( BANGKOK STYLE.... )
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- And now to
Bangkok's own brand of Graffiti....
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Goodbye, 11 Spring Street
UNIQUE GRAFFITI 'GALLERY' BOWS OUT
As November 2006 came to a close, so commenced a strange and spontaneous and lemming-like coalescence of New York's underground - their destination : 11 Spring Street. Known to all as just "11 Spring", the dilapidated 19th Century brick monolith at that particular address was once a stable and carriage house, and had long ago fallen into disuse. But recently, the building was acquired by Caroline Cummings and Bill Elias, who announced their intention to redevelop the building into condominiums. "So, what's the big deal?" - you ask. "Why the pilgrimage?"
The long-abandoned 11 Spring was not outwardly unique, attracting it's share of graffiti writers and their variegated spray-can magna opera. But for reasons which will never be made entirely clear, these serial spraypaint defacings at 11 Spring drew neither the ire of the surrounding community nor the wrath of the constabulary. Over the last two decades, the number of artistic contributors grew: they continued to add to, and to over-paint and to elaborate. Inevitably, amongst the graffiti writers themselves, it grew in stature; it became the place to get up. It had become, over time, a 'gallery' of graffiti, the tags reading like a who's who of graffiti writers. And now, suddenly, this choice ad-hoc preserve of street art was going to disappear, virtually over night.
The initial wake-like procession of camera-toting devotees to 11 Spring grew from a smattering of nostalgia-bitten graffitophiles to a slow-motion deluge of New York's art community, not to mention the graffiti writers themselves, and a growing herd of appreciative onlookers. It had become, in now-archaic hippy terms, "a happening". None of which was lost on developers Cummings and Elias; they immediately saw that they had something of intrinsic value, not to mention very much out of the ordinary, right there, quite literally, in their own front yard.
In what can only be described as an unique tribute to graffiti, they enlisted the support of Marc and Sara Schiller from arguably the top website on graffiti, the
Wooster Collective, to invite graffiti artists from far and wide to come and completely cover all five floors of interior brick walls with their works. Many of the invitees were already contributors, many were new to 11 Spring.
Response was immediate; contributing artists, graffiti and otherwise, flew in from such disparate points on the globe as Los Angeles, and London, and Sweden's Arctic Circle and even Madagascar. They immediately set upon 11 Spring's 30,000 square feet of brick interior. No longer "underground" the event got Media coverage in the likes of the New York Times and on CNN. Correspondingly, the ranks of visitors to 11 Spring swelled - and a new term was coined: "Graffiti Tourism".
And by mid-December, with only days to go before the dry-wall crews were to come in to cover over this gallery finally and forever, virtually every brick had become part of the tribute. Once the fog of spraypaint had settled, visitors and artists alike found themselves looking upon a startling array of the bizarre - a one-time opportunity to see a unique art display - there would be no 'encore'. Alas, the gallery and it's weird and wonderful works will no longer exist by the time you see this in print, but thanks to our ever-ubiquitous 21st Century electronic environment, it is entirely possible that the images of 11 Spring re-recorded herein and elsewhere could outlast the pyramids themselves.
Our thanks to The New York Times and Wooster Collective websites,
from whom we excerpted - and synthesized - everything.
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- And now to
Bangkok's own brand of Graffiti....
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Graffiti #106
Appeasement
(partial)
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Graffiti #107
Professor Hybrid
(partial)
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Graffiti #108
Horrible One
(partial)
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Graffiti #109
Justine Cubed
(partial)
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Graffiti #110
Viet Frog
5 ft high x 7 ft
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Graffiti #111 A
In Cans We Trust
(partial)
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Graffiti #111B
Full-Metal Cans
18 ft. high x 40 ft.
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Graffiti #112
Nicky Boy
8 ft. high x 15 ft.
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Graffiti, Graffiti, and more Graffiti -
Bangkok's
original and
ONLY Graffiti Site
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The MIDNITE HOUR Graffiti Page is prepared by Staff Contributor "Boge" Hartman.
(The above photo is not a graffiti per-se, although there are those who have insinuated....)
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Copyright © 2006, BANGKOK EYES /
bangkokeyes.com
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