Читать книгу Street Knowledge - King ADZ - Страница 5

One thing I can certainly guarantee anyone buying this book is that with the possible exception of those of you who have read King Adz’s previous work, you’ll wait a long time before you see anything quite like Street Knowledge again. You’ll notice how lavish and vibrant both the text and illustrations are, and how comprehensive and off-the-wall the book is.

King Adz makes no distinction between so-called ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, nor between the backgrounds of the diverse artists he includes in this work. Whether their point of exhibition happens to be in the corporate world - in terms of advertising campaigns or products produced by multinationals - or resolutely ‘underground’ - written on the walls and bridges of our urban environments - makes absolutely no difference to him. The only thing that matters is impact and visibility on the street. Adz defines street culture as ‘an ever-evolving influence on daily life. It can’t be held, but it can be seen, everywhere. It cannot be bought but it is often used to sell everything from video games to haute couture.

King Adz sees ‘street’ art purely in terms of its aesthetics and the impact it has on the people who experience it. So in Street Knowledge you’ll see a variety of art originating from right across the globe, culture depicted not only by fêted individuals who have become world-famous stars and consequently treated very well by capitalism, but also by resolutely subterranean figures who are little known outside a small group of perhaps largely local cognoscenti (and in many cases that’s exactly how they like it)-and just about everyone else in between.

Of course, the growth of the information highway and the continuing development of our cyberspace lives force us to consider the question of whether anything can truly be considered underground. As Adz says himself, ‘it’s 2010 and we’re all down with the latest everything. Nothing is hidden; everything is instantly accessible.

Art is created to be seen and enjoyed, debated and discussed. But while it can be accessed, it’s becoming an increasing myth that the Internet necessarily throws everything that’s good up into the light. For one thing, there’s just far too much going on for most of us to be able to care or spend the time sorting out the wheat from the chaff. In a disposable culture, we experience things in different ways. As for music, a young kid in the seventies and eighties might typically have bought a single every week and an album every month. These items were cherished artifacts, played time and time again, whose artwork and sleeve notes were poured over. Their counterparts in 2010 can immerse themselves in tracks from the 1930s or music that has been made literally minutes ago. And there is so much more of it made now.

This is where someone like King Adz comes in; he travels the world, checking out everything and everyone he’s heard of, been referred to, or stumbled across on the net. I personally rack up plenty of airmiles per annum, but I’m a positively stay-at-home, carpet-slippers individual compared to him. Look at the diversity of locations in this publication, he’s been to them all - from my home town of Leith where we took a leisurely stroll down the Walk to the Docks on a sunny day, enjoying the banter of some of the more colourful locals, to the Cape Flats of South Africa and beyond to the backstreets of Tehran. Evidence of his globetrotting is apparent throughout the book; Adz in your town, hanging out, taking in the visuals and the pulse of life.

If I was trying to get in touch with someone who didn’t want to be got in touch with, Adz would be the first person I’d go to, just in order to work out how to go about it. One of his great talents as an artist, compiler, networker and individual is his resolute refusal to see barriers where the rest of us have been conditioned into doing so.

Street Knowledge will turn you onto stuff that you would never ordinarily encounter in years of websurfing. I repeatedly found myself fascinated by stuff within its pages I’d hitherto had zero interest in, precisely because I had only had limited exposure. I tend to order books online these days. In some ways, this breaks my heart, because one of the great pleasures in my life used to be browsing in a bookstore, coming across something I didn’t expect to see. That pleasure is all but gone now, as when we walk inside it’s hard to escape the feeling we’re being force fed increasingly dull, corporate fare by marketing people, pushing us into sterile consumerist boxes: art, literature, travel, cooking, crime, romance, thrillers, classics. It’s therefore uplifting to come across something that intrinsically says, ‘fuck all that nonsense’.

So have some Street Knowledge.

Irvine Welsh