Hjalti Karlsson, Jan Wilker
September 4-September 10, 2006
Times Square, Madison Square Park, Chelsea, SoHo, Battery Park City, Coney Island
Image credit: Justin Ouellette
In search of an idea for the cover of Creative Time’s first major book celebrating thirty-three years of bringing art throughout New York City, the team of designers, Hjalti Karlsson and Jan Wilker of karlssonwilker inc., conceived of a means to generate a cover that would capture the essence of the organization: a site-specific public art project called The Urban Visual Recording Machine (UVRM).
The UVRM was a set of equipment housed in a truck reminiscent of a “pope mobile” with its large Plexiglas windows. The machines in the truck were programmed to record the colors, volume of sound and voices, and weather (wind speed and direction, temperature, and humidity) of each individual location the truck traveled to for that moment in time. The data was instantly transcribed into an abstract visual representation of the environment, with graphic shapes and patterns created by the designers and Show & Tell Production, and printed out on-site with the time and date. Every thirty seconds for five days the truck visited locations of signature Creative Time projects: Times Square, Chelsea, the East Village, Coney Island, The Art Parade in Soho, and Lower Manhattan. Five thousand book covers, each capturing a moment in New York City, were instantaneously printed on-site, effectively bringing together new technology with artistic vision as part of Creative Time: The Book.
The Urban Visual Recording Machine from creativetime on Vimeo.
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Keith Haring in the Subway 1980-1985
"December 1980, still in December probably, I go into the subway one day and see for the first time an empty black palate which has been put there to cover an old advertisement. I find out recently that they had been put there for years. I've seen photographs from the 40s and 50s, old subway photographs where there are these empty black panels. So it wasn't a new thing, but I had just never seen it before."
"But somehow this one day when I saw it going down in the entrance near my apartment at the time (the F train at 6 ave and 41st street), I saw this empty black panel, and immediately I knew that I had to draw on top of this panel. It was a waiting perfect surface."
"The paper they use to cover it is a soft matt black paper. If they had used shiny paper none of this would have ever happened. But they had this soft matt surface that was dying to get drawn on.
"I immediately knew that I had to go above ground and buy chalk."
--Haring, from interviews by John Gruen
Introduction to Art in Transit
Henry Geldzahler
In the 1960s and the 1970s, the New York subway system, and the city's doorways and blank walls, became internationally famous as the breeding ground and blackboard for the most fertile and pervasive crop of graffiti artists since "Kilroy was here" in the aftermath of World War ll. It is, perhaps, no accident that in both instances stress and danger - combat conditions and a certain camaraderie - prevailed.
The graffiti artist, or "writers” as the prefer to be called, graduate at any age between eleven and sixteen , from the schools and sidewalks to that olympic arena - public transportation. Enormous media attention has been focused on them. There has been, however,no unanimity of opinion on their value or on what their presence indicates about our society. What to one observer seems a healthy artistic outlet for rage, frustration, and the opportunity to identity in a culture which only "stars" are admired, is to another the unsightly defacement of public property - a Bronx cheer at government and authority.
Since the 1980's, a new presence has been seen and felt in New York City's street and subways. Radiant Babies, Barking Dogs and Zapping Spacecraft, drawing simply and with great authority, have entered the minds and memories of thousands of New yorkers. Our instant familiarity with this new pantheon of characters coincides with our rapid recognition that a sympathetic sensibility is at work in our midst. This call to attention, stronger than that exerted by the colossal glut of advertising or official signage, sets the work of Keith Haring apart from other graffiti writers. The man responsible for all this cheer never signs his work Keith Haring's gift to the public is generous and heartfelt - a celebration of the spirit that is not and cannot be measured in dollars.
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Nikki S lee
Nikki S. Lee is a Korean-born, New York City-based artist and filmmaker, born in 1970. After earning B.F.A. at Chung-Ang University in South Korea in 1993, she moved to New York in 1994 and attended the Fashion Institute of Technology. She earned her M.A. in photography at New York University in 1998.
In 1999 Lee's first one-person exhibition took place at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York, which was her exclusive representative from 1998 through the fall of 2007.
Lee's most noted work, Projects (1997–2001), begun while still in school, depicts her in snapshot photographs, in which she poses with various ethnic and social groups, including drag queens, punks, swing dancers, senior citizens, Latinos, hip-hop musicians and fans, skateboarders, lesbians, young urban professionals, and Korean schoolgirls. Lee conceives of her work as less about creating beautiful pictures, and more about investigating notions of identity and the uses of vernacular photography.
#7 from The Skateboarders Project
#18 from The Hispanic Project
#4 from The Yuppie Project
After observing particular subcultures and ethnic groups, Nikki S. Lee adopts their general style and attitude through dress, gesture, and posture, and then approaches the group in her new guise. She introduces herself as an artist (though not everyone believes her or takes it seriously), and then spends several weeks participating in the group’s routine activities and social events while a friend or member of the group photographs her with an ordinary automatic “snapshot” camera. Lee maintains control of the final image, however, insofar as she chooses when to ask for a picture and edits what photographs will eventually be displayed.
From schoolgirl to senior citizen, punk to yuppie, rural white American to urban Hispanic, Lee’s personas traverse age, lifestyle, and culture. Part sociologist and part performance artist, Lee infiltrates these groups so convincingly that in individual photographs it is difficult to distinguish her from the crowd. However, when photographs from the projects are grouped together, it is Lee’s own Korean ethnicity, drawn like a thread through each scenario, which reveals her subtle ruse.
Lee’s success with these projects depends heavily on the appearance of the final photographic record. Her use of the snapshot aesthetic is partly what convinces us that she belongs—along with her uncanny ability to strike the right pose. The electronic date stamp in the corner confers scientific specificity and authenticity, while at the same time marking the picture as candid and familiar, the work of an unassuming amateur. Indeed, sometimes they are exhibited as drug-store prints push-pinned to the wall. Exhibited as enlarged, framed works of art in a museum context, however, the photographs reveal the conceptual foundation of Lee’s projects. As a group or just mixed together, the projects support and define one another.
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Ed Ruscha, «Every Building on the Sunset Strip», 1965
Ed Ruscha took the photographs contained in this leporello with a motorized Nikon camera mounted to the back of a pick-up truck. This allowed him to photograph every house on the Sunset Strip while driving – first down one side of the street and then the other. The pictures were then pasted in order, and the individual buildings were labeled with their respective house numbers.
Black offset printing on white paper; folded and glued. 17,8 x 14,3 x 1 cm (closed); 760,7 cm (open). First edition: 1000 copies; second edition, 1971: 5000 copies.
The Sunset Strip appears in light-gray lettering on the cover and spine; Every/Building/ On the/Sunset/Strip inside (in an unlabeled silver slipcase). [From: Ed Ruscha, exhibition catalog, eds. Neal Benezra and Kerry Brougher, Zürich a/o. 2002]
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