Poster Boy Is Caught, or Is It a Stand-In?

Photo-Poster BOY in action!

ARTmostfierce for quite a while , has seen the work of Poster Boy mostly in the 8th Avenue 23rd St C& E train stop in Chelsea . I must tell you ...the collages are brilliant,hilarious and so are its messages.Reminiscent of Keith Haring and Basquiat but,in a more contemporary and newer technique. I find so silly that the Police Department is wasting time and tax money , like they did with Keith Haring, (he was arrested so many times) chasing a guy that his work is so cool. At first glance, you can't even notice that the advertising sign was altered.It is a joy for me to see the work and I tried to peel it from the wall and take it home. Maybe next time I see the guys putting new ones...
Anyway Randy Kennedy from the NY Times wrote about Poster Boy. Watch out Bansky...we got something good across the pond...
Watch him in action!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21iVQ0iXs00

By RANDY KENNEDY
Published: February 3, 2009
If you’ve been half-awake in the subway sometime in the last year or so and thought you noticed two guys drowning in a glass of beer in a Michelob ad, or saw an ad for a television program about the Drug Enforcement Administration altered to say, “Iran: Every Deal Can Turn Deadly,” or that familiar subway door sign reworded to read, “Do Not Lean on Poor,” you have most likely seen the work of Poster Boy.

While most other street or graffiti artists concentrate on adding their own imagery, illegally, to parts of the subway system, Poster Boy, a kind of anti-consumerist Zorro with a razor blade, a sense of humor and a talent for collage, has made his outlaw presence known all over the city by cutting and pasting the images that are already there in the form of ads.

But his stealth campaign, which has entertained thousands of normally glassy-eyed commuters and infuriated the police and the companies whose costly ads he has chopped up and scrambled, will probably get a lot harder now. At an art event in SoHo on Saturday, a group of plainclothes New York City police officers finally caught up to and unmasked, at least metaphorically, the man they say is Poster Boy.

He is Henry Matyjewicz, a 27-year-old who lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and he was found after a tip from someone who saw the name Poster Boy on a flier for the event, the police said.

Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, said that Mr. Matyjewicz (pronounced Mat-ee-YAY-veetch), who was also being sought on a warrant for a petty larceny charge from last year, was arrested in the art space, at Broadway and Howard Street in SoHo, and charged with two misdemeanor counts of criminal mischief.

“The officers had information that he was, in fact, going to be at that gallery that night,” Mr. Browne said, adding that he believed that the department had evidence of Mr. Matyjewicz at work scrambling parts of subway posters. (Although his face is obscured, there is also plentiful video of Poster Boy doing his thing at friendswelove.com and on YouTube.)

But a man identifying himself as “Henry,” who called The New York Times on Tuesday in response to messages for Poster Boy sent through friends, cast some existential doubt on whether Mr. Matyjewicz was, in fact, the man the police were after.

“Henry is one of many individuals who believe in the Poster Boy ‘movement,’ ” the man wrote later on Tuesday in an e-mail message, referring to Mr. Matyjewicz in the third person. “Henry’s part is to do legal artwork while propagating the ideas behind Poster Boy. That’s why it was O.K. for him to take the fall the other night.”

He added, “Henry Matyjewicz is innocent.”

Moni Pineda, a co-creator and producer for Friends We Love, a New York documentary video series that profiles young artists, said that she and the series’s other creator, Mike Vargas, had just begun a benefit event in the SoHo space on Saturday evening when they noticed a commotion involving a person Ms. Pineda would identify only as “a friend,” adding, “Poster Boy could be anybody.”

“The police came into a private event,” Ms. Pineda said. “They didn’t show a warrant to me or anybody. And the next thing we know, our friend is walking out with a bunch of guys we didn’t know.”

Ms. Pineda said she and others came up with bail for their friend, but not before he had been transferred to Rikers Island, where he stayed before being released in the wee hours of Monday morning.

In one of his YouTube videos, Poster Boy says that he started rearranging subway ads because he wanted to make art but could not afford materials. “I mean, a razor pretty much anybody can afford,” he says.

His work grows out of a wave of remix culture that has inspired many young artists and musicians over the last decade, though in Poster Boy’s case it is decidedly analog. And he would like to see the idea spread, he wrote on Tuesday in a series of answers to e-mailed questions.

“Socially, I’d like people to understand that there is a difference between what is right and what is just,” he said. “If there is a law that is outdated, impractical, and/or immoral, people should have the right to challenge it. Remember, slavery was considered legal at one point. I consider the world’s current modus operandi a modern slave system. I intend to challenge it in any way I can.”

In a recent interview with Gothamist.com, Poster Boy bragged that the police vandal squad officers had been “hounding” him for his autograph. He added that he had begun moving on to more ambitious — and, legally, probably riskier — projects involving whole billboards and, mysteriously, “something planned that, if successful, will make the poster and billboard stuff look trivial.”

On Tuesday Poster Boy said that Mr. Matyjewicz’s arrest meant only good things for Poster Boy. “More awareness,” he wrote in the e-mail interview . “More support. Outdoor advertising, a blight that can’t be ignored, will become illegal.”

Yet Ms. Pineda, who said she had seen her friend on Monday after his release from jail, said he might have to reassess his plans in light of his looming legal problems.

“He believes in what he’s doing,” she said. “He still has a lot to say. But I don’t think even he knows how things are going to shape up.”

“And again,” she made a point to add, “Poster Boy can be anybody.”

Two Artists United by Devotion to Women

Wallace Berman, "Untitled (Al Marilyn Monroe)," 1970


I was not familiar with Wallace Berman work but, after reading this article, seen some of his work and doing a little research, I will try to get my hands in some of his work. It has a raw 60's and 70's quality that a lot of new (sick of the word emerging) and contemporary photographers try to emulate.Please read article written by Randy Kennedy of the NY Times

By RANDY KENNEDY
Published: December 22, 2008

As artists’ biographies go, those of Wallace Berman and Richard Prince could hardly be more different. Berman, who died at 50 in 1976, the victim of a drunken driver, was a kind of Beat guru flying just below the radar, showing his work in only one conventional gallery exhibition during his lifetime and popping into rare view in strange places: a cameo in “Easy Rider”; the cover of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” where his face is wedged next to Tony Curtis’s, just below Jung’s.

By contrast Mr. Prince, 59, labored in obscurity for years but not exactly by choice: he wanted a larger audience and found it. For more than two decades he has been one of the most influential contemporary artists, and his work — paintings, photography, car-centric sculpture — has sold for many millions of dollars, allowing him to create an impressive studio complex in Rensselaerville, N.Y., in Albany County.

But Berman’s eccentric, highly personal art and career has long fascinated Mr. Prince, who has painstakingly collected copies of his signature work, Semina, a kind of early California zine that Berman made with — and mailed only to — his friends, from 1955 to 1963. For Mr. Prince, a bibliophile with a special love for the Beat years, the fascination stems partly from Berman’s Zelig-like connections in those years: his circle included Allen Ginsberg, Dennis Hopper and Henry Miller. One of Berman’s collaborators was the artist known as Cameron, whose first husband, Jack Parsons, as Mr. Prince notes, was a friend of L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology.

But these days Mr. Prince seems to be drawn to Berman as much for what his life represented, an almost ascetic pursuit of art for art’s sake that seems increasingly distant from today’s art world. Berman’s work “was very word-oriented and a lot of it was free,” Mr. Prince said in a recent telephone interview. “It had nothing to do with the market, and it had to do with a lifestyle that was very anti-establishment.”

For the first time Mr. Prince’s work will appear alongside Berman’s in a show called “She” opening Jan. 15 and running through March 8 at the Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles. The exhibition focuses on a common subject where the two artists overlap in odd and unexpected ways: women.

Berman surrounded himself with women and loved photographing them, seemingly just for the pleasure of taking the shot; most of his pictures were never even printed during his lifetime. He made romantic portraits of his wife, Shirley, and erotic ones of the painter Jay DeFeo and unlikely ones of the young actress Teri Garr, a friend to whom he regularly mailed artwork. “He was a great person,” Ms. Garr recalled. “He was always saying, ‘Just make things, just make things.’ ”

His collages often relied on found imagery of women in magazines. And it was a borrowed image of a woman — a sinuous drawing of a demonlike one and a man in flagrante delicto — that led to Berman’s arrest and conviction in 1957 on obscenity charges during his first commercial show at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, establishing the twin themes of his career: exploring the fringes of American society and shunning the attention of the mainstream.

Like Berman, Mr. Prince mines the ways that society has portrayed women and how women have seemed to want to be portrayed. But his obsessions — images of half-clothed women taken from pulp fiction, biker magazines and other subculture publications — toy much more ambiguously and provocatively with sexism, exploitation and the conventions of pornography than did Berman’s. And Mr. Prince constantly pushes buttons to keep those ambiguities alive. In a question-and-answer session included in the show’s catalog, he is asked whether he has any female friends. He says no. Asked when he thinks a girl becomes a woman, he says it is when she starts baby-sitting.

“I think he likes to be mischievous,” said Kristine McKenna, a writer and curator who organized the exhibition with Mr. Prince and Berman’s widow. “When Richard makes this kind of work, you get the impression that it’s very playful, that he goes into it to figure out what it’s going to be.” (Ms. McKenna recalled that when she first met Mr. Prince in the 1980s, while he was living in the Venice section of Los Angeles, his spare, suburban-style house was “strewn with copies of all these weird specialty magazines like Parakeet Fancier.”)

She said the idea for the show came about because she knew of Mr. Prince’s longstanding interest in Berman and thought that their mutual focus on women and sensuality would be an interesting way to put their work together. After many years of newfound interest in Berman’s art, this also seems to be his moment. His work is included in an exhibition now on view at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and in shows that closed recently at the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Camden Arts Center in London. Galerie Frank Elbaz, a contemporary space in Paris, is planning a show, and “Semina Culture,” a traveling exhibition organized in part by Ms. McKenna from 2005 to 2007, was well received.

Mr. Prince said he agonized over the work he wanted to include in the Los Angeles exhibition, submitting and then withdrawing hundreds of pieces before settling mostly on recent collages that take a familiar theme of his — covers of naughty nurse novels — and combine it with pornographic images, tame compared with most things floating around the Internet but most still too explicit for a family newspaper.

While his work and Berman’s are very different, Mr. Prince said, he sees an affinity in the frankness of their approach to carnality, a subject that art too often dances around. “I’ve never wanted to be transgressive or to make an image that was unacceptable or that I would have to censor,” he said. “But that being said, I think a lot of the imagery I do create is sexual, and I hope it does turn people on.”

If it is pornography, he said of his and Berman’s work, he hopes it is a better kind. “Ultimately I find porn boring,” he said. “An erotic painting by Picasso is infinitely more interesting to me. Pornography is only functional. What I’m looking for is a picture that dreams and imagines.”

Feliz Navidad !