Curly – Sticking It Up ‘em

London has witnessed a surge in statement based illegal art in the past year or so, not just letters or mere words but often whole sentences and even punctuation. Elbow Toe scribbled haikus; Mobstr stencilled witty check lists; Ron English pasted up dis-embodied private secrets in speech bubbles and thought balloons. There has even been a very polite voice on lurid mini stickers urging us to “Please be nice to each other” and “Please say please thank you”. You may be thinking “basic information - graff worships the font, dude” but what we are talking here is a bombing mode that unlike graff eschews repetition, each intervention an original.




Chief protagonist of this prosaic prose vandalism is, let’s not quibble about definitions, sticker artist Curly. In a movement that lionises those most “up”, sticker artist Curly has captured a safari park’s worth of attention in the past year with more than a 1,000 wordy pronouncements stuck on street furniture all over the World. His stickers have the air of insider jokes, very market aware, very art joke infused, very tuned in to sensitive matters impacting a street artists’ credibility yet at times his thoughts betray an air of self-effacing vulnerability.




Getting wind of a planned Summer visit to the UK, Graffoto managed to secure an interview which the sticker prince elected to conduct via his preferred media, the United States Postal Service label. Curly led Graffoto a merry jaunt around London and into one or two tensely balanced and rather risky situations, we hope you find the results worthwhile.

We start with the most important issue – have you ever been busted?


Only by the NYPD


Another answer that nearly got your photographer in the pooh after the artist legged it: Is it ok to do stickers if you can't skate?


Skateboards are for suburban pre-teens


The answer to “Will stickers ever become appreciated as graffiti?” had me wondering if this Curly character was out to get me lynched:


Why would anyone want that? Graff is for pussies. Art-fags have balls


Pressing on with the interview, do you know Banksy?


You mean in the biblical sense? Yes of course. But I make him wear a mask, so I have never seen his face


Should stickers be political?


If that sells


Do you think it is important for stickers to have a message?


Conceptualism is a vastly over-rated concept


Are all your stickers installed illegally?


Technically this is illegal but nobody cares


Will stickers ever become appreciated as art?


Only by those boring enough to care


Should street stickers be protected by perspex?


Perspex is a perfect surface to get up on


Do you think a sticker artist will ever have a solo gallery show?


If you can’t get a solo gallery show, you’re not really an artist


Could any of the candidates in the US presidential nominations benefit from a sticker campaign?


I would love some free pizza from Herman Cain


When did you get into stickering


Last Week


What makes a good location for a sticker?


Wherever a good photo can be taken


The best graff writers get to paint naked girls, would you consider stickering girls?


Only on really big ones


Any technical tips for aspiring sticker artists?


Take amazing photos and post them to flickr


Is There Room For Humour On Stickers?


Only This One (Respekt IZM - no proper graff was really harmed in the making of this interview)


Is there a hop-hop/graffiti style link between stickers and music?


I listen exclusively to Leonard Cohen


Fine point or chisel tip?


What ever is handy


where did you get your name from?


The logo came first then I needed a name. It was between “Curly” and “really poorly done cursive f”. The logo came about because even a talentless toy could write it.


(yeah – Graffoto had to google cursive too, means “joined up” ). Any views on the absence of stickers from Museums?


What absence? I’m in Art In The Streets in LA


Will museums not truly represent the commoners art until they have a Curly in their collection?


Museums will not truly represent the elite until they have a Curly in their collection


Are you a disciple of Jenny Holzer's Truism-ism?


I’m a post-truist but I’ll always tell the truth


How can we convince Graffoto’s reader that you are the original Curly and not just some kind of wannabe copiest?


My style is unique and impossible to imitate


We conclude this interview with a quaint relic of innocence illustrating Curly’s failure to grasp the dog-fuck-dog nature of the street art “market”, at his request we include this sticker grovelling to someone he’s never met:


He’s not a sticker guy, but this interview concept has been blatantly stolen from Lush, so he probably deserves a shout out


Hunting for suitable spots for “Curlies” resulted in the discovery of ancient and weathered Curlies south of the river and way out West which Curly himself had forgotten. Cap doffed at that level of getting up. Cynics and moaners constantly gripe about street artists prostituting themselves putting up lame commercial shit in the usual art bordello locations. In the process of giving this novel interview, Curly vandalised property on Fed stations, post boxes, tube panels (window down!), HOFs, museums and art galleries. What was most impressive was that Curly went all-city EXCEPT Shoreditch – avoiding the most boringly obvious location for a publicity seeking street art whore to get up, way to go!


Curly In Action, possibly.

Gocco Printing - Malarky at High Roller Society

all photos: NoLionsInEngland



Last Summer High Roller Society did a fascinating and informative trio of workshop demos on print making. Graffoto loved them and scribbled a few words about them here and here.

Current show at the gallery is “Summer Breeze” featuring the flat fantasmagorical pop creatures of Malarky and Billy and Malarky gave a demo of Gocco print making, used to produce editioned prints such as this one from the showhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif




What is a Gocco print? A print made by Gocco printer I suppose, which is one of these kitsch looking gismos from Japan which uses a clam-shell device to force inks through a silk screen. Style-wise everything about a Gocco printer screams retro toy but don’t be fooled, this is both a screen burner and print maker which can produce multi layer prints limited only by your patience. Apparently the Japanese intended it to be used for producing high quality party invitations and wedding invites.




The intrepid demonstrator Malarky took a group of a dozen or so somewhat bashful watchers through the various stages including burning the screen, inking up the screen, fudging the alignment of the paper and then pressing the Gocco to create the print.


Printing off first layer


This light box sits on top of the Gocco and burns the screen from a photocopy of the artwork, the bulbs have a one shot life and they aren’t cheap!


Light source



Burning a screen


Each screen is then subdivided using sticky strips into zones for each colour, no holes in the dyke allowed or colours will bleed into each other


Inked up Gocco silk screen


An un-expected lesson was that when printers, pundits and gallerists apply expressions like “uniqueness”, “charm” and “individuality” to screen printed editions, they mean bits where the ink didn’t come out.


Layer one

The registration process for the second screen was real hit and miss skill and judgement, seems you do a test print, then trim off an edge to correct mis-alignment, push it around abit, try again, eventually you reach a predicament a bit like someone in a barber’s chair staring wistfully at a pile of clippings on the floor and a crew cut mess on the head. If you ever wondered where artist’s proofs came from, there’s your answer.


Artist Proofs!

The gallerist’s husband (congratulations!) kept the information flowing with suitable questions and un-suitable banter. Malarky produced a two layer 3 colour print in the two hours of the workshop, we all had a go at printing a few sheets. And we all had the chance to come away with a copy of the fruits of Malarky's labours produced before our very eyes.




For an office slave caged in a totally non arty/media environment, these insight into the craftsman’s side of the creative arts are supremely fascinating. High Roller Society deserves huge applause for taking the trouble to host events like this and Malarky is a star for allowing us to watch the artist at work, those working inside the arts world may not appreciate how intriguing and fascinating that is for us civvies. We hope there will be more!

New Ron English/NoLionsInEngland Collab Revealed

all photos: NoLionsInEngland

I have always been repelled by Ron English’s udder-rich pop coloured studio work, few exceptions barely worth mentioning. Moving that studio art out onto the streets doesn’t change my mind – see Camo boy from 2008. Even his inclusion in CANS with what looked like paste ups seemed a bit odd.


Ron English Camo Boy, London, (this was spot jockeying, not a collab!)


The billboard campaign stabs corporate and western imperialism nicely where it hurts, in the blind eye it turns on its own hypocrisy


NABKA60 - 60 Years of Palestinian Occupation
Ron English, SHepherds Bush, London 2008


This week I have collected a large series of sightings of speech bubbles and thought bubbles containing wistful bon mots, semi lucid sound bites and snippits of a private inner monologue best not brought out into the open. A bit of flickr research confirms Vandalog to be the first to attribute these to Ron English and for artists of such stature, RJ’s attribution is a good as law, in fact if it wasn’t Ron English I suggest he knock a few of these out sharpish.




At first glance these captions were puzzling and seemingly un-satisfying. What was their point, and why was their placement so damn careless. Not one of them seemed to relate in any meaningful way to its environment. London’s walls are heaving with graffiti characters, rich singers masquerading as teen sluts on illegal flyers or marketer’s perfect families on advertising hoardings, these captions could surely have been better placed so that they looked like they were coming from those flat characters?




Perhaps you might think the walls as well as having ears also have thoughts, complexes and wise words to share.




We know this artist grafts ruminants' udders onto Disney characters but what are these ruminations about? Then the penny drops. What English has put up is a series of incomplete installations, the pieces only make sense when YOU come along to actually say or think them. That placement - he was wilfully avoiding those characters on the wall. Every single one of these pieces works brilliantly when a member of the public passes by and momentarily the captions belong to them.


(In one block I will be run down by a bus....if I walk in the gutter)

Even more intriguingly, the person who fleetingly becomes part of the installation is probably not aware of the significance of his role. The art exists only for a tantalising moment and really is best appreciated from the third party perspective.




You can only conclude that this art needs you there to complete it and in the case of the various art pieces illustrating this web page, the art existed only when I the photographer was present to observe and record its transient existence. I am honoured to be able to share with you this street work that Ron and I put together.


(clothes and gait - model's own)


I would like to thank Ron English for his vital contribution to our collaboration, I really couldn’t have done it without him. Thank you also to his assistants, drivers, ladder bearers, make-up artists and anyone else who knows him.




If you think this insight is rubbish (congratulations) I believe Ron English makes his intention quite clear with this particular caption for those of a more Liliputian stature.




This Ron English campaign is the conceptual opposite of my single all time favourite street art installation – Jimmy Cauty’s street mirror under Old Street Bridge which makes the observer disappear. Here English requires you to appear. You can’t knock the genius of a guy who can come up level but opposed to Cauty’s finest (street) hour, this is why Ron English actually is deservedly the legend he is.


Jimmy Cauty, London, 2008

That said, in a period where an artist is taking art placed in the bottom 5 inches of London walls to new heights (no – really, boom boom), Ron manages to sully that hem of public space with a small paste up of an excessively pneumatic Mini Mouse. Oh dear.



Additional photos here

Day Off Urbexing

So, I had a rare free day planned a week in advance to go to a few abandoned sites around East Sussex - namely a closed technical college on the sea front. . .







And then on to a long closed private school in the countryside





Now whilst on these trips I do expect to see the odd bit of graffiti, I certainly wasn't expecting to find my first two full on Paul Insect pieces!

This stencil firstly:



And then this "life sized" Mickey Mouse:



Originally questioned by a few Flickr contacts, to which I said "nah he wouldn't come out here to paint that surely"? Then contacted and had it confirmed by the gallery.

So much for a day off. But I really wasn't complaining!

Street Artist Servants Express Gratitude For Long Weekend

all photos: NoLionsInEngland


To echo The Socialist Worker’s famous “traffic delays in London” commentary on the wedding of Charles and Di, large amounts of Britain came to a standstill today as workers enjoyed an extra day off work and a 4 day weekend. Kate Middleton, slim, looker, married Prince William, privileged, inherited. Street artists, resplendent in traditional livery of flat sole sneakers, shin length skinny denims and Abercombie hoodies paid tribute to the occasion.

Perhaps the most prolific around the ancient borough of Shoreditch, haunt of their majesties’ crustier artists and other trendie subjects, was Dotmasters, in his customary supporting role as Bearer Of The Exacto Knife, delivering a prolific number of this single layer stencilled artistic tribute of the royal likeness presented in the form of police identikit photos.


Dotmasters


Mr.Farenheit, Master of the Paste, has installed at strategic locations (i.e. the usual spots) a selection of newsprint pages stencilled over with a variety of messages expressing a commoner’s love the future Queen.


Mr.Farenheit


A parallel between a Prince’s desire to be left alone (particularly when falling out of the VIP area area of a Chelsea nightclub with a dozen close freeloading rugger mates) and a reluctant sexual partner adorns several locations of the realm.


Mr.Farenheit


The street art community has paid its respect to the ancient traditions of this Sceptr'd isle, led symbolically by its great royal figureheads, successors to a long line of distinguished and brilliant cross-dressers, into a brave new era of tourist economy dependence, determined to show the world whose eyes today watch our green and peasant land with envy and awe how Britain maintains its love of honouring those born to be first to the trough.




K-Guy produced a limited edition screen print but didn’t make it out onto the streets. This sort of summarises the general level of ennui reigning among a populace upon whom the greatest impact will have been “yippee, another 4 day weekend”. All in all a pretty paltry reaction to the wedding. Apart from the obvious targets - privilege, wealth and un-earned but mainly symbolic authority, it seems Willy and Kate present little material to inspire the artist courtier. Perhaps the scintillating wit and pointed political satire is being reserved for the eventual wedding of his swastika wielding brother.

Late update, I forgot about this one,as likely to be a paid for commission as not, cheque signed "love Liz and Phil"?




After The Piss Up.....The Paste Ups

K-Guy obviously felt the sludge landslide of instant commemorative pull-out souvenir colour supplements leant an excessive gloss to an overblown celebration of the marriage of the nation's favourite negligee manikin to the single beaming 2:1 chink of intelligence flying in the face of the royal family's fine tradition of academic mediocrity, so he silk screened this mass paste up souvenir bollocks with the exortation "God Save Your Mad parade" from the Sex Pistols 1977 Jubilee year single "God Save The Queen".


K-Guy



K-Guy


Just yards away HowAboutNo, still reeling from an excess of Amsterdam refreshments, spotted a couple of figuroids bigging up William as a kind of "Mens Health" speedo poser and Kate with a splat of blood on her wedding dress designed by someone dead. Somehow we doubt that was the first time the Prince stormed her palace gates, c'mon, the Royals move with the times daddyo.


Unknown

Sweet Toof And Paul Insect, London, 2011

Lots of fun recently quietly observing a furtive pair of artists working silently and swiftly on one of London’s less accessible rooftops.


Sweet Toof and Paul Insect, London Rooftop, 2011 from NoLionsInEngland on Vimeo.



It took 4 nights and about 50 litres of paint for Sweet Toof and Paul Insect to blend signature imagery in this visible-from-space collaborative masterpiece. In essence, the painting is a double headed face munching away at the rooftop hut. Best viewed from 1,000 feet, the symmetry ensures the effect is the same whether viewed from the east over the Olympic Stadium or the west.

From the photography point of view this mission had a few tricky aspects. Obviously you can’t go throwing huge illuminative arcs of light around so you work with the natural light. The first night, after about 20 minutes the low cloud base boiled away and the urban-orange sky turned black plunging the rooftop into darkness. At the end of the clip you can see the opposite happen. Exposure times varied dramatically between 10 and 30 seconds.

There are two gas boiler outlets on the upper level, the output from those condenser boilers is bloody wet. Using a patented knotted rope to get up there to set up a camera position, the wind would veer and back unpredictably giving the camera a misty drenching.

I flew BA over the Olympic Stadium the other day but couldn’t find any landmarks other than the Olympic Stadium, there should be a prize for the first photo from a scheduled airliner!

UPDATE:
At last, Aug 2012, an aerial shot


BACKDATE
Dark Horse, Sweet Toof's first New York solo show opens at Factory Fresh on 29th of April 2011

Paul Insect has just collaborated with Sickboy on an installation at the onethirty3 space in Newcastle

Artists: Sweet Toof, Paul Insect

Photography, video: NoLionsInEngland

Music: Booze - Insanity Drive

Mike Ballard -The Ultra Nomadic Def Smith Cycle

Edel Assanti Project Space
276 Vauxhall Bridge Road
London SW1V 1BB

Thursday 24th March - Saturday 30th April 2011

All photos NoLionsInEngland except HowAboutNo where stated.
Video by Mark Gostick via GalaxyRays


Hanging a few canvasses and calling it a show isn’t Mike Ballard’s style. Ballard deals in whole room illusion experiences, multi-media sonic and video assaults, challenging conceptual celebrations of “taking without consent” and the intersection where delusional un-hinged jazz weirdoes meet dazzle painting. The whole lot flows through the fizzing circuits of Ballard’s brain and discharges via electrical components melded together by the mad boffin’s own hands.




The Ultra Nomadic experience starts with a curious framed circular patterned paper, various Ballard themes can be recognised in the concentric circle patterns but the most interesting orbit is the very out edge which has two semi circles of patterns of images, each image remarkably similar to its neighbour but different by some incremental detail like one of those flicker book animations, and the significance of this is revealed as later as you dive into the subterranean space.




First stop in the basement is a garden shed, a hut – no hiding that’s what it is. Inside set in the middle of the floor is a low level kinetic lightbox. The glossy black box is punctured by a circular screen, a beam sweeps out repeating circles picking out a viscous, boiling universal. Is it detecting the beginning or the end, or a continuous repeating loop between the two? Who knows, some say it marked out an organic intra-cellular voyage path picked out by a navigation system travelling within a mutilated, knifed body. You choose, it’s in the eye of the beholder this one.


The light arc shows the sweep of the light line in the photoexposure time


The Ultra Nomadic Def Smith Cycle is a bigger, better cosmic traveller, a maker of tangibles and intangibles (Smith as in smithy, forge) and What The River Brings, a poker phrase and also the oldest piece in the show dating back to about Ballard’s All Of Everything era, represents that voyage, the transformer nomad complete with suitcase sets off propelled by energy from the larger older version of himself.




There are two other minor photographic collage pieces hidden away in an almost un-noticed recess at the rear of the basement, Ballard’s view on these springs from his obsession with music. The images pay tribute through the representation of a mystical figure transformed with visible bizarre inner energies and wizardly properties, the whole referencing the originators of hip hop DJ Kool Herc and Grand Wizard Theodore. Once again Mr Ballard is responsible for me wasting entire minutes googling musical references an indie honky knows nothing of.




All of which doesn’t so much as define a backdrop as get completely blown away by the main feature of the show. You can’t miss it, its ambience is apparent as the lo fi one note synth-meets-stuck-oscilloscope-drone permeates your head from the moment you commence your descent at the top of the stairs. The source is a new installation but one that very clearly shows its relationship to the LaPlace Transforms sculpture which Graffoto patiently explained after the 2009 Long Arm Gallery Galaxy Rays show.




In this incarnation, an edition of the circular paper Ultra Nomadic Def Cycle drawing we found at the top of the stairs rotates on a platter with two turntable pick-ups. One tone arm has a scalpel blade resting on the rotating disc, this both creates and picks up the vibrations though unlike the earlier Laplace Transforms, the blade doesn’t cut into and destroy the disk. The signal passes through a vocoder which results in the sonic eminences we hear. A second tone arm holds a small camera and a light.




Compare the Ultra Nomad Def Smith Cycle above with the LaPlace Transforms from the 2009 show:


Mike Ballard - LaPlace Transform, Bristol 2009, photo: HowAboutNo


The frame rate of the camera, the rotational speed of the disc (78RPM)and the separation of the images around the paper have been critically tuned so that each successive image captured by the camera is dead centre in the frame. The resulting live “time lapse animation” is projected onto a screen built into the housing, Ballard christens the whole thing a sonotrope merging the idea of an image generator and a self noise generator in one device.




The sculpture is topped off with various minute figures signifying a mystical origin or source. The device radiates warmth and a riich lushness, coning you into supposing that the innards must be full of valves and “Elvis at Sun Studio” microphones




So much for describing the appearance, the experience however is nothing without the sound. This whining acoustic screech won’t leave you alone, you can try ignoring it but your subconscious always picks out the tones, some crazy inate Fourier analyser within your nervous system locks onto the frequencies then shifts to pick out some higher harmonic, then a different tone. The effect is as if the instrument is somehow being “played” with a gentle, slow tensioning and relaxing of the “angry flies trapped in a balloon” knob.




Trance like rapture would be a suitable response. If the images generated by the same disc as the sound aren’t perception enhancing enough, then this is probably exactly the sound track for a fairly bad trip on psychedelic grade As. The ambience needed sylph like naked females to slowly whirl around, arms aloft in complete immersion in the mood but none of them could be persuaded. What you really want is to witness! Thankfully, Mark Gostick produced this really slick video which Graffoto has nicked without consent.


from GalaxyRays by Mark Gostick

Interestingly, the inner images, a silhouette figure saluting the sun and some geometric patterns are being illuminated at 50Hz (probably) and are rotating at 78rpm and as you can see in the vid that image moves forward very slowly, a bit like the wagon wheel stroboscopic illusion on film.

This show is about transformations and trance, repetitions and electricians. Compared to past shows it is more about immersion than illusion. If you are a tall slender hippy chick with your own stash of hallucinogenics, please get in touch for the Graffoto guided tour.

A few other photos here.