From hip-hop culture to a global urbanism
By Marc Spiegler

Starting in the early eighties, people whose heart pounded to a city beat embraced hip-hop culture worldwide. No matter how far it spread, however, it remained a deeply American phenomenon. But in the late nineties a more truly global urbanism emerged from Japan and Europe, even broader-ranging in its activities and more varied in its influences.

Consider the album "Bossa Très Jazz: When Japan Meets Europe": music that fused forms originated in Bahia (bossa nova), New Orleans (jazz) and Germany (electronica); played and produced by musicians from cities including Paris (Tom & Joyce), London (Modaji) and Tokyo (Jazztronik); curated by a Paris producer (Alain Ho, aka DJ Yellow). Its CD case contained paintings, based around the tracks, by a Chicago artist (Dzine) and a limited-edition shirt from Japan's fashion avante-garde (Final Home).

Active far beyond the music scene, this urbanite globalism also includes installations, fashion, film, painting, publishing and design - often in unexpected combinations. But whatever the endeavor, the energy driving these collaborations comes from the studios, dancefloors and streets of the modern city. No one cares if it's Berlin or Brooklyn, Brixton or Brazil: There is no single center, no "original source," no country that can claim to make the rules or authenticate the artists.

Over the trajectory of their artistic career, Dzine, Rostarr and Doze Green have all moved from the street to the studio, and then beyond. Traveling the world, these creators have conversed and collaborated with whoever came across their paths, regardless of what genre they worked within. In different ways, the paintings of the three artists reflect that growing cosmopolitanism, marked by an evolution toward making work that's more comfortable with ambiguities, abstraction and unspoken truths.

What binds this "citadins du monde" culture? A deep receptiveness to other cultures, and an adamant refusal to worry about "authenticity." Because this is no movement waiting to be mainstreamed - rather, it is a series of collaborations (some life-long, some song-short) in which the boundaries between fields, genres and cultures evaporate. Thus, Dzine creates both layered abstract paintings for his varied solo exhibitions and large wall installations for "visual sound" performance projects with DJs and avant-garde live performers. In addition to gallery shows worldwide, Rostarr has started a fashion line (D©GS) and a design consultancy, and published the book "Graphysics" with New York's Alife. Beside his two-plus decades of traditional exhibits, Doze Green has also painted onstage with poets and musicians, and his characters have migrated on to clothing lines and limited-edition dolls.

In this new and fluid urban mindspace, there is ample room to include anime and haute couture, skateboarders and architects, vinyl and celluloid, sculptors and Santeria priests. What counts here is not the raw cultural elements you combine, but rather the precious new alloys created.

Marc Spiegler, raised in Chicago but based in Zurich, has written about contemporary art and pop culture for magazines including Arena, ArtNews and The Face.

www.marcspiegler.com
www.urbanskills.ch