No One In Paris Owns a White Truck

No one in Paris owns a white truck. Oh, they may drive one off the showroom floor white, but after a very short time (overnight in some neighborhoods) they are no longer trucks, or white, but mobile canvases that promote the work of the coming generation of street artists.

 

For the folks who own the trucks, this is the downside of street art, the point where they would probably say the practice crosses over into vandalism.

Some of these "artists" are simply taggers, in Paris Play's view, low-level wannabes who piss like wolves with magic markers or spray cans simply to mark territory, and leave their scrawls on the fronts of houses, on shop windows, on automobiles and trucks--in short, anywhere, just to say, "I was here." We agree with Tom Finkelpearl, executive director of New York City’s Queens Museum of Art, who says, “I can’t condone vandalism… It’s really upsetting to me that people would need to write their name over and over again in public space. It’s this culture of fame. I really think it’s regrettable that they think that’s the only way to become famous.” 

An article in the latest issue of À Paris, the official magazine the city sends free to local residents, makes a clear distinction between artists and taggers, the latter of whom cost the city €4.5 million ($5.82 million) each year in clean-up fees. À Paris said, "There is no question here of artistic practices on walls or dedicated street art…but those who defile façades and houses." After noting that the city's legal options are limited, the article concludes, "It therefore encourages residents and owners to complain, so that the damage will be treated as a crime and not as a fatality. Le graffiti sauvage is liable to a fine of €3750…up to €7500 for a public building."

A step up from tagging, the lines begin to blur. When enough tags accumulate, the result can be a collective collage that turns into a work of art. One of our favorites is this tiny work above, the locked gate at a long disused railroad tunnel in the 14th arrondissement. 

The graffiti crew "Spank," with their latest work on a "legal" wall on city property

And the next step up from tags as collage are the works of graffiti artists (individuals or "crews") who create larger spraypainted pieces with psychedelic colors and misshapen letters that carry our minds back to the Wes Wilson, Kelly/Mouse, Arab et al Fillmore and Avalon Ballroom posters that burst out of the Haight-Ashbury in that Sixties blaze of cultural and artistic ferment. We'd call those Bay Area-based artists godfathers to the graffiti crew phenomenon of the seventies in Philadelphia, then New York, etc., though the music that inspired those latter rebels was hip-hop, still associated, in many people's minds, with the larger calligraphic pieces that spread around the world, the gradual evolution of tagging into works of graphic art. 

 

(It's not our intent to delve into the arcana of styles, bubble-lettering versus wild style, or how different styles evolved in different ends of the same town, but anyone who'd like to add to our store of knowledge is free to join in the comments section.)

The final step (so far) are the full-scale works of art, with or without calligraphy, that Paris Play has been covering for the last two years, the urbain art movement that is filling galleries, exhibition spaces, and gradually museums around the world, and fetching prices even heftier than the penalties for tagging.

One of the distinctions that artists we've come to know here make is permanence versus impermanence. The organization Le M.U.R., whose exhibition we covered a few weeks ago, now has three billboard sites around the city, but each of those large pieces of billboard art only stays up for two weeks before it is replaced by the work of another artist. Street art, they believe, is ephemeral, ever-changing, which is why we are out at least three days a week documenting with our cameras what we see in the streets. It could literally be gone in a day. 

While street artists work in various media--painting, mosaic, wood blocking, yarn bombing, stencils, multimedia installations--many of the art pieces we photograph, like the popular work of Fred Le Chevalier, Kashink, Norulescorp, Tristan des Limbes, Madame, and others are "sticker art" done on paper, with wheat paste to adhere it to the walls, precisely because it is impermanent. Some artists like seeing their work decay over time; the process of decay is part of the life cycle of the work, and a comment on city living. The replacement of their work with other peoples', which also decays and is replaced by others, makes some street walls pentimento collages.         

But the spray-painted trucks are permanent, looking like rubber-tired versions of circa-1970s New York City subway cars. In some neighborhoods that have street markets a few times a week, where trucks are parked regularly in order to maintain a position on market day, it's an artistic free-for-all--trucks as chum for a school of art sharks. Walk along Boulevard de la Villette or Boulevard de Belleville in the 11th arrondissement (same street, it just changes its name near the Belleville Metro stop) and you'll see a free plein air gallery.

 

However, there may be a bright side we're missing. These could all be commissioned works, from crews like FD and 1984, whose work appears frequently. Perhaps the truck owners have simply hired a local crew to create some coherent, themed mural, rather than succumb to taggers with no taste. If you can't beat 'em, hand 'em your own spray can and stand back.

 If you'd like to see more, we posted our overflow pictures here. 

Street Legal Art (for a few days)

Mural by Bustart

What a fine week it was for street art in Paris. The equivalent of, if not Woodstock, at least 1967's Monterey Pop Festival.

Last week, Paris Play joined the organizations Alternative Paris and My Life on My Bike to provide wall-to-wall coverage of the four-day long urban art exhibition featuring the work of fifty street artists from all over the world, organized by Le M.U.R. de L'Art. The documentary crew of six (including Richard, and our nephew, Jonathan Edwards) shot photographs and conducted thirty-five videotaped artist interviews in ninety-six hours, with the eventual goal of producing a documentary about this effervescent scene.

Le M.U.R. de L'Art was founded in 2007, and serves as a legal, aboveground, as it were, gallery for street artists. To make a long story short (you can read the long version here), street artists began hijacking billboards here in Paris in the early 2000s, replacing advertising with street art. Finally, one billboard company simply gave up the fight for one piece of turf, and donated its ground-level billboard on rue Oberkampf to the community. Hence, Le M.U.R., which presents a different artists' work made on that billboard every two weeks, to celebrate both street art and its ephemeral nature. If you miss that fortnight's work, it's gone.

But here's where relationships get strange. Le M.U.R. gives each artist €500 to create his or her piece, a stipend provided by the City of Paris. And this four-day exhibition was supported by the City, in a city arts center in the Marais. So, while much of the art we are so fond of photographing and showing you here on Paris Play is illegal, and artists can be fined and jailed for putting it up, detente exists, though some artists do not want their photographs published. Nonetheless, it was great fun putting faces to many of the names whose work we've admired for the last few years.

Kashink with her sculpture, "Cash Cow"  

Each of the fifty artists who exhibited last week in this benefit for Le M.U.R. had previously been featured on a billboard. Some, like Jérome Mesnager, Mosko and Associates, Speedy Graphito, and Gérard Zlotykamien are the equivalent of O.G.s (original gangstas) on the street, and have already been the subject of books, museum catalogs, and have their work in contemporary art museums and galleries, selling for thousands of euros apiece. Others, many of them women, have been in the game for a lot less time, but their work is of a high enough quality that it rivals that found in the formal galleries in the Marais and St. Germain des Pres, and is often more interesting. 

And since the work, by artists from as far away as Chile, Argentina, Canada, Italy, Spain and Scandinavia, speaks for itself, we'll be quiet and let you enjoy. If you like a name, Google it for more examples; just about everybody has a Website or Facebook page. And Le M.U.R is a non-profit, which welcomes your support.

Jérome Mesnager

Mosko et Associes

Gérard Laux of Mosko et Associes, surrounded by the staff of Graffiti Art magazine

Speedy Graphito

Bustart

Shaka

Kashink

 

Kouka

Thom Thom

Thom Thom (Thomas Schmitt) is co-founder of Le M.U.R.

Ella & Pitr

 

YZ

FKDL

Mural by FKDL (left) and Stoul (right)

Stoul

Sixo

Le Cyklop

Chanoir

Teaching his son how to mix paint

Jana and JS

 

Nicogermain

Paella

Surfil

Surfil with Alternative Paris' Demian Smith

Macay

H101 and Zosen

Gilbert

Rue Meurt d'Art

Kenor

Kenor teaching a fan

No Rules Corp

Alber

 

Michael Beerens

If you've scrolled this far, thank you. And here's your surprise: links to the four two-minute or so videos the team produced each day of the event, as teasers for the eventual documentary. Video one, two, three, and four. Enjoy. 

Here's Looking at You, USA!

Street art by Speedy Graphito

While April in Paris is the customary month for visitors, October is also huge. We like to say that we've had more visitors from L.A. (and elsewhere in the U.S.) in those two months than in the last five years we spent in Los Angeles itself. 

Top question we get asked, after "How can *I* move here?" is, "Do you miss the States?"

How? It's impossible to walk more than a few blocks in Paris and not see some American iconography, or a reminder of that cultural tsunami.

Back in 1982, the incumbent French Minister of Culture, Jack Lang, gave an incendiary speech in which he blasted the United States's "cultural imperialism," and advised that other cultures enact protectionist measures against the way the American cultural/consumer juggernaut "grabs consciousness, ways of thinking, ways of living." 

In those days, to cite but one example, the Hollywood machine was squeezing smaller French films out of the marketplace in both countries, a cultural trend that required state intervention, Lang thought.

Interesting concept, but there was no way American culture wasn't going to overwhelm the world like a tsunami. The French Academy tried to ban English words like "weekend," and "hot dog," but what do the French now celebrate on Saturday and Sunday?--"le weekend," when they eat "le hot dog." McDonalds, Starbucks, and KFCs are ubiquitous, and American apparel stores dot the Champs Elysses like chocolate sprinkles on a cappuccino.

The list of American words is endless now, as are the American images, for better or worse, that form a great deal of the street art, and advertising, that we see daily.

So, a portfolio of Americana, as filtered through the French consciousness and reflected back. Then just for fun down below, another Paris Play Pop Quiz.

Street art by GZUP

Street art by Shadee.K

 

Street art by Jef Aerosol, legs by Jerome Mesnager

 

Paris Play Street Art Pop Quiz

Below you will find twenty more American-inspired images from Paris street art.

Look at each of the twenty images, then post a single comment listing the names of the person, character, or American cultural icon you see; i.e., #1 is ____________________, #2 is _______________________, and so on through twenty.

We suggest you enter your answers in your own word processing program, then cut and paste them into the comments section below, which sometimes eats or loses comments entered directly.  

The first five people who get every one right will each get their choice of photograph from any 2012 Paris Play post, e-mailed to them in high-resolution, from which they will be free to make a single print for their own enjoyment.

Leave your e-mail when you leave your guesses, so we can contact you with your prize. We will favor longer than shorter answers (i.e. Michael Keaton as Batman), but these aren't essay questions.

If no one gets them all right, we'll take the answers with the best nineteen of twenty, or eighteen of twenty, etc. You have until midnight, Paris time, October 26 to get your answers in.

Good luck, and thanks for playing.

#1

#2  

#3

#4 

#5

#6

 #7

#8. Street art by Jef Aerosol

#9. Street art by Jef Aerosol 

#10

 #11

#12

#13

#14

#15

#16

#17

#18

#19. Street art by Jef Aerosol

#20. Street art by Gilbert Shelton

Evolution of An Octopus (or, Poulpe Fiction)

One of Richard's and my favorite mutual Paris pastimes is walking around and visiting the art gallery in the streets. It changes daily; as artists emerge, old art gets covered by new, or by swaths of paint or whitewash applied by building owners and city crews, or it ages from weather and wear.

Fifteen months ago, walking hand-in-hand in the Marais, after marvelous galettes in our favorite crệperie, we spotted some new work, a spray-painted outline of an octopus, with some vertical lines scrawled to either side to signify motion. Richard photographed it for the street art database he's accumulating, and a few streets farther, we spotted another couple of octopi, these filled in with orange and green paint.

Still nothing to write home about. The octopus outlines were a step above mere tagging--marking ones' initials, the way dogs mark territory--but not particularly brilliant.

We're not big fans of tagging, even if it metamorphoses into huge, swirling, psychedelic-colored initials or names. Those are still a territory-marking syndrome, not yet over the border into art.

What's the difference? Here's a BBC article on pre-Olympics London street art cleanup that applies the "I'll know it when I see it" standard that the U.S. Supreme Court also applies to pornography. In London, as in Paris, the works of certain artists are protected, while city clean-up crews ravage others.

As months went by, the octopus artist graduated to creating creatures with a variety of colors and expressions, on die-cut plywood sheets about two feet square super-glued to the sides of buildings, mostly on the second story (first story in France). But it was hard to know if it was a single artist, or if a meme had begun to spread. One other street artist, who glues life-sized ceramic "death masks" of his face with four different expressions all over Paris, allows people to buy them and paint their own designs and decorations; perhaps these octopi (who were beginning to look more like space aliens) were a collective expression.

Then, a few months ago, we spotted new octopi with a tag, GZUP, and we had a clue to follow. An Internet search revealed that the artist who calls himself GZUP was a suburban army veteran in his mid-thirties who had just returned to the streets after a hiatus since the mid-nineties, according to this interview with a street art blog. His return was prompted by seeing a street art show at the Cartier Foundation, where he realized that what had begun as a step above vandalism had become "democratized."

(While GZUP didn't mention it, gallery street art is also attracting impressive prices from collectors, which might be a tiny, niggling nudge toward more permanent materials. Die-cut plywood is easier to curate and collect than paint-bomb scrawls.)

His influences are "those who make me dream and constantly raise the level, those who innovate. People coming out of the 'Classics' in all fields: Keith Haring, the dribbling of Cristiano Ronaldo, dialogues from movies of Tarantino…Rihanna, Shakira, the Air Max 90, DJ Quik, [and] Nate Dogg (RIP)," while his pseudonym is taken from a particularly raunchy Snoop Dogg song (if that's not oxymoronic), "GZ UP, HOES DOWN."

 

According to the interview, "GZUP does not like octopi, neither in the sea nor on his plate; he just liked that shape when he began drawing." When asked his favorite color, he said, "The green without hesitation. A color that made me vomit when younger." (A mythical note: in Greek myth, the goddess Athena is associated with octopi (among her many totems), and in our personal mythology, her color is green.) Obviously, these pieces of art are evolving beyond mere sea creatures.

For more on GZUP, here's a You Tube video, a second, and his Flickr page.

We Live In a Political World

Although this is an election year in France, our Dylan-inspired headline doesn't just refer to electoral politics.

Everywhere we turn in Paris, someone's making a statement about something, on sidewalks, walls, fence posts, Metro stations, parked and moving cars, etc.

We've collected some of the socio-political comments we've seen in the last year, which we present below without much comment, only simple translations. Given the fact that it would be rude and presumptuous for us, as immigrants to a new county, to pretend we're au courant on all the nuances, and capable of trenchant commentary, we'll let you simply see what we see.

We see that Parisians live and breathe in a climate where rights--of women, immigrants, minorities, corporations, animals, babies, etc.--are constantly being discussed, debated and argued.

France is reeling, as is the world, from the current economic crisis, and European radicalism being what it is, there's more anti-American and anti-capitalist sentiment on display. And, as we know from American politics, when the economy is bad, demagogues turn against immigrants and against internationalism. Environmental safeguards also take a turn for the worse.

Dechets: waste (toxic, nuclear). OMG: agribusiness, Monsanto. Marées noires: oil spills. 

We can report a few facts about French electoral politics:  Center-right incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy is running for a second five-year term as president, but he is running behind the Socialist challenger, François Hollande, by as much as fifteen points in some opinion polls. The first round of elections is April 22, with the second round on May 6, if no candidate gets a majority. No candidate ever has. The far-right candidate, Marine Le Pen, whose father led the National Front party for years, ranks third in the polls with around seventeen percent, but she does not yet have the required number of signatures from local mayors around the country (yes, that's how you qualify) to get on the national ballot.

Please remove your brain before entering.

Notre corps nous appartient: Our body belongs to us. Autonomy, abortion and contraception, free and without charge.

Couples, parenthood, stays, change of civil state. Lesbians, gays, bis, transexual and intersexes want equal rights.

Abas, Nazis, Zionists, fascists, racists! Palestine will live! Will conquer!

Progress in the USA. (An electric chair)

Profits are big in order to pay for your health.

Advertising two days of anti-capitalism demonstrations.

To preserve our health and the future of the planet, leave behind nuclear power.

Get involved. Kick him out.

Do something for liberty at Place Stalingrad on May 28th.

You have to get tough, but without losing your tenderness.

No on the government's proposed austerity plan.

Solidarity with the revolt of immigrants against the borders.

"Banlieues" are the suburbs just outside Paris, many of which are heavily immigrant, and in which major protests and riots occurred in the last decade.

The financial sector is killing us.