URBAN INTERVENTIONS - CONSPICUOUS CONCEALMENT

The knitting graffiti phenomenon achieved international notoriety in the latter-half of the noughties, spear-headed by an aptly-named art group from Houston, Texas known simply as 'Knitta'. By 2009 the movement had well and truly arrived in Sydney and knitted urban interventions began attracting the attention of tabloids, broadsheets, blogs and councils alike. A relic of this (not-too-distant) bygone era may be found, though faded by the sun and worn at the seams, on Crown Street in Darlinghurst. For want of a better description it is a painstakingly stitched Tree Blanket in various shades of wool, conspicuously concealing the fork of a street-side tree. An intervention of this order achieves so much with so little. It speaks of feminist theory, of the resurrection and reinterpretation of traditional handcrafts, of grassroots movements, and of globalisation and the exploitation of the Internet as a means of spreading what may have started as a small-scale artistic prank in Houston, to Sydney and Copenhagen and beyond. It conspicuously sheds light on all that it conceals, transforming a generic, though nonetheless delightful tree into a beacon for philosophical, artistic and social discourse.

                                                        Tree Blanket on Crown Street

      
                                   Conspicuously concealing a fork in the tree

The following links explore the emergence of knitting graffiti as an artistic movement:

Knitta at Wikipedia         

Urban Knitting: the world's most inoffensive graffiti

Sydney Morning Herald: Graffiti artist spins a new kind of yarn

URBAN INTERVENTIONS - APPROPRIATION AND SUBVERSION

Urban interventions often alter our experience of an environment on an unconscious level or in a fashion that is indiscernible or indescribable. The blue cast of a crushed soft drink can bearing illegible branding attached to a brick ledge on Oxford Street, Sydney is one such example. 

Subtle and unassuming, it is positioned shin-high by an automated teller machine on the high street, creating new meanings through the appropriation of a common everyday form and material subversion. As with the majority of urban interventions the artist and their intentions remain anonymous, thus engendering an otherwise banal environment with myriad opportunities for personal experience and interpretation. It poses a question, yet refrains from ever explicitly spelling out what that question is. 

URBAN INTERVENTIONS - COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN

This exquisitely crafted masonry mobile phone lies camouflaged on the sidewalk of City Rd. Darlington. Chances are you've walked passed it countless times and not noticed it; perhaps this is part of the anonymous author's intentions... to concretise the breakdown of communication? To surrealistically explore the separation of word and image? Or is it the physical manifestation of a messy break-up played out over the phone?

Conjecture aside, this intervention enhances an otherwise derelict urban environment through sophisticated subtlety and jestful provocation, but blink and you will miss it.

 

URBAN INTERVENTIONS - THE JESUS OF STANLEY STREET

The Jesus of Stanley Street

Harry Seidler's Horizon in the background

Sydney has a burgeoning street art scene with new works appearing every day. Stencils and paste-ups are the mainstay of the Urban Interventionists and the Jesus of Stanley Street is an example of the former, executed in black paint on the interior facade of a dilapidated building on the corner of Bourke and Stanley in Darlinghurst - note Harry Seidler's Horizon in the background. The building has council approval plans so the Jesus of Stanley Street probably won't be around for much longer! 

URBAN INTERVENTIONS

What are Urban Interventions? In what way do they alter the urban landscape? Some may consider uncommissioned public art as petty vandalism, others as enriching the tapestry of the built environment. Yet Culture Jamming surely has a valid place in a society dominated by the media, and journals such as Adbusters do a great deal to legitimise the plight of grassroots interventionists. The following are recent excerpts from the UK's Guardian newspaper:

"Princess Hijab: underground resistance

The Paris metro system is under attack - by graffiti artist extraordinaire Princess Hijab, who provocatively adds veils to billboard advertising"- http://bit.ly/aMYhyR

"Graffiti art divides councils' opinion

Is graffiti a renegade art form or a public nuisance? Hackney council is demanding a giant rabbit be whitewashed while Brighton is using graffiti as advertising" - http://bit.ly/bgtE0r

URBAN GROWTH - c3 ASAKUSA, TOKYO

                                                
The Central Capsule Co-operative, Asakusa. A project attempting to synthesize the characteristics of modern Japanese instant gratification, exemplified by the myriad vending machines littered around the streets of Tokyo with traditional Japanese artisanship to create a modular building capable of reprogramming and upgrading in response to evolving social needs. The building grows organically from the fine-grain of the pixelated urban landscape with discreet capsules morphing over time and changing the overall form.