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Hollywood to the Street: From the Poster to GraffitiNovember 13 2004, to January 20, 2005.Opening Saturday, November 13, 6 – 8 PM on the 2nd Anniversary of the Chelsea Art Museum
The exhibition brings together works from the 1950s to the eighties of the great Italian affichiste, Mimmo Rotella, rarely seen in America, with a graffiti mural, commissioned for the exhibition by Miami born artist, José Parla. The works of both artists share a spirit of rebellion, a “criminal” aspect inherent in the tearing down of a street poster or the “defacing” of a wall. Separated by close to three generations, the works share a radical commitment to life in all its forms, a desire to harvest the rich energy of the street, to excavate its spirit, both past and present in listening to the voices of the walls and shake thereby the perceived apathy of art making and its institutions. “To tear down posters from walls is the sole compensation, the only way of protesting against a society that has lost its taste for change and fantastic transformations. Myself, I stick posters on and then I tear them: thus are created new and unforeseeable forms.” So did Mimmo Rotella in a now famous statement of artistic intent from 1957, describe his rejection of easel painting in favor of an art of décollage. The section of the exhibition devoted to his works traces the development from the first phase of his work with the “affiche” or poster, in which the posters were torn from the walls of Rome and placed onto canvas and then torn again by the artist once they had been stuck to the support. Between 1958 and '60, Rotella’s vision moved toward a language of disfiguration. He abandoned his purely abstract compositions in favor of a more figurative tearing allowing the fragments of images from the various levels of poster accumulation to interact on both figurative and formal levels to produce a shock of realization – the real world thrust into the space and gaze of the viewer. Rotella gradually began to limit his intervention on the material, simply selecting the posters, taking them down from the walls and not allowing himself any retouching to allow the preservation, as far as possible, of certain icons of contemporary life, in particular those relating to the manufactured dreams of the movie world (he particularly favored images of Marilyn Monroe) and declaring them as art. As Pierre Restany, who had invited Rotella into his group of luminary New Realists, wrote in 1962: “In the energized context of impersonal laceration, the sudden flash of a smile, the emergence of a face or the thrusting out of a body have an unexpected effect… these forceful images from the walls of Rome take on, in relation to their original state, a demythifying meta-presence. They become more real than the myth they claim to embody…the broken up film star is less of a star, but infinitely more a woman.” From the New Realist group (which included Arman, Dufrene, Hains, KleinRaysse, Spoerri, Tinguely and Villégle and César) Rotella strengthened his personal philosophy of the use of the real world, of the sense of life as a grand ready-made. From the ready-made of the poster, Rotella began selecting objects from every day life such as bottle caps and stoppers and the Shell oilcans, which will be featured in the exhibition. Around 1963 Rotella moved from the use of the actual posters to a process which became known as Mec Art, the direct appropriation of the industrially produced photomechanical image as will be shown in the celebrated work, “La Dolce Vita.” The 1980’s saw the return of the artist to painting, either in the form of painting over posters or in his appropriation of the Graffiti forms, the urban expressionism he was so drawn to on the city streets.
The sense of urban excavation inherent in the multiple layers of Rotella’s torn posters, the radical energy of line and gesture informs José Parla’s “Conversations with Rotella” (2004) a gigantic 2 part mural executed for this exhibition as a response to Rotella’s heritage. Born in Miami to a family of Cuban exiles, a somewhat itinerant life made him aware of the wanderings and migrations of urban populations. In the context of the upheavals of cultural migration, Parla is fascinated, like Rotella, with the way that cities function as palimpsests, upon which the experiences of those who pass through them are materially inscribed in decay, in graffiti, on the surfaces of deteriorated walls, and in remnants of construction markings. Parla’s work is inspired by the anonymous art found in the streets, often in the form of calligraphy or the actions of torn and stripped posters. The inscriptions in his work are used as a form of drawing, a record of his observations of the fleeting evidence of anonymous creators, both aware of their message yet oblivious of what he may find in their signs, a dialogue that for the most part goes unnoticed yet which daily inscribes itself into the urban subconscious. The layers and textures which Parla brings to his work attempt to capture the psychology of a segmented reality, the choices of people making their marks, stating their existence as they write, paint or destroy the surfaces of public spaces. As Parla states, “Once these “segmented realities” or images are transferred and converted into paintings, they become a “memory document”, a sort of time capsule for my experience in history. With this language I hope to communicate and provoke thoughts of the past and present conditions in the human spirit.” “Conversations with Rotella, I” is a 28ft. mural intended to invoke a wall on a city street, like Tremont Avenue in the Bronx. Such a street, lacking attention from the city, has never been “cleaned up”, so different layers of “writers” as graffiti artists are termed, have been saved. Parla can thus read in them a trail of history, the development of the different graffiti styles of all the artists who have left their trace. Using materials from the construction industry, such as cement, concrete and compound, Parla builds up the layers and the past and then destroys them to both age the surface and highlight the inherent beauty of decay. On this surface Parla then paints in his particular graffiti-expressionist style, less illustrational and colorful than much current graffiti but more expressive of the pain and suffering of such harsh neighborhoods as he has passed through in his life. Rich reds, passages of black and white, fragments of posters are swept through with an expressive calligraphic line, now abstract, now bearing the autobiographical mark of a “space stealer” in an existential gesture of existence, an “I was here.” “Conversations with Rotella, II” a 48ft. work which bisects two walls of the museum, evokes the spaces of a subway station, part platform, part tunnel, covered with 100 years of grime spotlighted at certain intervals and then marked by signatures of people from the past. Parla’s desire for this piece is to pay homage to these writers, those artists who have affected culture and then passed on or moved away from graffiti art such as Smiley 149, Brooks 119, Lee, Edec, Faz. The panels of the work function as memory documents, testaments to voices from the past frozen in time. His hope is that the work has the same energy and grime and will serve as a testament to their legacy. — Manon Slome A discussion on graffiti art will take place at the Chelsea Art Museum For more information, please contact Manon Slome, exhibition curator,
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