My final project Don’t Blink is a commentary on the public yet underground and fleeting nature of graffiti art and how many ignore it while some engage with it. I accomplish this by book-ending a graffiti art fan’s stop motion adventure into the Graffiti Hall of Fame with clips of people walking, riding, and driving right past it. Sound drives the hyper-kinetic nature of the stop motion video, with dizzying and energetic electronic beats serving as the soundtrack. I intentionally chose to include techno even though graffiti art is rooted in hip-hop culture. Hip-hop has become highly commercialized today but techno continues to remain underground, just like true graffiti art. While the Graffiti Hall of Fame is a commissioned public art space in a schoolyard, it was conceived in 1980 by New York graffiti artist, Ray Rodríguez (a.k.a. “Sting Ray”), as a site for local graffiti artists to display their skills without having to break the law. It is definitely an art space for and by the Harlem graffiti art community and not for tourists.
Furthermore, graffiti art has an ephemeral nature. Graffiti artists constantly retouch their work, tag over others work, or city workers remove their work. The Graffiti Hall of Fame represents this fleeting nature as the walls are redone by graffiti artists every six months or so. Thus, I incorporated the element of time into Don’t Blink. The title itself implies a warning to the viewer about the timing of the video. Due to the speed and stop motion animation, if you blink you might miss something. This creates the possibility that multiple viewers can perceive the video differently and want to go back and watch it again.
My intention of using the medium of video as a window to the perception of time is highlighted by Kate Horsfield in “Busting the Tube: A Brief History of Video Art” Horsfield describes how artists discovered the opportunity to utilize video as a means for aesthetic experimentation and how it could operate as a witness in the surveillance of observer and the observed. This idea is encapsulated in my video by the appearance random passersby juxtaposed with the graffiti art fan engaging with the subject matter of the video. By filming the fan engage with the graffiti art and the passersby not engage with it, the viewer is able to witness my surveillance of the observed. Finally, comparisons can be drawn between Don’t Blink and Omer Fast’s video installations at the James Cohan Gallery. In his latest installation Spring, Fast integrates different perceptions of the same event and shows them together instead of showing different scenes on each of the screens. Don’t Blink utilizes only one screen, however it does show both passive and active perceptions of the same event.