Blu

As is the case with most contemporary graffiti artists, the Italian born “Blu” remains just out of the public eye while his monumental designs dwell in it. Ever elusive, Blu prefers anonymity as he leaves his mark all over the world. Active since 1999, he has covered the walls of buildings from Berlin to Peru to Los Angeles. However to refer to Blu strictly as a graffiti artist would be a grave misinterpretation of his work. Although he does has a long list of wall commissions in several countries, Blu is best known for his incorporation of his signature massive paintings with stop-motion animation. These animations are several minutes long, with each frame commanding an astonishing amount of adjustment and effort. The sheer size of his compositions are baffling, and those with any inkling of the work necessary to achieve just a single frame of his sometimes ten-minute long videos appreciate even more the labor required of this artist. 

 ...His arguably most famous animation, Muto.

Tim Lefens

Review of Artist Lecture: Tim Lefens

The lecture given by Tim Lefens on Wednesday, November 9^th, was certainly the most controversial, opinionated, and entertaining of the artist lecture series at SUNY New Paltz this season. Aided solely by a recorder with his own voice giving him prompts, Lefens discussed his views on art through several of his theories. Theories the audience was extremely interested in hearing, considering they followed his opening declaration that Duchamp was the beginning of the end of art. How curious that the for the Art Seminar course, Duchamp is the beginning of the beginning...it calls to question what an old school opinion is doing in a line up of current, contemporary, progressive-thinking artists. Did we know what we were getting ourselves into? Lefens, who provided no visuals of his work (and upon further investigation, visuals proved difficult to find) was a rogue presenter who spouted ideas of transcendence and visual aesthetic and condemned social-political content in art. Indeed his definition of art seemed wholly anti-conceptual, anti-academic, and anti-modern which throws up fistfuls of red flags when we consider the context and environment in which he was presenting. It is absurd to suggest to a group of 21^st century art students and professors that they turn their backs on art which does not aesthetically “transcend” and is successfully devoid of all conceptual factors during the making process. This defiance of such art practice is to be ignorant of a century's worth of art history.

While several of his arguments were outrageous, he had the quality of a salesman with his uncanny ability to hold an audience with his eccentric personality and colorful anecdotes that reeked of embellishment. His habit of trailing off into hilarious tangents made it difficult to impose judgement on such a likeable character. It must be said that Tim Lefens is a passionate man, and what he does he believes in. His work with quadriplegics is undeniably fascinating and would have been better served as a lecture all its own. His performance as an entertainer was highly successful and even if you disagreed with everything he said, he has certainly become a topic for conversation and debate. Yet for all of his redeeming qualities it must be said that Lefens was disappointingly single-minded and contradictory and hopefully most folks will have enough sense to not buy too much of what he was selling.