Weekend in New Orleans

Since I’ve been back in the US, I’ve been traveling with my friend Jayson and his sideshow gig, Ming Donkey’s One Man Band. Spent Saturday and Sunday in New Orleans, that fantastic hobo city of pirates and saints. Everyone has a story there, and all the stories are the same: “hopped a train, had a plan, landed here (that wasn’t the plan)”

I’ve loved this city forever, spent my life escaping three hours south, along the world’s most crooked straight line. Nothing like chasing tattooed clowns. Anyhow, the story starts here:

Donk was playing a farewell party at Saturn Bar, a classy little dive on St. Claude. Our friend John is leaving for Afghanistan. He’s already been dispatched twice to Iraq, and he has a lifelong fear of cannolis, which it’s better not to get into. But his girlfriend, Tami, brought a whole table of cannolis, muffalettas and mac & cheese from the Italian restaurant her family owns. So I ate a cannoli and washed it down with whiskey. This plan could have backfired. Luckily, it didn’t.

Living Walls Conference: Debate Continues

In the comments section of the Burnaway article…

There’s this, from MTM:

“My disappointment with the City is not in the lack of public work or ’street art’ but in the lack of discourse about it especially after this very egocentric grand stand of self professed street art is largely over.

I’m not sure if the conference or Pecha Kucha presentations approached any of the important questions about the act of graffiti and it’s place in art history because I didn’t attend. But from a outsiders critical and curatorial perspective, I think the project lacked some grounding and rigor. There were questions that occurred to me over the course of the thing and I wish there was more discourse about it here. Instead all I hear is “what a great party that was!” So if nothing else, yeah, it was a great gathering.

Living Walls Controversy

So this is Living Walls Part 3, I guess…or maybe instead of Living Walls: The City Speaks, this is Living Walls: The Conversation Continues. Or maybe you could even call it Living Walls: The Assault.

I’ve just heard that some of the Living Walls murals have already been painted over, most notoriously by a local writer named Vomet. Here are photos of the Swampy/Gaia/Greg Mike wall, taken from the Living Walls Facebook page:

The FB reaction ranges from people cheering Vomet on and complementing his style to disappointment, outrage and casual acceptance.

Keep reading at Juxtapoz.

Living Walls at Burnaway

“OX moves beyond the common practice of simply appropriating public space for the proliferation of personally meaningful marks or imagery by incorporating aesthetic elements of a piece’s environment into the language of the piece itself. The result is work in a place that is also about that place and therefore about anyone who is in that place to see it. The status of the commandeered public space is elevated from that of mere canvas to objet d’art—the viewer graduates from witness to participant, completing the work by observing it.”

Artist Daniel Clay’s take on his Living Walls experience, at Burnaway, an online arts magazine out of Atlanta. The editor Jeremy Abernathy asked a few disparate parties (including me!) to weigh in on the conference. Check it out here.

Living Walls Conference, part 2

Part 1 lives here.

Friday afternoon and evening, there were panels and lectures (and one amazing cake!) at Georgia Tech. There was a lot that was awesome and a little that wasn’t about this part of the conference. Awesomeness #1: the lectures were packed, right up till the end of the night (10:30-ish). And yeah, some of the people were Living Walls affiliates, artists and such, but there were also a ton of Georgia Tech students and sundry other locals.

Keep reading at Juxtapoz. For more pics of Living Walls, check out my Picasa page.