By Ian Bourland
COST was there. It’s difficult to imagine New York City (to say nothing
of its global imitators) without street art bedecking every nook and
cranny. The streets of Williamsburg and SoHo are wheatpasted, stenciled,
and stickered, old-school throwies and bubble letters cheek-by-jowl with
corporate-sponsored attempts to capitalize on the popularity of artists like
Banksy and Shepard Fairey. But a mere twenty years ago, what is now
commonplace was virtually unheard of. During the early years of the
Giuliani administration and the twilight of old school train car graffiti,
COST and his partner in crime REVS revitalized aerosol art’s core mission
even as they opened the door for a generation of street artists to follow.
During the late seventies and early eighties, New York experienced an
efflorescence of street art: on the one hand, crews of aerosol writers
bombed the city and its subways with increasingly elaborate style and
intricacy; on the other, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring served as
crucial links between the downtown gallery scene and the streets, writing on
walls and subway platforms in bold, easily-recognizable text and linework.
COST was of a generation younger than the likes of Basquiat, Lee, and
Seen, but growing up on the streets of the East Village he absorbed their
influence, as well as the DIY ethos and graphic influence of the punk rock
subculture centered around CBGB. The hand-painted works he would later
wheatpaste around the city featured figures reminiscent of Haring’s “radiant
children,” and his own arrow-laden tags. In COST’s terms, he took all the
came before, all the was forged in the welter of downtown, and “mixed them
in his paintbucket.”
The results were iconic, and give us a window into an often-overlooked
history of street art. In the face of an increasingly ornate and unwieldy
style of graffiti and a hostile mayoral regime, COST and REVS aimed to strip
graffiti back to its roots: getting over and reclaiming urban space. He
recalls that, “in the early nineties I was frustrated and upset with the
direction that graffiti was going once it officially moved above ground
after the train era died out...We began to incorporate and emphasize the
philosophies of non-perfection to an art form that had steadily moved
towards a state of perfection. The focus became more on involving ourselves
within the everyday landscape—we were doing outlaw art, and it was for
everyone to see, from a child to your grandmother.”
This outlaw art required a new set of rules, and a new approach to
medium. Spray cans and caps took a less central role, and COST and REVS
pioneered now familiar tools such as heavy rollers, stickers, stencils, and
wheatpasting prefabricated work to any urban surface that would bear
it. During the first half of the nineties COST and REVS took the drive to
“get up” to a new extreme, diffusing their work across the CIty in ways
earlier generations could only imagine.
Walking around downtown Manhattan in those days, you could spot a
wheatpasted painting in a brick inset on the backstreets of SoHo, rolled
tags on fourth floor walkups off Lafayette street, murals around Tompkins
Square Park, and their ubiquitous, sans-serif stickers. Some of these were
simple and declarative: “COST Fucked Madonna;” other recalled the
interactive and politicized spirit of both Fluxus and the hardcore
scene—dial the number on a COST sticker, get the rant of the week about Rudy
Giuliani. In this way, COST served as a crucial bridge figure, a link to
graffiti’s golden age and street art’s future. The mural “Mt. Krushmore,”
depicting Andy Warhol and Keith Haring in blown-up photorealism, synthesized
the grand scale and aerosol style of the eighties with the graphic
sensibilities of the present. That piece, towering over the East Village,
was up for several years. Nowadays, more familiar names might occupy the
walls downtown, but make no mistake: COST was here.
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