As next week (Wednesday, June 1, 2016) the second edition of New Street Art by Claude Crommelin will be officially presented (Brick Lane Bookshop, London), I thought it helpful to translate my review of the first edition (New Street Art, April 6, 2013) into English. So that more people may share my enthousiasm for this inspirational book.
The street,
always the street, that unpredictable combination of purpose and blunder.
Newspaper flies over sidewalk, tree
drops some leaves exposing accidental bird, car bumps softly into lamppost
- lamp lights up and a man carefully
focusses his camera on the wildly painted wall,
the famous actrice patters by on the exact moment he presses the button.
The street is stage for improvisation on the theme intention versus coincidence.
In 2008 the
Amsterdam photographer Claude Crommelin moved to London. As soon as he started
scouting-out his new neighbourhood, he stumbled on a surprising quantity of
high-level street art. He bought a tiny digital camera and on almost daily
expeditions began to photograph every piece
he liked. Then he decided to put
these pictures together on flickr, http://www.flickr.com/photos/claudelondon/. Being a persistent guy he built a large
collection of pieces and an extensive documentation on London street-artists to
boot. Now, five years later, his book is
here: NEW STREET ART, by Claudelondon.
It is a
sturdy, square shaped (211 x 211 x 22 mm.) book, that I have trouble putting
aside ever since I layed my eager hands
on it.
The selection of the pieces is of great quality, the pictures are
clear and subtle, the ostensibly modest bits of text hide a treasure of
information. Of course the bookdesign gives the
pictures priority - each of the 272 pages
has one or more splendidly reproduced. But in the margin Claudelondon
manages to tell a lot about the makers and their work, to investigate the mores in street art and to relate
the – often comical – incidents that occurred while
hunting the volatile street-artists. Thus he intertwines the personal histories
of artists coming from all corners of the world with his own story - vagrant
birds of a feather.
To read this
book is like being on a hunt with him through the streets of Shoreditch; again and again with a stir of anticipation I
turn the page, as if I turn a corner to see what the next street has to offer.
Hasty, since many a piece is granted only a short life. Which for me is
precisely the essence of this artform: the whithering of a piece through time makes it an ode to the transience of the
street.
Since I have
known Claudelondon as a avid birder, I expected his book to sport at least a
folding map of the burrow covered by a colourful confetty of cyphers indicating
pieces by location, overlapping circles
(breeding grounds) and patterns of artist
migration. And of course the unavoidable app to facilitate the reader who wants
to tour East London guided as in a museum. But non of this is here - and I do
not miss it at all. The city street is ever changing; pavement gets broken up, new lampposts appear,
walls are torn down. Street art is simply part of street life and many an artist
turns out to be more elusive than a bird ever was.
The non-organized or rather the untamed character is street
arts’ hallmark. It is an expression from below, literally: from the streets. As
such it is the exact opposite of the topdown organised urban embellishment
project. Even though a singular street artist who has made a name for himself takes
money from the authorities to paint the fences around a disputed
construction-site (as Shepard
Fairey aka Obey did at the Central Station in Amsterdam).
That is why my favourite part of NEW STREET
ART is the grey coloured section in the back, called The unknown artists. It contains the persistantly anonymous pieces
whose makers even the fanatic Claudelondon has not managed to trace down. They
remain as anonymous as a kerb, a streetlamp, a passing cat. But they are just
as undeniably there. For me that is hard-core street art. And I am glad this
twitcher also mentions the birds he saw but could not put a name to. Way to go,
BrunaDude!
May 29, 2016
