Slick
and Risk
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By Vince Basehart
February 22 -- Slick and Risk sound like chapters out of a workers’
compensation insurance textbook. In fact, they are the noms de guerre
of legendary Southern California graffiti artists. Their names are
whispered with hushed reverence by every vandal with a spray can
or kid with a knack for art.
They are the creators of the eye-popping, hallucinogenic mural covering every
square inch of the brick façade of the building on the southwest corner
of Broadway and Cloverfield. The artwork has been dazzling passersby since 1991.
The whole building is covered in the equivalent of a multi-colored whole body
tattoo.
By the Lens’ standards, it’s not really "graffiti," but
then again, art is interpretive. It was in fact created using countless rattle
cans of spray paint, and done in the hip-hop style. I think it gives the well-heeled
street devoted to offices and fancy schmancy art studios a bit of much needed
street cred.
Imagine R. Crumb having been born a couple of decades later, raised in East
Los Angeles, and set loose on the building while tripping on acid.
Jagged 3-dimensional graffiti lettering wanders away and doubles back on itself,
bumping against urban Alice in Wonderland characters. There is an disquieting
character pulling a hood from over his eyes, and a clown with Rastafarian dreadlocks.
In an apparent nod to Crumb, there is a Keep on Truckin’ like character
long-stepping across the wall facing Cloverfield. One bubble-headed character
is blowing a storm into a cloud. Lightning shoots out of the mouth of a cow-devil.
An eye peers at you from the center of a marijuana leaf. Skulls are impaled
on pikes.
This is weird and wonderful stuff. You could spend a couple of hours exploring
the mural’s many wings, eyeballs and disembodied heads and trying to find
the silhouette of a Tech-9 pistol.
I find this stuff far more interesting than any other kind of modernist art.
Cubism? Pollack? Please. Half the stuff at the new Broad Contemporary Art Museum
at LACMA doesn’t hold a candle to this.
Knowing one man's art is another man's eyesore, the Lens took a wildly unscientific
sampling of Santa Monicans' attitudes of the artwork on a recent drizzly afternoon.
A UPS man in a hurry: "It's okay I guess," as he loaded boxes in
the back of his van.
A middle aged woman walking a hyper kinetic Jack Russell terrier: "It's
not really my thing," she shrugged, wrinkling up her nose.
Two kids in backpacks. The one on a skateboard: "It rocks! I'd like to,
like, you know, maybe do that kind of stuff." He was referring to a career
in the arts. I couldn't help but notice the boy's backpack was covered with
ink pen scrawls not too dissimilar to Slick and Risk's work itself.
A guy about the Lens' age putting additional coins into the parking meter:
"It's really colorful. We could use a lot more guerrilla art."
I find "guerrilla art" a bit dramatic for an entire building-encompassing
mural which took days to complete. Not quite hit and run. But I get his point:
it’s sort of urban-gritty.
The business housed behind the painted bricks is Rock, Paper, Scissors, a studio
which does production and editing work on television commercials. When I spoke
with an employee during her lunch break, she explained that the company is fairly
new to the building.
Between forkfuls of salad she explained that the question of whether or not
to keep the mural, or sandblast it and repaint the building has
come up.
“We’re still deciding,” she said. “But
if we do keep it we’ll have the mural retouched.” Go check it out while the going’s good.
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