Critical texts, United States, Cumberland, 06 June 2009
‘THE WALLS OF WATERLOO”
Photographs by Danielle Mortensen
Exhibition from June 6 to 26, 2009
Tangram Gallery
424 Virginia Avenue
Cumberland, Maryland 21052
Having grown up in New York in the 1980s (and having once nearly been caught in the Coney Island Subway yards with six cans of spray paint), I’ve noted that there are three types of graffiti: obnoxious and anonymous tagging, political sloganeering, and artistic endeavors in nontraditional media. Photographer Danielle Mortensen captures all three strains in the screen-printed photographs of her exhibition “The Walls of Waterloo” now showing at the Tangram Gallery at 424 Virginia Avenue in Cumberland. The canvases capture graffiti Mortensen encountered in the London underground, and the multiple filters through which we experience the work (first the eye of the graffiti artist, then the eye of the photographer, then our own eye) allow us to be surprised by how truly artistic graffiti can be by how well it survives dislocation, much the way the work of Keith Haring survived the transition from wall to t-shirt a generation ago.
We see the three strains of graffiti brought together in “Gentrify This!!!”–the large, light blue “billboard” that takes up most of the canvas’s upper portion shows the hand-painted Gentrify This above a concrete wall. The lower half of the canvas is peppered with socio-political slogans (“we need the freedom to stencil”), tags, and stenciled renderings of five spray paint cans designed to look like Warhol soup cans among a variety of other stencils. A cable seems to split the canvas in two, so that the whole piece seems paneled like a comic book in microcosm. “Gentrify This!!!” becomes a slogan, and the word gentrify–often used as a way of talking about positive socio-economic change in poor sections of major cities–is turned on its head by the graffiti artist’s craft.
The silk-screened photo renderings that Mortensen uses were championed by Warhol (as was Jean-Michael Basquiat, the most famous of the eighties graffiti artists) and this piece, with its comic Campbell’s Tomato Spray cans, brings together the variety of artistic intersections nicely without self-consciousness.
It’s this lack of post-modern intrusive self-awareness that makes these pieces compelling. Perhaps because these are artistic renderings of art, and therefore such self-consciousness has been mediated out of the work; however, while we never lose sight of the fact that these photographs were “framed” and printed by an artistic process, Mortensen’s choices allow for all the surprise and artistry of the graffitied originals to do the work.
For instance, in her canvas of Jef Aerosol’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, a slightly inclined hand rail splits the piece in two, and it appears that a young man–knees to chest, arms around knees, chin on knees–sits on the rail. To the left, another figure sits, this one split by the rail. He holds his bowed head so it’s as if he were crying. Both figures are in black-and-white and are in shop contrast to the supporting figures: above and to the left of the latter is a reddish tiger’s head, while above the other figure is a series of white, cartoonish heads–and through their placement these seem to work like thought bubbles in the piece. Although such big figures are what captures our attention at first glance, it’s the subtleties of the canvas that kept me looking. A small red arrow points at each figure, and similar arrows point at the pigeon that seems to fly between them, and two the two more pigeons that stand on the ground beside a frog and a cat.
An entire story is implicit in this piece–are these men brothers, lovers, friends? Their sadness is made visceral by the use of black-and-white contrasted against the colors of their “thoughts.” Imagine the commuters at the train station writing their own lives into this graffitied scene.
In the show, this piece is set between two renderings of noted graffiti artist Bansky’s work: “Buddha in a Neckbrace” by and “Blowing Hearts,” each a single figure canvas. In the latter, a young girl in black-and-white blows a dandelion, the spores of which are small hearts, several of which seem to float toward the upper right corner. Although the hearts can be a cliché and even sentimentalized image, their context as both graffiti and as dandelion weed transforms the over-familiar into the fresh. The dandelion, the heart/spores, and the bow in the girl’s hair are all red, while the upper most levels of brick are a blue that is no doubt meant to represent sky and works in sharp contrast to the natural brown of the bricks themselves. Blowing dandelion spores is one way to make a wish as a child, and the hearts make us assume she is wishing for love. It’s a haunting image, made more so by the way the curves of the graffiti (the hearts, the dandelion’s circle, the folds of the girl’s dress) contrast with the right angles of the masonry and the jagged cracks in the bricks themselves.
Mortensen knows that such contrasts are the hallmark of graffiti art–the “canvas’ is often imperfect and the artist has to work with such imperfections. Ditto location establishes contrasts. By printing the photographs on canvas for display in a gallery, Mortensen further deepens the dialectic of such work so that graffiti’s inherent duality as public nuisance and public art (emphasized best in her photo of Bansky’s “Roller Chimp,” in which a chimpanzee rollers paint on a brick wall–is the graffiti maker artist or mindless animal?) is explored. If art is the experience, as John Dewey claimed, then both Mortensen’s work, and the originals she honors, argue that graffiti at its finest is an art.
One piece that best illustrates this is “Buddha in a Neck Brace,” a wonderful mixture of the sacred and the profane. It uses all the traditional Buddha iconography (the bronze color, the halo, the traditional sitting mudra), so that–at first glance–one might not notice this is a beat up Buddha: its left hand is bandaged, its nose is bloodied, and it wears a neck brace. Another canvas that transforms familiar–albeit pop-cultural–iconography is the ironically titled “Freedom Kiss,” which shows a blurry rendering of Madonna and Britney Spears’s kiss on MTV a few years back, shown so it’s almost as if the two are behind bars.
More likely, the black-and-white “kiss” is seen through a blurry television screen, as the image is centered in the canvas like a screen, or it’s portrayed to work as a window on the brick face of the building. The curves of the electric cables above the kiss reflect the cursive declaration that “life is beautiful” below, both of which strain against the masonry’s lines and the imperfect black vertical lines of the screen. All this is echoed in miniature in the lower left side of the canvas where a painted pigeon stands in a white box so it seems as if it’s caged ... or in a television’s glowing screen. It’s this attention to detail that, no doubt, captured Mortensen’s photographer’s eye.
What’s lovely about these canvases is the collaborative nature of the works. Mortensen’s use of canvas adds a layer to these photos of paint on brick and concrete. This mediation doesn’t distance the viewer from the experience but instead forces us to reconsider the notion of how we experience art.
--- Gerry Lafemina
Photographs by Danielle Mortensen
Exhibition from June 6 to 26, 2009
Tangram Gallery
424 Virginia Avenue
Cumberland, Maryland 21052
Having grown up in New York in the 1980s (and having once nearly been caught in the Coney Island Subway yards with six cans of spray paint), I’ve noted that there are three types of graffiti: obnoxious and anonymous tagging, political sloganeering, and artistic endeavors in nontraditional media. Photographer Danielle Mortensen captures all three strains in the screen-printed photographs of her exhibition “The Walls of Waterloo” now showing at the Tangram Gallery at 424 Virginia Avenue in Cumberland. The canvases capture graffiti Mortensen encountered in the London underground, and the multiple filters through which we experience the work (first the eye of the graffiti artist, then the eye of the photographer, then our own eye) allow us to be surprised by how truly artistic graffiti can be by how well it survives dislocation, much the way the work of Keith Haring survived the transition from wall to t-shirt a generation ago.
We see the three strains of graffiti brought together in “Gentrify This!!!”–the large, light blue “billboard” that takes up most of the canvas’s upper portion shows the hand-painted Gentrify This above a concrete wall. The lower half of the canvas is peppered with socio-political slogans (“we need the freedom to stencil”), tags, and stenciled renderings of five spray paint cans designed to look like Warhol soup cans among a variety of other stencils. A cable seems to split the canvas in two, so that the whole piece seems paneled like a comic book in microcosm. “Gentrify This!!!” becomes a slogan, and the word gentrify–often used as a way of talking about positive socio-economic change in poor sections of major cities–is turned on its head by the graffiti artist’s craft.
The silk-screened photo renderings that Mortensen uses were championed by Warhol (as was Jean-Michael Basquiat, the most famous of the eighties graffiti artists) and this piece, with its comic Campbell’s Tomato Spray cans, brings together the variety of artistic intersections nicely without self-consciousness.
It’s this lack of post-modern intrusive self-awareness that makes these pieces compelling. Perhaps because these are artistic renderings of art, and therefore such self-consciousness has been mediated out of the work; however, while we never lose sight of the fact that these photographs were “framed” and printed by an artistic process, Mortensen’s choices allow for all the surprise and artistry of the graffitied originals to do the work.
For instance, in her canvas of Jef Aerosol’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, a slightly inclined hand rail splits the piece in two, and it appears that a young man–knees to chest, arms around knees, chin on knees–sits on the rail. To the left, another figure sits, this one split by the rail. He holds his bowed head so it’s as if he were crying. Both figures are in black-and-white and are in shop contrast to the supporting figures: above and to the left of the latter is a reddish tiger’s head, while above the other figure is a series of white, cartoonish heads–and through their placement these seem to work like thought bubbles in the piece. Although such big figures are what captures our attention at first glance, it’s the subtleties of the canvas that kept me looking. A small red arrow points at each figure, and similar arrows point at the pigeon that seems to fly between them, and two the two more pigeons that stand on the ground beside a frog and a cat.
An entire story is implicit in this piece–are these men brothers, lovers, friends? Their sadness is made visceral by the use of black-and-white contrasted against the colors of their “thoughts.” Imagine the commuters at the train station writing their own lives into this graffitied scene.
In the show, this piece is set between two renderings of noted graffiti artist Bansky’s work: “Buddha in a Neckbrace” by and “Blowing Hearts,” each a single figure canvas. In the latter, a young girl in black-and-white blows a dandelion, the spores of which are small hearts, several of which seem to float toward the upper right corner. Although the hearts can be a cliché and even sentimentalized image, their context as both graffiti and as dandelion weed transforms the over-familiar into the fresh. The dandelion, the heart/spores, and the bow in the girl’s hair are all red, while the upper most levels of brick are a blue that is no doubt meant to represent sky and works in sharp contrast to the natural brown of the bricks themselves. Blowing dandelion spores is one way to make a wish as a child, and the hearts make us assume she is wishing for love. It’s a haunting image, made more so by the way the curves of the graffiti (the hearts, the dandelion’s circle, the folds of the girl’s dress) contrast with the right angles of the masonry and the jagged cracks in the bricks themselves.
Mortensen knows that such contrasts are the hallmark of graffiti art–the “canvas’ is often imperfect and the artist has to work with such imperfections. Ditto location establishes contrasts. By printing the photographs on canvas for display in a gallery, Mortensen further deepens the dialectic of such work so that graffiti’s inherent duality as public nuisance and public art (emphasized best in her photo of Bansky’s “Roller Chimp,” in which a chimpanzee rollers paint on a brick wall–is the graffiti maker artist or mindless animal?) is explored. If art is the experience, as John Dewey claimed, then both Mortensen’s work, and the originals she honors, argue that graffiti at its finest is an art.
One piece that best illustrates this is “Buddha in a Neck Brace,” a wonderful mixture of the sacred and the profane. It uses all the traditional Buddha iconography (the bronze color, the halo, the traditional sitting mudra), so that–at first glance–one might not notice this is a beat up Buddha: its left hand is bandaged, its nose is bloodied, and it wears a neck brace. Another canvas that transforms familiar–albeit pop-cultural–iconography is the ironically titled “Freedom Kiss,” which shows a blurry rendering of Madonna and Britney Spears’s kiss on MTV a few years back, shown so it’s almost as if the two are behind bars.
More likely, the black-and-white “kiss” is seen through a blurry television screen, as the image is centered in the canvas like a screen, or it’s portrayed to work as a window on the brick face of the building. The curves of the electric cables above the kiss reflect the cursive declaration that “life is beautiful” below, both of which strain against the masonry’s lines and the imperfect black vertical lines of the screen. All this is echoed in miniature in the lower left side of the canvas where a painted pigeon stands in a white box so it seems as if it’s caged ... or in a television’s glowing screen. It’s this attention to detail that, no doubt, captured Mortensen’s photographer’s eye.
What’s lovely about these canvases is the collaborative nature of the works. Mortensen’s use of canvas adds a layer to these photos of paint on brick and concrete. This mediation doesn’t distance the viewer from the experience but instead forces us to reconsider the notion of how we experience art.
--- Gerry Lafemina
Comments 0
Say something