256 pages Edited by Robert Klanten & Matthias Hübner Foreword by Lukas Feireiss Designed by Matthias Hübner 30,5 x 24,5 cm Language: English Hardback Publisher: Gestalten 2010
Gestalten's attempt, in 2010, to name what came after street art. The premise is that the interesting work had stopped being about surfaces and started being about objects and situations: modified traffic signs, swings hung at bus stops, drawings made in sand and snow, small sculptural insertions that most passers-by never register as art at all. Slinkachu's miniature figures are here, alongside projects from New York and London but also China, Colombia and Turkey — the geographic spread was part of the argument.
Whether the "next generation" framing held up is a fair question, and the book is very much a document of its moment: the years when the scene's centre of gravity was sliding from writers toward artists with art-school vocabularies, and when publishers were racing to name the shift. Read that way it is more useful now than it was then. Large format, heavy, printed to Gestalten's standard of the period, and the sequencing of images does most of the work — the texts are brief.
