The Null Device
Posts matching tags 'stencil art'
2008/5/6
This weekend, your humble correspondent went to the Cans Festival, a huge stencil art exhibition in a tunnel under the former Eurostar platforms of Waterloo Station. The festival organisers took the entire road tunnel and transformed it into a gallery, with artists from all over the world painting pieces (most involving stencilling, though a few being paste-ups) along its length. The most publicised name attached to the exhibition was, of course, Banksy, and he had a number of works there; as well as some stencils, he was responsible for a sitting-room installation with derelict sofas and an old piano made available to the public and a number of "remixed" classical statues. Though there were several dozen more artists, and indeed, anyone could come along, register and add their artwork to the exhibition. (On Saturday evening, a section of the passageway was sealed off from the general public and made available only to registered artists, who were busily adorning it with stencils.)
Anyway, here are a few photos; the entire set is here:
2008/1/17
As Banksy's artwork continues to climb in value (a collector recently bought a piece on a building wall in Notting Hill for £208,100, plus the (not inconsiderable) cost of removing and relocating the wall), BBC News has a piece on how to tell an authentic Banksy from a knockoff:
wo key signifiers of a genuine Banksy work are a busy location and a political subject, he says. While other graffiti artists go for railway lines or rundown areas to reach their community, Banksy aims for the wider public.
"The drawing will be reasonably competent, not brilliant, he's not a great artist. And it will be making a small jokey point about something. It's very difficult to fake that authentically. I don't doubt people will try but he'll distance himself from it."
2005/12/5
Here is a gallery of stencil art from Buenos Aires. Much of it is fairly political, and not too dissimilar in spirit to Australian stencil art.
2005/12/3
A newly released book has dubbed Melbourne the stencil art capital of the world:
London's street art guru Tristan Manco, whose books include Stencil Graffiti and Street Logos, vouches for the vigour of Melbourne's stencil art scene — with one qualification. "To take on the title of 'best stencil graffiti scene in the world', Melbourne would have to have a showdown with Buenos Aires in Argentina — the scene there has reached critical mass right now, with a fiery political and creative passion."This title could be short-lived, though, with the Melbourne City Council and Victorian government adopting a Giuliani-esque zero-tolerance policy towards graffiti, in order to sanitise Melbourne for the Commonwealth Games, as well as the new sedition laws allowing more severe penalties for some political statements (the one of Philip Ruddock's head with "Insert Bullet Here", for example). Though, as some say, the hard-line zero-tolerance approach could backfire, by replacing Melbourne's characteristic stencil art with ugly, mindless tagging
But the State Government and Melbourne City Council's hardline approach to graffiti will backfire, according to Smallman and the stencil artists and result in a proliferation of one of the most detested forms of graffiti — tagging, which can be done in five to 10 seconds.
2005/10/20
2004/6/23
2004/3/7
Sunday photo feature #4: stencil art:
(Every Sunday, I put up a selection of photographs from my archive, taken between 2002 and now, with a specific theme or motif.)
2003/6/19
Stencil Revolution has a lot of resources on stencil graffiti/art, incuding tutorials and EPS files of artwork.
2002/8/15
Stencil bombing isn't just for south-of-the-Yarra commercialists. The following piece of political commentary was found in a car park in Fitzroy:
An article on stencil bombing; the use of illicit spray-painting (with smoothly designed stencils) as an underground advertising tool; predominantly by trendy T-shirt labels in Prahran (you know, the ones that sell $80 T-shirts where the logo accounts for $79.50 of the price).
Tim Everist, who runs a Prahran-based T-shirt label called Schwipe, says "stencil bombing was effective and underground in the '90's, but then all the big companies started using this form of advertising".
2002/6/1
A chap by the name of Banksy is responsible for a lot of subversive and/or pranksterish stencil graffiti around London and various other cities across the world.
He's also behind a recent anti-Jubilee party in London. (In Britain, republicanism has an air of unspeakable subversiveness about it, like revolutionary anarchism; unlike in Australia, where every respectable non-Liberal-voting latté-leftist and progressive business/media identity from the big end of town is a card-carrying republican).
2001/10/4
