Considering it’s been around for seventeen years, and currently on their seventh issue, I’ve come to Unpleasant a bit late. Covering “international train writing culture” this publication has everything we’ve come to expect of high quality German magazines – it’s just a pity I’ve never picked it up before!
In Paris they take graffiti seriously. Just walking around the French capital leaves a certain kind of tourist full of admiration albeit for the hardcore damage rather than the usual attraction of towering ironwork. In particular the technique of ‘punitions’ whereby a train panel is covered with repetitions of a tag, rather than a larger piece, fires the imagination. Travelling around the city on the métro and the eye is drawn to another type of tagging in the form of the numerous abrasive marks scratched into the shiny metal doors of the carriage interiors. Hidden in plain sight most passengers must barely notice these colourless tags but a new publication MF.67D: Ligne 12 sets out to document some of those that can be found on the twelfth line of the subterranean transport system.
Having reviewed Wojciech Wilczyk’s work in the past the Graffiti Review were pleased to catch up and ask the photographer about his newest release Słownik polsko-polski, which translates as the ‘Polish-Polish Dictionary’. This evolved out of his previous book, named after the notorious ‘Holy War’ derby between the two major Kraków football clubs, which documented the graffiti of Polish fans. His latest publication focuses on the nationalist murals that have come to dominate the country’s walls under the PiS government.
To give it its full title Boulevard: On Trespassing and Culture is a great project, conceived by Thomas Lauterberg alongside editors Robert Kaltenhäuser and Harald Hinz, which was launched last year. The aim of the publication is to collect and reprint hard to find essays alongside translated texts previously unpublished in English. Boulevard is foremost a critical and art-historical endeavour presented as a midi format newspaper with three distinct pull-out sections. The first of these is a short current affairs section of graffiti news and reviews, in the middle are the reprinted essays, and finally a paper filled with striking images.
They say never judge a book by its cover… well, when it comes to graff mags, the reverse applies, they should always be judged on their cover. So having first clapped eyes on The London Line, produced by the photographer Cities At Night, I knew it was gonna have some nice content without even opening it! The zine is pretty self explanatory; the publication is made up of analogue photos showing London around the moonlit hours.
Subsolo: Ruas do ABC is the sort of publication that ticks all the boxes. Published by Studio Treze it has a specific regional focus, it has lots of tags, and the whole thing’s interspersed with mini-essays sharing a bit of history and politics.
When the new book by Sabrina DeTurk plonked through the letter box and I saw the title I admit I wasn’t too enthused. Firstly street art ain’t particularly my cup-of-tea and secondly the topic of Street Art in the Middle East isn’t exactly uncovered ground since the Arab Spring. I hold some vague theory that the street art that accompanied the uprisings was seized on by Western spectators as an easy visualisation of events in an otherwise politically alien landscape. It was perhaps proof this ‘backward’ region was yearning for Western values and culture. The attention on street art was another simplification of events that fed into, what David Wearing calls, “a deeply ingrained set of basically racist assumptions that frame many people’s understanding of our relationship with this part of the world.”
This is the eponymously titled Depor Este zine which is a collaboration between two artists from Germany and Brazil. It’s a nicely produced little publication showcasing some funky styles. A few themes crop up such as ancient Egyptian motifs, cats, and high art juxtaposed with derelict graffiti covered walls. The photography throws out some cool scenes such as two gaúcho’s checking out graffiti or a cat perched on a piece beside an image of paw prints set in concrete.
Trees might seem an odd topic for the average reviewer of graffiti publications to discuss but here I find myself with not one but two graff related books about trees! The first is a large format zine called The_ Forest _Man which collects together tags scratched into tree trunks. The second is the Urban Jungle: Eindhoven which, as the title alludes to, is a graffers-eye-view on the flora of a Dutch city.
Livor Mortis is a tidy two-tone zine from the UK. The content is based around themes of decay from rundown cityscapes, derelict buildings, to graveyards. Obviously graffiti is a feature and issues 5 and 6 in particular include it almost as a representation of decline. I say almost because on the one hand a tagged up shattered pane of glass positioned alongside dark eery corridors leading to nowhere tips into some sub-genre of graff-horror. But elsewhere murals painted onto the crumbling plaster of tenement blocks signify a more vibrant deterioration of urban areas. A painting of a cat pouring out graffiti from the trumpet it’s playing or an Anarchist hitting back at the cops beating him are signs of life. And there’s humourus additions too with ET’s head on a giraffes body, two human-spiders shagging, or a throw-up across some Granny wallpaper.
Continue reading