ELLE and Martha Cooper: Unextinguished at Mecka Gallery

Unextinguished opened at Mecka Gallery in Brooklyn on Saturday 26 April 2014 and ran until 10 May. It paired ELLE, one of the busiest names on New York walls at the time, with Martha Cooper, the photographer whose pictures of painted subway trains, published alongside Henry Chalfant’s in the 1984 book Subway Art, became a reference for writers all over the world. Visitors were promised extinguisher paint sprayed across the walls, catwalk dresses made from screen-printed paper, and Cooper’s photographs of children at play in the street. ELLE talked about the work, her place in the scene and what it is like to be a woman painting at night in the city.

How the pairing happened

Mecka had put on three exhibitions before this one and had invited ELLE to make the fourth. When she went to see the building she found a warehouse of roughly 2,000 square feet, far more room than she wanted to fill alone, and she asked the gallery whether she could bring in a partner. She had crossed paths with Cooper twice at Art Basel, when the photographer turned up to shoot one of ELLE’s walls. Afterwards ELLE wrote to her, a little nervously by her own account, asking whether she would consider a joint show that did something other than a conventional hang. Cooper said yes and came to the space to work out ideas with her.

They settled on a lesser-known part of Cooper’s archive. Between 1977 and 1980, as a staff photographer at the New York Post, Cooper had photographed children making their own games among the rubble and vacant lots of the Lower East Side, pictures later collected as Street Play. ELLE described that New York as looking almost like a war zone, and the children in it as endlessly inventive. The images were less familiar than Cooper’s graffiti work, which gave the two of them a starting point that would not simply repeat shows Cooper had done many times.

What a younger writer brings

ELLE was frank about the imbalance. Cooper had been present when graffiti began and had followed it from the trains to the streets; she could exhibit with whomever she liked. ELLE said she did not consider herself a great bomber and that her technical skill still had a long way to go, with many writers around her doing it better. What she could bring was the vocabulary of the newer generation, and when she thought about what she actually does, it came down to wheatpaste and the fire extinguisher.

The extinguisher suited the idea. Cooper had recorded graffiti’s origins; the new show could record how it had since changed, including the arrival of a tool that nobody used in the early years and that now leaves long, dripping, abstract marks. ELLE compared those marks to Jackson Pollock’s poured paintings and liked the thought of pulling the extinguisher into a conceptual, fine-art frame. The walls of the warehouse would be sprayed that way.

She wanted her paste-ups in the show as well. Much of her street work is figurative, built around a recurring warrior woman, and she first thought of using that figure. In the end the two artists chose simpler imagery that kept the focus on the change in graffiti across time and on two women from different generations working together. ELLE hand silk-screened her wheatpaste designs, laid Cooper’s photographs over them, and turned the sheets into six wearable sculptures in the form of dresses, along with a hazmat suit.

The opening was planned as a performance. Cooper, in the hazmat suit, would photograph ELLE, wearing one of the dresses, as she sprayed an extinguisher across walls already pasted with both women’s images. ELLE saw it as the two of them making art inside their own art.

The street before the gallery

With five or six years behind her, ELLE said she still had a great deal to learn and knew many people who were better than she was; sharing a show with someone who had been around as long as Cooper felt like an honour. She hoped to reach the level of the scene’s major players eventually.

On moving from walls to galleries, she said the warehouse was the reason she took the show on at all. It allowed something other than framed work on white walls, and the dresses and suit were meant to raise questions about categories: whether this counts as street art, whether it counts as graffiti, and whether it is feminine or its opposite. She likes making work wherever she happens to be, in the studio and out of it.

She did not think galleries were where her recognition would come from. The more pressing need, she said, was to work harder outside. She cares about the writers who are getting up relentlessly, and named Rambo, whose billboard work she admired, and she wanted people like that to see her putting in the same effort. Slipping into galleries is easy now, she suggested; the hard thing is keeping a balance. A graffiti writer, in her definition, cannot survive on commissioned murals, whereas street art is a looser label. Putting work outside for strangers is spontaneous and generous, and she wanted to keep doing it.

Travel matters to her for the same reason. She had no special interest in showing abroad, but she wanted to paint abroad, because a street artist whose work never leaves one block has not really put anything out into the world. One of her strongest memories was finding BNE stickers all over India some five years earlier. Seeing a familiar name far from home, she said, feels like bumping into a friend, and it meant far more to her than another piece on the one wall every writer in the neighbourhood already hits.

Being a woman on the walls

ELLE welcomed the growing number of women painting and wanted to encourage more. She understood the prejudice that women should not be out at night risking arrest in a dirty business, and she had her own stories: the officer who arrested her later tried to give her his number and ask her out, and held her hand while taking her fingerprints, refusing to let her do it herself. She treated it as one of the drawbacks of being female in the game.

Visibility is part of the point for her. She chose the name ELLE because it is the French for “she”, and she deliberately makes her graffiti more girlish than she is herself. She cited 17, a tough New York writer whose work gives no clue to her sex, and said she wanted the opposite: pieces that are unmistakably by a woman. Far from avoiding pink and Hello Kitty, she was happy to pile on the glitter. At the same time she wanted to match the men on their own terms, so that if a man could paint a billboard, so could she. She described that as a challenge she meant to meet.

After Mecka

Her plans were loose: a rest, some travel and a trip to Los Angeles to paint. She had several group shows ahead, among them Back Against The Wall, an exhibition of rugs designed by street artists including Reader and COST, hand-dyed and woven in Tibet.