They are never going to see either piece in person. The difference is that The Underbelly Project is a more extreme example of what the internet has done for street art. It initially seems to be exclusive because the physical space is a restricted location, but photographs of the project spread worldwide and had greater reach than works in more accessible public locations.
The Underbelly Project is a case where geography and physical access no longer matter. Only the documentation and the distribution of that documentation matter. Suddenly, some people see the process as distasteful and inauthentic.
Any street artist who submits photographs of their work to a blog or maintains a social media presence would be at fault too. One thing The Underbelly Project accomplished that a lot of street art aims for but falls short of achieving is to enter the realm of folklore. There are only a handful of instances over the last thirty or so years where street art and graffiti projects have left such a mark.
These are the projects that force people to think differently and consider their surroundings in a new way whether they witnessed the projects in person or not. There are few people better than Curry to explain the power of art turning into folklore.
What I loved about this moment was how quickly the thing had been distilled into legend, how accessible the beauty and strangeness of such an endeavor was to people who were only just hearing about it. It became a perfect silver strand plucked from the atmosphere, lovely as the sound of bells reaching you from off in the distance.
No fuss, no muss, just a little pearl under the dark sea. Standing between Mr. Secret Organizer and this recounter of the story, I felt the awesome dissonance between what goes into making something like this, and what the thing becomes in the minds of people.
The Underbelly Project might not be a mural on a wall, but for so many it has had a greater impact and spurred them to think more magically to borrow from Curry again about the city. Photo by Joe Anzalone. It was essential to this particular myth that the project happened where nobody could see it. Many other projects that became myths only took place for a short period of time.
Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Viral Art Viral Art. The Underbelly credo is hardly original: artists throughout history have similarly striven to purge themselves of the marketplace.
PAC, an even more hardline advocate of creative cleanliness, was all for not publicising the existence of Underbelly at all.
We are speaking sotto voce , almost whispering. Sound reverberates in this hollow chasm, and can escape through cavities to places where it might be heard. The regular clatter of trains thundering past sometimes muffles our voices altogether.
Light streaks across the walls of the site like film being fed slowly through a projector, scattering transitory illumination across eerie works that will never be seen in the light. Did its citizens but know it, the New York subway is home to a considerable labyrinth of abandoned spaces which were once destined to become stations and, for whatever reason, never made it.
When three independent subway companies from the early s merged, for example, construction was rationalised. The s crash in certain cases halted it altogether. Later, longer trains rendered some stations unusable. Extended platforms put some impracticably close together. One station under New York City Hall with brick-vaulted ceilings and skylights is even open for tours from the Transit Museum.
It was one of these who introduced PAC to the station in For a couple of years he would sporadically visit. We walk along a series of platforms and ledges towards a small room off the far end where the first images were painted.
PAC shines the light on a striking jolie-laide image of a two-tone face, orange and white, with seductively hooded eyes and buck teeth. Pictured below: Jasper Rees in front of image. We were all so energised, we went back to my house and had margaritas at 7. We went to bed and learned when I woke up how filthy the place is. We had tromped mud all over the place. Every artist would need escorting, and while more than one could come down on the same night, their guides would need to make a minimum of 60 visits each.
So they imposed a time limit. Four hours to work. No exiting for more materials. No coming back. They also had to pay their own expenses — including air travel — and generally subsume their ego to the wider mission. Naturally there was no talk of remuneration. We didn't tell them who else was involved. Those are just some of the stellar urban artists who give the Underbelly Project its artistic credibility.
Faile, a Brooklyn collective, have exported their sly comic-book style to public wall spaces across the world. Swoon, a Brooklyn urban-art activist, made waves at the Venice Biennale when, uninvited, she sailed a floating cityspace sculpture made out of trash down the Grand Canal at 3am.
For the record, Banksy was asked, but it was while he was promoting his film Exit Through the Gift Shop. The artists who came down were more or less self-selecting. SheOne, a Londoner with 20 years on the clock as a graffiti artist, was one of the last in. And a certain amount of adrenalin kicked in. To have them all in one place is quite a coup. I felt completely out of my comfort zone. It had a really strong effect on me. But the majority were their fellow Americans - appropriately given the origins of the modern urban art movement in s New York, when graffiti artists started covering subway trains with their tags — graffiti argot for a signature.
In the s the work of street artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring both dead by took the movement off the walls of Manhattan and into galleries, museums, international biennials and, above all, auction houses.
The Underbelly Project is rooted in that early history. Their most ambitiously placed tag on Brooklyn Bridge made it onto the cover of The New York Times and sparked a public outcry about defacing public buildings. The city pressed charges. Sane subsequently fell to his death from the same bridge, though whether it was a suicide or an accident was never established.
The work ranges from simple statement to dense allusion, from vast and bold, lurid and DayGlo to subtle and pernickety, intricate and arcane. Some works are shiny with childlike rainbow-coloured optimism. One artist has counterintuitively daubed a huge red-and-white flower up the wall, as if anything could grow down here. But the pieces which grab me are the ones are more sinisterly in sync with the space - skullheads and creepy profiles, Hadean spectres and a pair of huge scuttling rats.
There is an expected amount of anarchic sloganeering and sly digs at the corporate-commercial complex. Another is plastered in a woozy, zig-zagged Stars and Stripes banner. One artist in the throes of a break-up deposited his dreams of moving home on the wall in the cartoon form of a walking house.
Workhorse reserved a cinemascopic space for himself and used his time slot to create a minutely detailed stencil-based image of himself in an empty subway carriage. The working conditions were not ideal.
I woke up the next morning and couldn't write because I had hit it so much with the palm of my hand. The site mostly comprises a series of parallel railway beds, all closed off at both ends.
As we walk from one to another, along platforms and railway beds, there suddenly looms out of the darkness perhaps the most curious contribution to the Underbelly Project. The piece is by an artist called Jeff Stark, known for carefully choreographing dinners for 40 in abandoned spaces around the city. He put out a call and they had to write an essay saying why they should be the people chosen. They had a tour while the artist set up, then sat down to a five-course meal.
Like something off the Marie Celeste, the table is the only evidence that anyone ever dined in this most exclusive New York eaterie. But mostly the artists came down in ones and twos and occasionally fours, donned their face masks and head torches and set to work. I have to come to this station another 40 times. Another time Workhorse was about to leave with a young Australian artist when he saw workers walking down on the track and they had to beat a hasty retreat back to the site.
I wanna make sure she doesn't make a noise but if she's injured I have to take her out. Turns out she's OK. Ron English Self as Self. Shepard Fairey Self as Self. Revok Self as Self. Jordan Seiler Self as Self. Swoon Self as Self.
Gabriel Carrer Angus McLellan. Storyline Edit. Making late-night trips to an abandoned New York City subway station right below a police station, the curators Workhouse and PAC share details with other artists 'about their secret expeditions. Add content advisory. Details Edit. Country of origin United States.
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