Shepard Fairey: The Public Space Issue 30th Anniversary Archive - Kevin Pearce Thomas Campbell - Evan Hecox
ÂŁ4.25 | issue 30 Dec 2011/Jan 2012 Shepard Fairey by Mustafah Abdulaziz
14 HUCK
Five years and thirty issues ago, HUCK took its first step into the publishing game. Back then – and it feels like ages ago – print was supposed to be dead, high-frequency trading was the only show in town and kids still had jobs to go to when they finished college. Inspired by Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, we clung to the raft as we threw ourselves downstream – defying the naysayers with our belief that compelling words and beautifully curated photos HAD yet to find their match. And guess what, we’re still here today – taking the radical heritage of surf, skate and snowboarding and applying it to whatever we think is cool, relevant and zeitgeisty out there. The world over, school kids and workers alike are compelled to down tools and head for the ocean whenever the waves are good. As in, fuck work, I’m gonna go surfing. There’s something beautifully subversive about that single act of adolescent rebellion. We’d like to think HUCK captures a little bit of that spirit. What follows is a retrospective of the first thirty issues. Hope you’ve enjoyed ’em as much as the next thirty or more to come.
Vince Medeiros, HUCK FOUNDER AND PUBLISHER.
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In 2008, Shepard Fairey helped the world see Barack Obama as an iconic torchbearer of positive change. One presidential term later and disillusionment has spread where h o p e o n c e s t o o d . N o w, h a v i n g l i v e d t h r o u g h criticism, court cases and commercial success, the skate punk-turned-street art entrepreneur is ready to back his own campaign. Interview Jon Coen Photography Mustafah Abdulaziz
omeone stole our stencils,” announces Shepard Fairey. Just this morning, Fairey and his crew threw up a series of record-sleeve stencils on the north side of Asbury Park’s Sunset Pavilion. They’d begun another on a west-facing wall before they broke for lunch. When they returned, they were a few stencils down. The situation drips with irony. Here’s one of the best-known street artists in the world – a subversive visionary whose illegal work helped stamp his name onto the pop culture landscape – and while he’s granted permission to legally adorn walls in the ‘safe’ waterfront area of a city undergoing a slow resurgence, the outlaw-turned-folk hero gets his stuff nicked – most likely by fans of his work. Welcome to Asbury Park, New Jersey. Fairey is in town for the week doing a series of pieces, both wheat paste and stencil jobs, on the once-glorious architecture from this city’s heyday that has since fallen into disrepair. The corruption, fires, race riots, economic ruin and subsequent ghost-town status that Bruce Springsteen wrote about were real. But this town was never dead. Home to legendary clubs, it has since become a countercultural capital. More than a decade ago, the skaters, artists, small businesses, gay nightclub owners and musicians (a Shep Fairey crowd if ever there was one) staked out a little piece on the Atlantic Ocean that no one else wanted and made Asbury Park their home. Today, you can find mate tea, Ceviche de Pargo and Avalon Cabernet. There was a push for a topless beach. The boardwalk offers Balinese jewellery and locally shaped twin-fins. There are tattoo conventions, roller derbies, bike shows and lesbian kickball games. But it’s always been about the rock. That’s what brings people here. That’s what brought Fairey here, too. First he agreed to do the poster art for All Tomorrow’s Parties, the American version of the British festival by the record company of the same name, which is curated by a different artist each year. But then longtime friend Jonathan LeVine, best known for turning DIY creativity into something wealthy people will hang on their walls, asked him to do an art show and leave his mark on the slowly transforming ‘Debris by the Sea’.
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S t r a i g h t Ta l k Chatting geometry with Evan Hecox, the Mission School graduate who sees abstract shapes in urban space. Te x t A n d r e a K u r l a n d Portrait Andrew Paynter
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Evan Hecox likes to keep things straight.
“I’ve always tried to reduce the landscape
When we meet on a rainy afternoon in east
into abstract things,” says Evan, meticulously
London before the private view of Borough
lining up his next shot. “Like, some of these
& Lane – a show inspired by London’s post-
shapes are just the suggestion of a window.
industrial landscape – the Colorado-based
With these pieces, I took it to another level by
artist is in a characteristically matter-of-
adding in geometric forms that have nothing
fact mood. He’s also drenched. Stepping
to do with anything real.”
inside the gallery, he tips off his hat, brushes
This perfectly simplified urban world,
raindrops off his coat, then methodically sets
where “really organic line work contrasts with
up a camera in the centre of the room. Our
geometric shapes”, has become the Hecox
conversation, for the next forty-five minutes
staple. Since landing in San Francisco in the
or so, becomes something of an orchestrated
mid-nineties – a time and place synonymous
dance; every few minutes we swivel around,
with Mission School artists like Barry McGee
turning the tripod inch by inch, so that he can
– Evan has taken everyday city scenes, from
snap his work from every angle. Geometry, it
Mexican taco shacks to suburban LA, and
seems, is a recurring theme.
found something vibrant in the mundane.
“Coming from Colorado, it was always
into the piece with line work and bold blocks of
collectors can’t afford a 10,000 dollar piece.
fascinating to me, being in a city so busy and
colour. It’s an aesthetic that skateboarding has
But you can’t have aspirations without actually
dense,” explains Evan, who became ensconced
lapped up. Since 1997, Evan has been Chocolate
doing it; you can’t just talk about it.”
in the art scene ballooning around The
Skateboards’ go-to guy, lending his tonal style
That night, Evan’s show attracts a mixed
Luggage Store, a gallery that showed the likes
to over 300 graphics. “In high-school, I would
crowd: there are beer-swilling drifters with
of Chris Johanson and Margaret Kilgallen. “I
read Thrasher cover to cover and draw pretend
skateboards hooked under arms, and snappily
had this fishing stool and I would go sit and
skateboard graphics for nobody in particular.
dressed designer-types whose pockets are
sketch architectural things, but people would
Now, I do my best to stay a little bit naive to
brimming with thirty-something cash. At the
always bother me. So, I found this old Polaroid
skateboarding trends, so that I can produce
centre is the unassuming figure of a man – neat
camera, and started taking black and white
work that doesn’t look like everything else.”
shirt, short hair – taking in the sheer scale of it
shots around San Francisco.”
With a New York show planned for May –
all. “London is a huge, vast, old place; you have
Working from photographs – in a pristine
“an opportunity to produce some larger, more
to live here your whole life to fully comprehend
studio built onto his Denver home – Evan breaks
ambitious pieces” – and a public wall to paint in
it,” says Evan. “But hopefully, from an outsider’s
down the image into its basic components,
Sydney, Evan’s ready to up-size the scale of his
point of view, I see little things filtered through
amplifies the shapes that catch his eye, strips
work, “regardless of whether they sell or not”.
my own perspective. It’s always interesting to
away the rest, and then methodically works
As he explains: “It’s not easy, when my basic
see someone else’s take on a place.”
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