Microcinema DVDs - Inside Outside

2009-08-25 Digigods

Inside Outside: Vandalism, Art and Vandalism as Art is a riveting two-hour odyssey beyond graffiti and into the heart of guerilla art. In a sense, two hours isn't really enough time to fully do the subject justice, as virtually every corner of the globe possesses its own brand of graffiti and guerilla art, along with unique socio-political causes, themes and concerns. But as a blanket look at this rare and massively misunderstood field, this is about the best overview presently available. Copious extras, too.

2009-06-23 popmatters.com
By Shaun Huston

After opening with a montage of cops, street artists, their materials and ‘canvasses’, and dogs, the makers of Inside Outisde pose a seemingly simple question to one of their subjects, the Paris-based “Zevs” (or “Zeus”): “Why do I have to paint in the streets?” He doesn’t have an immediate answer, but the question informs the entirety of the documentary’s 57-minutes.

To share. To experiment. To provoke. To reclaim public space. These are the answers shown through the lives and work of the film’s central characters.

The title, “Inside Outside”, has at least two levels of meaning. The one closest to the surface is to explore what it means to be an artist on the “outside”, both in the sense of not being part of the mainstream and of doing one’s work on the street. While many of the featured personalities converge at Backjumps in Berlin, a street art festival and installation, “Swoon” and Ron English, both based in New York, best represent the tensions and interrelationships between the inside and outside art worlds.

Swoon makes intricate and beautiful posters of everyday people from all walks of life. She sees her images as responses to advertising, which, she argues, tends to reduce the human form to a limited ideal of “perfection” that most people cannot attain or live up to.

Her work has earned her access to the inside world of museums, galleries, and collectors. What does that do to the spirit and meaning of her pieces? What happens when a transient art is translated into a more permanent form? How does she navigate these transitions?

For his part, Ron English is a multi-media artist who, depending on the context, is known either for his subversive billboards or for his pop art paintings. English suggests that these two worlds, and their audiences, are largely out-of-communication with each other. His story raises question of what might happen when the two worlds collide.

What does it mean to have a fine art reputation when one is arrested for illegal “culture jamming”? What does it mean for one’s political street art to have a reputation in the “inside” world?

While the other artists in the film might flirt with mainstream acceptance, especially Zevs and the Brazilian duo “Os Gemeos”, the remaining subjects seem more singularly rooted in the outside than do Swoon or English. And as such they point to the second meaning of the title, which is that “inside” and “outside” are always relative to each other, and, specifically, the “outside” has its own “inside”.

Many of the subjects seem to know, or know of, each other. Indeed, it’s hard not to think that the selection of subjects wasn’t at least in part driven by wanting to send the right signals to those in the international world of the “outside”. Zevs and “KR”, both of whom are shown to be innovators in technique and materials, particularly appear as consummate insider outsiders.

Through the character of “Butch”, who does the actual work of putting up billboard advertisements and commercial fliers, Andreas Johnsen and Nis Boye Moller Rasmussen also suggest that the “inside” has its own “outside” in the form of low-wage workers and formal access to the streets.

The latter point is also made by the NYPD’s Steve Mona who expresses frustration at the corporate appropriation of graffiti styles, which he sees as legitimating the real thing. (Mona himself, with his bevy of tattoos, is also an interesting case in the complexities of inside and outside.)

The toughest subjects to locate in the film’s narrative are Adams and Itso, a traveling pair who work in Scandinavia, but whose medium is housing rather than more readily recognizable “art” media. The film, of course, poses the question, “what is art”, but without explicitly exploring how Adams’ and Itso’s experiments in DIY housing belong in that conversation.

The DVD includes a series of extra interviews and features including one that follows-up on the apartment that Adams and Itso created out of an empty space in the Copenhagen subway. In following and listening to Chief Subway Inspector Per Buur work his way through the mystery of the apartment, the beauty of what Adams and Itso did is more apparent than it is in the documentary proper. More broadly, these extras extend the main film in a number of ways, especially in those segments hat feature people not included in the documentary proper.

The disc also offers slideshows of works by Zevs, Swoon, KR, and Ron English. KR’s art benefits the most from this treatment. KR uses a special “Krink” marker to create patterns of drips and lines on whatever surface the ink is used. Being able to take a closer look at the patterns that emerge from the application of the marker draws attention to the intentionality and artistry of what KR does in ways that the short takes in the film itself do not. The Wooster Collective extra feature also helps to put his work into context.

The narrative in Inside Outside is not very tight or pointed, particularly not in comparison to other recent and similar works such as Bomb It (2007) and Chris Marker’s Chat perchés (Case of the Grinning Cat) (2004), but it does offer a compelling cast of characters, especially Zevs and Swoon, who together constitute the heart of the film. Perhaps the best compliment I can give this documentary is that it made me want to grab a marker and go outside.

2009-06-02 DVD Talk
By Tyler Foster

I think most of us take graffiti for granted, but every once in awhile I'll have to stop and think about the level of skill it would have taken, to have not only paint some of the elaborate tags you see on rusting train cars and the undersides of bridges, but to have painted it quickly enough to escape should the cops come by (and I'd guess even then, anything I see in the Seattle graffiti world probably pales in comparison to the kinds of work in New York or LA). It poses the question: if these artists are so good, why paint on the sidewalk? Inside Outside tries to answer.

We meet several, apparently notable graffiti artists during Inside Outside (notable enough that they all get name-checked on the DVD front cover), including ZEVS, a masked French artist who experiments with all types of unusual graffiti, even the kind that can't be seen by the human eye; Swoon, a painter who pastes pre-designed murals onto New York City walls; KR, who sells his own brand of especially wet spray paint; and Ron English, an artist who plasters his own incendiary billboards over existing corporate billboards, not to mention several other artists and painters who get a more limited amount of screen time.

Unfortunately, it's hard to tell if directors Andreas Johnsen and Nis Boye Møller Rasmussen had particular goals in going out to shoot Inside Outside, other than to get broadly defined "insight" on what makes graffiti artists tick. ZEVS seems to be their star player, and he's easily one of the more interesting subjects in the documentary, bringing black florescent lights to hook into existing light fixtures while he paints with UV reactive paint, then putting the original florescent bulbs back in. "Voila! Invisible cloud on the police precinct," he grins after painting his signature image on a sign. It's a really intriguing moment in the movie, yet it arrives literally minutes before the movie is over, so you don't get to hear about any real motivation or history behind ZEVS's unseen, invisible graffiti.

As for the motivation behind graffiti in general, it seems mostly to be political. Not surprisingly, most of the artists here talk about fighting for freedom of speech through their work, and while some of it, like Ron English's outspoken billboards, can get a little heavy-handed or loaded in its message, English states his point clearly: "They don't know what the f--- to do with artists in this society. Obviously these aren't criminals. These are really talented people. I mean, God's giving them this talent, and then this idiot society doesn't know what to do with it." The movie tries to explore some of the anti-graffiti perspectives, by interviewing an NY police officer in charge of stopping vandalism and a guy who covers walls with advertisements, like you always see in movies, but the filmmakers again seem uninterested, unable or unaware of what questions to ask these subjects to make for a more interesting contrast.

Still, there's a lot of interesting artwork covered in the movie's short 60-minute runtime (don't let the cover fool you, the "2 hours" it lists includes both the film and the extra features). I'm sure there's a better documentary to be made about the craft of graffiti, and I know that Inside Outside isn't the first to tackle the subject, so perhaps that documentary even already exists, but the people covered by this independent project are interesting, enthusiastic hosts, which goes a long way to making it an interesting watch.

The DVD
Inside Outside comes in a surprisingly dull-ish cover; you'd think with all the artists involved with this project and the style of the film they could have designed something a little more striking than this (lots of Arial and not enough interesting pictures of the graffiti in the movie). It comes in a cheap (but not cheapest) style of transparent DVD case, with some slightly more interesting pictures on the inside. There is no insert, and the disc label is black with white text (again, really?). The menu is much more interesting, preceded by a short introduction by ZEVS (0:16).

The Video and Audio
The colors on this anamorphic widescreen presentation (looks to be 1.85:1) really pop off the screen, from the yellow in ZEVS's masked getup and basic skintones to the inky blacks of night, peppered with all sorts of bright streetlights. And really, between that and the detail, which is acceptable (although whites are severely blown out), there's not much more that's really important about the picture quality from the documentary's standpoint. Still, the picture is most often completely and totally overwhelmed by mosquito noise in essentially every low-light night shot, I spotted edge enhancement from time to time, and there's more than a handful of jagged edges and flickering moire patterns throughout the movie.

Being a documentary, the primary focus in the film's Dolby Digital 2.0 audio (a mix of various languages, primarily English and French) is the dialogue, which comes through crisp and clean. Even if it wasn't, however, you'd still be able to tell that the English subtitles provided on this disc are often shortened and paraphrased. As an English speaker, I only know the English-speaking sections aren't accurate, but it certainly made me wonder about the parts subtitled from French. Admittedly, the paraphrasing isn't inaccurate in spirit, because nothing relevant is lost through the alterations, but that doesn't make it a good decision. One line of the movie was chopped off by the track I was using (there are separate tracks subtitling the non-English parts and the entire movie). Danish, French and Chinese subtitles are included and listed on the packaging, and Portuguese also appears to be included.

The Extras
Os Gemeos (10:09), Nofitti (6:01), Magic (2:14), Wooster Collective (9:53), Steve Mona (6:41), Earsnot (6:47), Adams & Itso (7:14), Swoon (8:18) and Ron English (6:04) are all featured in bonus interviews in which they expound more on their artistry. On one hand, it's almost refreshing that despite another hour of footage, the documentary itself doesn't run two hours; I've often thought documentaries should make their points concisely rather than stretching itself to feature length just because it can be, but on the other hand, a lot of the footage here feels like it would have worked, focusing on the actual art being created. These video extras are all subtitled in English only. Unfortunately, there is no "play all" option, so you may find yourself getting tired of the menu music.

There are also four slideshows for ZEVS (2:10), Swoon (3:35), KR (3:50) and Ron English (8:15).