The Fake Life - Love movies? We do too!

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Review: Next: A Primer On Urban Painting

In 1983, Henry Chalfant and Tony Silver's documentary on NYC Graffiti bombers, Style Wars, was shown on PBS. Style Wars was the patient zero of the graffiti movement, spreading the virus around the world through subsequent international airings and tenth-generation bootleg copies, infecting young artists around the world with the urge to pick up the spraypaint can and make their urban environments more beautiful or ugly, depending on your perspective. Next: A Primer on Urban Painting, aims to be a long-overdue update on the progress of those seedlings.

Director Pablo Aravena has traveled the world filming graff artists in action and capturing their words and images on film. While the nature of Next doesn't allow for him to get as close to the individual artists' lives as Chalfant and Silver did, he is able to paint a larger mural of a movement that is both international and local, where the social pressures and graphic traditions of each location influence the art produced. The journey begins in NYC, with contemporary interviews with Chalfant and Style Wars vets like Lee Quinones, establishing the origins of the graffiti-as-art movement while updating on where the original generation is today. From their, the story moves to Canada, Paris, Barcelona, Amsterdam, London, The Berlin Wall, Tokyo, and Sao Paulo, before circling back to New York to check up on the current generation of artists.

While the movement is international, each city has its own personality, its own attitudes on the art. When artists started writing in Barcelona, they were surprised to find no real opposition from the citizens, who were all happy to have some new works of public art. Other cities, such as London, have harsh laws against such vandalism, producing very different graffiti cultures. The Barcelona writers have adopted a zen-like approach, investing hours in painting masterpieces that they know will be painted over by another artists within a week. In London, the art takes on a more political edge, with statements against gentrification and class warfare manifested in the art. In Montreal, an artist named Other spends his days bombing freight trains. The history of graffiti goes way back: Other talks about a reference to hobos leaving graffiti on freight trains that he found in a Jack London book, and in the most exciting segment, Parisian writers point out graffiti left in the catacombs beneath Paris from the 19th century.

The scene in the catacombs is amazing. These artists have gone beyond writing and painting on the walls--they've actually begun carving elaborate sculptures out of the stone walls below the city! Not only is it impressive art, but it's art that seems to emerge naturally from the environment, in a direct lineage from the officially-sanctioned sculpture and architecture of the city above.

I'll admit that my own feelings about graffiti are somewhat ambiguous. Driving around L.A., the fantastic murals that adorn the freeway overpasses, billboards and buildings around the city make for the best public art L.A. has to offer. On the other hand, the simple signatures that appear on every surface in Magic Marker or spraypaint seem closer to litter than art to me, and I'm sure would be even more irritating if they appeared on my shit (which, so far, they have not). I had hoped there might be some attempt to wrestle with the issue in Next, but ultimately there seems to be no reason to muddy the waters with controversy. Next is a celebration of art and artists.

For the time being, Next is traveling the festival circuit, with a gallery show in tow for most stops. You can find out where it plays next, and see some nice video, at the official site.