Книги о граффити, стрит-арте и urban art искусстве

Urban Guerrilla Protest showcases the ways and means of individual, subversive protest actions. Featuring over 90 artists and initiatives from around the world, the book provides insights into the resources that are being used to place activist messages in the heart of the everyday, documenting the rise of the media-guerrilla during the decade spanning 1995-2005. All over the world, activists have disseminated their messages using an array of methods targeted to grab the attention of the public, as well as the perpetrators of the actions that have instigated the protestors.

Berlin-based graphic designer Ake Rudolf has compiled an international collection of successful and poignant actions; its design and bilingual English/German layout is an homage to the Do It Yourself attitude that all of the examples champion in the name of questioning corporate hegemony. Examinations of Reverend Billy, the Yes Men, The Institute for Applied Autonomy, The Billboard Liberation Front, The Ruckus Society, Yomango, Surveillance Camera Players and more than 90 other examples from all over the US, UK, Australia, China, Argentina and elsewhere illuminate how these messages are heard, and in many cases incite change.

In the words of Rudolf: “Subversive communication practices mediate disobedience and visual subordination. They create new meaning, providing the public with new perspectives for how they view the world, which all too often differs from how huge corporations want the public to view the world.”

Evolving from graffiti and street art, urban interventions are the next generation of artwork to hit public space. Using any and all of the components that make up urban and rural landscapes, these mostly spatial interventions bring art to the masses.

They turn the street into a studio, laboratory, club, and gallery. Modified traffic signs, swings at bus stops, and images created out of sand or snow challenge us to rediscover our environment and interact with it in new ways. The work is an intelligent and critical commentary on the planning, use, and commercialization of public space. With a rich visual selection of projects and methods, Urban Interventions documents this new artistic approach to urban art that is currently making a profound mark on our contemporary visual language.

The book shows the growing connections and interplay of this scene with art, architecture, performance, and installation. Propagators of urban intervention surprise and provoke with work in cities including New York and London, but also in countries such as China, Columbia, and Turkey. Everywhere the work appears it turns public spaces into individual experiences. Urban Interventions is the first book to document these very current, personal art projects in a comprehensive way.

Street Art in a New Outfit

The latest urban street art doesn’t involve paint cans, stickers or wallpaper paste - but knitting needles and wool - as can be seen in this book filled with eye-popping images.

Whether they’re knitting colorful clothes for trees, crocheting adornments on park benches, or wrapping traffic signs in brightly hued yarn, urban knitters are waging wooly war on the mundane, humdrum, and expected. You’ll find this urban art on the most familiar locations: phone booths, buses, chain-link fences, subway platforms, and park benches. Vibrant and clever, making a statement that’s irreverent and rebellious, the urban knitting scene has grown to be an international phenomenon. Fashion hound Simone Werle has captured the most intriguing of these creations from around the globe. The images collected in this book will surprise and delight readers, who will certainly keep their eyes out for evidence that urban knitting has come to their city.

Vandal Squad: Inside the New York City Transit Police Department, 1984-2004 has caused consternation throughout the global graffiti community with charges that author Joseph Rivera is profiting off the very criminals he spent his career incarcerating.

Graffiti writers have left a vivid trail and told their spellbinding tales the world over in countless books and magazines, films and videos, websites and events. They have shared stories of war and glory, of battles and triumphs, and have the pictures to prove it. But many have gone down for those ups; they've been caught in action or hunted as criminals, and brought forth to answer for crimes of vandalism. They've copped pleas or pleaded guilty outright; they've been sentenced to do community service, to pay fines, and sometimes even to serve jail time yet more often than not they got right back in action. No one knew this better than the New York City Transit Police Vandal Squad.

Founded in 1980, the Vandal Squad's mission was to protect the subway system from hardcore criminal acts of destruction like kicking out windows and throwing seats out of train cars. It was only with the Clean Car Program of 1984 that graffiti became the primary focus of this specialized Unit. On a mission to catch those who gained fame under tag names, the Vandal Squad had to identify and locate these individuals cloaked in anonymity (and often so transient they were referred as "ghosts") using every means available, including the NYPD computer database, Search Warrants, subpoenas, and even vandals themselves.

In Vandal Squad: Inside the New York City Transit Police Department, 1984-2004, former member Officer Joseph Rivera recounts the days and nights spent in pursuit of some of New York City's most notorious vandals. The only book on graffiti told from the perspective of law enforcement, Vandal Squad takes us inside the New York Police Department. Rivera's fast-paced tales of cat and mouse are presented alongside professional disregard within the Department. Featuring never-before-seen photographs and stories of graffiti's infamous Top 40, Vandal Squad offers an unprecedented look at the graffiti world from the other side of the game.

From the Impressionists to the present day; from the cut-up Cubist collages of Picasso to the monumental filmic narratives of Fiona Banner; from the subversive schoolboy script of Magritte to the demotic scrawl of Cy Twombly, Writing on the Wall shows how artists have responded to an environment increasingly saturated with words, and how the mass media have adopted and adapted artistic devices in typography, propaganda and advertising.

This groundbreaking study explores the strange, unsettling and often humorous results when words escape their traditional confines and begin to inhabit artworks: it ends with an analysis of current developments in the world of hypertext, where word and image have at last found a more essential unity.

The first monograph on Germany’s most popular street artist.

XOOOOX was the first German street artist to come to prominence on the international art market. His prints have been shown in numerous international exhibitions and sold at auction.

This book is XOOOOX’s first monograph. It focuses mainly on his portraits of female models that he prefers to stencil or wheat-paste onto surfaces of older buildings scarred by the passage of time. The contrast between the strikingly beautiful women and the crumbling walls is a fundamental aspect of his creative vision.

Other work featured in XOOOOX is a clever critique of consumer culture. For example, the artist reinterprets logos of brands such as Hermés or Chanel to make people aware of how easily dazzled they can be by the superficial promise of luxury. Or he morphs an H&M logo into the letters HIV as a statement against the leveling effect of global clothing brands that are spreading around the world like a virus.

The documentation of XOOOOX’s work on the street is complemented by photographs of select exhibitions and of the artist at work.

The book is edited by Benjamin Wolbergs, an author and photographer who specializes in subjects related to urban art.

Бэнкси уже давно стал культовой фигурой в среде граффитистов, хотя его настоящее имя до сих пор остается загадкой. Первая иллюстрированная биография на русском языке знакомит читателя с работами скандально известного английского андерграундного художника. Рисунки и фотографии сопровождаются автобиографическими анекдотами, афоризмами и практическими указаниями по рисованию граффити по трафаретам.