved to see the mural in front of the offices of Halliburton-KBR or on Wall Street, for America's war profiteers to see."

Blu responded in a very thoughful and thought provoking email in the Hyperallergic article as well. He is a brilliant artist and it makes me so sad to see this piece destroyed. As Chalfant also states, it really is a tragedy to lose such a brilliant piece of work and the word censorship, as much as it makes Deitch and MOCA, and many of us cringe, might be fitting but it's also a reality and it's the central issue around this art form as a whole and one of the things that makes it so compelling. What is rebellion if it doesn't occasionally offend? and what is the human race without rebellion? Capitalism can not function well without controlling rebellion. It makes me think about this stuff. I think we need to think about this stuff. Blu's work makes us think. Deitch's decision to remove it makes me think, too.

Whatever your feelings about the show, censorship and about street art itself, you should try to take it in if you have the chance. It is arguably one of the biggest art events of our times. Me, I'm going to try to make the LA show before August but maybe it'll be Brooklyn in the spring? Who knows but I'm not missing this for the world. 

Art as mirror of a culture? Andy Warhol might agree.

I've heard it said that art is the mirror of a culture. That sentence often grounds me and helps me make sense out of what I do.

As artists we take in information all around us and then filter it through our own set of fun house mirrors and what comes out we call art. For me, Warhol's paintings, his Cambell's Soup Cans or Brillo Boxes are perfect examples. 

 
Warhol in New York's Stable gallery, 1964, amid the Brillo box sculptures at the centre of the scandal. Photograph: Getty Images

Campbell's Soup 1 Screen Print 1968 Photo: Wikipedia

In a way they're like petroglyphs for some future society to decode. In essence —We were a society that worshiped products and celebrities the way the good people of the renaissance revered their saints and martyrs— Not pretty but pretty accurate if you think about it.

Photo: deniffelook.weebly.com

I LOVE this photo. It really sums up the public reaction to his early work. There was quite a scandal when this sculpture hit galleries in '64. Recently I saw a poster of his famous Marilyn hanging in a Friday's. Everything gets assimilated eventually. 

My background, like Warhol's is in advertising. Having been an art director/copywriter for a decade probably has a lot to do with the cynicism and irony in not just my work but how I've chosen to sell it.

The irony is unconscious, mostly. But the one conscious, necessary component of the process for me, the one thing I know I need, is the struggle between me and the painting. It's a love/hate relationship. I hate the endless battle but it's necessary for me to fight with it to develop a relationship with it.

I seem to always be struggling with either the media itself or with an idea and sometimes I seem to almost intentionally massacre a section of the canvas just so I have to battle with it to regain some perceived sense of control. And in the process destroy another area. And then it starts all over again... until it's done. And this I've noticed could be a metaphor for my entire life. 

©2011 Jenny Berry "Eye Candy No. 4"

This is the first in a series of new paintings that I'm finishing now for a show the end of June in Santa Fe. Warhol's influence was unconscious. I was focused on the irony of ad messages, the bright colors and scantily clad women used to push products. And candy cigarettes? Did that actually even happen!?!? I only realized when it was finished that it's kind of a little Warholy. 

LOVE this ART: Casey Diebold & Adam Devarney

Boiled Oil by Adam Devarney 24 x 36 2011

Up Above a Town by Casey Diebold 30x24", Acrylic on Canvas

Love both of these artists so much! Adam Devarney & Casey Diebold just had an amazing joint show called 'Godspeed' at Sacred Gallery in NYC. This is the kind of work that is influenced in theme by everything that I love and their execution is spot on. 

If you're not familiar yet with the Sacred Gallery in Soho, don't miss it next time you're in the city. They give a much needed venue to the work of tattoo and subculture artists and in my opinion that's were the freshness (ahem... okay... soul?) is right now. 

Mars Motor Speedway by Casey Diebold 30x24", Acrylic on Canvas

 

Lazy Susan of Death by Casey Diebold 36x24", Acrylic on Canvas

This Old Con Ain't Gonna Last by Casey Diebold 36x24", Acrylic on Canvas

Diebold's background as a storyboard illustrator is up the same alley as mine as an ad agency art director. Maybe that's one reason I find his work so compelling. Coolhunting.com did a great feature article on the show and I'm sure it can answer any further questions about them both. 

Dead Men Tell No Tales by Adam Devarney 24 x 30 2011

High Temperature Cutoff by Adam Devarney 24 x 36 2011

 

Trash As Treasure: Some incredible recycled art

These artists are doing amazing things with found objects. Some of this stuff is just mind boggling. The recycling/repurposing/upcycling (insert fav nomenclature here) thing is something I've been exploring a lot in my own work lately.

I've got piles of metal in the backyard and as of yesterday... my very own, brand-spankin new, angle grinder for smoothing the edges of some old rusted tin siding that I found that I want to paint on. I was calling it an ankle grinder... didn't hear the guy at Harbor Freight right... but now I can not only pronounce it, I can actually use it so I'm going to be painting on metal soon too... hopefully with good results. 

Here's the first one I did last summer. Hopefully more of this type of work will be coming along soon. I like the idea of pulling things out of the dump and making art out of them. Something just seems very right about that somehow.

Look close at those sharp edges. The ankle grinder's going to take care of those though :)

Below are a few excerpted highlights from a very informative feature article - the entire blog post from Somethin Beautiful is totally worth your time. This barely scratches the surface of the artists they feature in the article. 

Sarah-Jane van der Westhuizen

The art is created from old car parts, recycled metal pieces, and anything the artist could get her hands on. Van der Westhuizen has installed several of these trash sculptures all over Europe.

Frank Russell

The shark piece below, Captain Crunch, was constructed from hubcaps, food packaging tins, and the leg of a male mannequin. The fins are copper and the teeth are soup cans. It is ten feet long. Russell specializes in these sculptures produced from found objects.





Mario Caicedo Langer

Langer creates sculpture from trash and broken gadgets.





Jason Mercier

Mercier specializes in celebrity collages done with the celebrity’s own discarded objects. While Hello Kitty likely didn’t discard any objects, Donald Trump and Mariah Carey probably did.






Tom Deininger

Deininger is widely known as a famous artist who upcycles junk into fine art installations. He is also a highly regarded and collected visual artist.






Subodh Gupta

Brass pots and eerie skulls from a mashup of metal parts are just part of what this skilled Indian artist has done.




Ha Schult

Schult is known for creating massive installations of people constructed from trash in major locations around the world. Here are just a few of them.











Tyree Guyton

Guyton created the Heidelburg Project as an urban renewal project, transforming a rundown section of Detroit from a place where people were afraid to walk to an art exhibition that people wanted to visit.





Charles Kaufman

Kaufman’s crushed can art is done on crushed soda and beer cans.

2011 TED Prize winner: Artist, JR

JR is a French artist that has been amazing the world with his Inside Out project.

He is the much deserved winner of this year's TED Prize. This amazing video clip will bring you up to speed on one of the most amazing artists of our times.

TED Prize Winner JR & INSIDE OUT from TED Prize on Vimeo.

 

Sometimes I feel like an ARTBOT

Okay... I have to be honest. When I saw this video this morning I couldn't stop laughing. I love it. Probably because I know how this little guy feels. I also understand what probably drove the artist, considering current economic conditions, to create an exhibit like this one.

I mean, I love what I do, don't get me wrong but it's HARD sometimes, not physically so much but mentally... emotionally... to paint as many paintings as i do every day. 

It is mind numbing, butt kicking hard. Friends call me The Art Machine... we have superhero names for each other, long story... a couple of us have theme music... one of us actually has a bobble head ninja, replica of himself on his desk but I can't name him here obviously cuz of the whole secret identity thingy...

 

oh and while I'm on the subject of my superhero friends - "Happy Birthday J!!" (It's The Darkness' birthday today. No, really. Facebook just sent me notification. Not that I don't have it memorized J :) <3 U

...So anyway, back to my point... AFTER hours of painting there's the photography, the digital manipulation and color-correcting, the computer work of designing the listing and posting everything on eBay. Then there's the emails, question answering, shipping, packing, tracking and followup. 

The ordering of supplies and keeping track of an inventory that at any given moment tops 200 to 300 paintings. Of course we can't forget the blog, web site, Facebook fan page and Twitter updates. Social marketing isn't "the future" it's the damn lifeboat!! sorry... anyway... 

All of this taking realistically ten times as many hours as the actual painting. And with the lower prices I'm having to sell paintings at these days, I can no longer afford an assistant to help me with these things so I'm pretty much working around the clock. The funny thing is that I still totally LOVE it. It's still fun to get up and go to work every day. 

Even so, I often collapse under the pressure of it and focus on my gallery work for a while—meaning, the more expensive, slower processed, contemplative stuff as opposed to the less expensive, faster processed, intuitive, expressionistic stuff. Sometimes a change of gears for a while clears my head—and then my eBay customers will be harping that I've only got 5 paintings up for sale in my eBay store. But I still love you, even when you harp :) 

But even on my downest days I still feel like the luckiest person in the world to be able to sell my art this way... but still... i'm just sayin'... sometimes I feel like an artbot :)

Seriously, this little guy has just got it all figured out. And the thing that really KEEPS me laughing about this is that I KNOW there are people out there that think I don't paint all this stuff myself. While I'm drowning they actually think I've got some robots or something like this going... but alas... I'm not that smart :) 

This is the blurb from RobotLiving.com... I have no idea how I surfed my way to that site over coffee this morning, sure I like robots much as the next guy but... robotliving?

Oscar D Torres is a graduate student that has created a robot that paints named Jackoon.

The robot is named after Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. You can see the similarities to the artists in the painting here called Lemon Wasp.

Although the paintings look random, the robot uses a camera mounted on the ceiling to help tell it where to paint.

Jackoon is currently part of the ITP Spring Show.

See also Drawbot, the robot that draws.

Link to the Torres' Artbot Video on RobotLiving.com

I'll think I'll save the Drawbot for tomorrow. Too much for one day. But seriously, Oscar you're my hero :) now try working on one that does birds...

Banksy strikes again

 

Picasso would've loved this don't you think? Just way too funny!

Although this exhibit happened a year ago I want to post this for anyone that hasn't seen it because I believe this was just way too important to miss! Check out this article on coolhunting.com about Banksy's 2009 exhibit in Bristol. 

The upshot is that with only a few museum officials being in on the fun he went in and changed out a lot of the museum's works with his own pieces. It is just over the top great, even for Banksy. If you haven't read about it yet here you go...

Banksy's exhibit at the Bristol City Museum and Gallery 2009

He never fails to crack me up. He's a constant inspiration but I will say that his Madonna with ipod is a concept I explored in 2008 also... 

 

© 2008 Jenny Berry 'The Non-Thinker' 

not that I'm implying in any way that my work inspired his! just that we both noticed the same cultural weirdness... and it inspired us both. I love how we approached it from opposite directions though. I did a painting of The Thinker with an image transfer ipod and he did the reverse. 

© 2009 Banksy Crude Oils, Silent Night Madonna and Child with ipod 

I think that's why I love his work so much. It's concept before everything. He's a writer first. A thinker. He is exactly what an artist is supposed to be in my opinion... a mirror for the culture. 

What more could we be? We filter our perceptions of the world through our own internal system of funhouse mirrors and serve it back in our art. 

I'm not sure art should have any agenda other than that. Oscar Wilde thought it was about beauty and George Sand thought it was about ideals. I think some art is about those things. The only thing that seems certain is that the minute someone tries to define it it'll morph into something else. 

Time capsules full of Shakespeare and Mozart just aren't the whole picture. If they're the flesh of high art in our culture then Banksy and Basquiat are what? the ego? the anxiety disorder? maybe our shadow... they're certainly the manifestation of the darker things in our culture and that is real, honest and necessary to embrace because we all know what repressing it results in.

I only know that I'm sleeping better at night just knowing he's out there holding vigil over our complacency, poking culture in the eye and kicking the tires of our comfort to see if it can hold up under scrutiny.