Demian Repucci content

I finally got to see the ‘Whole In The Wall’ show in New York put on by the Hellenbeck Gallery.  The New York Times wrote a recent article about the show which first caught my attention.  The show is subtitled ‘Old and New Masters: Largest American and European Street Art Exhibition in New York’.  Interesting claim.  The exhibit consists of about 12 artists along with a few photographers that focused on graffiti and street culture from the early days to the present.  The show also features an area populated by french estate furniture from the 17th and 18th Century juxtaposed with graffiti pieces.  The furniture was provided by Jean Gismondi, a Parisian antiques dealer.

My guess is that the show seeks to do a couple things.  First is to trace a historic line from the dirty, gritty, broke, intense roots of the beginnings of graffiti art to the monied, gallery-ized, culturally saturated, art-star graffiti of today.  The other is a sort of side project to draw parallels between baroque decorative detail and the detail found in the current visual vocabulary of graffiti.  Well… in my mind both fell a little short.

Though the show had many pieces it failed to attain the title of  ’retrospective’.  Too many pieces by the same artists.  And not enough variation of art or artistic style.  I think, really, it was more of a group show by the few graffiti artists that bothered to put some of their work on canvas or a panel that could be moved.  Of course Banksywas represented.  But Blek le Rat is very similar in style.  Maybe too similar.  But Banksy does not represent all of the variation of the London street art scene.  Where are pieces by the London Police, Dface or Faile?  And what about the artists in Spain and Italy?  Not to mention Eastern Europe?  Anyway, the show was a bit narrowly focused and the work was not the best that’s out there.  And one side note that must be mentioned - the prices on all of Lee Quinones’ pieces were ridiculously high.  About ten times too high.  I am not joking.

The french furniture, although a nice visual play of high and low, antique and new, ‘refined’ and ’street’ revealed nothing more than that to me.  And it did nothing to reinforce the ‘historic roots’ concept of the rest of the show.

A bright spot for me, though, was the photography.  Especially the shots of graffiti’s development in the early 1980’s.  Every shot of people standing in graffiti covered subway cars made my heart skip a bit.  These photographs let us peer back in time to a New York that was more intense, more gritty, more earnest.  Less comfy-cozy bourgeois that we have become used to now.  It made me remember my first trip to New York City with my dad and my brother when I was about 14 in the mid 80’s.  We walked down into the subway and the train whizzed by in a visual cacophony of colorful graffiti and spray paint scrawl.  I was transfixed.  When I finally returned to New York for good the city I moved to had been scrubbed clean.  Maybe too clean?  But these photographs of kids and cops riding graffiti covered trains brought back for me the New York I fell in love with.  Even if it was with an incomplete understanding of the troubled times the city was wadding through, it still looked vibrant and intensely creative.  This is where I wanted to be.

As boastful as the shows title sounded (’Masters’?  ‘Largest’?), it set the bar too high for itself.  But it is a large space filled with lots of graffiti.  And I am a sucker for graffiti.  Even though it is only up for a few more days it is worth checking out.  The fact that it was two blocks from my house didn’t hurt either…