WAR 42

GRAFFITI: IS IT ART OR VANDALISM?Or, are the stylized smears, colored tags and toilet scribblings found nationwide a little of both? See what TIME has said about the graffiti phenomenon over the years:

The aerosol paint can is science’s contribution to the ancient art of public defacement, and the vacant-minded or vicious are taking to it in ever-increasing numbers — gleefully spraying their names, initials, class numerals and favorite biological functions over national monuments and natural wonders. The taxpayers’ bill for cleaning up after them is getting higher all the time.

From The Spoilers
Jul. 3, 1964

When Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art this winter staged ‘Word and Image,’ a poster survey, the artist selected to design the show’s theme poster was neither Glaser nor Max. Instead, the museum commissioned a fragile, mop-topped Japanese named Tadanori Yokoo.

From Commercial Graffiti
Jun. 7, 1968

No one can fix an accurate price tag on vandalism, which is not always reported, not always identifiable as such and covers everything from toilet graffiti to arson….Contemporary life invites the vandalistic act. The media play so endlessly on themes of violence and aggression that they become, to the young at least, an accepted part of life.
From The Vandal: Society’s Outsider
Jan. 19, 1970

There are still an estimated 10,000 graffitists on the loose in the City of Brotherly Love, and some people profess to see an aesthetic value in their obsession. ‘We sense that there is a lot of creativity in these graffiti.’ says the Philadelphia Art Museum’s David Katzive. ‘Most interesting, the trend is away from profanity and toward simple signatures — a kind of identity thing.’

From An Identity Thing
Mar. 13, 1972

One realizes where a New York graffiti artist like the fulsomely promoted Keith Haring, 25 ‘the Peter Max of the subways’ filched his ideas, a decade later. Penck’s paintings consist of stick figures and linear signs, enacting parodies of myth, ritual and archaic language.

From German Expressionism Lives
By Robert Hughes
Aug. 8, 1983

Today American pop-culture imagery is being recycled more obliquely by Italy’s Memphis group of furniture designers and by French painters mimicking the East Village fashion for graffiti art.

From Pop Goes the Culture
By Kurt Andersen
Jun. 16, 1986

The stylized smears born in the South Bronx have spread across the country, covering buildings, bridges and highways in every urban center. From Philadelphia to Santa Barbara, Calif., the annual costs of cleaning up after the underground artists are soaring into the billions.

From Zap! You’ve Been Tagged!
By Jonathan Beaty
Sep. 10, 1990

Twombly was one of the first American artists to interest himself in graffiti. Forty years ago, the term didn’t suggest city kids’ spraying their aggressive colored tags all over subway cars and buildings. It wasn’t bound up with the seizure and degradation of public space. It was, so to speak, more muted and pastoral: harmless scratches, small obscenities, chalk on Roman distemper. To adopt graffiti to the painted canvas was to pay homage to European art informel — Fautrier, Wols and especially Jean Dubuffet.

From The Grafitti of Loss
By Robert Hughes
Oct. 17, 1994

Brassai discovered the weird beauty of graffiti. Just as he had seen what was lovely in the louche spectacle of the Parisian cafes, he recognized what was indelible about graffiti, the bad penmanship of the group unconscious. In his photographs of the stick figures and screaming heads carved and scribbled on Paris walls, you find the most unruly human impulses–sex, anger, even exaltation–brought alive and made legible in odd corners.

From The Night Watchman
By Richard Lacayo
Jan. 18, 1999

The other route an artist can pursue is to borrow from readily understood sources in pop culture. That would describe Basquiat’s graffiti-derived gestures and Koons’ life-size renditions of Michael Jackson and the Pink Panther.

From How Does ’80s Art Look Now?
By Richard Lacayo
Mar. 28, 2005

In the brief annals of street-art history, graffiti ranks as something like cave painting–a first gesture, recognized for its primal intuition that public space is up for grabs–and has, in the past four or so years, been overtaken by a host of new practices: wheat-pasted posters, adhesive stickers with oddball images on them, elaborately stenciled images and even three-dimensional objects. And like many things that start below the Establishment’s radar, it has caught the eye of the mainstream and is edging into the galleries.

From Takin’ It To The Streets
By Richard Lacayo
Oct. 24, 2005
Photo Essay: Art of the Street

Many British fans never forgave Eno when he split from Roxy Music after just two albums and headed off into musical outer space. But in New York City they came to adore him Ñ eno is god read the graffiti in the late ’70s Ñ as he set about reinventing the studio as an instrument for making music rather than a place for capturing it. Light Years Into The Future

From A Coming-Out Party
By Michael Brunton
Nov. 27, 2006

Majerus made waves by painting the entire faade of the Italian pavilion at the 1999 Venice Biennale with a pastiche of famous artworks. In 2002 he covered Berlin’s famed Brandenburg Gate with a digital rendering of a graffiti-blighted East Berlin housing block.

From A Coming-Out Party
By Donald Morrison
Feb. 28, 2007

It’s humiliating, and hard not to interpret this as a collective punishment against Palestinians. First, I walk into a long, wire mesh cage that runs along a 20-ft.-high concrete wall which, on the Palestinian side, is smeared with graffiti. On the wall, someone has painted a big pair of scissors as if to say: Cut along the dotted Line. If only it were that easy.

From No Room for Civility at the Checkpoint
By Jamil Hamad
Mar. 5, 2007

Dream a true legend that was widely respected in the Hip Hop world. He appeared on Saafir’s first album Boxcar Sessions on a song called Pee Wee so we got that for those of you that might not of ever heard it. But first we got this Equipto dedication song to the Bay Area and Mike Dream called My Dream.

 

 Equipto - My Dream ft. MikeMarshall: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Saafir-Mike Dream-Pee Wee.mp3: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

RAISED IN THE HUSTLE -
ENLIGHTENED BY THE STRUGGLE….

Written by Spie one of the Mike DREAM TDK family collective…

Michael Francisco, better known to the world simply as “DREAM”, was tragically murdered on the night of February 17, 2000. Oakland’s twelfth homicide this year claimed one of West Coast’s premiere “graffiti” artists. Hip-Hop in the US and internationally, is suffering a great loss.

DREAM started writing in 1983 and soon became recognized as one of the Bay’s stylistic innovators. Pioneering the art form of “graffiti” on the West Coast, while hip-hop’s various elements began taking permanent hold around the globe, his pure love for expression attracted hundreds, if not thousands to, also spray “your name.” Inspired by the New York City originators, DREAM constantly stressed the historic developmental knowledge in the writin’ game and always reminded us that “getting up is one thing, but to get up with style is a whole different ball game.”

As DREAM earned respect, he saw the power of conveying messages through the aerosol medium to the greater society, especially amongst young people. DREAM pieces connected with and raised the sights of a broad community voice, unifying people from vastly different backgrounds. DREAM understood that art should not just be nice to look at but needs to be used as a weapon of defense against oppressive injustice. Mike DREAM organized and participated in very controversial gallery installations such as “No Justice, No Peace – Word from the Underground” (1993) and “Amerikan Terrorism – Shadows on the Global Street” (1995). Along with taking a stand against police violence, nuclear proliferation, colonialism, and cigarette companies, which target people of color, DREAM produced artwork in defense of Mumia Abu-Jamal and against corporate take overs of people’s institutions. He did all this, while at the same time schooled kids to recognize self-determined pathways in life. Whether it was passing along an Assata Shakur, Malcolm X, Carlos Bulosan, George Jackson, or even an Iceberg Slim book, Mike DREAM preserved that culture of resistance by urging others to recapture their past and be conscious minded in their lives.

With a firm pride in his Pinoy roots, DREAM embraced other cultures as well. He built bridges between the Black and Asian/Pacific Islander communities. The spirit of fallen brothers PlanBee and PakOne continued to be expressed through his work.

For some, life is nothing more than grindin’ and pimpin’ on the east and west sides, but Mike had passion for life that was large, He created art which sometimes paid, but more importantly was not self seeking, and were always gifts to the community. That’s what Mike was about, being a provider and he laid the ground work for people to come together. His folks was in the flatlands. DREAM was a survivalist in the Otown and what he had most was love for the people.

Opinionated, critical, and energetic, Mike’s charisma defined what it means to be real. Dream stressed the importance to document our own contribution to the culture to insure it from being misrepresented by someone on the outside. He was a leader and displayed true love in all aspects of life through the soul of his pieces. You didn’t just see his work, but the colorful fades moved you and you could feel it. You could sense the passion he represented clearly and directly on the walls. And when he matched the letters with a definite message, the wake up call was shot at the onlooker like the lighthouse beacon to the boat gone astray. Dream, but don’t sleep.

Mike DREAM was a friend to all and one would often hear him blurting out with a gracious smile,”yeah, I love that.” The line, color scheme, and symmetry of those kick ass burners’ always had kids flocking, but a modest DREAM always kept asking to see their black book style progressions. DREAM was a visionary and what more could explain his persona better than an analogy of our own dreams…somehow they never are memories of past events, but inspirations to create future works. Forward ever, backward never… peace and safe journey onto the next…DREAM lives forever.

www.DreamTDK.com

Albert Hofmann, 102, a Swiss chemist and father of LSD who came to view the much-vilified and abused hallucinogen he discovered in 1938 as his “problem child,” died April 29 at his home in Burg, a village near Basel, Switzerland, after a heart attack.

His death was confirmed by Rick Doblin, the Boston-based founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a nonprofit pharmaceutical company developing LSD and other psychedelics for prescription medicines.

Lysergic acid diethylamide, thousands of times stronger than mescaline, can give its user an experience often described as psychedelic — a kaleidoscopic twirling of the mind pulsating with color and movement.

After its discovery, LSD was viewed as a wonder drug with the potential to treat problems including schizophrenia and alcoholism. For the latter, some held the theory that chronic drinkers quit only after experiencing the hallucinations of delirium tremens.

LSD attracted many prominent advocates. They included Aldous Huxley, author of “Brave New World,” and psychologist Timothy Leary, who saw the drug as a potent way for people to live up to his 1960s counterculture motto: “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”

The CIA was also widely reported to have used LSD in experiments on unwitting subjects. This, and greater recreational use that caused some fatal overdoses, led to the widespread condemnation of the drug and, by the early 1970s, its criminalization. As a result, research permission and funding from state and federal agencies was terminated.

In Dr. Hofmann’s opinion, outlawing LSD made its use even more attractive to young people and diminished any safeguards. He spoke of many hippies stopping by his home on the way to their spiritual quest, hoping to score from his “secret stash.”

Dr. Hofmann came across LSD while working on medicinal uses of a fungus to act as a circulatory heart-lung stimulant. His first LSD “trip” occurred in 1943, a troubling experience that led him to write in his journal, “A demon had invaded me, had taken possession of my body, mind and soul.”

Dr. Hofmann remained wary of LSD’s recreational uses as well as its portrayal in the media.

“I was not surprised that it became a ritual drug in the youth anti-establishment movement, but I was shocked by irresponsible use that resulted in mental catastrophes,” he told Playboy magazine in 2006. “That’s what gave the health authorities a pretext for totally prohibiting its production, possession and use.”

Albert Hofmann was born Jan. 11, 1906, in Baden, Switzerland. He was the oldest of four children, and after his father, a toolmaker, fell seriously ill, he was forced as a teenager to seek a commercial apprenticeship to support the family.

While learning a trade, he continued his private schooling with financial help from his godfather. In 1930, he received a doctorate from the University of Zurich, where he studied the chemistry of plants and animals, and he joined the pharmaceutical-chemical firm Sandoz (now Novartis) in Basel.
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here is a clip of the 1UP crew killing this wholecar in a matter of minutes and to watch the whole movie just [...]