Guerrilla Art

Yesterday, the Oscars prize giving ceremony took place in Los Angeles and yes, I was not surprised that Christoph Waltz got his Oscar for his “Inglourious Basterds” Nazi-part, because in conclusion he’s an Austrian… However, also British street artist D*Face visited LA. During the last days, he installed two skeleton-like Oscar sculptures, each about two meters high and now referred as “Zombie Oscars”. As you maybe know, D*Face loves skulls and skeletons - What’s the intention behind that interesting installations, D*Face told NBC Los Angeles: ...

Today I received an e-mail by the Spanish street art crew La Pluma Eléctri*k, who among other things makes QR code street art. Some of you will now think “Wow, how do they do that?” and the others will think “Heh?! What’s that?”. If you are in the latter case, I will explain QR for you: QR means quick response and is a bare codes 2.0, which was created in 1994 in Japan with comercial purpuse. It’s a code that can decrypted using some special software, which is for example part of modern mobile phones. You take a picture and the program tells you what is inside the pixels. ...

Two weeks ago, I informed you about this years “No Pants Subway Ride”. It’s an urban mega-event, organized by the Improv Everywhere crew. Now there is a great official documentary video online! I think, it was a great action and the people had a lot of fun… “On Sunday, January 10th, 2010 over 5,000 people took off their pants on subways in 44 cities around the world. In New York, the 9th Annual No Pants Subway Ride had over 3,000 participants, spread out over six meeting points and ten subway lines.” (Improv Everywhere) ...

Urban interventions are - in addition to graffiti and classical street art - my main topic and I think the majority of you has also a partiality for it. For that reason, I will present you a new book, called “Urban Interventions - Personal Projects in Public Places”… “Evolving from graffiti and street art, urban interventions are the next generation of artwork to hit public space. Using any and all of the components that make up urban and rural landscapes, these mostly spatial interventions bring art to the masses. ...

Do you remember the “No Pants Subway Ride” from 2009? It was a great event - an impressing mixture of flashmob and urban intervention! 1,200 New Yorkers ride the subway without pants in a snow storm… Now it’s time for the next “No Pants” global action day on Sunday, January 10th! For the 9th time, Improveverywhere encourages people in other cities around the world to stage their own “No Pants” rides on the same day. ...

Street art belongs on the road - The Canadian urban artist Roadsworth takes this literally. He paints directly on the streets and uses thereby pre-existing things like road markings. Since about 2001, he reinterprets various elements of the urban landscape with his original street art. His unique style of his interventional painting, makes him popular around the globe. Peter Gibson (Montreal, Canada) otherwise known as “Roadsworth”, looks to street lanes, crosswalks, and traffic markers as the inspiration for his painterly interventions. In what he refers to as “Pedestrian Street Art”, Gibson employs humble materials of stencils and spray paint to turn the street into his canvas. The resulting work re-fashions the all too familiar signage of streets and sidewalks, creating a whimsical new twist on civilian wayfinding. (press release) ...

Since the mid-80s, shortly after he had worked himself up to the showcase graffiti artist of Spain, Madrid-based writer Spy began to deal with other forms of artistic communication in public space. Since then, Spy is titled as a second Banksy, because of the extreme innovation and audacity of his artworks. He therefore enjoys a heightened public interest, not only in Spain but also in Europe and around the world. ...

Some days ago, I told you about the spectacular adbusting by urban artists in Berlin. About 20 different urban artists took over so called citylight-posters with their artworks and made in this way a wide street art group-exhibition in public-space, called Nothing but Quality Street. But how did they do that? In Berlin Mitte, Kreuzberg and Neukölln it’s almost impossible to do such a big action they did. Because of the high number of arson attacks by left-winged autonomists, there’s a very high police appearance. ...

My friend Martin from the online platform for contemporary urban art “LetterXIII” asked me to post some infos and photos about the urban art group-exhibition and advertising takeover “Nothing but…”, which took place in Berlin some days ago. About 20 different urban artists took over so called citylight-posters with their artworks between Mitte and Neukölln. Involved on this wonderful, temporary adbusting action were for example Evol, Bronco, Brad Downey, Filippo Minelli, Akim, Laurent Basset and many more! ...

I like Ron English and his political and creative liberating of commercial billboards. But this time, he did an other spectacular intervention. Ron takes graffiti to new heights yesterday morning by skywriting the word “cloud” over the lower Manhattan! I don’t know how to make these so-called “Cloud Graffiti”, but it’s really wonderful and inspiring. Let’s see, when there will be the first skywriting adverts… None the less, nice action Ron! For more info, visit his webiste popaganda.com. ...