Cans Festival

Leake St, 3 May – 5 May 2008

words/pictures: nolionsinengland.

LA got its elephant in the room (has anyone else noticed the “Elephant In The Room” drawing added to Banksy.co.uk, curious since everything else on his site is publicly seen work), Notting Hill had the rats, Waterloo’s tunnel hosted possibly the finest selection of global vermin to ever paint together in anger.

Banksy’s Cans Festival is one of the most electric and eclectic shows of art I have ever had the pleasure of seeing. With a glorious cluster of major Banksy murals to take in, several aspects of the Banksy pieces are worth mentioning. For execution, the graffiti cleaning squad buffing the cave painting is breathtaking. Whilst the murky cave painting details echoes previous Banksy cave painting exercises (British Museum), the trick on the eye that the cleaner has sprayed a swathe of the wall clean is just spot on. A little amusing detail is the red hand silhouette implying that primitive homosapien had spraycans. Nice to see the Banksy tag on a wall piece again after such a long time.

 
Banksy – Caveman



The battered Budha on close inspection is nursing a shiner, has a bloody nose, has wrenched his neck and has his left fist swathed in bandages, Banksy’s comment on the beatings, suppression and state bully-boy tactics in Tibet. This picture doesn’t get close to showing the quality of those details.

 
Banksy – Buddah


The CCTV tree installation echo’s many previous installations, pictures and the recent One Nation under CCTV piece. Skilfully and wittily Banksy deploys a burned out wreck of a car wrapped around the tree supporting the cameras to make the point that all the video footage in the world will only record crime, not wipe it out.


Banksy – CCTV tree


The Beach Hut installation is more than just a chill out zone, it echoes and perhaps takes on Tracey Emin’s similar beach hut piece from the 90s. The structure is actually a child’s toy play house, which would give it a relevant relationship with the Noddy car on bricks next to it.


Banksy – Beach Hut


All told, there are 6 or 7 Banksy wall stencils, and at least four, possibly six installations. For sake of brevity a link is provided lower down to a more comprehensive set of pictures but let’s not forget, Banksy isn’t the only can-slinger in town.

Eine’s recent east London pixilated “HELL” is echoed with its obvious partner word HOLE. The word hole obviously also can be associated with the word SHIT, which has been added by roller above it and in a non-Eine style suggesting someone else's intervention. Sweet.

Eine


NY's Faile are present big time, a monstrous cast metal door has been given the treatment with no fewer than ten major Faile stencils, and a Faile van rammed into a concrete wall has its flat tyre being hastily hand inflated by a addidas three-striped yob with an exploding head. Other minds think the car and the exploding head stencil are completely un-related, but if they are then this just becomes a pointless car covere in re-hashed Faile motifs.


Faile

Logan Hicks, also from NY, has done a pair of awesome photorealistic walls, bringing a whiff of NY into this heaven-in-hell.


Logan Hicks


Asbestos has a pair of fish-tailed pink Zebra trying to flip-kick their way off the walls, quite unlike anything I have ever seen from Asbestos on the streets.


Asbestos


One of the beauty of have time to peruse such a galactic array of talent is that previously mysterious street pieces suddenly become attributable. Among this lot, the anonymity of the un-tagged leaf-carrying ants is revealed to come from the hands of Dotmasters. Our Ant messengers this time tell us ”What a Load Of Rubbish” (possibly this piece below should be attributed to Dotmaster’s alter ego Bagsy).


Dotmasters


Pure Evil’s reputation will be further enhanced by the stunning quality of his collection/installation of a variety of but by no means all of his recent output. Street lights shine through the suspended Pearly King stencil sheet making it stunningly luminescent and the Mash-up latex bunny girl, bunny hands, neon evil bunny and butterfly wings rocks the show.


Pure Evil


With delight the presence of Cartrain can be confirmed, this is a good thing since firstly he is at least as “real” as any of the artist here in terms of being out there all the time and getting up, and also like all of us he can only learn and get better when rubbing shoulders with art and artists of this calibre.

At this early stage (hours after the opening) there are a large number of, to me anyway, un-known artists and this is part of the thrill of this show, we learn all the time folks until we close our minds, then we die. Here are a further highlights with quite a few un-attributed pieces, feel free to share if you can identify any.


Sten

Orticannoodles

MBW

Daniel Melim

Panda Dreams, by….?

Unknown

Broken Crow,


I don’t agree with the view that “this event is what graffiti is all about”, or that this is Banksy “keeping it real man”. This is about a whole bunch of things including Banksy being a great artist, with an un-rivalled ability to speak humorously through art in a way ordinary people can relate to; about a diverse range of talents and subjects opening our hearts and minds to the quality currently being achieved in street art. It is also fully authorized, legitimate and frission free, it has nothing to do with risk, danger or law-breaking spontaneity and those key elements make graffiti even more admirable. Sanitised anti-establishmentism anyone?

Banksy

The point was un-intentionally illustrated by the security. Minutes after the gates opened a city gent mannequin in pinstripes wearing white shoes with a white briefcase stuffed with twenty pound notes was hung by the neck over a wall on the tunnel exit ramp. In terms of execution the quality was right up there with Banksy, the political point was a laser-guided sniper shot and indeed the situation was reminiscent of Banksy’s Disney Guantanamo stunt. A panicked steward radio-ed for help, and tried to usher us away from the scene of the crime saying “No, don’t look; not part of the show; it’s illegal”. Moments later three security guards, doing what security guards do, arrived, hacked down the doll, frisked it, gave it the kiss of life, trousered the money and took it off in an ambulance. Sorry, I mean they threw it away. But the point was this un-authorised and un-regulated rule-breaking intervention was exactly what street art is about, far more than the art on show in the tunnel. If this wasn’t Banksy, he has a damn fine imitator (rumour says "George").

Unknown “illegal”


A portion of the tunnel, actually the slip road up at the end, is relatively clean at the moment and it seems the plan is that anyone who fancies trying out a stencil can come along and throw it up. It will be interesting to see how this pans out, hopefully by Monday evening a whole new slew of un-sung talent will have revealed itself.

It would be great to show pictures here of every piece on show but sadly that would be taking far too much of your time, so please feel free to browse a much fuller collection by clicking here.

This whole show is free, like street art and graffiti should be but clearly a lot of expense has been incurred staging this so, to whoever is backing this, huge thanks.

POST SCRIPT:

Cans Festival and its successor event cans II proved to be something Graffoto was to devote a lot of time and love to, far more than just this post. Here is the full set of related posts:

Cans Festival - the first preview night visit
Cans Festival - Let Us Spray - what went on in Banksy's pet project, the public access spray zone
Banksy, No Lions, Eelus Group Show - Banksy wanted anyone apart from artists to take up stencilling, we accepted the challenge
Cans Festival - One More Sniff - How the Cans wall art evolved in the first month or so after the event
Cans Recycled - First Peek - An un-scheduled sneak peek at the second version of Cans Festival when the tunnel was closed for a few days.
Cans Recycled Opens - Like it says on the tin
Alphabet Soup - The Cans 2 Letter Hunt - A Rarekind of letter game played at Cans Recycled
Cans2 Recycled Revisited - more.

Blam – Die!!! Spraycan

Blam Solo Exhibition

New Cross Gallery

1 May – 24 May

In the world of graff art, few pieces achieve a wider recognition beyond hardcore wall spotting fetishists but one piece known to many otherwise dis-interested Londoners is the Oscar The Grouch on a wall in Shoreditch.


photo: Howaboutno


Credit for this enduring and council-preserved piece goes to Blam whose show opened in New Cross Gallery tonight. Blam is also known for freehand photorealistic enormo portraits such as Rolf Harris in the possibly doomed Southbank skateboard graff space.

First impression of the items shown in this bijou utilitarian space are blimey, they’re small. At the very bottom of the scale are postcards and badges. Nuff said.

A sprayed and acrylic painted Russian doll set indicate a painstaking attention to detail and the faces look like they ought to be someone. This nagging familiarity repeats throughout Blam’s portrait work. Meeting him in person you can instantly pick out the bug-eyed, bearded, pearl-toothed self-portraits but apparently most of the others are based on random anonymous photographs.





Blam’s cartoon skills are un-leashed in a small collection of pen sketches.





Progressing up the size chain, monocoloured spray cans are vacuum-sealed in plastic and framed. Four separate cans feature one letter each from Blam’s name captured in relief below the surface of the vacuum wrap. Curiously, each can is priced individually so all the Alans, Lilas, Marks, Berts and so on will have to scrap it out for the can bearing their initial.





Graffiti and gun culture thankfully have comparatively little association, Blam brings the two closer together by killing spraycans for fun and framing them. A double barrel shotgun was used to pepper a pair of cans and their mountboard with holes and as Blam suggests, this would look ultra-cool with a high intensity light behind it. The shot trapped inside the can rattles, which could make quite a novelty baby toy. A white version features the entry and exit holes from a gunshot bang on the centre, quite a piece of marksmanship if performed after the can has been vacuum sealed to the mountboard (don’t try this at home kids).





Moving on to the portraits, eyes and teef, anger, tiredness and plaque are the big things to take away. Blam uses a photorealistic technique and style not dissimilar to German graff artist Akut, the puggish half of Herakut. Working to produce a show such as this whilst holding down a full time proper job means late hours, no sleep and bags under the eyes, which Blam doesn’t spare us in the middle “Stare” piece of the eyes canvas threesome.





Henry Rollins from an iconic mid 90s blood-vessel bursting red portrait is the loose source of the aptly titled Anger.





An Oscar canvas will undoubtedly suit the wall of someone seeking a facsimile of the iconic street image. It might have been the entirely average lighting in the gallery but this canvas appeared to have a distracting orange tinge around it.





Oscar goes pop in a dark but rich print in an edition of 15, its overall multi-coloured lushness makes one forgive the giclee production.





The appreciation that Blam is a street artist who has taken the spraycan as more than a tool, as the form for art itself accompanies us as we board the sleeper back to London. We look forward to seeing Blam rocking the streets largescale again in the very near future.

As usual, more photos here

Have You Ever Smelt Marianne Faithful? ?

No photos. Pin back your eyelids and try reading some words for a change.

Howaboutno and Nolions rocked up to the premier of Joy Division by Grant Gee, courtesy of an email passed on from an obviously nameless mutual friend and photoshopped to look like addresssed to us. Two immediate questions, why London not Manchester and why bother when last year's film of the year Control had covered the whole Joy Div/Ian Curtis obituary, albeit throught the slightly third party eyes of Debbie Curtis.

Not being miserable enough or Manc enough, turned out we were on a secondary list and thanks to a bit of lip from HAN to the oriental bird graciously deigning to hand out tics, the doors were slammed in our face. None the less, having a eagle eye for an opportunity, as the introductions of the faces were being made to the audience, we managed to hook on behind a small group and ended up sneaking into a pair of very plush seats in a box. Ligging and blagging is a refined skill.

Spookily, for the second time in three days we bumped into MJar, what are the odds!

The film has a bunch of major defects. Before it begins you know how it is going to start, all 70s ooop-north depression, sparking cloggs and smoke pumping chinmeys. The whole of the film is again an obituary and you know what the bloody ending is going to be. Unlike control which was pure dramatisation using actors and no appearances from band members, this film is pure documentary, relying on grainy gig footage and talking heads. As Hooky says in the film, "we never meant things to sound so fucking miserable, we really wanted the records to chop people off at the neck like the live stuff". Top punk attitude.

Grant Gee and legendary Factory Records design guru Peter Saville took the stage afterwards to answer questions.

"Peter, how do you think this contributes to the legend"..."Well it doesn't really"

"Peter, what do you think of the film posters"...."Pretty shit really, I'm glad I didn't have to do them..I left that behind over a decade ago, I can't think what Joy Division wuld look like now"

Afterwards, we blagged a ticket off the same forgetful or forgiving Oriental vision to some West End red roped celeb tarts bar for free Japanese beer and shoulder rubbing with various ancient ghosts from the past. "Smoke either side of the red rope" said the bouncer, which seemed less designed to allow us maximum freedom and more an excuse for him to twat us either way.

We don't think we saw Marianne Faithful but we were puzzled how poncey journo chat-up lines are supposed to deliver the close-quarters limb entanglements when a dready next to us asked a posh bird "Have you smelled Marianne Faithful? she smells deeeeeeviiiiiiiiiiiiine" we certainly didn't smell anything devine dahhhling so perhaps the fragrant Faithful was elsewhere.

The bus ride home was memorable. Rain bucketed down and the bus skewed through deep channels spraying tar and froth over windows and pedestrians. The budget windscreen wipers failed to clear upright rivers from the windscreen, and lights shone green, red, amber and white through the rivulets. The miserable cunts even arranged the weather as a PR stunt.

What a Difference a Couple of Weeks Make. . .

15.04.08

It was bound to happen.....especially in the middle of Hackney

28.04.08

Christ Strike A Light, It's Monday...And Here's An Update!

Here is a new laugh for you... I'm going to turn this into a daily update. Ahahahahahahahaha. Maybe.


Nuff said.

Cancer Sell Street Art Tour

The freezing temperatures and shitty smells of Hoxton, Shoreditch and Brick Lane are readily tolerated by vandals going about their clandestine work on walls so a little dank mist and a few squally showers weren’t going to deter a hardy group of walkers in search of graffiti enlightenment and soul purifying charity support.


Photo: HowAboutNo (all other photos NoLionsInEngland except where noted)

We headed first towards Clerkenwell where Nick Walker’s 11 day old Ratatouille was found to have been partly dogged, evidently in a petty fit of graff jealousy.

Around the corner in Whitecross Street, Banksy’s Ratapult was thankfully intact but the small oil painted vegetable that appeared nearby a while back had developed a stalk and budding flowers, added by the original unknown artist. A bit of communication on flickr revealed that the plant has grown in stages and who says it has stopped growing?

Photos: top-NoLions; above-with kind permission of Unusualimage; right - HowaboutNo

At Blackall Street we came across a new paste-up by MJar that hadn’t been there the previous Friday. By the time we had admired the quality of the 2007 Swoon and Elbow Toe paste ups it was already apparent that the pace was slower than we had really allowed for.

We observed a great variety and quality of street art, the various techniques looked at included stencil, free hand spraypaint, paste up, rooftop roller jobs, shutter jobs, stickers and with thanks to the observational powers of our youngest vandal-to-be, mastic graffiti.

Among the new pieces we were able to spot were a rich collection of stencils by Asboluv, a Titifreak on Brick Lane and a well worked Dicky Smif on Pedley St.

Colours, smells and swear-words our graffiti neophytes were exposed to were produced by Apishangel (Nick Walker), Banksy, Kriebel, C215, Eine, Cartrain, Prefab77, Ace, K-Guy, Insect, Asbestos, Titifreak, Sickboy, Elbow-Toe, Rowdy, Elmo, Cyclops, Sweet Toof, Hera, Bortusk Leer, Swoon, Copyright, Mantis, Dicky Smif, The Krah and many many more than a sane person would want to be bothered with right now. The prolific international artist Unknown had also been pretty active.

Photo: HowAboutNo

We did miss out probably 3 key Shoreditch locations in an effort to end before darkness fell, one being the EndOfTheLine spot (think Eine’s Vandalism) which would have revealed the jaw dropping ultra fresh ATG paint job, another that twilight zone behind Curtain Street and also we missed the Banksy sniffing copper alleyway where we would have seen MJar at the top of his game doing a collection of his fantasy figures on a transparent paste-up.

Photo: HowAboutNo


Most of the week the wall in the Sclater Street car park is blocked by cars and vans but this Sunday evening we were able to catch Lister, Sickboy, Dscreet et al in stunning glory with the stench of piss and billowing market debris to lend true street ambience.

Eventually, we wound up in The Archers pub down at the bottom where Brick Lane turns into Osbourne Street, beer at £2.50 a pint suggested some kind of timewarp pricing kicking in. We bumped into MJar of all people who shared a pint (or two) and loads of cool stories about getting up and being involved over the past decade or so, the group was wowed by meeting someone whose street art had been seen on the walk. Coooool. All our exhausted perambulators received an envelope of stickers and cards collected (by Howaboutno and NoLionsinEngland, not by Cancer Sell) from street artists and shows over the past 6 months and in a particularly unusual form of lottery, two copies of Martin Bull’s Banksy Locations and Tours were given away.

We enjoyed sharing quite a lot of facts and no little bit of fiction with the group and as Cancer Sell remains a truly noble fundraising cause, we will dare to repeat the venture.

Another good reason to repeat is the wonderful efforts of this mob below whose self-perpetuating job-for-life is to prepare the blank canvas for our street art creatives, keep up the good work guys!

Graffiti Solutions!

Our plans are probably to do another Sunday afternoon job in a month or so, and possibly also a couple of mid-week evenings. Keep ‘em peeled for further news and as usual, more pics here.

Ahead of The Git

Stopped on my bike on the way home this evening to snap some rooftop stuff. It has been there for ages, its on a pretty fast and hectic stretch of road, the Euston Road just before the underpass.






Scientific measurements by journalists last year proved this is the shittiest, most polluted bit of road in England.

Its easy to spot this stuff on my way in to work, but I am usually late and it is also on the other side of the road. Tonight, as I came up the underpass I thought hah - lets do it. So I pulled over onto the derelict un-trodden paving that separates the 2 lanes of the westbound underpass from two lanes merging from Tottenham Court Road.


(this mauvey looking building is RASA, one of the best indians in London. Used to be the home of Ghurkas 20 years ago, a great Nepalese restuarant and student staple).

I'd grabbed a few pictures when a silver Porsche pulled to a stop on the outside lane of the slip road. The driver wound his window down and snarled "Don't stand there, you look like a policeman" (I was wearing a cycling top which retains its luminescence despite being 14 years old). I walked over and got a bit Churchillian right in his face, and he hit the pedal and fled.

Since when was a policeman putting the fear of the law into penis-mobile drivers a bad thing?



In case you were wondering, ATG, look above the restuarant rooftop, stands for the Ahead Of The Game crew which includes errrrrrrr... Elmo, flyboy, Mighty Mo, Panik, Asure, Getsy. possibly some or all London Frontline members, possibly they are one and the same, I dunno. But thats what it stands for and thats why the title.