From modart issue #8
SELL OUT - the attitude of Adam Neate

We are born with a scream; we come into life with a scream, and maybe love is a mosquito net between the fear of living and the fear of death. – Francis Bacon.

The story of street art was always a love story. What started with candlelight and homemade wine has turned into an all-out orgy. From sprayed murals or stencils, to stickers, sentences and detailed illustrations, people around the planet have taken to speaking up on the streets, using art to give the silent majority a voice, transforming forgotten concrete or instructive advertising into palettes of new possibilities.

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From modart issue #8

Skaters by their very nature are urban guerrillas: they make everyday use of the useless artefacts of the technological burden, and employ the handiwork of the government/corporate structure in a thousand ways that the original architects could never dream of.
- Craig Stecyk

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From modart issue #8

To an American ear, Swish is the sound a basketball makes when it enters the net without rattling the rim – the perfect arc and spin, a sinking orange sphere sensually grinding against air then vinyl. To anybody swaggering through Soho, it might seem more similar to the sound of a whip cracking against sky or skin. Before there was the Lazarides Gallery, the venue for this show specialised in spanking. Basketball or bondage, both go Swish with a flick of the wrist. Swish was also the name of the cherry popping event of the Lazarides Gallery in London, which had too much edge to produce such a sweet and gentle sound. Located smack in Soho, the whips are gone, but the spanking continues.

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From modart issue #9
The Nothingness - The Street Artists’ favorite Street Artist hits Madrid.

Most screens are tinted with numerous shades of BLU ...

By now most of us are accustomed to viewing the Internet as a window to worlds once too far away to imagine. But just as a photo usually fails to properly convey the moment it captures, all the evolving online medias still don’t quite cut it when it comes to sharing certain things, like street art.

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From modart issue #9

EMOTION HEATING.
OF TREES AND STARS.

A report on preparing an exhibition with RINZEN.Process is an art in itself, an art, which often can be seen only by deconstructing an end work – and even all those French Post Modernists will admit that this dulls the fires. In this Show and Tell, Joern Vater talks about the process of collaboration and staging a show

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Units Moved - What makes a bench a bench?
From modart issue #10

“What’s that,” said the boy. “It’s a bench,” the man answered as if it were a fact that had fallen straight down from the heavens. The man was no longer capable of seeing anything but a bench in the wooden object before them. He was not even certain he could describe the bench if he had to. He simply, though surely, knew it was a bench. The boy accepted the response, but the question isn’t answered: what makes that bench a bench?

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From modart issue #10

Coinciding with the annual European Open skateboard championships in Basel, Don’t Hang Up On Me brought together a selection of well-known and not-so-well-known artists whose credentials within the skate scene are impeccable. The location was an old printery that used to churn out a Socialist Worker’s newspaper, and with walls scarred and spattered by its former trade, its credentials were also impeccable for a skate art exhibition.

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From modart issue #10

Itinerant is a word that can be easily attached to board cultures; wandering, working here, then there, migratory, unsettled, roving, roaming … often like the birds, following the sun towards the deep south. Last year Volcom holed up down south in their Hossegor shop, and let all the itinerant inhabitants of this beach town take a look at exhibitions from four of their talented artists.

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From modart issue #11

This was the slogan chosen to promote an exhibition marking 3 years of the life for the Iguapop Gallery in Barcelona. A slogan, which smirks at the sound of itself and sounds like a sigh…

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From modart issue #11
23 Aug 2006

FriendsWithYou are suffering from the myspace syndrome. They have so many friends that they are being stretched like elastic Malfi’s and pulled through new mysteries all over the planet. Fortunately, they also have the remedy, real friends and fans willing to give them a push when they need it. The pains of a cancelled show, became seeds of a bizarre collaboration.
It’s a love story, and like any good adventure of the heart, it began in a romantic place in early spring ...

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