Читать книгу Street Knowledge - King ADZ - Страница 25

www.james-dodd.com

Jimmy and I met by chance when we were both guest speakers at some insane street art fest in Belgium (>p82). It was a strange but interesting weekend and it was one of those meetings where it feels like you’ve known the person forever, which is what friendship is all about: eternity. Jimmy used to be one of the most prominent stencil artists in Australia until he gave it all up to go back to uni and study for his Masters of Visual Art. This was an astute move as now his work has all the influences of the street but with the heavy-weight conceptual backing of the art establishment.

What Jimmy does is travel the world collecting scrawls and graffiti (not the street art kind, but the underclass style — people writing band’s names, expletives, insults, gangs etc). He shoots them on a digital camera, and then comes up with a concept to incorporate the image — like the time he built a facsimile of a Darwin bus shelter (which are renowned for being painted with very kitsch sunsets) and used exact copies of the collected scrawls to cover its surfaces. Thus underclass outsider art (ie art created by members of the underclasses out of frustration) becomes high art. I fucking love it.

‘I’ve always been attracted to graffiti and to people who do things that they’re not supposed to.’

Having spent years knee-deep in the Melbourne stencil scene, Jim knows better than most what he likes and, more importantly, what he doesn’t:

‘I’ve decided that most New York/train-oriented graf is very derivative. As a culture, it often doesn’t support innovation and experimentation. But these are the primary things that I find exciting in all creative endeavours. That’s why I find outsider graffiti so exciting, because it doesn’t adhere to a set of rules and is often unpredictable.’