Graffiti is the ultimate expression of the ephemeral, the here today, gone tomorrow game of cat and mouse with the Vandal Squad, property owners, and other graff writers, who move in a world of art, politics, and criminal mischief. Once upon a time, New York City was covered in scrawl, in tags and throw ups that lined every surface you could imagine.
It started on the streets then took to the trains, then on to the highways, vans and trucks, and eventually, canvases, art galleries, museums, and auction houses. Graffiti has become one of our most evocative sources of anti-social expression, a means to becoming equally parts famous and hated among the public at large.
But over the years, New York whittled away at this form of public discourse as fines were raised and jail time was incurred, as cases were built and kids were getting locked up. It got to the point that the trains and buses ran clean, and the streets slowly but surely were reclaimed by the clean, wholesome image that New York now projects, a beacon for foreign investments and bourgeois children of privilege.
And so as it was, and so it shall be that those dedicated to living the life, to pursuing the dream, they must adapt or die, as Darwin says. Mint&Serf, better known as The Mirf, have been walking the line between commercial and criminal throughout their lives. The received commissions from clients as diverse as the New York Yankees, the Ace Hotel, and Marc Jacobs, all the while running downtown studios with the support of Red Bull.
But commerce was the mistress, and art was the wife, and so the Mirf returned to where it all began. The mark. The tag. The proof of it all. Marker to surface, paint and scrawl. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was all. But artists grow and expand in thought, and the Mirf took it full circle and brought the wall indoors. Upon canvases they’d paint until the paint grew thick and took on a life of its own and began to live and breathe in space.
The canvases became layered with days and nights of who knows what they were on and what was on their mind. And as the canvases compiled, a book was born. Support. Therapy and Instability: Works by Mint&Serf, in collaboration with Jacuzzi Chris, Pablo Power and The Peter Pan Posse (Special Graffiti Unit) features texts by Cat Marnell, Carlo McCormick, and Peter Pan. Just released in conjunction with an exhibition at the Bleecker Street Arts Club (through February 22, 2014), Support. Therapy and Instability is more than a catalogue of paintings but a collection of photographs taking us behind the raw paintings and inside the collective. The photographs reflect the very thoughtful yet reckless energy of the paintings themselves.
As McCormick writes, “Though the paintings contained in this book must rank as some of the most self-indulgent art ever produced, what is remarkable is despite all this they are pretty damn smart and more a conceptual project than a mere orgy of vandalism…. I still hate these paintings and imagine some part of me will always feel that way, but I love them all the fucking same. Perhaps they represent one of those dangerous moments where there is truly a break in the hegemony of good taste and sensible reasoning.”
But in the lives of the artists, there may never have been a break, for their sense and sensibility is tied to art imitating life imitating art, a snake spinning round with its tail in its mouth. Support. Therapy and Instability is beautifully produced, elegantly designed, a conscious and deliberate act of a classical mind. In the work of The Mirf we are met with the tension that exists within the void, in the space where paradox amuses itself at all hours of the day and night with a spray can in hand and a canvas hung to the wall, recreating what we sometimes see but more often than not, look past without thought. Support. Therapy and Instability reminds us, if you decide to buff the walls, graffiti will just make its way inside, through the front door.
http://www.mintandserf.com/
http://bsacny.com/exhibitions/16/overview/
http://missrosen.wordpress.com
