It wasn’t long ago that I saw Chor Boo­gie paint­ing live as 50,000 peo­ple watched at the Elec­tric Zoo Fes­ti­val in Randall’s Island, New York.
Benny Ben­nassi and Axwell were bump­ing in the back­ground. (Arti­cle here. ) Or, you might have heard sto­ries of a San Francisco-​based artist who stub­bornly fin­ished a 100-​foot mural after being stabbed while paint­ing in the mar­ginal Ten­der­loin neigh­bor­hood. “The Color Ther­apy of Per­cep­tion.” is a pub­lic mural com­mis­sioned by the San Fran­cisco Arts Commission’s “Arts in Store­fronts” project. An ini­tia­tive with a mis­sion to improve the street life of trou­bled areas. (Arti­cle here.) Jason Hai­ley, the artist’s birth name, has con­tin­ued to grow expo­nen­tially. Last week, while at the Stroke Urban Art Fair in Berlin, Chor was given the oppor­tu­nity to paint on a sec­tion of the Berlin Wall. Adding another zero to his view­ers at Elec­tric Zoo, Chor’s piece, “The Eyes of the Berlin Wall”, sold for 500,000 euro.

This is a big num­ber for Chor Boo­gie, a self-​taught artist who early in his life was afflicted by drug prob­lems, home­less­ness and “too many trips to jail.” More excit­ing than the price is the his­tor­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance of the piece. Graf­fiti on the Berlin wall has a long and tumul­tuous his­tory. Since the 1980s, despite paint­ing being pro­hib­ited, many artists attacked the West­ern side of the wall, tak­ing back a free­dom of expres­sion that the gov­ern­ment had banned. That west­ern por­tion of the infa­mous wall earned it the name the “death strip” – implying the heav­ily guarded bar­rier which included a highly mil­i­ta­rized sys­tem of guard tow­ers, trenches and other defense archi­tec­ture. The Berlin wall became a mecca for the most dar­ing street artists around the world. The late Keith Har­ing paid the site a vis­ited when he painted on the Berlin Wall at Bran­den­burg Gate in 1986. Many local writ­ers tagged the wall as well, many of their pieces buffed within hours and restored back to the orig­i­nal neu­tral gray.

The 500,000 Euro price tag (roughly 700,000 USD) is a bench mark for Chor, bring­ing him into the realm of world recog­ni­tion as the British Banksy, who has fetched as much as 288,000 pounds, roughly 600,000 USD. (Arti­cle here.) How­ever, unlike Banksy, Chor is a spray paint tra­di­tion­al­ist refus­ing to use any sten­cils and more con­tem­po­rary meth­ods of appli­ca­tion – a com­mit­ment to the medium that Chor Boo­gie has prided him­self in. “I’m a tra­di­tion­al­ist when it comes to spray paint­ing. I’m try­ing to get as many effects as pos­si­ble out of the can”, Chor told me can­didly on the NYC sub­way last month. Today, via phone he humbly shared, “like an oil painter uses his medium, I use mine. It’s about hav­ing a level of respect for the medium.”

The piece is also impor­tant as a social mon­u­ment. Chor Boogie’s can­non for mak­ing the piece is com­pa­ra­ble to the “eyes on the street” the­o­ries prop­a­gated by urban­ist and writer Jane Jacobs. “The build­ings on a street equipped to han­dle strangers and to insure the safety of both res­i­dents and strangers, must be ori­ented to the street. They can­not turn their backs or blank sides on it and leave it blind.” writes Jacobs in “The Death and Life of Great Amer­i­can Cities”. Its also impor­tant as a com­par­i­son of the value of art. That is, Chor’s piece costed half the price of the price for the entire wall restora­tion in 2009, one mil­lion euro. It intro­duces the beau­ti­ful idea that in our social order, art is above preservation.

“The Color Ther­apy of Per­cep­tion” San Fran­cisco, CA.

Lastly, this piece is incred­i­bly impor­tant because the Berlin wall changed a lot for paint­ing and art his­tory. Recently (Jan­u­ary, 2006), Arthur Lubow, wrote about the impact impact of col­lapse of the Berlin wall in an arti­cle called “The New Leipzig School.” for the New York Times Mag­a­zine. (Arti­cle here.) Leipzig was a tra­di­tional paint­ing school focus­ing on fig­u­ra­tion and tra­di­tional ideas of paint­ing such as learn­ing to draw real­is­tic per­spec­tives and rules for com­pos­ing paint­ings. This, at a time when the west had it’s eyes set on abstract paint­ing which empha­sized orig­i­nal­ity and expres­sion over tra­di­tion. With the Berlin wall as a large screen, the school was almost cap­tured in a style of paint­ing that one might con­sider passé. How­ever, with the fall of the Berlin wall, the painters in Leipzig started to intro­duce other ele­ments of abstrac­tion still hold­ing onto fig­u­ra­tion which was engrained into the school’s way of work­ing. Stars such as Neo Rauch, Tilo Baum­gar­tel, and Mar­tin Eder were only able to pro­duce this kind of work because of the fall of the Berlin wall.

Oddly enough, I see Chor’s piece as a nod to the aca­d­e­mic artists that came out of the Leipzig school. His explo­sion of color and pat­terned abstrac­tions, when mixed with a sense of real­ism in the fig­ure intro­duced, are kin to the work of the artists who Lubow called “the young lions of the inter­na­tional art scene”. The tra­di­tion­al­ist in Chor Boo­gie is still there –in his com­mit­ment to the can.

Tags: Berlin, chor boogie, Jason Hailey, Patrice Lux, Stroke Art Fair

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 15th, 2010 at 6:35 pm and is filed under Mural, News, Painting.
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