The Evolution of KAWS' Street Art Aesthetic | Brilliant Ideas Ep. 29

brilliant ideas powered by hyundai motor I guess we're installing the cause exhibition today six large wooden sculptures which have to be assembled bit by bit it's quite a task we've got 85 ton cranes on site - 20 ton trucks 22 technicians with wagons running back and forth we've had 13 40 food trucks onto the site this week just delivering the sculpture I think that when people see this exhibition what they will understand here is the sheer quality of his work is quite extraordinary we saw a piece in you're like wow like that guy took a Calvin Klein ad and made some type of sperm cell probably wrapping around a woman or whatever and you're like whoa what's that about clauses lines are all perfection he knows how he wants this art to feel he knows how if he wants you to feel and he's a complete master over what he's doing if it's a canvas if it's a product if it's a toy if it's a wall on the street I think he doesn't care it's really about being able to communicate in a way that's meaningful to him you know I don't really try to impose like any certain feeling or like a reaction I'm not trying to pull react you know somewhat you want to make a sculpture no I just think I just want them to take from it what they can Brian Donnelly goes by the name cause best known for his work as a painter toymaker product designer and sculptor he's created an instantly recognizable aesthetic that has seduced followers all over the world his most famous creations are the crew of characters he's developed over 20 years such as bendy a sexually disconcerting tadpole-like creature companion the first character to take 3d form the bold figure of Chum and accomplice his pink bunny suited rabbit you know when I was a kid I was always drawing I just it's sort of like the thing I retreated to and it wasn't wasn't for really any reason I didn't know of like artists I thought artists would dead people in books basically when I was in class if I was disinterested I would draw on the sidelines of the books and you know any any chance I got I kind of like I use that as my crutch to to deal course grew up in Jersey City where from a young age art was an escape I actually met Bryan or Klaus when he was still in college first he brought me his portfolio right so he was an illustration school not in fine art school and he had the most amazing portfolio and he could literally do anything he could do Rembrandt she had this like very vast skill set and now he's kind of narrowed that down to like his thing but you know he came from a position of power where he could do anything and then he picked the thing he was going to do and he stayed with it he got caught up in the heady New York graffiti movements when he moved to Manhattan in 1996 it's not an adventure just to be a studio artist but it's a huge adventure to be a street artist or a graffiti artist because you go out at night you're breaking the law you're going to some really high dangerous place you're knocking at something and the next day everybody can see it and suddenly graffiti kind of gave me a sort of way to communicating with other other peers or other older kids it's just you know I learned a lot you know I was trading photos with kids in Germany kids in Spain and I was going you know around the Bronx and Washington Heights taking photos so yeah I was sort of like a gateway into a thinking thinking more broadly about art when I started getting more into graffiti I started to think about just a name that I like the letters and how they how they worked with each other and you know if you're gonna paint the same letters over and over you might as well find something that that you think is suitable nothing that course does is ordinary and the graffiti is of a huge scale on bridges and freight trains and trucks the quality of it is quite extraordinary the way that it's painted is it is exceptional painting and that of course is what marked him out against all of the others or some of the others are a lot of very good graffiti artists working in New York at that time but he was very clearly from a very very early stage considered to be one of the best the name he made for himself as a graffiti artist coincided with a surge of advertisers in New York taking up coveted graffiti wall space for their billboards in the 90s there is a sort of explosion of um wall painting with advertising in Manhattan there was these I think it started with these giant Donna Karan murals that were like you know from curbside to building top these giant decaying white with cityscapes in them and then eventually other advertisers started to do it and all these great spots over graffiti spots for decades we're suddenly getting painted over so you know I just felt there was kind of strange that you know it was sort of taking a lot of sort of younger voices away and I like the idea of taking some of that property back I started painting over billboards which are these giant advertisements on highways and I would just stand on the platform of painting there would be cars going by and overnight this kind of engagement with advertisers pushed cause to make his graffiti increasingly provocative when I went to Manhattan in 96 I started working over phone booths and bus shelters he got a key that enabled him to open the cases in bus shelters and phone booths and he removed the posters took them to the studio worked on them overnight and then surreptitiously put them back into the cases and so New Yorkers were confronted by Kate Moss and Christy Turlington in their Calvin Klein underwear encircled by this figure called bendy or cavorting with him and he's a very ambiguous character in some ways there's a kind of friendliness about him in other ways that's the opposite of that is true I started to think about how like advertising worked and how that communicates to such a broad audience and thinking of graffiti as being such a small closed off world that you know the participants really kind of understand what's going on but to the greater public it just you know you can look at a wall and really not know where you're looking at and when I was working with the ads I started to think about you sort of iconography that would operate in a broader sense it wasn't quite graffiti anymore for his specific art he employs the excise which signifies death in older cartoons he would just use popular characters that a lot of people grew up with such as peanuts Snoopy dating back to Mickey Mouse in the 1920s to present times with SpongeBob and Simpson so she like really reached a broad spectrum of generations in my opinion the skull and crossbones heads are masks they're hiding the foibles and the fal ability that we all have and in some of the works have on their hands they're gloved hands have this cross and in some works the the hands go over the eyes and it's as though from my perspective the figures are hiding themselves from the world and yet they're still looking through their fingers are still aware of what's happening out in the world he wants to speak through visual imagery he wants to speak through accessible visual imagery which is figurative imagery right and he's just looking for mechanisms he's looking for means in which he can convey his ideas over the years causes relationship with commercial advertisers became closer but at the same time more complicated there's a Captain Morgan billboard that he graffiti'd and then Captain Morgan incorporated that graffiti into their next generation of advertising so this symbiotic relationship begins at a very early point and this sense of what is fake on what is original is established very early on causes undeniably become a cultural phenomenon but this success has raised questions about the relationship between his commercial outputs and his standing as an artist artist cause came from the New York graffiti scenes become an international cultural phenomenon he's made his mark on everything from painting and sculpture to clothing and product design but the turning points for his career in the commercial world came after meeting a toy designer in Tokyo in Japan there is a company called bounty hunter and I was introduced him to this company I was working with called hectic and you know they were making toys or making small edition toys they made this toy for this English artist actually James Jarvis and he was interested in happy to do a toy with me so I just did you know a bunch of rotation drawings the way you would an animation of what a figure would look like from each angle and we worked with a sculptor and sort of sculpted it and got it right and then suddenly I have hundreds of these toys that I took around and sold on consignment before I even knew who Bryan was or who cause was I saw the character that he created so here I was in Tokyo and I saw one Hong Kong dealer and he had a table and on his table he had these I would say look like Mickey Mouse characters and I asked him what they were and he said these are called companions and he gave me a price and I said I want to buy the whole table I want to buy everything you have I just knew that this was something that was so cool and I had to buy it I had to get it I had to have it and I wanted other people to see it the companion in 1999 was a really important point for a number of reasons I mean for one thing it gave him a kind of economic viability because they sold like crazy and then he was able to make more and to do other things but it also I think spoke to him about the possibilities of what sculpture might be of how he might be able to make sculpture you know I'd only I only know my work into 2d in the past from drawing and painting I've been doing that pretty much my whole life so to suddenly have like a sculptural thing and it really just got me thinking about what else sculpture I can make and when I first started working with companion but it was as a toy wasn't really even thinking of this character that would have any life beyond the first sculpt I've always sort of jokingly imagined it to be something like 15 feet tall and here it's only few years later and it's 40 feet and it's filled with helium and Thanksgiving beg for it it's just bizarre I know Brian was excited but I was probably just as excited as he was to see you know the character the companion from how you know I had it sold it and all of a sudden everyone can see it in life-sized floating in the Macy's Day Parade if you have a balloon and it Macy's Day Parade your big time the art world really hasn't got a piece in the Mesa State parade until cause as if confirmation was needed of causes success on the public stage he was soon given the ultimate assurance of his place in popular culture and 2013 cause really brought the barriers of what an artist can do and she was approached by MTV to reimagine the Luo man award and his own image the companion image as well as design everything whether it's the banners or the stage itself suddenly went from all the sculpture the trophy looks amazing would you run a design whole stadium and of course I'm going to try to you know make the most that opportunity so suddenly working with these giant inflatables and designing stage sets and doing all the visuals for the tickets and the advertising reflecting his high profile in the media causes products were becoming desirable collectibles in 2014 his original fake companion sold for a hundred and twenty nine thousand US dollars at auction one of the highest prices ever achieved for a toy he has a growing family of fans all over the world any time anyone ever comes into toy Tokyo the first artists toy anything related is cause you have anything from cause you have anything about cause you have this cause this cause when the collectibles and figures were released in the retail market they started off as low as $98 or even as low as 50 and now they skyrocket some tenfold some more than that before for companion roughly fetches for around 30,000 to 40,000 and auctions and his small-scale limited edition collectibles range anywhere from $100 to $25,000 my collection personally I got at least about a good 70 to 100 course pieces in my collection what collecting too means to me it's something that represents who you are and that means like if you come to my house and you see like bare bricks and you see like cause figures and you see like bathing ape stuff in my house you know that's what I'm into most of these I acquired back in 2013 so a few years after his release what you saying is underneath what would be a dead companion is a she's full-color there's life in there and you can really see you know what makes the core you get the psychology on a molecular level that people are more than what they are in the surface for some causes work means more than mere collecting cos helped me become Who I am as a person and define my career path so what started out as a hobby really took off and I really invested a lot of time and blood sweat energy into it and it really pays off and it really becomes doing something I loved every single day you know but does causes commercial focus in any way diminish his importance as an artist the art world in which we live today is much more complicated a much more chaotic in some ways is a kind of balkanized chaos and within that balkanized chaos there are multiple registers of value and those registers of value how we determine quality and importance of art now those registers overlap to some extent one register for instance of value is the marker another register of value is critical acclaim another register of value is museum exhibitions and collections cause I think has been very successful as a commercial artist he's also very popular with critics and collectors but his our historical value I think is questionable most artists in history have been commercial artists most of the greatest artists that we adore were commercial artists Rembrandt was a portrait artist you paid him he made a portrait of you Michelangelo worked for the church he did these spectacular pieces for the Pope it wasn't really till the 20th century that the concept of art you know this pure sacred thing that's art for art's sake actually existed to treat him as any less of an artist because he's involved in a directly commercial enterprise or the fact that his skill set transcends the art world I think is a big mistake it's additionally something that makes him much more interesting as an artist rather than less so when course was looking at other artists when he was growing up and I think he's someone who's always looked at other artists he was looking at people like Warhol he was looking at jean-michel Basquiat he's looking at Klaus Oldenburg and Keith Haring so people who are creating pop-up shops people who are creating products they're interacting with the world of fashion and advertising and design essentially just merging those barriers you know it's just the same way that people try to like compartmentalized you with like oh you know there's people that know me from graffiti and they're like oh you're a graffiti artist oh you're a toy designer with people of their first interaction with me is that a museum they're going to be like Oh contemporary artists and I always felt like those labels are unnecessary a museum exhibition is a serious test for any artists reputation but because what his first ever show in the UK helped secure his place in the art world as a major contemporary artist you causes first-ever Museum show in the UK has just opened to the public it's a pivotal moment for him as an artist every bit of weather has been chopped at this show we've had wind snow ice the whole thing but always people out there I mean physically there's always there's always like obstacles when you're installing something of the scale and you know you to consider sort of how is it grounded how you know what are the winds in Yorkshire like oh just things that you don't at first like when I was thinking about Scotia I never thought about but then you know you realize it's it really becomes about engineering I think they're fantastic and it's really something quite quite different that we've done here before there's a little children standing behind me earlier on and they're just standing there with a Mauser been thinking a Mickey Mouse which is landed it has a look of Disney about it the finish is lovely as well a wood is lovely yeah and the size is spectacular this is very much so I think it might encourage the youngsters to actually get involved in in art more because it's not that versus studio or the fine artists it's more of a pop art in some ways seeing it with the treeline seeing the wood sculptures there's a certain warmth to it that I think really works and it also is the first time to have them all in the same sight line like I've never been in a situation where I can look across and see them at different scales or or walk from such a distance where you have this little P that eventually becomes this towering figure the thing that you know I find really moving is watching how people just kind of converged onto this space and that I've never seen that area of land come alive in the way that it did beautiful really beautiful thing to see not only is the show a crucial opportunity for cause to consolidate his position in the art world it's the first time he's been able to explore the use of wood on a grand scale the first wood sculpture we did we wanted to make the hardest one possible so we went with making a 10 meter sculpture that just took you know a lot of engineering to figure out and I thought small why just being you know sort of a reference to Pinocchio and wooden character that you know wishes was real this Pinocchio this small lie is 30 feet tall he's as tall as a tree practically next to him and he has this little slumped figure it's the most compassionate work I think we have in the exhibition and even though these are these are not human these that you know in the sense these are toys or they're beasts but the sense of humanity is very very powerful in them I think that when people see this exhibition what they will understand here is the sheer quality of his work I can imagine cause in a room which you are mirror with him anymore and they would they will be talking for hours you know because they have very very shared concern big flat pure colors people respond to them so much because they're so beautiful and it's really something we don't get from nature so that something we depend on art to get just the you know the ecstasy of color I think causes Korea is taking him everywhere really anywhere he wants to go and I think the art world is a much more interesting place having him in it I think of it as art what started as a toy now becomes art I feel like I've always put myself completely into the stuff that I do it's just really naively optimistic about things and it's worked I mean knock on wood you know who knows me but you're doing a story about me and bankrupt and selling my home but um at this moment it's worked out every show I see I think well he's taking it to another level do you know what I mean he's like a great jazz guy who's got complete control of his instrument he has his style and inside his style you know he just keeps bringing it up to the next level I can't imagine anybody not wanting doing the Cosby brilliant ideas powered by hyundai motor

Channel: Bloomberg Quicktake

Views: 443,588

Rating: 4.875 out of 5

Keywords: Bloomberg, KAWS, Brian Donnelly, Nike, Uniqlo, MTV, Pharrell Williams, Kanye West, graffiti, art

Id: fPTntCQqXm4

Length: 24min 17sec (1457 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 15 2016