Street art

Guerrilla knitters fight the power in
Yarn Bombing. Plus: Gig Posters Vol. 1

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG and
ROXANNE HUDON

Yarn Bombing: The Art of
Crochet and Knit Graffiti
Street crews, ninja masks and guerrilla tactics: grab those needles and join the “yarn domination.” In Yarn Bombing: The Art of Crochet and Knit Graffiti, Vancouver-based knit artists Mandy Moore and Leanne Prain introduce us to this new brand of street art.

Started in 2005, yarn bombing involves attaching a handmade item to street fixtures or leaving it in the landscape. It has become what the authors call an “international guerrilla knitting movement,” with knitted tags popping up everywhere from Canada to China.

The opening chapter covers the history of the phenomenon and the ideas behind it. It defines the activist side, going as far as comparing it to a form of anarchy and saying that some artists have used it to counter “industrial capitalism.” Forget your crazy Marxist ideas, just make a scarf and tie it to a telephone pole! More sweaters, less global warming!

The following six chapters are a step-by-step guide on how to join the world of yarn bombing. This includes everything from the best equipment to use and how to organize your own “crew,” to the best ways to tag and several patterns to knit or crochet. If you’re like me, however, and needles are for medical purposes only, then you probably won’t get all the technical terms like “gauging,” “swatching,” “chevrons” and “bobbles.”

On the plus side, there are photos on every page that will keep you entertained. Some are just simple rectangular tags on trees, but others are quite impressive, like a pink crocheted army tank cozy. My favourite is “The Hare,” a 200-foot-long pink bunny by Vienna-based art collective Gelatin, stuffed with straw and completely knitted with wool.

If you’re still scratching your beard wondering, “What the fuck’s the point?” then just enjoy the puns: Knitta, please, Incogknito, beat-knit, Mascuknitty, Kninja and so on and so forth and all that yarn. (RH)

Gig Posters Vol. 1: Rock
Show Art of the 21st Century
Outside of a small clutch of marginal genre obsessives, the vinyl record and the foot-squared jacket that went hand in hand with it are a thing of the past. Soon enough, as a matter of fact, their five-inch descendant, the CD cover, will be gone as well. That means that other than the t-shirt, the last redoubt of the large, attention-grabbing, eye-popping static visual-art connection to music is the concert poster.

The precedents—the psychedelic scorchers of the Fillmore era, the contrarian rawness of punk and hardcore flyers, the grunge era’s marketable melding of the two—are mentioned only tangentially in Clay Hayes’s Gig Posters Vol. 1: Rock Show Art of the 21st Century, a gorgeous, oversized collection of post-millennial printed matter. To be fair to Hayes, he started his authoritative, archival website gigposters.com in 2001, just as the latest (and as observed above, most desperately needed) resurgence of concert poster cool kicked in. Hayes’s book offers a carefully curated overview of who’s doing what among the thousands of artists in his orbit.

The 101 artists or design teams are profiled in a uniform manner—a page of bullet-form bio deets and four or five small reproductions, and one full-sized (11 x 14”), detachable poster (suitable for framing but not for wrapping fish—the book is printed on thick, high-end stock).

Originality isn’t always an essential ingredient. Several works here play the tired old Russian Constructivist propaganda-poster card. Others replicate the lurid, clean-lined comic-book aesthetic of Kozik and Coop, or borrow Art Chantry’s crude yet controlled clip-art steez. But there are more than enough—the clever Patent Pending Industries, the endearing Furturtle and Dan Stiles, the playful Nate Duval and Montreal’s own Seripop—who surprise, intrigue and delight. (RB)

GIG POSTERS VOL. 1: ROCK SHOW ART
OF THE 21ST CENTURY, BY CLAY HAYES,
QUIRK BOOKS, PB, 208 PP., $55.95
YARN BOMBING: THE ART OF CROCHET
AND KNIT GRAFFITI BY MANDY MOORE
AND LEANNE PRAIN, ARSENAL PULP
PRESS, PB, 232 PP., $21.95