Tonight The Pavements Are Ours

One of the many justifications given by street artists for their wanton abuse of other people’s property is that it's a response, a push back against the use of the public visual space to host corporate propaganda, known in the indoctrinating the masses trade as advertising. One of Graffoto’s favourite proponents of advertising resistance is dr.d who has long chosen to turn the enemies’ tactics against themselves; his subversion, sedition and perversion of the political sphere is frequently conducted on hijacked billboards and street signage.


dr.d, Dalston, 2010


Now, in partnership with Chu, another English graffiti writer and artist whose work we have long admired, see the stunning rooftop anamorphic street scene below, Worship The Ground has been established to allow anyone to have a short message temporarily painted on the streets.


Chu - Cordy House, 2010


In their own words:

A pioneering, personal street art message delivery service launches this month.

Worship The Ground (WTG) is a brand new online service, empowering members of the public to order a written phrase or slogan for any location on the ground. WTG will first launch in London and Bristol, with Brighton and Manchester soon to follow. The new company is co-founded by Chu and dr.d, two legendary wordsmiths known for their work in the public environment.


photo courtesy Worship The Ground


WTG works for good people and good causes. Direct Messages are for personal use only, advertisers need not apply. WTG can write on the pavement whatever you can write on paper, up to 100 characters in a choice from one of ten bright colours. The new website is now available to visit at www.worshiptheground.com. Until Friday February 28th, visitors can use the discount coupon code “worshiptheground” at the checkout stage for a fifty percent off the basket total.
dr.d explains “Our Direct Message gift is useful for celebrating a birthday written on someone’s route to their workplace, or declarations of love between couples outside their front door. They could write messages of frustration with a football fans manager outside the team’s ground, and crucially our service is to get any message across by making someone’s day, or not.”


photo courtesy Worship The Ground

WTG have already helped to champion good causes in conjunction with the Mayor of London’s anti knife crime initiative (#LondonNeedsYouAlive) and the homelessness charity Centrepoint (#BleakFriday). {end quote}

Many of you may recognise the title of this post as a paraphrasing of the Richard Hawley song “Tonight The Streets Are Ours”, used as the theme tune to Banksy’s street art mockumentory Exit Through The Gift Shop. Worship The Ground are offering exactly that, your message on the pavements, max 100 characters, with no risk of you getting caught red handed. Or green handed, or white handed or any of the ten colours the service is offered in.


photo courtesy Worship The Ground


If you are concerned about the legality of this, let’s just say that perhaps you don’t have the right cheeky sense of humour required to appreciate the opportunities presented here and which lies at the heart of a large slew of street art. The Worship The Ground website says, and their FAQs (“this section is devoted to the word “no”) are well worth reading for a laugh, “Can I get arrested for booking a text message?
Answer: No – it is a lawful requirement for us to cleanse any markings within 48 hours of notification, unless the rain and/or traffic has worn it away already.”


photo courtesy Worship The Ground


dr.d is not known for his expertise in advising and interpreting the law or even being aware of its existence but there is perhaps a relevant analogy in the world of flyposting. All those illegal adverts for raves, records and recreational activities feature a lot major corporates using illegal flyposting as part of their eyeball reach manoeuvres but it’s not those companies that get into trouble and it is not even the advertising companies that commission the flyposting organisations that get into trouble, if anyone gets into trouble it is the flyposting teams. Perhaps people using Worship The Ground’s service have a similar degree of separation between themselves and some kind of offense.




Graffoto is noted for its complete legal incompetence and nothing said on here should be treated as a get out of jail free card. But like we hinted at earlier, if you do intend to take legal advise first then this really isn’t going to fit your Valentine’s Day cupid strategy. In fact why are you still reading this? Be gone. Unsubscribe!


photo courtesy Worship The Ground

links:
Worship The Ground website
dr.d website
Chu website
All photos Dave Stuart except courtesy Worship The Ground website where noted

Dr d Extends London Open Prison and Social Cleansing Zone

Dr d., London’s top political malcontent street artist is on a roll and has been out again, this time taking over pavement advertising sites. The new version of HMP London (HMP: Her Majesty’s Prison] open prison advises us that innocent or guilty, we are all now being spied on.




Highlighting the pernicious erosion of freedoms through unwanted surveillance is the main thrust of these previous versions of Dr d's Open Prison.


(apologies for repeating an image used another recent blog post but it's relevant)





Social cleansing Curfew Zone works in a variety of way but when a van with Immigration Enforcement drove past this morning, Dr d’s subversion became a clear warning to beware the insidious intrusion of UKIP’s thinly disguised racism into mainstream politics.






Cycling around hunting for these pavement advertising boards makes you realise firstly how much you just filter these thing out of your consciousness (clever thing the brain) and then, how the hell did so many pavements become obstructed by these monstrosities. You can bet that if you blocked the pavement like this for a good cause but hadn’t paid for the pleasure you’d be having your collar felt double quick time. The authorities don’t mind the obstruction to the pavements but they do mind you doing it without their control and without topping up their counting houses.

These delicious political annexations of the mechanism and locations of paid for advertisements by Dr d is one of the un-sung wonders of London’s street art scene. Read HERE how and why Dr d declared the City of London a Central Curfew Zone.

Links: Dr d.

Dr D Designates Curfew Zone In City Of London

all photos: NoLionsInEngland (with anonymous passerby help gratefully received where noted!)


Dr D is a perhaps the perfect street artist. His paste up works are epic in scale and they commandeer outdoor channels generally exploited for advertising or control, if they can advertise there, Dr D will hijack it. His guerrilla advertising talkeovers inject political truisms and subverted corporate messages into our consciousness. His needle sharp wit pops the balloon of up-your-own-surgically-sculpted derriere celebrity pomposity and mocks the self interested control assumed by authoritarian state bodies. That’s why I love him.


Dr D, Kingsland Rd, London 2008


Dr D Whitecross St 2009


After an evening in Shoreditch, my late dash to the tube station was abruptly halted at the sight across the road of a very official looking warning sign which faced traffic up the very busy Shoreditch High Street. This enormous paper sign had evidently slowly detached itself from its host surface but even from across the road it was evident that was a pasted “pastiche”. The paste was still wet but a hunt for a stick or brush or any kind of implement to push the peeling paper back up into its intended position proved fruitless so holding up the paper myself, a passing kind young lady who didn’t run off with my phone when my back was turned took a photograph.


Dr D Curfew Zone


Dr D’s Curfew Zone spoofs the conventional “Congestion Zone” signs which fortify the “Central Zone” where traffic has to pay for the privilege of less vehicle strangled roads to allows for faster assaults on cyclists and pedestrians. That big threatening red letter C now stands for Curfew. Now Dr D brings it to our attention, doesn't “Central Zone” sound quite sinister, used to be that all our districts had historical names, not designations that look like geographic Big Brother tags.


Enter Ye At Great Cost

Dr D doesn't rail against injustice by daubing screaming capitalised angry messages over official signage(*), he creates subverted adverts that use the same visuals and prose as corporate advertising, or he creates signs that look so much like the authority's signs that we initially think they are. His witty distortions hit us with the realisation that actually, we are pretty damn close to the authority abusing its mandates and powers in exactly that way. Our new official Dr D designated Curfew Zone highlights the police powers to Stop And Search which can be exercised without reasonable suspicion so long as it has been approved by.....the police!
(* Maybe he does actually)

About the location, this is virtually the north eastern gateway to the City, London’s financial district. Dr D's unilateral curfew denies ne’erdowells free access from 6pm until 7am but keeps the City open and safe during financial market opening hours. Guess whose benefit that might be for.

I am pretty sure that the last time I looked closely at this wall, which was only a few days ago, there wasn’t a wooden frame masquerading as an official billboard spot. Dr D, going that extra mile is applauded! Even if you didn’t do that framing… the accuracy of the reproduction and the scale of the spoof. This is how you get your message up on the public highway yourself, don’t wait for consent, don’t pay, just do it.

++++++
UPDATE

Dr d returned the next day and skilfully repaired the peeling paste up where your scribe failed miserably.



Taggers also left their mark, either they mistook this for new official signage or they were just asserting graff's natural superior position over street art.

Representatives of Dr d have also confirmed that the frame is a fresh addition to the wall and that the piece also has relevance as a reaction to the response of authorities to the Charlie Hebdo atrocity or a housing issue, itself subject of a major march today from just up the road from this spot to City Hall.
++++++


To get the idea of the intelligence and concepts which have made Dr D’s street art stand out you can see a selection of pieces from down the years on this photo set here.

I also went to a Dr D show a few years ago in the unpromising location of a fully functioning open as usual Bethnal Green launderette which I wrote about here.

Olek, Injustice, Anti Slavery International, Dirty White Cotton

All photos: NoLionsInEngland




Ready mades – the term coined by Duchamp when he elevated everyday pissoirs to works of art – is annexed by Poland/NY artist Olek to describe in one way the main form of her work, "Crochet Readymades". It is worth googling the images of the effect she has when she cloaks public sculpture in crochet art. There is a lot more to her work, including performance art where she dresses up volunteers in full body crochet morph suits to interact with the public.


Amusing interaction,man in Olek crochet body suit, Olek UK Solo show 2012.


Anyone who thinks slavery died out with the 19th century deeds of William Wilberforce and the Slavery Abolition Act needs to take a peek around themselves, detention and exploitation thrives all around us, even here in London where immigrant workers have their passports confiscated by gangmasters, are obliged to live in insanitary overcrowded conditions at exorbitant rent and paid such a pittance that they are never out of the debt of their gangmasters.

Olek is showing her support for the work of slavery international by hanging this massive four panel crochet piece at Village Underground, London this week. Here is a very short time lapse of the panels being installed - Click through to view it properly on Olek's Vimeo stream!


Olek In London from olek on Vimeo.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
BY MARTIN LUTHER KING

September 29th - October 5th, 2012
Village Underground, London, UK


The “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” quote is from a letter written by Martin Luther King from a Birmingham (Alabama) Jail in 1963.


Olek, Village Underground,


The statement resonates with Olek’s own personal predicament, following an incident on a visit to the UK around the time of her solo show at Tony’s Gallery last year, Olek has been found guilty despite the incident arising as she defended herself against the unwanted and excessive attentions of a man in a bar. Olek is expecting sentencing this week and is currently restricted by an ASBO style tag. Again, Life and Art are inseparable



Olek - Free At Last?


Village underground hosts an art show and auction this Wednesday (3rd Oct 12) staged by Street Art Against Slavery to benefit Anti Slavery International. Details of the auction can be found HERE. Olek is supporting this cause and her piece on Great Eastern Street is part of the event.


Street Artists Against Slavery, Weds 3 OCt 2012, rsvp essential (link below)


While addressing this worthy issue it is worth mentioning a couple of other closely related street art interventions. Firstly, insulation tape artists AD/SO who also has donated work to the Street Artists Against Slavery auction executed this stunning 8 story piece on the multi storey car park very close to Village Underground.


AD/SO


We also came across this Mear One piece “Freedom For Humanity” looking stunning on Hanbury St.


Mear One


Finally, Dr D has been getting up some paste up to show support for a documentary exposing labour exploitation and its consequences in the cotton trade, and if there is one thing we have learned about Dr d its that he only does good cause.


Dr d., The Cotton Film: Dirty White Gold


The Cotton Film: Dirty White Gold is being produced by Leah Borromeo (some readers may know her by the name Montris), the film needs some funding and Dr d. is releasing this Dot and Nick Cotton (venerable and slightly un-hinged stars of UK soap opera Eastenders”) print to raise funds to support the production of this film. Details of the fund raising and Dr d print are HERE, support it!


Wrapping up on a lighter note, the day after Olek installed the crochet work, someone darned (damn – I hope that is the right word) a heart into the piece overnight. A wool love tag. Wow! Piece over tag, yarn outline over Crochet Readymade, whatever the unwritten rules of crochet piecing and tagging are its lovely to see wool dogging is nice and sweet and supportive!


Heart Olek


LINKS
Olek
Street Art Against Slavery
Anti Slavery International
The Cotton Film: Dirty White Gold

Banger Art - Part II

13 Jun 2012 - 1 night only

then Lovebox Festival, Victoria Park, London

15 Jun - 17 Jun 2012

all photos NoLionsInEngland,

In case you missed Part 1 of Graffoto’s news and views from Banger Art, check it out here (opens new window or tab or something) for background and loads of artwork.

Eine, Will Barras, Aida, Sweet Toof

Did you know Pablo Delgado also painted? News to us but a reliable source identified these coarse and somewhat KKK channelling figures as by Pablo.

Pablo Delgado

Matt Small paints anonymous humanity, defusing the stereotype and reducing the inferred intimidation. In this show Matt paints on car bonnets and doors, revisiting a format he showed at Black Rat Press in early 2009 but let’s face it, there aren’t many forms of reclaimed metal that Matt hasn’t daubed. Matt’s technique is based upon blending various immiscible oils and liquids on a level(ish) surface then dragging the fluid around to create the image. A little information about his technique is quite irrelevant of course as these hanging works serve as a jolting reminder of the colour and beauty in Matt’s portraits.

Matt Small

One of the first examples of Will Barras’ work this keyboard botherer came across was a battered van at Cans II Festival in 2008, his stunning char-a-banc at this show was an even wilder and willowier series of ethereal wispy human and equine figures on a smoky abstract background. Should black, greens and cornflower yellows work together in a Ridley Walker-esque frieze of gothic post apocalypse characters and mad animals, perhaps not in theory but behold the beauty.

Will Barras

The underground car park is huge, let’s take a guess and say it might have fitted 60 to a hundred cars in the architect’s utopian scheme. Pillars, pipes and weird skanky flooded side rooms break up the space. Transits, that is lines of sight rather than Ford vans, offer all kinds of beautiful interactions between cars, installations and art on the walls.

The eyes have it: Jorge Rodriguez-Garada, Matt Small, Sweet Toof

The Borrowers style miniature figures of Pablo Delgado have been populating the streets of London for over a year now but the pavement level dwellers have suffered some tragedies with spectacular lorry jack-knifings and terrorisation by Aida’s oversize dayglo queen of the jungle. It has the look of a cult B movie in the making.

Aida, Pablo Delgado

The car decorated by Pablo Delgado features a hugely intricate mankind-as-plague tableau. The human population squeezes out the animal kingdom and to escape their self inflicted overcrowding the humans scramble up the passenger side door (dear America, right handed drivers would find drive-by shootings easier with the steering wheel on the other side) and in through a hole in the window, to reappear out another hole on the driver’s side where they expire in free-fall, greatly improving matters for the rest of nature which now have more room to graze. As a fully thought through coherent composition executed in pain-staking detail, this stood out in exceptional company.

Pablo Delgado - passenger side

Pablo Delgado - side where the steering wheel goes

Back to Aida, the Princess of Screenprinting has done a masterpiece of pop art with more than a hint of glam with a glittery neon zoological kaleidoscope, perhaps the spangley gun on the dashboard even hints at gangstaaa! Rising to the challenge of the novel medium, Aida brought her screens with her and sprayed through the image with aerosol stencil style, bet that’s easier said than done..

Aida

Group shows generally give us the willies with many ill-combined artists chucking in lackadaisical “cluttering up the studio” pieces but in Banger Art, all the artists worked on site for days putting in shitloads of time and creativity. There is not a single crap “dialed-in” performance in the cavern. In the case of the artists whose work is familiar to us (sit down Dan Hillier, Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada) the concept was much more taking the refinements of the studio art to the car park rather than the usual cash-in taking the street into the gallery, except of course for Matt Small who routinely paints rusty metal in the studio. Good art deserves a great environment and this grubby neglected underground bunker provided a perfect ambience for art on wrecks.

Dr D

The potency for street art to play a positive role in a regeneration programme has been discussed before and specifically was one of the elements in justifying the use of the St Peter’s estate car park facility.  I am a little inclined to be sceptical and cynical about this but there is no doubt that the wave of positivity around this event, where the door was open and residents mingled and marvelled, creates a lasting impression that feeds into the necessary positive sentiment about the area.

There was something so right about this location for this spectacle, it will be interesting to hear from anyone how these cars fit in in their second incarnation at Lovebox festival in London’s Vicky Park this weekend, link up your pics in the comments below.

The texture, scale and colour of this show made it incredibly photogenic. More photos meaning other photos not used in this blog are here.

Ella (surprise guest)

With so much to see and so many ways to see it, there are several other great photo sets out there and each has a number of unique pieces not repeated in the others, check out HowAboutNo, Hookedblog and LDNGraffiti

Banger Art

13 Jun 2012 - 1 night only
then Lovebox Festival, Victoria Park, London
15 Jun - 17 Jun 2012

all photos NoLionsInEngland, except HowAboutNo where stated

OK, so who’s idea was it to mash up memories of an embassy car park (Banksy, Swiss Embassy, London) with the spirit of a secret NY subway station (Workhorse et al, Underbelly)? Step forward Nelly Duff with their one night only art on scrapyard fodder jalopies in an abandoned basement car park under an intimidating Hackney block.

St Peters Estate underground car park

Street art gets the setting it deserves in this underground swamp, it is filthy, reeks of piss in corners, had to be swept of needles and shit and figuratively is a million miles from the sanitised, optimised cubicles most art in the city is seen in. The walls are festooned with graffiti evidencing a propensity towards racism (NF), football tribalism and even burned out occult weirdness.

St Peters Estate Car Park: "they'll kill you...before we lay" apparently

This show is as much about the vibe as the art. Over this space is a concrete playground surrounded by high rise council flats.  Intended originally for the cars of local residents, the space became the problem haunt of junkies and vandals with a noted propensity for torching vehicles. Contributing nothing to easing the social issues in the area, the council sealed off the car park many years ago, residents who have lived in the blocks for over 10 years said they had never seen it open. Brutal walls and stark lighting lend a grimy austerity which fuels the sense of in-hospitable danger. Calcifying stalactites leach out of the concrete and drip something that probably isn’t spring water on cars and punters.  So it's a perfect place for some street art.


Aida


Ten artists jumped at the chance to pimp clapped out cars, though Jorge Rodrigues-Gerada confided he would have liked his to have been burned out and rusty as well, who’d have thought that’d have been too much to wish for round here. Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada is far better known in America where his forte is the top-to-bottom building end gable photorealistic portraiture done in charcoal. The rougher the surface the better he says, this car represents quite a different scale to his usual street works. The medium is charcoal on white paint in the style of revenge attack on teacher’s car. I love the detail of the photographer reflected in the eyeball.

Jorge Rodrigeuz-Gerada

Dr D never misses a political target and this week has seen a former Prime Minster of the UK demonstrate the extent to which politicians have been at the whim of an excessively dominant media baron. Politicians and the press are stable targets for Dr D so he/she/they (whatevah) must be wetting themselves with the revelations in London this week about the media and government taking dirty weekends away to finger eachother, while the media mogul stuffs hoards of cash in tax shelter hide-a-aways made from feeding us a diet of scandal, lite porn and celebs. The scary thing is the headlines pasted in the car are from real lfe.

Dr D - Tits and Farce

Eine’s Beemer has been decorated in a crystalline diamond pattern which originated from the new direction used for the background of his recent Lowrie Museum mural, The application slick and mechanical, the colour pops off the car though photos from the Lowry suggest that the pattern works better in lighter colours as background to huge circus font letters rather than the small stencil tags on automobile bodywork.

Eine - Diamond Beemer

Dan Hillier’s car was stuck in the darkest corner furthest from the bar, probably not being seen by many in its paste-up’d glory, which is a shame as the scary surrealistic fauna as humanity and dali-esque bodies are fascinating.

Dan Hillier

Toasters have thrown almost the full stencil repertoire at their racy looking machine, flames and flying stones in the form of buff toasters, abstract toaster parts and dayglo toasters spew out from the tyres of their car, there is no shyness about bold colours here. See how many toaster parts you can spot!

Toasters

The average man on East London council estate if pressed to identify the piece of graffiti he notices most often would almost certainly recollect “them teef wiv the pink gums”. Not content with just a car to batter, Sweet toof has boldly gone “all car park” producing a myriad of lenticular faces across several successive pillars, not to mention teef, teef and more teef everywhere.

Sweet Toof

Sweet Toof seems capable of transforming any paintable surface into a sickly sweet menace of teef, check the wing mirrors, the Merc badge and out of shot even a fire hose reel has been subjected to the slack jawed toof decay thing. Sweet Toof’s pimp mobile looks like it is venting pink vapours into the gloom of the roof as it positively glows with marshmallowness, has pink ever managed to look so malevolent?

Sweet Toof

Part 1 of this reflection on Banger Art closes with a selection of photos from ace snapper HowAboutNo. Part 2 will be with you in the next couple of days, you may anticipate more stunning photos and highlights from the St Peters Estate bunker.

UPDATE - Part 2 featuring Pablo Delgado, Aida, Will Barras, Matt Small and others here (opens in new window)

Matt Small, Aida, Sweet Toof

Pablo Delgado, Sweet Toof

Dan Hillier

Jorge Rodriquez-Gerada

More delicious HowAboutNo photos in a flickr set here