AND A MICROPHONE

Architect Sekou Cooke spoke last month in support of Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture, a survey exhibit he curated at the New York Center of Architecture in 2019. He authored a manifesto on the subject, The Fifth Pillar: A Case for Hip Hop Architecture, in 2014, and is completing a book about it. I didn’t visit the show, which sounded gimmicky, but in photographs, and in Cooke’s presentation, the work collected has power and presence.

So it’s strange that in both speech and in writing Cooke is reluctant to define what hip-hop architecture (HHA) actually is. In the article, after failing to find an adequate definition for “architecture,” he moves on to describe hip-hop as a “subculture” that is at its core countercultural and multi-disciplinary. At the lecture, when someone asked what the formal ideas behind HHA were, its Five Points, he paused, sighed tiredly, and said only that hip-hop architecture was many things, that it really had no rules.

This echoes the words of Deconstructivists. And, formally, HHA might be the inverse of what that movement was. If Deconstructivism, in architecture, suggested forms coming apart centripetally, broken into smaller shards and sucked away into a vast neutral field, then the works Cooke showed might be understood as forms coming together centrifugally, of different parts from different places fitted together within a sliver of space in a city to make a vital new thing. That new thing is characterized by sculptural movement, calligraphic ornament, and percussive rhythm.

The most beautiful works Cooke showed were from his own studio, a series of models made by 3D printing the mass of an existing single-family house while spinning the printer. The resulting forms are bright and bold, human scaled, and accepting and recharging an existing vernacular. Architecture is made, ultimately, of forms and materials, not of ideas. There’s an architecture here; let’s look at it.

August 30, 2020 by Nalina Moses

Paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat light up the cavernous Gagosian Gallery on far West 25th Street like a carnival. At each turn they offer up big noisy characters and splashes of crayon-box color and snatches of street slang. Basquiat, like Warhol, is a brilliant graphic designer, and paints to charge each square inch of surface with a bristling kinetic energy. It’s as if every figure, phrase and mark we see could burst forward at any moment, but has been pinned in place with scientific precision. These canvases are full but aren’t overwrought. In Italian is packed with all sorts of things (faces, quotes, splotches, scribbles, two quarters, one gorilla) and yet remains remarkably poised, with swatches of primer and raw canvas showing through, giving the scene, below its lush, funky texture, space and depth.

Seeing these paintings expunges Basquiat’s personal mythology of a boy genius dying young. These are substantial works that stir up recollections of Jackson Pollock (in their deep swirling motions) and Willem De Kooning (in their scary, funny monsters). They also, seemingly effortlessly, capture rhythms of cartoon art, graffiti, advertising, and video games. Two paintings here stand out for their brute, experimental simplicity. Each of these was shaped by stretching canvas over a wood pallet, overpainting it in a single color, and embellishing it with a single face and name. One, red, commemorates Jersey Joe Walcott and the other, black, commemorates Sugar Ray Robinson. These two pieces have an unique sculptural charisma that sets them apart from the other canvases. They’re more powerful as talismans than as paintings, and start to chart a different course. It’s hard not to wonder what more Basquiat would have done if he had lived. There is in these canvases an iconography not yet fully developed.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, In Italian, 1983.
Courtesy of the Gagosian Gallery

April 29, 2013 by Nalina Moses

What happens to graffiti when it’s hung inside a gallery and sold, besides losing a great deal of its cool? Is it fine art, and is it good art? An exhibit at one elegant Lower East Side Gallery gathers saleable pieces from several prominent street artists. Most of the pieces look like they’re samples – smaller segments cut out from works the artist might have completed on the side of a building somewhere. They feel unnaturally reigned in, like zoo animals, drained of their natural elan.

Only the pieces by Ben Eine sit comfortably within the gallery. This English artist stencils letters across buildings, and is best-known for painting the entire alphabet on storefronts along Middlesex Street in London. Like Shepard Fairey, his work is linked to Barack Obama: Prime Minister David Cameron presented Obama with an Eine canvas on a state visit. And, like Shepard Fairey, Eine is a skillful graphic designer. His work relies less on scale, site and bravado for its power – as so much street art does – than on composition and color. There’s a strong tension between figure an field in his paintings; he doesn’t like empty space, and inflates letters to fill the void. The lettering styles he uses resemble nineteenth-century type faces, so that, both in process and feeling, his stencils feel more mechanical than free-form. And his texts are becoming increasingly complicated, especially when he stencils streams of letters. He’s not writing poetry, not yet, but his format slows the act of reading, so that one stops and thinks rather than taking in the words all at once, seamlessly and mindlessly, as happens with so much advertising, signage and media. Eine's letters have a bracing physicality that alerts us to how powerful and subversive text can be. Sentences are always written for us with a reason.

I know…, 2012. Ben Eine. Couretesy of Charles Bank Gallery.

January 24, 2013 by Nalina Moses