We braved Olympic-sized slush puddles Sunday night to drop by the East Village’s Mars Bar, known around town as an anachronistic ode to “authentic New York.” In bar-speak, this translates to “dim lights, cheap drinks, and Trainspotting-worthy toilets” (it apparently also means “desirable place to stage awkward celebrity photo shoots”).
The occasion: Mars Bar was getting a makeover, courtesy of a dozen-plus local graffiti artists. The show’s curator, Grimace, gave a nod to the establishment’s history as a hub for street art, mentioning Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lee Quiñones and Keith Haring — arguably the three most influential names behind graffiti’s acceptance by mainstream gallery culture — as one-time patrons. Pointing out that he and his collaborators had protected a swath of the bar’s pre-existing wall — a colorful mish-mash of abstract geometrics hovering above a guitar-playing skeleton — Grimace stressed a desire to “bridge the gap between the old and the new” in reinventing the bar as “a living, breathing, drinking art piece”:
The artists overhauled about half of the bar on Sunday, whitewashing and painting directly on some walls and installing hung pieces on others while adding complementary flourishes to the bathrooms and the underside of the weathered, wooden bar itself. Other surfaces — notably the ceiling — will receive facelifts sometime in the future, according to Grimace.
We caught up with a couple other street art vets, New York natives both: Like Grimace, who spins regularly at 3rd Ward’s massive “Danger” bacchanals in Bushwick, ShazOne and Milk are renaissance men of sorts. In addition to their involvement in street art, both now focus, to varying degrees, on music, with Milk professing to having “retired” entirely from graf writing. They also share a measure of dismay over the perceived degradation of graffiti etiquette in New York, with ShazOne the more outspoken of the two. Here, he describes the graffiti community’s self-imposed justice system — and we’re inclined to trust his explanation, given the assumption that his residence “in the mountains for a couple years” doesn’t mean he was opening for Don Rickles in the Borscht Belt:
Milk employed a different, yet related, euphemism, explaining that “in the early 1990s, I kinda terrorized the L train, the M train, and…doing that type of work kind of led me to a 10-year vacation.” He also forwarded a theory that sound entirely plausible to anyone who’s familiar with the recidivism rate of American ex-convicts…or the origin of the MS-13 street gang…or the move Blow: that New York City abolished its practice of sentencing artists convicted of vandalism to clean graffiti-adorned walls because such programs promoted networking among artists, who would bond over the cleaning and plan future ‘bombing’ sessions — with “future” typically being “right after we’re done cleaning this wall”:
