Menace 2 Society: NYC Police led this 12-year-old girl out of her classroom in handcuffs for doodling on her desktop…

Increasingly, harsh zero tolerance policies towards graffiti and other offenses in US schools are seeing grade school-aged children being treated with harsh adult-style police discipline inside the actual classroom. This problem was exemplified when, incredibly, a 12-year-old NYC girl with a spotless record was physically arrested in her classroom for doodling on her desktop this month:

GIRL’S ARREST FOR DOODLING RAISES CONCERNS ABOUT ZERO TOLERANCE
By Stephanie Chen, CNN February 18, 2010

(CNN) — There was no profanity, no hate. Just the words, “I love my friends Abby and Faith. Lex was here 2/1/10 ” scrawled on the classroom desk with a green marker.

Alexa Gonzalez, an outgoing 12-year-old who likes to dance and draw, expected a lecture or maybe detention for her doodles earlier this month. Instead, the principal of the Junior High School in Forest Hills, New York, called police, and the seventh-grader was taken across the street to the police precinct.

Alexa’s hands were cuffed behind her back, and tears gushed as she was escorted from school in front of teachers and — the worst audience of all for a preadolescent girl — her classmates.

“They put the handcuffs on me, and I couldn’t believe it,” Alexa recalled. “I didn’t want them to see me being handcuffed, thinking I’m a bad person.” Click HERE to continue reading at CNN…

What has to be the final nail in the “Street Art” coffin was driven in last weekend by none other than MR. BRAINWASH (aka: “The Christian Audigier of Street Art”) when he opened his massive, self-produced “Icons” show in a rented space (which, ironically, was once a real art gallery, pre-recession) in the heart of Chelsea. As the subject of Brit Street Art king Banksy’s recent docu-parody film, “Exit Through The Gift Shop,” MBW has been the focus of much hype and speculation as his presence finally seeps into the fairly muddy stream of mainstream consciousness. Last week’s Wall Street Journal article articulated this particularly well:

“Fueling the buzz around Mr. Brainwash is that no one knows exactly who the 44-year-old is. Some Web sites have speculated that he may be an invented character, part of a performance-art hoax. Others think he may, in fact, be the popular British street artist Banksy, whose face has never been shown on camera … “Maybe I am Banksy,” says the enigmatic artist, who says his real name is Thierry Guetta and speaks in a thick French accent. “Maybe not.”

Of course, the most amusing part of all this dumbfounded hypothesizing is how real—and accessible—Mr. Brainwash actually is. Far from actually being Banksy or any other legitimately mysterious street art phantom, MBW is simply Thierry Guetta, aka “French Terry,” a Los Angeles-based French transplant who cut his teeth in recent years by following around the architects of the scene, Shepard Fairey and Banksy, camera in hand, capturing film of them in action for what was to be his own documentary on street art. In the process, Guetta was inspired to follow in the footsteps of his idols and ultimately passed through the looking glass, assuming the incredibly ridiculous moniker of “Mr. Brainwash.” Guetta then forged a visual identity for himself by mining literally every Pop Art gimmick of the past 50 years and running it through the stylistic filter of Fairey and Banksy to achieve his own heavily derivative results. Of course, this would all be an act of genius (or at least considerable humor) if French Terry was doing it as a grand act of parody, skewering the scene he had been so closely observing for all its inherent gimmickry and blasé appropriation. In the process of his conversion, however, French Terry, like the computers in so many Sci-Fi tales, became self-aware, and convinced that he himself was in fact a true artist and the bona-fide “next big thing” of street art. Enter Banksy…

Convinced that Terry—due to his own directorial ineptitude or self-possessed drive to become a street artist himself—would never finish the original film as planned and recognizing the inherent absurdity of the would-be filmmaker’s hilarious conversion, Banksy did what he does best and flipped the tables by taking possession of Guetta’s reels and creating a new documentary with his own team. Focused not on himself or Shepard Fairey as originally intended, “Exit Through The Gift Shop” would instead chronicle French Terry’s amazing transformation as a metaphor for the absurdity of the street art world and Banksy’s own brilliant “take a sucker for all they’re worth” ethos. The result was billed by Banksy as “The world’s first street art disaster movie,” with the film’s trailer showing footage of Terry spilling paint in his truck and walking into signposts while quotes like “in a world with no rules, one man broke them all,” flashed across the screen. You could almost hear the sound of journalists scratching their heads at screenings in Park City (Sundance) and Berlin.

Dateline, February 12, 2010: Following up his self-produced June 2008 one man show in LA (that was itself a direct copy of Banksy’s epic solo show there two years earlier) that was held in a cavernous old abandoned TV studio facilitated by his family’s extensive real estate holdings and chronicled in depth here on Supertouch, French Terry unveils the East Coast installment of his street art apocalypse with the opening of “Icons” at a massive rented defunct gallery space in Chelsea. Featuring an equally absurd array of Warhol-derived celebrity portraiture (using silkscreen and splatter paint along with broken 45 records as his prime medium), mixed with Claes Oldenburg-style object sculpture, and exact replicas of Banksy-style found old master hotel room paintings featuring modern ironic interventionist touches (ie: P-Diddy raising the roof in a Renoir style oil painting) with prices ranging up to the—hold your breath—$300,000 mark, the show was pure MBW through and through. And while serious art collectors scoffed, knowing that the only reason French Terry was going rogue to such extent in NYC (aside from the obvious financial gains of having no gallery to cut in on the take) was because no serious art gallery would touch him, new money suckers and socialites were lining up to fork over the green to invest in the street art equivalent of Bear Stearns. Of course, MBW loyalists would cite his sold out show of work at SoHo’s Opera Gallery late last year as evidence of a real art career, but Opera is simply a tourist art gallery dabbling heavily in so-called “lowbrow” and “street art” of late (with a heavily funded/deluded client base, no less).

So what’s the take away here? Do we love French Terry for what he is? Deride him for who he thinks he is? Embrace him for bringing laughter to our hearts and lips? In the end, we at Supertouch are left to mine our own previous coverage of MBW’s Los Angeles show to deliver an apt closing moral:

“To call last nite’s opening of newly minted and ridiculously named “artist” MR BRAINWASH an “art show” would be a disservice to artists everywhere and even Mr Brainwash himself. Instead, let’s call it what it really is: a grand art prank of epic proportions. A heist. A spoof. A joke. Or maybe just the biggest, funnest, sloppiest high school art fair of all time … In the words of one of LA’s most pioneering street art provocateurs, Skullphone, “if Disneyland wanted to open a street art ride, this is what they’d have done.”

Our prediction for French Terry’s next big project? Our money’s fully on the Mr. Brainwash clothing line by Christian Audigier. It’s just too bad Michael Jackson’s not around to see it (or this show), he would have eaten it up…

HAVE A LOOK:

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ST buddies Damien, Hacula, Terry Richardson, and our beloved John Waters at the fete. Flix by AA…

Our friends at ART IN AMERICA covered the scene well at the opening of DAMIEN HIRST’s “End of an Era” show (so named because supposedly it’s the last time his formaldahyde pieces will be shown) at GAGOSIAN’s Madison Ave. gallery, but the NEW YORK OBSERVER did a good job summing up the show quite nicely:

IS THIS THE END OF A DAMIEN HIRST ERA?
By Alex Taylor | New York Observer  Feb 2, 2010

It’s time we had a talk about Damien Hirst. I know, I know. Mr. Hirst, who was born in 1965 and came to prominence in the London art scene of the late 1980s as the first among equal of the Young British Artists, has for so long been ascending to the kind of fame perversely reserved for artists of maximum visibility and a minimum of formal skills that the mere mention of his name may prompt a fatigued groan even among the most detached museum-goer. That guy? Again? So what’d he do now? Mr. Hirst has been such a big player in art during the last decade and a half—everything from its calculated affronts and controversies to its biennial boom to the explosion in cost-and-scale: in short, the very market mechanism itself. If you are one of those people who don’t particularly like contemporary art or disagreed with the Met’s decision to display Mr. Hirst’s dead shark for three years, you probably think Mr. Hirst has a lot to answer for. This thought was occasioned by Hirst’s current show at the uptown Gagosian Gallery, which runs until March 6. “End of an Era,” its called. And the title feels just about right. Click HERE to continue reading…

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In Honor of MOTHER’S DAY, Supertouch’s resident tattoo godfather SCOTT CAMPBELL will be doing “Mom” tattoos for $100 each on a first come first served basis this Sunday, May 10th at THE SMILE (SAVED TATTOO’s second location in Manhattan). He will have a set of 5 designs to choose from that he drew up specifically for the occasion, and he will not tattoo these designs again after Sunday. Inking starts at 8am and Scotty will take as many people as he can until 6pm. Don’t sleep!

THE SMILE: 26 Bond St, between Lafayette and Bowery, NYC.

The work of 74-year-old painter PETER SAUL reveals an artist whose vigor for wild Cartoon Expressionism remains undiminished by age. A pioneer of Pop Art who wears his pulp influences on his sleeve, Saul has created some of his finest modern work in this show of mostly large scale new paintings now on display at NYC’s venerable DAVID NOLAN GALLERY, all of which explode with the trademark color and humor inherent in all of the artist’s most memorable work. Rightfully, the paper of record has taken notice:

The irrepressible Peter Saul, now 74, continues his cheerfully acerbic, riotously goofy ways. The paintings in this entertaining show are made in Mr. Saul’s signature Pop-Surrealist cartoon style. With their rubbery, pneumatic forms neatly rendered with a spongy, semi-pointillist touch in glowing colors, they are like much-enlarged stills from a twisted animated film.

There are three different types of pictures: weirdly personal, violently political and insouciantly art historical. In “Viva la Difference,” a grinning bon vivant in pajamas with a martini in one hand wraps his arm around an amorphous blob that sprouts multiple breasts and is perforated by numerous vaginal orifices. (Talk about your male gaze!)

On the political front, there’s “Stalin & Mao,” in which the dictators are represented as giants punching the heads off enemy soldiers. As for art history, “Better Than de Kooning,” a translation of de Kooning’s “Woman” paintings from the 1950s into a picture of bulging, writhing, tubular forms, is visually captivating and amusingly Oedipal.

“Beckmann’s the Night” is based on a 1919 painting by Max Beckmann. In Mr. Saul’s version, a green maniac armed with a knife and a pistol attacks a naked blonde tied by her wrists to an overhead beam, while Beckmann himself licks the swollen foot of a half-naked man who hangs by the neck. A careening bullet rips through the flesh of the strung-up victims. Mr. Saul’s picture reminds us that few sights are more gripping to behold than scenes of horrific carnage.
—KEN JOHNSON, NYTimes

On display until May23rd, consider this a must-see show of the highest order. HAVE A LOOK: Read the rest of this entry »

Every nascent artist knows that a glowing review in the NY TIMES can do wonders for “making” a career in the art world. Incredibly deserving Supertouch buddy TOMOO GOKITA got just such a boost this week when art writer KAREN ROSENBERG took notice of his excellent new show “Champion Carnival” at ATM GALLERY (previously covered HERE):

TOMOO GOKITA: ‘Champion Carnival’
ATM Gallery, 621 West 27th Street, Chelsea (through May 2)
“If you think that black-and-white painting is the province of Minimal and Conceptual artists, Tomoo Gokita’s strong second solo show in Chelsea will shatter your illusions. Mr. Gokita, a Japanese draftsman turned painter, invokes Surrealism, Op Art and post-painterly abstraction without ever dipping into color.

Mr. Gokita, who works in gouache and on a range of scales, specializes in controlled chaos: small areas of tonal modeling suggest a black-and-white photograph torn into tiny pieces and rearranged. Insectoid B-movie forms, as in “Solid State Survivor,” and occasionally puerile humor, as in “Hemorrhoids,” temper the palette’s austerity.

Female figures seem to inspire the most arresting compositions and varied brushwork. The limbs of the woman in “Night and Day” have the even, metallic sheen of forms in a Fernand Léger painting; her hair, meanwhile, is a frosted mass, like a thundercloud. And in “Kathryn,” a similar hairdo is a foil for a striped shirt and neat button earrings. The face is a featureless slab.

There’s something uncanny about Mr. Gokita’s art; it could almost be a black-and-white reproduction of a full-spectrum painting.” —Karen Rosenberg

Wow, take a trip in the way back machine to when the old New York was the only New York, the subway looked like a rolling art gallery, and  FUTURA (then known as FUTURA 2000) and MADONNA were coupled up big time…

Controversial Algerian artist ADEL ABDESSEMED whose works depicting animals in often violent and fatal situations has brought his incomparable vision to American shores with his first NYC solo gallery show “Rio” at DAVID ZWIRNER. Opening last weekend to a crowd that included the awestruck alongside the aghast, the show’s crowing installation was a massive sculpture of twisted and intertwined plane wreckage that transformed the original vehicles into what closely resembled a trio of wrestling earthworms that inevitably brought to mind the crash landing of a passenger plane in the Hudson River this winter. The most divisive works, of course, could be found in the exhibition’s screening room where short films of animal fighting and abuse were screened in loops as an illustration of cultural violence not intended for the faint of heart. In fact, this is exactly the type of work Republicans usually trot out in front of Congress when lobbying against Federally subsidized arts programs. Explaining the show’s title, the artist said, “The show is called Rio, meaning river. I observe the world with the same fascination that my daughter, Rio, contemplates the big animals in the zoo that are thirsty and hungry.” Having roused the ire of Italian audiences with his “The Wings of God,” exhibition in Turin, Italy and the outright condemnation of pseudo-hippies in the Bay Area with his “Don’t Trust Me” show at the SF Art Institute (which was canceled before the scheduled end date), both of which featured similarly violent animal films, Abdessemed is boldly taking the fight for artistic expression to the front lines of the art world with the help of a gallery unintimidated by the current pervasive climate of fear and loathing. An impressive array of other conceptual works including “Music Box,” with a mechanism made from an oil drum, and “Prostitute,” a set of leather bound copies of the Bible, Torah, and Koran, each meticulously handwritten, page by page, by actual prostitutes rounds out the provocative show which, in these knee-knocking times, should be considered essential viewing for all. HAVE A LOOK: Read the rest of this entry »