kasselshadow – Boulevard

An experimental curatorial module: 16 Elements Of Hip-Hop, Shadow Residency, Mirror Room, Un/Authorized Collection. And an inevitable question familiar from the world of graffiti: what lies behind these names?

Self-authorized forms of expression find their way onto public infrastructure. Free from institutional guidelines and restrictions, they have become what’s maybe the sole really relevant art form of modern urbanity. However, any original curatorial approach to these expressions requires an informed and genuine engagement with their specific characteristics.

‚Elements‘ refers to these specifics. A series of practice-oriented workshops to re-examine the often conservatively understood field of hip-hop culture as a space of possibility, extending beyond the so-called ‚4 elements‘. The number 16 functions merely allegorically here, just signifying ’significantly more‘. To conduct these teach-ins, we invite practitioners who have already pioneered – and continue to pioneer – such an expansion of the urban playing field.

Since someone has to make a start, Troy Lovegates was asked to come around. Lovegates‘ signature artistic method is wandering. As a skater, he explored his hometown of Toronto in the 1980s before taking up graffiti under the Other pseudonym. Yet he remained something of an outsider. Through figurative art, he distanced himself from generic imitations of the New York standard very early, and, by consistently working illegally, from the meanwhile fashionable ‚urban art‘ later on. Like a hobo, he began drawing with oil pastels on freight trains and took up traveling on them, too. In this way, he developed a new format that lies between hobo signatures and figurative street art. He has since expanded this practice to include murals, printmaking and sculptural wood carvings. Expanded, mind you – not replaced.

In Kassel, we walk around the Schillerviertel. Troy Lovegates is on his way to the ‚Tschilla‘ creative space, to work there and teach his techniques to interested visitors. For the four days ahead, he will open his temporary studio, situated between the bicycle repair initiative, the tailoring workshop and the language school, who share the room. As yet, there are few materials and no concrete idea. Yet, that is precisely – the idea.

Lovegates came with the decision to beforehand keep the list of materials as short as possible: tools for woodcut and linocut, and a bit of paint. He himself would bring along a few solid marker sticks. Traveling light – like we used to do. Equipped only with lightweight luggage, Lovegates would try, as far as possible, to create from materials found along the way. This journey’s path – or paths, more precisely – is the proverbial destination here.

There – a decorative plank of natural wood amongst a pile of trash waiting for the kerbside collection. There – a pencil in a bulk container. The artist takes both. The wood we found is immediately worked on, but proves too tough for extensive print carving. However, a first motive was engraved. Time to wander on.

Our first long walk takes us along disused railway tracks. In the evening light, we pass piles of railway sleepers and an abandoned signal box. Graffiti tags cover the walls, including several ‚fist‘ symbols by Kripoe. Rectangular rubber pads, which were used as track pads, lie on the former track bed. They will become printing plates for Lovegates.

Carolina accompanies us. Beach slippers, fishnet stockings, she knows to walk over oily sleepers, trough blackberry brambles, she carries the ritual. We have fun. Then we discover something else – hidden beside the tracks is an entrance to underground chambers. We climb inside. A small bunker or shelter, with a ventilation system dating from 1943. Back in the light of day, we will wait a while. The Lovegates has stayed downstairs, he is already busy painting the walls.

We can assume, according to Rivasi, that practitioners of unauthorised public art will always intervene in urban space outside the scope of their commissioned work, in the shadows, so to speak. Results of these free artistic expressions can be collected for documentary purposes and presented in an interpretative manner. An exhibition space then becomes a ‚Mirror Room‘, capable of evolving before the audience’s eyes, while the works are gradually overwritten or eventually disappear. Thus, interventions from the outdoor space are reflected and enter into dialogue with works created in the workshop. In the foyer of the creative space, there happens to be a community swap shelf. On it we find a few small picture frames, which, with spontaneously created little drawings, find their place alongside the photos from the freight yard.

The shadow as a metaphor has various meanings, some of which overlap. Is it the marginal field, failed by the spotlights of official recognition? Or is it a welcome cloak of relative invisibility, under the protection of which secretive works are prepared, only to emerge into the light all the more surprisingly? The audience is invited to accompany us for a short while. Along the Grüner Weg, past the North Hessian Police Headquarters and the pub ‚Zur Gemütlichen Ecke‘, then across Schillerstrasse. By the Krauss-Maffei Wegmann tank factory, we angle off towards the railway sidings. Along the way, figures can be spotted here and there, pointing us in the right direction. Our destination is the small bunker room. Once there, candles and torches provide the lighting, and we celebrate another exhibition opening with some drinks brought along.

Later, everyone returns to the foyer presentation with a fresh and different, broadened perspective. We have now seen some of the originals in the outdoor space, we visited the site where the repurposed printing plates were found and know their original function. Perhaps everyone has glimpsed some of the atmospheric inspiration behind the whole project. Just outside the door, Troy Lovegates holds another artist’s talk. Insights into what is otherwise hidden.

Finally, there is the Un/Authorized Collection. We will explore the question of how the classical idea of a collection can be reconciled with these art forms that thrive in the shadows. On the one hand, unauthorised painting in public spaces already constitutes a ’shadow collection‘ that is more comprehensive, more accessible and closer to our collective memory than many institutional art collections. With its dynamic, unstable form, it also poses a challenge to the “institutional curatorial practice of preserving, classifying and presenting.”

What modes of collecting could do justice to both? What leads from the ‚discourse on the wall‘ to the ‚Museum of Visual Dissidence‘?

In any case, visitors of the presentation’s opening and closing receptions have already taken a first step ahead of any surrounding established institutions when it comes to collecting. They took individual works off the wall and along with them. The artist himself has expressly encouraged them to do so.

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