Street Legal Art (for a few days)

Mural by Bustart

What a fine week it was for street art in Paris. The equivalent of, if not Woodstock, at least 1967's Monterey Pop Festival.

Last week, Paris Play joined the organizations Alternative Paris and My Life on My Bike to provide wall-to-wall coverage of the four-day long urban art exhibition featuring the work of fifty street artists from all over the world, organized by Le M.U.R. de L'Art. The documentary crew of six (including Richard, and our nephew, Jonathan Edwards) shot photographs and conducted thirty-five videotaped artist interviews in ninety-six hours, with the eventual goal of producing a documentary about this effervescent scene.

Le M.U.R. de L'Art was founded in 2007, and serves as a legal, aboveground, as it were, gallery for street artists. To make a long story short (you can read the long version here), street artists began hijacking billboards here in Paris in the early 2000s, replacing advertising with street art. Finally, one billboard company simply gave up the fight for one piece of turf, and donated its ground-level billboard on rue Oberkampf to the community. Hence, Le M.U.R., which presents a different artists' work made on that billboard every two weeks, to celebrate both street art and its ephemeral nature. If you miss that fortnight's work, it's gone.

But here's where relationships get strange. Le M.U.R. gives each artist €500 to create his or her piece, a stipend provided by the City of Paris. And this four-day exhibition was supported by the City, in a city arts center in the Marais. So, while much of the art we are so fond of photographing and showing you here on Paris Play is illegal, and artists can be fined and jailed for putting it up, detente exists, though some artists do not want their photographs published. Nonetheless, it was great fun putting faces to many of the names whose work we've admired for the last few years.

Kashink with her sculpture, "Cash Cow"  

Each of the fifty artists who exhibited last week in this benefit for Le M.U.R. had previously been featured on a billboard. Some, like Jérome Mesnager, Mosko and Associates, Speedy Graphito, and Gérard Zlotykamien are the equivalent of O.G.s (original gangstas) on the street, and have already been the subject of books, museum catalogs, and have their work in contemporary art museums and galleries, selling for thousands of euros apiece. Others, many of them women, have been in the game for a lot less time, but their work is of a high enough quality that it rivals that found in the formal galleries in the Marais and St. Germain des Pres, and is often more interesting. 

And since the work, by artists from as far away as Chile, Argentina, Canada, Italy, Spain and Scandinavia, speaks for itself, we'll be quiet and let you enjoy. If you like a name, Google it for more examples; just about everybody has a Website or Facebook page. And Le M.U.R is a non-profit, which welcomes your support.

Jérome Mesnager

Mosko et Associes

Gérard Laux of Mosko et Associes, surrounded by the staff of Graffiti Art magazine

Speedy Graphito

Bustart

Shaka

Kashink

 

Kouka

Thom Thom

Thom Thom (Thomas Schmitt) is co-founder of Le M.U.R.

Ella & Pitr

 

YZ

FKDL

Mural by FKDL (left) and Stoul (right)

Stoul

Sixo

Le Cyklop

Chanoir

Teaching his son how to mix paint

Jana and JS

 

Nicogermain

Paella

Surfil

Surfil with Alternative Paris' Demian Smith

Macay

H101 and Zosen

Gilbert

Rue Meurt d'Art

Kenor

Kenor teaching a fan

No Rules Corp

Alber

 

Michael Beerens

If you've scrolled this far, thank you. And here's your surprise: links to the four two-minute or so videos the team produced each day of the event, as teasers for the eventual documentary. Video one, two, three, and four. Enjoy. 

Here's Looking at You, USA!

Street art by Speedy Graphito

While April in Paris is the customary month for visitors, October is also huge. We like to say that we've had more visitors from L.A. (and elsewhere in the U.S.) in those two months than in the last five years we spent in Los Angeles itself. 

Top question we get asked, after "How can *I* move here?" is, "Do you miss the States?"

How? It's impossible to walk more than a few blocks in Paris and not see some American iconography, or a reminder of that cultural tsunami.

Back in 1982, the incumbent French Minister of Culture, Jack Lang, gave an incendiary speech in which he blasted the United States's "cultural imperialism," and advised that other cultures enact protectionist measures against the way the American cultural/consumer juggernaut "grabs consciousness, ways of thinking, ways of living." 

In those days, to cite but one example, the Hollywood machine was squeezing smaller French films out of the marketplace in both countries, a cultural trend that required state intervention, Lang thought.

Interesting concept, but there was no way American culture wasn't going to overwhelm the world like a tsunami. The French Academy tried to ban English words like "weekend," and "hot dog," but what do the French now celebrate on Saturday and Sunday?--"le weekend," when they eat "le hot dog." McDonalds, Starbucks, and KFCs are ubiquitous, and American apparel stores dot the Champs Elysses like chocolate sprinkles on a cappuccino.

The list of American words is endless now, as are the American images, for better or worse, that form a great deal of the street art, and advertising, that we see daily.

So, a portfolio of Americana, as filtered through the French consciousness and reflected back. Then just for fun down below, another Paris Play Pop Quiz.

Street art by GZUP

Street art by Shadee.K

 

Street art by Jef Aerosol, legs by Jerome Mesnager

 

Paris Play Street Art Pop Quiz

Below you will find twenty more American-inspired images from Paris street art.

Look at each of the twenty images, then post a single comment listing the names of the person, character, or American cultural icon you see; i.e., #1 is ____________________, #2 is _______________________, and so on through twenty.

We suggest you enter your answers in your own word processing program, then cut and paste them into the comments section below, which sometimes eats or loses comments entered directly.  

The first five people who get every one right will each get their choice of photograph from any 2012 Paris Play post, e-mailed to them in high-resolution, from which they will be free to make a single print for their own enjoyment.

Leave your e-mail when you leave your guesses, so we can contact you with your prize. We will favor longer than shorter answers (i.e. Michael Keaton as Batman), but these aren't essay questions.

If no one gets them all right, we'll take the answers with the best nineteen of twenty, or eighteen of twenty, etc. You have until midnight, Paris time, October 26 to get your answers in.

Good luck, and thanks for playing.

#1

#2  

#3

#4 

#5

#6

 #7

#8. Street art by Jef Aerosol

#9. Street art by Jef Aerosol 

#10

 #11

#12

#13

#14

#15

#16

#17

#18

#19. Street art by Jef Aerosol

#20. Street art by Gilbert Shelton

Cheeky Olympics Ads

Now that this season of Mad Men, the brilliant TV series about Madison Avenue ad men (and women) in early ‘60s NYC, has ended, Richard and I plan to watch it the way we prefer to watch a season of a TV show, all at once.  So, no spoilers, please.  We'll download it from iTunes or Netflix and have a marathon viewing session, 13 episodes in a row. 

Speaking of marathons, and advertising, we’ve noticed a few posters in Paris promoting the 2012 Olympics in London, created on behalf of an Olympics sponsor, Eurostar, the high-speed train service that gets people from Paris (or Brussels) to London in less than three hours. The ads seem to us pure genius. Why?

· They express an ironic message about something of value: excellence in athletics and health (As the pre-Socratic philosopher, Thales, said: “Νοῦς ὑγιὴς ἐν σώματι ὑγιεῖ," -- “A healthy mind in a healthy body.”); 

· but without preaching; 

· with quintessential deadpan British humor;

· depicting two English blokes with English hair and paunchy bodies as ancient Greek statues, frozen in modern “athletic” poses for two favorite British pub sports: darts and snooker.

We discovered that the ad campaign for Eurostar was created by a French company, Leg, who have done other Eurostar ads poking fun at French stereotypes of the beer-swilling Brits, an approach that's likely to attract the French and Belgians to London’s Olympic Games.

How delicious! Wouldn’t it be great if all advertising were this witty and original, linking ancient art and attitudes about health with modern physical culture? How rare is that?

Now if only they’d reinstate the ancient Greek custom of competing naked, rubbed all over with glistening olive oil, Richard and I would jump on the Eurostar and go, too. Or maybe we'll just rub each other with olive oil for our Mad Men marathon.