As part of the move, found some posts that never made it up for whatever reason. Here’s one that is still relevant
Mark and Blinky on Flickr – Photo Sharing!:
From: Brian@*****.com
Subject: Somebody ate a Power Pellet
Date: February 3, 2007 4:19:16 PM CST
You made me curious and I had to find the answer to the trouble you’ve been pac’ing. Wonder how much urban art will appreciate before someone has to acquire it?
(I was on your website ’cause I was looking for images from Johnson’s Cyclopedia and you had that “Vienna Ref 33 Unframed” map. Not what I was trying to find so onwards and upwards… )
Felicitations on your upcoming nuptials.
from http://www.artsjournal.com/man/archives20050601.shtml
Invader at sixspace: An artist named Banksy has been getting a lot of pub by invading art museums and installing fake paintings in galleries. The idea seems kind of lame, the exact kind of thing that a general assignment writer at AP finds exciting, but that everyone else finds tedious.
Much more clever is the work by a French artist who goes by the way-too-gimmicky name Invader. He treats built-up environments, like Los Angeles, as if they were the playing field of a video game. At night, during a recent stay in LA, he drove around the city and ‘invading’ areas by placing his little tile-and-resin critters on buildings, billboards, signs, and the like. Some critters look straight out of Pac-Man, others like pixellated versions of pop-culture iconography. (And by installing at night, Invader mimics the look-and-feel of early video games, which were made up of colored dots on black fields.)
If you’ve driven around Los Angeles in the last week or two you have probably seen Invader’s work on LA landmarks, lightposts, on the entire side of a building (somehow), on the boardwalk, or on the beach. I was strangely thrilled to find one on La Cienega, in the Culver City gallery district.
I can’t imagine that they feel as right anywhere else. (Invader seems made for the festivalism of the biennial circuit, I suppose. Yawn.) The entertainment industry (+ Eli Broad) runs LA. Movie and TV billboards are everywhere. A few times a year a porn company invades the Sunset Strip with a risque billboard, sucks up the hoped-for publicity, and then limps away. Why shouldn’t art invade the urban environment too? (Disclosure: sixspace owners, and art.blogging.la webgods Caryn Coleman and Sean Bonner are good pals.)
As a postscript, it appears that the one by Stages is gone; I looked for it when I did the show there last month, and it was not to be found.
