Misdemeanours today, masterpieces tomorrow

Pablo Aravena’s Next primes the public on urban painting

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

For the last few years, Montreal filmmaker Pablo Aravena has been criss-crossing the globe, from New York City to Sao Paulo to Berlin to Tokyo, getting a fix on the global graffiti movement. The result is Next: A Primer on Urban Painting, which has its world premiere this weekend. While interviews with the art form’s originators and grand old men, such as Lee Quiñones, Doze Green and Style Wars doc-maker Henry Chalafant, sketch where the medium comes from, Next lives up to its title by focusing on where it’s going (which is everywhere and anywhere). The Mirror hassled a dog-tired Aravena over the phone from his hotel room in Puerto Rico.

Mirror: The basic arc of Next is to show how graffiti graduated, over the years, from the trainyards of the Bronx to art galleries worldwide, and in the process became an international visual language with its own local dialects. In charting that course, however, you bumped up against some fascinating tangents in graf’s evolution—the 3D light drawings of PIPS:labs, the geometric installations of Berlin’s Akim, the writing in the catacombs in Paris. Was it difficult to keep your eye on the ball, so to speak?

Pablo Aravena: The lightbulb for this whole film was looking at it as a world culture. I had a list of cities, and artists in each city, and I had a series of questions that I asked everybody. So there was a matrix that I was following. I tried to show people who personified different aspects. I knew what was next and what wasn’t next, if you will. I was also looking at the national variants. You look at the work from Brazil and it comes from a certain reality, the colour scheme and subject matter. The work from Germany and Holland is very linear and clean, architectural and geometric. You go down to Spain, the lines and colour are wilder. Then in Japan, you have this more minimal approach, with kanji-style tags. You see the Japanese art history, because Japan didn’t have perspective.

The graf gospel

M: Graffiti seems beset by inherent contradictions at every stage, possibly one source of its energy as an art form. The dawn of graf was torn between the anonymity its criminal aspect required and the all-city thing, the hunger for fame and recognition. As it has reaches the galleries, however, it loses not so much this vague notion of street cred as the ephemerality and, as far as the trains go, mobility that so defined it initially.

PA: I’ve had a lot of arguments about that. I remember talking with art students in England about it, and they were quoting Foucault and talking about semiotics, that it changes its meaning once it comes off the wall or train, and loses all its power. If you want to be purist and nerdy about it, sure, you could say that. But things evolve. It’s 34 years old now. It can’t stay what it was forever. Basically, it’s created generations of artists, the first, second and third wave. I always compare graf to jazz music, in the sense that, 100-and-something years ago, it was in the whorehouse. Then it went to the club, then the concert hall, and now you have to go to McGill to study jazz. It’s just the process of culture.

M: It was interesting hearing the writers defend their art form in their own words, but I think I was most struck by the remarks of the businessmen in London, who gave a degree of respect to the work by Banksy, while recognizing that piece they were critiquing in fact critiqued them.

PA: That shows a certain evolution in the public’s perception. The quality of the work—that’s kind of the point of the film, in a sense. Yes, it’s vandalism. Yes, it comes from the street. But look how good it is—period. I’m trying to preach the gospel here, showing the dope artwork to people who don’t know about it, and it’s gonna be so good that they can’t deny its value. That’s why I didn’t call it A Primer on Graffiti—I called it painting. This is the abstract expressionism of the 2000s. Years from now, a lot of these guys are going to be looked at as art history. Imagine hanging with the Impressionists when they were chilling in the café in Paris, before they became superstars. Having a little DV camera, which is portable and inoffensive, you can go and get this moment.

World premiere, with after-party featuring DJs Sixtoo, Moonstarr and Scott C, and live painting by Heavyweight, Roadsworth, Other, Labrona and Turf One, at Musée Juste Pour Rire on Friday, Oct. 21, 9 p.m., free

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