Brutal Lazarides Vinyl Factory Group Show

Lazarides/Vinyl Factory
180 Strand, London
Tuesday 15th to Sunday 27th October 2013

words and photos: NoLionsInEngland


A nailed on dead (literally!) cert highlight for each of the past few years has been the Lazarides’ offsite exhibition expedition which in the past saw the gallery packing their toiletry bags for Bedlam, The Minotour and Hell's Half Acre in the Waterloo tunnels. This year’s jolly is off to an unattractive grey former accountants’ office block at 180 Strand, London which sadly is just so plain and ugly it doesn’t even deserve the inverted poetic description “brutalist”.

This show feels more about how artists have harnessed the gentle light of the space than about responding to Brutal as a theme. Many of the works interact with the very limited light available in ways which throw their influence much wider than the work’s own footprint.

The one I kept going back to on both my visits (so far) is the awesome installation by Know Hope who grabbed the reflective oily pool gimmick before Doug Foster turned up. Know Hopes has always been strong on installations and dioramas but here he kicks things up a huge gear on an abstract emotional level. It’s all about missing parts not missing hearts, rectangular holes allow found views, found light rectangles and chance vistas. It’s about absences and the play of light through those absences played out with a heavy Twin Peaks meets Blair Witch Project atmosphere. Stanley Donwood will be tearing his hair out.










Know Hope


Next highlight is Lucy McLauchlan. Lucy brings a rougher looser feel to this almost immersive experience as slightly heavy and indistinct figures swoop and gyrate through this gymnasium for acrobatic goths. The movements and curves traced by her leaping dancing figures create a dizzying sense of sweaty chaos and the music from the nearby Doug Foster installation suited McLauchlan’s room more than it did Foster’s cinema.




Lucy McLauchlan


Having mentioned Foster a couple of times already it’s best to put that experience out of its misery. The slow churning light is present, the epic growling soundtrack driving the sub woofer through the neighbours’ ceiling has turned up but those infinite reflective surfaces are missing. What is left is a very very widescreen light animation, a bit like watching tv through the gap under the door. The revolving kaleidoscopic imagery seemed at times to suggest long leaved weeds waving under water then sometimes perhaps strange animated seed like structures viewed under a microscope, all pretty abstract but not sure that it achieved anything either itself or within the context of a curated show, two ways in which Foster installations at previous Lazarides shows scored heavily.


Doug Foster


Cleon Peterson had a very strong show at the Greek Street Lazarides early this year and proves at Brutal that this was no flash in the pan. His mural is filled with pain, brutality and a lack of compassion and it presents a particular challenge, to view the figures smoothly across the many surface fractures caused by a staggered series of wall steps, we need to lower our eye level to the same height as the traumatically assaulted victims of this tableau. Peterson is killing us.


Cleon Peterson


I haven’t seen any Brad Downey indoor work since the disappointing 2009 show with Stolen Space but his Tarpaulin Café here really works well as an installation setting for what appear to be photographs of Brad Downey urban interventions and observations involving apertures in those building site net fences which have an image of the façade they are hiding. He has in the past created these holes in the nets himself, that was his art but this time it seems he is finding the holes and highlighting how the holes tear a gash through the idealised vision of the “artists’ impression” that developers deceive us with. The café setting gives an collection of surfaces, textures and light and shadow interplays which have all the ambience of a poolside bar in a war zone, in a good way!




Brad Downey


Moving onto artists I haven’t come across before, the work of Ben Woodeson was multi-layered chin dropping. Plates of glass and light interact to impose themselves on audience and surroundings in ways which could be either lightweight, perhaps the suggestion of a long shadow, or really heavy as in “this could slice through you”. Best get your retaliation in first by simply standing in the way of the strong illumination, this way you change the light and the shadows, imposing yourself on the way which the art work throws itself around the space.


Ben Woodeson


Conor Harrington matches Cleon Peterson blow for blow in responding to the theme brutality, Antony Micallef doesn’ t take us anywhere he hasn’t before with his dark impressionist portraits while Katrin Fridriks brings an abstract beauty to the game.


Conor Harrington



Antony Micallef



Katrin Fridriks


What do you expect attending an exhibition called “Brutal”? Pastoral landscapes and whimsy this is not. For all the fun with light and shadow play, no illumination was spared for the impossibly dark installation notes taped to walls around the place. Although the core theme perhaps is not as strongly defined as in previous outings some of the installations and spaces are stronger, harsher and often far more subtle than the previous experiences. As with all the Lazarides’ previous offsites, repeat visits are called for.


Mark Jenkins (again, for me, it's all about the light and shadows)



Karim Zeriahen



Boogie



Pose



Esteban Oriol



DalEast

Robbo vs Banksy - Did You Think It Was Over?

This post is written by nolionsinengland and is not necessarily reflective of the thoughts of co-bloggers Howaboutno and Shellshock, in fact they may not even be my friends any more!


About 4 days after you read it here on Graffoto, The Times proclaimed ”Not since the rivalry of Picasso and Matisse.... has there been such a clash between artistic camps". But this isn’t about The Times dissing us when it backed the only facts in its belated article as “The Graffoto website claimed that..”, this is about the ineptness of their headline “Banksy rival King Robbo has the final word in street art feud”.

The backstory in brief is, Banksy had a confrontation with London graff pioneer and legend Robbo resulting in a slap to the face for Banksy. Banksy painted over an ancient 25 year old Robbo throwie, days later Robbo struck back with a reworking of Banksy’s effort.

Full back story here.




Graffoto had a tip that there was more to come and so it proved, Team Robbo returned to Camden canal and modified another of Banksy’s masterpieces.

Before:




After:




This latest Robbo intervention lacks the killing finesse of “KING ROBBO” but carries the fight back to Banksy, who without doing anything is looking like a wounded animal.

The personal aspect of the Robbo/Banksy handbagging and the merits of the work produced in the feud have really become a sub-plot to the Grafitti vs the whole of creation posture-fest, so lets concentrate just on this second phase of Robbo’s riposte to Banksy. The original Banksy artwork employed street art stylisms to proclaim a message in general about the ubiquity of graffiti tagging and specifically about a society that equates the tag to rubbish fouling the canal. Banksy stencilled a boy fishing a Banksy tag out of the canal. Robbo has turned it around completely and now the fisherman is Banksy, neatly labelled in case there was any doubt and nattily attired in country garms befitting the “bumpkin” slur flung by the capital’s graffiti community (Bumpkin is a term of endearment used by London writers for any writer from the provinces).




Banksy’s catch represents the charge made by the graffiti community that Banksy is exploiting the culture of graffiti to boost his personal profile, by linking himself to the world of graffiti he is latching onto the maverick outlaw kudos, the artworld bonnie and clyde. Although Banksy’s haul is drenched in blue water, Robbo shows a clump of canal slime dredged up with the placard so neatly incorporating Banksy’s green drips as a consistent part of his composition, avoiding the need to go over Banksy’s green drips with blue.




Robbo is fully aware that his 25 year old piece and this episode with Banksy has become a major cause célèbre, press coverage and (at time of writing) over 300 comments on his flickr pic would see to that. He has neatly brought the direct personal nature of his action sharply back into focus by addressing a written message to Banksy alongside the modified artwork.


Memo - from: Team Robbo; To: Banksy


Did Banksy expect to provoke such a vicious reaction? Probably. He is and for years has been a seriously skilful publicity magnet and knew this slur would not go un-noticed. Despite what some say he knows the graff mentality well enough to guess that this would go beyond the single handed scrap to a battle between two related cultures, a battle to which only one side has turned up.

Should he have expected a response from Robbo? You betcha. He knows graff well enough to appreciate how grudges can fester and dissing is rarely allowed to go un-mentioned.
Was a prolonged backlash expected? Perhaps not, although quality beef generally assumes significance way beyond the original slight and graff never forgives and it never forgets (check London’s ATG/GSD rumble).

Is that the end of Robbo’s vendetta? Well apart from the two already taken apart by Robbo, Banksy laid down two other pieces of street art that December night. The stencil rat [http://www.flickr.com/photos/nolionsinengland/4199814591/ ] is so poor it might best be left as testament to an embarrassing lapse of quality on Banksy’s part but the best piece of the four fresh Camden Banksy’s , the pure letter “Global Warming” slogan looks like its message is begging to be modified


Banksy, Regents Canal, London, Dec 2009


And of course, there is Robbo’s public memo to Banksy to be taken into account.


We also shouldn’t rule out Banksy returning to the fray, he isn’t exactly shy about expressing himself on walls and he has some previous in harbouring grudges. Famously (to a small niche audience) he didn’t invite another Bristol stencil master Nick Walker to his Cans Festival and spitefully painted a flat cap wearing monkey painting flock wallpaper, generally regarded as a pointed slur at Walker and his art.


Banksy, Can Festival, London, May 2008


It seems more than just coincidence that Banksy’s canal-side art was produced within days of his former mentor and PR guru, now Worlds-Leading-High-End-Street-Art-Gallerist-Bar-None Steve Lazarides arranging for some of his stable to paint canal-side pieces just a few miles away near Westbourne Grove.


David Choe, Lucy McLauchlan


As an aside, those canal spots were popular with West London taggers and writers, the world of graff didn’t make a song and dance about street art intruding on its territory, it just set about its business of reclaiming the walls in its own brutal style.


“Health and prosperity to street artists everywhere, lots of love, 10FOOT”


Banksy knows the graff culture well enough not to be surprised that painting over Robbo produced a response. He would have expected it, he may not have expected the nuclear scale of the reaction online and in the press though and as it stands, he is eating Robbo’s dust in everyone’s minds.

Photos of the Banksy original canal pieces and the Robbo riposte here

You might find it interesting to read the Graffoto original coverage of Robbo’s Christmas day riposte.


Historical note - The full Banksy vs Robbo timeline:

Banksy hits Camden

Banksy vs Robbo...Did You Think It Was Over?

And The Beef Goes On

Banksy v Robbo: War Continues

Banksy Reparations