James Chip Thomas, JR and Banksy

The public art above (the bottom two photos are by Gary O’Brien) are by James Chip Thomas.
Thomas pastes up the giant  pictures on  a Navajo reservation where he works as a doctor. The pictures are nostalgic but also tragic and the few that he has made so far seem to integrate perfectly with the dilapidated aridity of their surroundings. It would be interesting to know exactly why he photographs what he does, and his rationale for siting the works.

I think Thomas was inspired by the giant portraits of JR, but though I admire the energy and ambition of JR, I am never quite convinced by either the pictures he makes, the sites he chooses and the combination of the two. Still, his work makes an impact. 

For more information on Chip Thomas, see Erika Schulz.

To see more of Chip Thomas’ photos, visit his flickr page.

Oh, and here's a little bit of Banksy while we're at it.

Banksy on the Israeli Wall

More graffiti/street art here. 

And this comes via Prison Photography again.

Richard Hamilton, Inventor of Pop Art

Everybody is talking about (sorry - seeing Irving Penn at the NPG and The Sweet Smell of Success in the same week has addled my brain) Richard Hamilton. Hamilton is the grandaddy, no -  inventor of Pop Art. He has a show on at the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park, London, England which I saw last week.

It's a mixture of old work and new work with some of the newer  work not quite hitting the spot - as  This Guardian review   points out. It doesn't work "where politics take over and the art becomes subordinate".  And here's another review which says why Hamilton makes art out of the obvious.

I like the obvious because  it is often not that obvious (and certainly not as obvious as we assume it to be - from our little self-contained world of self-contained assumptions). We need constant reminding of the obvious to help us stay human, to help us remember that killing and lying and stealing are bad. The simplicity and directness of the Palestine Map works incredibly well, especially with the Mordechai Vanunu print (based on the photo above) right next to it. It's obvious but it still manages to be visceral.

 Hamilton's work clears the smoke and mirrors of the world around us and then reapplies it until only the memory remains. It's influential (you can see bits of Hamilton directly in some of Paul Graham's work for example, as well as so, so many other people working with photography), and for me, the only pieces that dont' work are the Blair-based prints and mouldings, but that is because Blair is a slippery, chimerical character who exists only in the realms of his own fevered parallel-universe of an imagination. Nothing good can come out of him - not even good in a bad way, or bad in a good way.

The Times calls him the most important artist in Britain.

"America being America, the claims of Hamilton, Paolozzi and co to having instigated pop art have been ruthlessly swatted away. But the facts are the facts. And the facts tell us that, by 1954, Hamilton was producing collages and screenprints filled with film stars, comic heroes, pin-ups, pile-ups and kitchen goodies, whose chief purpose was to question the modern relationship between a consumer and his goodies. Even today, in this serpentine display at the Serpentine, Hamilton is surreptitiously investigating the manipulation of the buyer by the seller"


And this is Hamilton speaking in an Interview with the Telegraph

“I have a concept of being rejected for most of my life,” Hamilton tells me, with a smile. “When I had a show at the Tate in 1992 [his last London exhibition], it was rated the worst show of the year. And I felt rather proud of that, really – I’d come out on top for something at last. But I’ve always felt the same way: I never did anything that anybody else wanted.”

And the picture at the top is by Juergen Teller.