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comrade kgbe - The Vitals

Age: 21
Hometown:
Providence, Rhode Island
Where do you now live?:
Brooklyn
How long have you been creating street art?:
I’ve been doing the ROTGUT stuff in New York for about 3 years
/>What did you do last night?: Watched a movie called
Joysticks, went out drinking, ate White Castle,  then regretted eating White
Castle
What is your favorite thing to eat for dinner?:
Chicken wings from the Pink Teacup are really good
Who is
your favorite fictional character?: Sluggo
What do you
currently have in your pockets?: Some money, a Boy Scout pocketknife,
cigarettes
If you were given “more time,” what would you do with
it?: Utilize it
Who do you love?: God and my
country

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comrade kgbe - The A’s to Our Q’s:

Wooster: How did you get
started in creating art for the street?

comrade kgbe:
Growing up in Providence right in the shadow of the Rhode Island School
of Design, I was used to seeing my neighborhood get torn up by art school kids
doing graffiti or street art.  I must have been 10 or 11 when Shepard Fairey
started plastering his “Andre the Giant has a posse” stickers all over town and
a couple years later Sonik was bolting painted wooden signs into poles on the
street.  Kids were doing all sorts of weird things.. building bootleg tee-pees
in abandoned lots, hanging busted TVs from trees, floating derelict cars down
the river on makeshift rafts.  Sometimes it would be real pretentious artsy
crap but nevertheless it showed me the possibilities of what art could be and
the fact that you could put it wherever the hell you wanted to.  For a while in
middle school and high school I tried my hand at graffiti and I really got into
it but I realized the fun and satisfaction of it was less about the art I was
doing and more about exploring the places I did it at.  The way rusty old
bridges and train tracks and abandoned shacks looked was a lot more appealing to
me then the bright colors of the spray paint I was using.  So I started
scavenging for crummy metal and wood and painting them in a simpler way and
affixing them back outside, first with bolts and nails, later with chains and
locks.

Wooster: Why rotgut?

/>comrade kgbe: Rotgut just seemed like an appropriate term:
It just sort of fits the medium.

Wooster: What other
street artists do you most admire and why?

comrade kgbe:
I think as far as street art goes, REVS does really solid work. 
Monster Project and Os Gemeos
are also really good.  Street art has the unfortunate habit of getting kind of
inbred and repetitive from time to time so I admire people who consistently
innovate and push the boundaries.

Wooster: What’s
your favorite city, neighborhood, or block, to post and/or to see street art?
/>
comrade kgbe: I’m kind of partial to industrial areas
of the Northeast and the Midwest.  Any city with an ageing industrial sector and
train tracks is OK by me. I like to incorporate elements of the areas history
into the signs I put up there so areas with interesting history are preferable. 
I guess that’s a lot of the reason I like it in New York.

/>Wooster: What inspires you now?

comrade
kgbe: Reading inspires me a lot.  href="http://www.oscweb.com/writing/looking3.html">John Dos Pasos is good. 
Taking stupidly long meandering walks through neighborhoods I’ve never really
explored before. Grants tomb.  That kind of boring stuff.

/>Wooster: What are you currently working on?  Can you give us
a sneak peek?

comrade kgbe: I’m working on pieces
for an upcoming show in Philadelphia and just more of the same signs for fences. 
I’m also working on some real ugly pieces for a project in Manhattan for
fall.

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