Blast y el tiempo
Timelapse de Blast pintando la sala de mi depa. Ese chico se dedica a pintar en la calle, entre otras cosas.
Archived entries for art
Impresiones urbanas
Impressionism is an urban art, and not only because it discovers the landscape quality of the city and brings painting back from the country into the town, but because it sees the world through the eyes of the townsman and reacts to external impressions with the overstrained nerves of modern technical man. It is an urban style, because it describes the changeability, the nervous rhythm, the sudden, sharp but always ephemeral impressions of city life. And precisely as such, it implies an enormous expansion of sensual perception, a new sharpening of sensibility, a new irratability, and, with the Gothic and romanticism, it signifies one of th emost important turning points in the history of Western Art.
– Arnold Hauser en “The Social History of Art”, citado en un libro llamado The Urban Condition, que pueden leer por completo en Google Books.
Amateurs
A few days after I came across this shamelessly misleading ad in the street near where I live, some unknown member of the public answered back. Slapped across the chassis of the Ford Ka, small but unmissable in neat, black line-work, was a poster bearing the hand-drawn words ‘Let London breathe’ and the image of a woman’s bicycle. This changed everything. Suddenly the Ka billboard ceased to be a monologue, a piece of highly resourced and one-sided propaganda for a commercial point of view, and became a dialogue in which a radically different perspective was shown to exist. From this other viewpoint, the ‘alternative’ was not more cars in London’s streets, but fewer cars and other ways of solving the transport problem. Anyone looking at the modified Ka billboard now would have to think about the meaning of its claim to offer an alternative to public transport, even if they then went on to dismiss the cyclist/clean air point of view.
‘Let London breathe’ was a small but telling reminder of all that is routinely excluded and denied official expression in our supposedly public highways, but it was also significant in another way: it was a piece of graphic design. Not professional design. Sophisticated metropolitan imagineers would almost certainly have scoffed at the folksiness of the lettering and the antique air of the bike. The poster was awkwardly trimmed around the word ‘Let’, which projected beyond the main image area, suggesting it might have been cut from a larger image; perhaps it was made for some previous protest. Yet despise these oddities (partly because of them) it had graphic force. It has been designed for an use- and applied: it read well and one couldn’t miss it. If an amateur activist with a felt-tip pen, a pot of paste and the most rudimentary graphic skills can make you pause, what might a more professionally conceived form of graphic activism accomplish?
– Viene de “Design is advertising” de Rick Poynor, uno de los ensayos de Obey the giant.
