For our seventh installment of weekly interviews, Keith Goldman goes urban. Take it away, Keith!

If you have a Flickr account, and a decent list of contacts then your photo stream has probably been tagged by this week’s builder, Cole Blaq. Legally known as Aran Jitsukawa-Hudson (which is an awesome name and far more interesting than yours or mine), Cole has done what is so difficult to do in our flabby sea of Mannkinder; achieve a truly unique style.

I sat down with Aran on a cold November night, thirty feet over the Autobahn on the backside of a billboard for BMW. We drank whiskey from the bottle and talked about Fritz Lange, the evils of Teflon and the enduring comedic value of the Maginot Line. We also talked about LEGO.

The Build

Keith Goldman: Talk to me about bombing, burning and “getting up” with bricks. How did you develop your signature graffiti style, and what techniques serve as its core?

Cole Blaq: The ride’s quite a while ago, it dropped hard and after that all was left to burn. Getting up, spreading your name and development still continues. The material has changed but the style is still the integral element of self-expression. The context of public space is amiss, but yet it refers and in the proper spotlight this discussion definitely will be continued.

Since I restarted building with bricks in early 2008 I’ve had a vision of creating graffiti styles – it came naturally according to my previous years of expression. My signature was developed long before my brickish time. Now it just reappears into the bricks. Often the style has a certain character next to my signature that originates from the brick matrix and the character of the parts used.

The development with the bricks started with simple drafts to see with what techniques one can approach style-lettering. It started as a simple challenge over at the Urban Culture and Bricks group last May and within a month fully articulated and developed styles were achieved, wherein many of those previous draft builds melted together.

I have developed two basic techniques, one is based on straight slopes and the other one is based on wedge plates. The second technique includes hinges and hinges and hinges in order to break and angle the letters at the right places. With those parts I can shape the letters two dimensionally and in the next step I extend the letters into third space — considering different possibilities. That’s where it becomes really tricky and interesting. I am actually working on another founding structure based upon Technic parts. All these techniques can be modified and intermixed and limitless ways of creating styles are possible – it’s all about experimenting and trial and error.

KG: You are an art history student; does that influence your building? I once used this diorama for an Egyptian history course. Have you ever used the brick for an assignment?

CB: Art history is all about theory, not practice, which is my grande critique of the art historian education: Most students miss empathy for the work, its material and inner pictorial issues. As I have a continuous creative output I see myself in the same line, except I am not offishal, Mr. Offisha. An artistic approach is quite different than model building. Models are nice to build and the experience from that flows into my free works.

It is another issue to create something new, something not based upon a real life or a concept draft. Spaceship designs for example reach within these realms, but are too bound to our standardized perception of what a spaceship must contain.

Bricks have their value; they lay out a foundation and a certain pattern which enables certain things, predominated directions and characteristics.

At the same time the pattern and the material itself limits a free artistic expression. These days I often come to the limits of the bricks being true to my expression. Another problem is the core of a build. After creating a ground structure and building upon it, it is very often impossible to reach back to the core and tweak the structure, if one wants to change things later…
But that’s a topic I continue to ponder: how to approach that part practically and theoretically (due to my art historian studies).

No assignments up to now, but I am working on it and will share my success or cover my face in shame if I fail.

KG: Another fan of LEGO, Jon Palmer turned me on to Banksy. We have debated if it would be possible to do something “Banksy”-like with the medium of LEGO, what do you say?

CB: Yay, the Banksy question!

OK, what is Banksy-like? Banksy set a certain latter in subversive political humor without taking a direct position. Also most people are familiar with the stencil style he applies. If you are talking about his humor, it is possible to depict that kind in any medium. If you’re talking about stencils, its techniques are similar to those used for a silhouette / cut-out principle. Doing brick mosaics with bricksaic and some pre-editing in Photoshop will produce a similar effect. The theme / images with which Banksy plays, the interlocking stencil technique, are somehow copy-able. The biggest issue you’ll encounter is that of public space as the integral canvas / background which will be impossible to surrogate. Even his public space works being exhibited inside the white cube (classical museums and art galleries) raise the same problems. His work relating to the art business is different as it is an examination and debate within that context and also only works inside the gallery.

There are a few people who have managed to bring the brick message to the streets in their very own way. Two of them are Jan Vormann from St. Petersburg and ame72 from the UK.

Seeing Banksy’s kind of black and subversive humor in bricks would be great, but you’ll have to be prepared to question all existing rules and cut your precious little bricks until they bleed.

More of Keith’s interview with Cole after the jump: Continue reading →