Following a recent trip to Canada a friend kindly came back with the third issue of a tidy little magazine called Names and Places. Surprisingly this was actually the only domestic publication to be found among a wide selection of European train mags over there. Anyway as it happens Names and Places turns out to be a real gem!
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Starting out life as a black & white affair during the nineties Fumez has been given a fresh lease of life. Issue 1 of the newly released publication is now a full colour, slender looking, magazine roughly about A5 size. The cover of the mag proudly states that there are “over 100 photos” within. Considering its size, this amount of content could’ve resulted in small poor quality images. However the editor has done a good job in ensuring that the photographs are all nicely sized and of a high quality. Listing nine contributors Fumez covers nearly three decades of freight graffiti up to the present day.
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Not too long ago the second instalment of Gossenpost was released! The focus of the magazine remains on the margins of aesthetically acceptable graffiti with a load of grimy tags, but this time round it has a more specific focus around markers. The issue kicks off with tippex scribbles, followed by marks left with crayons, and a third section of juicy blammers. Alongside these three main sections are special chapters on individual taggers. Even more so than in the previous issue the pictures are compartmentalised and ordered by colour, surface, style and location. In fact this issue came about as an overflow of the first, containing some of the cool handstyles from around Frankfurt. Aside from being a glorious celebration of ‘the tag’ Gossenpost is original in its approach to displaying graffiti. To understand the concept behind it a bit more I asked the magazine’s editor how it came about.
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Henkireikä is a recently released magazine hailing from Sweden. The publication brings together some of the vibrant work of the graffiti artist Rikard Olsen. Working on the idea of a blackbook it is designed to display his work in a form that can be physically distributed. Olsen describes the painting of his work as a breathing-space or even a lifeline. At some time, during a conversation with a friend about art, Olsen came across the Finnish word ‘Henkireikä‘ which translates as something similar to the process of Olsen’s graffiti. With family ties to that country it seemed an obvious title for his first foray into publishing.
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For the last two decades Ian Vanek has been busy producing a graffiti zine called 99mm. Compared to his punk rock career this publication is seemingly one of his quieter projects but no less impressive in its dedication. Continue reading
Belarus is the European anomaly that the rest of the continent views as its ‘last dictatorship’. Although it’s recently been in the news most people, including myself, know little about this country and its culture. So it’s interesting to come across a new magazine that attempts to remedy this. Podpolie, which roughly translates as ‘illicit activity’, is the first and only publication to focus on the scene in this far-flung part of Eastern Europe.
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This month marks a hundred years since the artist Marcel Duchamp submitted his now famous artwork, Fountain, to an international exhibition in New York. Influenced by Dadaism his submission was simply a urinal he’d bought in a local shop. Duchamp’s surrealist questioning of institutional definitions of art has had a defining impact on modern art. Now, rather then creating something, a contemporary artist will add the label ‘art’ (and therefore implicit meaning) to anything they choose. Duchamp’s legacy has left a large portion of the public completely baffled when they enter a contemporary art gallery. Alongside its increasing commodification and institutionalisation this pretentiousness has also crept into urban art. This is what leads Pietro Rivasi, writing at the start of Trains, Travels & Murals, to declare that “we are living in the dark, medieval times of urban art.”
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On a recent trip to Japan a friend brought back a copy of Sane magazine. Based in Tokyo it’s apparently one of only three graff mags from the country. It begins with an introduction explaining the effects graffiti can have on an individual level which boils down to a hard lesson in the value of “effort and persistence. It nurtures the ability to see the core of things and the ways of society which we are not taught at school.” However the aim of Sane isn’t to delve into “the possibility of graffiti itself or its essentiality” but, on a more aesthetic level, to display great works of art. In fact the increasing popularity of large scale murals is described as a ‘new dawn’ awaiting graffiti.
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The third issue of Writing Hessisch magazine has recently been released and this latest addition is as good as ever. Once again the format has been tweaked slightly so that the magazine returns to a similar layout as in Issue 1. The work of several individual writers is presented over short sections while in-between the atmospheric ‘Yellow Light’ essays make a comeback. All this is followed with a fascinating look at abstract-graffiti, and then finally the magazine ends with a bit of urban field-archeology.
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Although tagging is generally seen as the ugly face of graff, both by those outside and sometimes even within the graffiti subculture, it’s essentially graffiti in its purest form. Unfortunately there’s not too many magazines that focus purely on tags, street bombing, and filthy walls. So it’s really good to see a new mag out that unapologetically presents this sort of grime. This is the first issue of Gossenpost or to give its translation; ‘the Gutter Paper’.
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