Nug and Pike’s videos

Nug and Pike’s film It’s So Fresh I Can’t Take It and Nug’s film Territorial Pissing depict graffiti in perhaps it’s most raw form: A person letting themselves free to mark any surface they wants in any way they want. In both of these films, the performance and the act is much more interesting than the aesthetics of the final product. The films are about showing the act of graffiti, and beyond that Nug says that his films are about “trying to translate how it feels to do it” into different mediums (“it” being the act of graffiti as well as the other activities associated with the life of a graffiti writer, and the feeling being a rush of energy and freedom). Nug and Pike’s videos are not big-budget affairs, but they get the point across. As for if the videos transcend documentation and are art on their own, this is not the strongest point, but I suppose it’s worth pointing out that their films have been shown in art galleries.

Angelo Milano, the organizer of FAME Festival, says that Nug was invited FAME Festival in 2011 because Milano had seen and loved some of Nug’s videos on YouTube. Nug organized two painting sessions at FAME Festival, each of which resulted in a film.

For Nug’s film the concept is fuck you, yes you, he basically facilitated a reenactment of It’s So Fresh I Can’t Take It in FAME Festival’s legendary abandoned monastery by a crowd of Grottaglie, Italy residents. Just like in It’s So Fresh I Can’t Take It, the viewer gets excited watching the video and a bit of the rush of writing graffiti or just going wild, but the piece really shows how Nug’s efforts to share that feeling with others are central to his work, since he got a bunch of random people with no background in graffiti involved in the creation of the piece. But since not all of Nug’s potential audience could participate in the creation of that piece, a video was still released online.

The same or a similar crew also painted a wall in the middle of Grottaglie under Nug’s direction. Milano, had this to say about that wall, “i didnt [sic] hear one single positive comment about it, if not from the people that joined painting it, for how liberating it was to actually make it.” Although Milano had perhaps not intended it, he had arranged for Nug to paint two walls essentially for Nug and FAME Festival’s global online fanbases, who seem to have appreciated Nug’s work in Grottaglie more than the local residents did.

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