If you are a street art fan, or even more accurately stated “a fan of graffiti” the tagging duo of Mint&Serf have shed their street vandalism tagging ways for one show to collaborate indoors, tagging canvases.  Because you can sell that.

The show titled Support, Therapy, and Instability just ended it’s run at Bleeker Street Arts Club.  If you are a Mint&Serf fanatic and missed their social media alerts that this show was on, enjoy these pictures.

If you aren’t a fan of graffiti, this show will take an open mind.  If you can blur your eyes beyond the words, abstract artwork might begin to form.  You know you are in for an interesting show when in their own press release they have to mention:

“Layered with paint, markers, and paper, the canvas is a never-ending sea of abstractly expressed thoughts and gestures. The dizzying result, described as anguished, dark, and criminal, can evoke conflicted reactions in the viewer.”

Multicolored tags on the traditional square / rectangle shape canvases, hanging in a gallery, in New York City.  That is how you know it’s art, not graffiti.

See, it’s fine art now.  Because, why not?

According to their press release:

“Working within the parameters of contemporary painting, the duo has used their history with street art and graffiti-writing to build a new portal of painting, a new surface, space and vision, that has not yet been explored,” says Laura Bloom, Director of Sandra Gering, Inc.”

It is mostly themselves getting wasted with their friends and tagging the words “Serf” and “Mint” in various colors, thicknesses, and mediums, and overlapping them, as well as some other words.

It is interesting to see how abstract words can become when they are overlapped to the point of illegibility.  It just becomes colors and shapes.

Which does make for an interesting thing to look at.  So who is to say this isn’t another way of making an abstract painting.  Words are just colored lines after all.

And now for the technical art-speak explanation of what they did:

For their show at Bleecker Street Arts Club, Mint&Serf have taken their graffiti practice inside the studio and applied the same gestural expression that they wildly employ out in the streets directly to canvases.  The result is a lush and crude composition, chaotic and thrilling.  Cat Marnell wrote, “What Mint&Serf … have accomplished with these pieces…so layered after months and months of tag upon tag upon tag…is to confine the unconfined: the spirit of vandalism, the energy and electricity of New York City graffiti.”

Mint&Serf have been featured in The New York Post, Interview Magazine, Huffington Post, Dossier Journal, Daily Mail, VICE, Paper, Gothamist and Blackbook.  Their book “Support, Therapy, and Instability” was published in 2013 with essays by Carlo McCormick and Cat Marnell.

Support, Therapy, and Instability by Mint&Serf ran from January 16 –  February 22, 2014 at Bleeker Street Arts Club 305 Bleecker St. NYC 10014

Written by Cojo “Art Juggernaut”

The post Mint & Serf Indoor Graffiti @ Bleeker Street Arts Club appeared first on Artiholics.

What kind of douche would tag a cartouche?  According to CNN, his name is Ding Jinghao unchained? (The D is silent 母亲 笨蛋!), a 15-year-old Chinese tourist whom actually carved the words “Ding Jinghao was here” into a 3,500-year-old ancient Egyptian Temple. This idiot does not know even the most basic rules of etiquette to graffiti writing.

The first rule would be to never tag your “real name” because it will make it a lot easier for you to get in “real trouble.”

The next would be, when you do tag something, you don’t need to write “was here” like KILROY, because the very fact that you tagged it implies that yes, you were there (making ‘was here’ redundant).,

If you have to do a “throw up tag,” try not to do it on an ancient cultural artifact while visiting a foreign country, they tend to frown upon that.

And finally, if you tag on top of someone else’s “piece,” the artist who created the original will have beef with you.  As the original artist of this piece is a long-dead 3,500-year-old mummy, the beef of course will be in the form of a Pharaoh’s curse, which will most likely (If you believe the movies) result in this Chinese “Teen Banksy” vomiting and shitting black blood while scarabs and hissing cockroaches crawl into his flesh from under his fingernails, and exit out of his orifices.

Great Job…Dingbat.

Written by Cojo “Art Juggernaut”

The post Can A Graffiti Tag Result In A 3,500-Year-Old Pharaoh’s Curse? appeared first on Artiholics.

New York, NY – Monday, April 22, 2013

One of NYC’s own living art legends, Kenny Scharf was arrested in Williamsburg / Bushwick, Brooklyn late Friday night for spray painting a black and white cartoon drawing of a snake in his signature style on private property (pictured above).  Kenny is a contemporary of Basquiat and Keith Haring.  One of the last of a dying breed of graffiti artist-cum-art stars of the 1980s.

Prior to this weekend, his most recent stint in a New York Prison for Graffiti charges was 30 years ago.  The now 55-year-old’s initial post on facebook after his his prison stay was of the image above with the caption:

“Just Spent 20 hours in 2 Brooklyn jails for this.”
-Kenny Scharf

I broke the story in this article on ArtSucks.com, and in the 9 hours since that posting the article has been read thousands of times by people in 44 countries, shared over 900 times, and liked over 335 times on Facebook.  It has been sourced in articles on Animal New York, Gothamist, Bushwick Daily, and Papermag and retweeted, forwarded, and stumbled hundreds of times.  Thanks for sharing everyone!

UPDATE: Day 2:

ArtSucks is becoming a 10-year-overnight-success, as the article is only a few clicks away from  500 likes.  The story is spreading, and a whole bunch of new sites have picked it up:  GalleristNY, Mass Appeal, Juxtapoz, Fecalface, Blouin ArtInfo and coolest of them all The Huffington Post because they gave us major love by just reprinting the title and first two paragraphs of the article and sending traffic directly to the site with a Read the whole story : Art Sucks.

Because they used my words verbatim, I can now add The Huffington Post to my writing credits.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE INITIAL ARTICLE ON ARTSUCKS.COM.

I spoke to Kenny Scharf recently and conducted an exclusive INTERVIEW WITH HIM this evening- read it here.

Written by Cojo “Art Juggernaut”

The post Kenny Scharf Arrested – The Scoop appeared first on Artiholics.

The newest episode of AMC’s The Walking Dead titled “Clear”  is now being heralded as possibly the second best episode next to the series pilot, and I can agree, it was amazing.  Not only for the full circle storyline of Rick and Carl visiting their home town and running into Morgan, the man who initially saved Rick and gave him the will to go on living, but finding Morgan living in a beautiful world of Art.

Is and has Morgan been a secret artist all along, or has the isolated world he’s been thrown into unlocked his true love of art, and his inner artistic potential?  The minute Rick, Michonne, and Carl step out of the car the screen begins to fill with a giant sculptural installation piece spanning a full town block.  From this point on in the episode there is rarely a shot that doesn’t have art somewhere on the screen.

Were you to find these sculptures installed in a Chelsea Gallery, they would fit right in without controversy.

The writing directly onto abandoned cars is classic Duchamp esque Dada.

The great use of type on the intersection broken up by the white lines, the three rows of abandoned cars, multi-colored arrows painted directly on the street leading in different directions, the various writings on tarps.  Ladders leading to strange windows color coded to match the arrows on the road.  An oddly placed blue door standing upright in the road leading to nowhere, this is brilliant.

Look at the detail of these punji stick sculptures.  Reminds me of Toothpick Explosion

Cages combined with bamboo with little living rats and birds in the core.  These sculptures have a living element, to compliment their killing element.

This looks like an umbrella stand of death.

The tower with various ropes and pulleys  in the middle of the parking lot created to be able to traverse the road from above without being bitten, is not only functional but beautiful.  Morgan truly has a gift.

Sometimes art can appear a bit dangerous.

Honing his craft Morgan has opted to let a little of the Walker clothing and sinew remain on this one, it adds a tactility to it that it otherwise wouldn’t possess.  Stunning!

The Artist In Repose

“Let me give you a tour of my studio, actually, I will talk to you more about my work when I regain consciousness.”  The interior of the building is art on a whole other level.

Aside from all the great words of varying sizes and colors, erased, written over, crossed out etc, there is on one wall with an amazing birds eye line art drawing of map of the town, and the areas of the town that have been cleared, and the areas that are burnt out.  This map reminded me of a Loren Munk Painting.

Rick is in awe of the amazing written text.  It far surpasses graffiti, in that it’s methodical to the point of excess.

Being trapped in a prison so long, Carl thought he might never see the color blue next to orange in such a beautiful way.  The R being reversed adds to the illusion of the artistic fall from sanity.  The artist has obviously thrown his full self into his artwork.

Michonne, surrounded by art for the first time in years is reminded of her love of sculpture.

Her favorite work is of course Venus de milo.  I only assume this of course, because she is somewhat of a sculptor herself.  She sculpted two of her own out of zombies earlier in the series.

The artist and her work “Venus de zombros.”

Here Rick is thinking:  “His overlaying of words, his color choices.  It’s not what he wrote, but what he wrote over, or crossed out that really gives it power and meaning.”

As the artist wakes up Rick fervently asks him how much he would have to have for this work.  “I know removing a wall will be difficult, but you must understand, money is no object.”  Rick forgets that money actually is “no object” in a post zombie apocalypse, but for the past few episodes he has been following ghosts around, so you look past this.  The walls of the prison are too drab, and this is just the right thing that would bring some life back into the old place.   Rick tries to commission a drawing installation for just one cell block, but Morgan puts his foot down.

“Listen, I don’t work on commission mother f**ker.  I make this art for me.  I pour my soul into these words, don’t you GET THAT?!”

Rick decides the least he can do is interview the artist.  He asks him a series of questions that end up putting Morgan in an awkward situation.

It reminded me a lot of this scene from the movie Basquiat.

So the question you have to ask yourself is, is Morgan going crazy, or is he just ahead of his time?

Art by Jean Michel Basquiat

Written by Cojo “Art Juggernaut”

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