Michael McDevitt and Boyce Cummings both forwarded this brilliant video to me.
Michael described BLU, the Italian artist responsible for the film, as "a perfect example of a true graffiti artist... not a tagger or vandal, but an artist whose medium is paint on buildings. It's like William Kentridge rolled up a big joint of Bansky and smoked it while he worked." Indeed, and the joint was sprinkled with some of Keith Haring's sympathetic sensibility, too.
BLU's resulting film, "MUTO," is wonderfully surreal. Watching it, I consider time (with regard to the artist's process, and to the temporality of art, architecture and our species), scale and even magic.
"MUTO" is also uplifting; after a viewing, I feel good about urban living, and about the balance of humanity's prospects with all of our serious shortcomings. It ends, as all things must, in death...but there is joy even in that.
Were Voyager 1 launched today, I'd petition for the inclusion of the video.
(Personally, I prefer to watch "MUTO" without sound.)
Watch it here. Check out more work by BLU here. Read BLU's blog here.
Photo credit: image ripped from BLU's website
4 comments:
MUTO is staggering.... and humbling.
I agree that this video is really a great example of real urban art. It represents a great exploration and exploitation of the urban habitat in which so many of us find ourselves... I always love to find gems like this, my personal favorite, to date, is this sidewalk artist, Julian Beever --- http://yoke.cc/sidewalk.htm. I know that a lot of this is (obviously) commercial work, but I am truly humbled by the mastery of perspective...
Sunil:
Agreed.
Josh:
Yes, Beever's ability to manipulate perspective is remarkable. I wish he did more interesting things with it, of course.
Yer my boy, Blu! A real prolific bastard. I dug up another movie from him on Vimeo and posted it here.
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