One of Richard's and my favorite mutual Paris pastimes is walking around and visiting the art gallery in the streets. It changes daily; as artists emerge, old art gets covered by new, or by swaths of paint or whitewash applied by building owners and city crews, or it ages from weather and wear.
Fifteen months ago, walking hand-in-hand in the Marais, after marvelous galettes in our favorite crệperie, we spotted some new work, a spray-painted outline of an octopus, with some vertical lines scrawled to either side to signify motion. Richard photographed it for the street art database he's accumulating, and a few streets farther, we spotted another couple of octopi, these filled in with orange and green paint.
Still nothing to write home about. The octopus outlines were a step above mere tagging--marking ones' initials, the way dogs mark territory--but not particularly brilliant.
We're not big fans of tagging, even if it metamorphoses into huge, swirling, psychedelic-colored initials or names. Those are still a territory-marking syndrome, not yet over the border into art.
What's the difference? Here's a BBC article on pre-Olympics London street art cleanup that applies the "I'll know it when I see it" standard that the U.S. Supreme Court also applies to pornography. In London, as in Paris, the works of certain artists are protected, while city clean-up crews ravage others.
As months went by, the octopus artist graduated to creating creatures with a variety of colors and expressions, on die-cut plywood sheets about two feet square super-glued to the sides of buildings, mostly on the second story (first story in France). But it was hard to know if it was a single artist, or if a meme had begun to spread. One other street artist, who glues life-sized ceramic "death masks" of his face with four different expressions all over Paris, allows people to buy them and paint their own designs and decorations; perhaps these octopi (who were beginning to look more like space aliens) were a collective expression.
Then, a few months ago, we spotted new octopi with a tag, GZUP, and we had a clue to follow. An Internet search revealed that the artist who calls himself GZUP was a suburban army veteran in his mid-thirties who had just returned to the streets after a hiatus since the mid-nineties, according to this interview with a street art blog. His return was prompted by seeing a street art show at the Cartier Foundation, where he realized that what had begun as a step above vandalism had become "democratized."
(While GZUP didn't mention it, gallery street art is also attracting impressive prices from collectors, which might be a tiny, niggling nudge toward more permanent materials. Die-cut plywood is easier to curate and collect than paint-bomb scrawls.)
His influences are "those who make me dream and constantly raise the level, those who innovate. People coming out of the 'Classics' in all fields: Keith Haring, the dribbling of Cristiano Ronaldo, dialogues from movies of Tarantino…Rihanna, Shakira, the Air Max 90, DJ Quik, [and] Nate Dogg (RIP)," while his pseudonym is taken from a particularly raunchy Snoop Dogg song (if that's not oxymoronic), "GZ UP, HOES DOWN."
According to the interview, "GZUP does not like octopi, neither in the sea nor on his plate; he just liked that shape when he began drawing." When asked his favorite color, he said, "The green without hesitation. A color that made me vomit when younger." (A mythical note: in Greek myth, the goddess Athena is associated with octopi (among her many totems), and in our personal mythology, her color is green.) Obviously, these pieces of art are evolving beyond mere sea creatures.
