FAILE (artist collaboration)
FAILE is a Brooklyn-based artistic collaboration between Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller. Since its inception in 1999, FAILE has been known for a wide-ranging multimedia practice recognizable for its explorations of duality through a fragmented style of appropriation and collage.
While painting and printmaking remain central to their approach, over the past decade FAILE has adapted its signature mass culture-driven iconography to an array of materials and techniques, from wooden boxes and window pallets to more traditional canvas, prints, sculptures, stencils, installation, and prayer wheels. FAILE's work is constructed from found visual imagery, and blurs the line between "high" and "low" culture, but recent exhibitions demonstrate an emphasis on audience participation, a critique of consumerism, and the incorporation of religious media, architecture, and site-specific/archival research into their work.
Biographical
McNeil was born in 1975 in Edmonton, Alberta; Miller was born in 1976 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. McNeil and Miller met during their youth in Arizona. Separated in 1996 when Miller remained in art school in Minneapolis and McNeil continued to New York, by the end of the decade, the duo reconnected and, with the addition of then artist Aiko Nakagawa, "A Life" was conceived. By early 2000, the trio contributed to the emergence of a nascent street art culture by circulating their screenprinted and painted work on city streets, usually using the subversive processes of wheatpasting and stenciling. During the ensuing years McNeil, Miller, and Nakagawa solidified both their omnivorous style of pop-cultural collage, and changed their name to FAILE. Nakagawa left FAILE in 2006, gaining success in her own right as AIKO aka , while McNeil and Miller continued on to increased commercial and institutional visibility.Career
Early years: 2000-2005
If FAILE's career can be viewed on a spectrum of "street art" and DIY-products to gallery-ready "fine art," then the first half of the aughts tilts more fully towards street practice. Although FAILE has always shown in galleries in one form or another, and still puts work on the street, these early years were spent deploying work in cities around the world and honing a distinctive style of wheatpasted and stenciled work that recalls both the shredded commodity collage of midcentury décollagistes Mimmo Rotella and Jacques Villeglé, and the pulp-cultural appropriations and comic books sensibilities of sixties "pop" artists such as Richard Hamilton, Andy Warhol, and Roy Lichtenstein. These influences were intensified in FAILE's work by the rapid fire splicing and re-assemblage of sampling, and the direct-to-audience urban raids specific to the golden age of graffiti.Although FAILE's style can be located in these art historical legacies, their style and idiosyncratic vernacular make FAILE's work distinct and recognizable. During the early years of their career, influenced by contemporaries Shepard Fairey, BAST, and WK Interact, FAILE generated both a process of assemblage and urban circulation, and consistent visual cues and themes. One such example is the Challenger space shuttle, which crashed shortly after its launch in 1986. Not only does the shuttle appear in various forms in much of FAILE's work, the year "1986" is appended to their pieces as a signature that both invokes their specific use of the shuttle image, and also a reminder to their audience of the event itself, of its role in their personal history. "1986" is both indicative of a populist or dialogic impulse in much of FAILE's work, and also an example of the characteristic ambivalence or dualism in their practice. Recurring themes of binaries such as love/hate, peace/war, triumph/calamity, satiation/desire are all prevalent in work that seems to assimilate the global urban landscape but tenders only oblique opinions about that landscape.
During this period, FAILE produced several books in limited edition, including, by 2004, Orange, Death, Boredom, and Lavender. The overlap between FAILE's art practice and design background was pronounced during this early period, and found them collaborating on clothing and shoe lines, and music projects, as well as work on the street. In 2004 McNeil reflected, "A lot of what inspires us and excites us is the opportunity to work with talented people and to work on projects that are a challenge. Having the chance to work on things of all different disciplines whether it is fashion, painting, shoe design, or making a toy. The ideas of getting locked in and known for one thing and having to repeat. It sounds like a dreadful situation to be in. Recently we got the opportunity to work on the new Duran Duran album with John Warwicker for Tomato."
This first phase of FAILE's career was markedly experimental and varied—constant travel, a lack of studio space, and a rapidly evolving process meant that work was made for specific sites, from Manhattan to London and Tokyo. Commercial projects helped to finance this period of dissemination and revision. By 2005, however, FAILE acquired a permanent studio space, and were able to commit fully to a more studio-driven practice that both adapted the entropic street aesthetic of FAILE's and others' work, and permitted FAILE to apply their practice to a wider array of media and socio-political themes.
Spank the Monkey (2006)
From 27 September 2006 to 7 January 2007, independent curator Pedro Alonszo's Spank the Monkey ran at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, UK. The exhibition brought together twenty two internationally recognized street artists and investigated street art's growing artistic quality and popular appeal and its rootedness in the realms of graphic design and global youth culture. The exhibition included celebrated "fine artists" such as Barry McGee, Takashi Murakami, and Ryan McGinness alongside noted graffiti, street, and design artists such as Os Gemeos, Shepard Fairey, Banksy, and FAILE. Spank the Monkey was the first exhibition of its kind, and followed closely behind the commercial success of Fairey's Obey line, and Banksy's "Barely Legal" sale of his own work in Los Angeles.The exhibition, which positioned works both inside the gallery and throughout Newcastle, received favorable reviews. Speaking of the show, critic Guy Bird noted that "when the gallery takes the art seriously, avoiding condescension, or over-glamorisation, and the artists avoid 'sell-out' accusations by keeping control of their message...the results can be spectacular." Spank the Monkey marked both the gradual institutional acceptance of street art, and FAILE's regular display in high-profile fine-art institutions. Indeed, FAILE used the venue to display some of their most somber work to date, in a series of twelve paintings titled "War Profitees," that incorporated harrowing photographs, newspaper text, and a dark color palette to bring to life the tragic 2006 Lebanon War, which killed 1,500 people, most of whom were civilians. The invocation of political violence, and references to Israel and Hezbollah indicated an intensification of FAILE's work, and demonstrated how their technique could be brought to bear on the precarious global order of the 21st century. The integration of form and content in the work, and sustained, critical attention to a political theme evident in FAILE's Spank the Monkey contribution was a harbinger.
Tate Modern (2008)
In response to the growing popularity—and commercial viability—of street art, the Tate Modern, located in London's Southwark, organized a show simply titled Street Art, that took place from 23 May to 25 August 2008, one week after Banksy's Cans show in a London railway tunnel. The exhibition, organized by curator Cedar Lewisohn, displayed work by six artists or collaborative projects in massive relief on the riverfront-facing wall of the museum's turbine room. Street Art included Nunca and Os Gemeos from Brazil, Blu from Italy, Sixeart from Spain, and JR from France. FAILE was the only group to participate in both the Cans and the Tate shows, contributing to the latter a massive image of a Native American in full regalia amidst a shredded collage of pulp images and found signage typical of FAILE's work in 2008, and constructed in pieces in the studio before being affixed to the Tate's exterior. Of the exhibition and the institutionalization of their work, FAILE argued "At least it's no longer undermined as something on the street, something without value. Money fuels interest—it's an injection in the butt that fires people up and makes them realise they should pay attention."While street art was, by 2008, an increasingly accepted and popular form overseas, in New York, graffiti's traditional home, street art was embraced by only a handful of galleries, such as Deitch Projects, an early champion of sometimes FAILE collaborator Swoon. As FAILE noted at the time, "New York has such a history of this art, but institutions are waiting to see what happens before they open the doors to it. The art is starting to surface in New York Sotheby's and Christie's, but it wouldn't be if not for the excitement ." Inclusion in the Tate show, which received widespread media attention and reached a large public, brought FAILE more fully into the international spotlight and further established them as one of the most recognizable names in an increasingly globalized and multi-platform art world.
Lost in Glimmering Shadows (2008)
On the heels of work in England for the Baltic Gallery and the Tate Modern, FAILE displayed a series of new work in November 2008 titled Lost in Glimmering Shadows, and thematically unified exploration of tension between consumer culture and spiritual fulfillment and the contradiction between America's sometimes bloody history and its democratic ideals.Housed in the Lilian-Baylis Old School in conjunction with Lazarides Gallery in London, Lost in Glimmering Shadows occupied an ambiently lit circular gallery space in which large-scale prints and paintings surrounded sculptural elements in the interior ring. While the temple-like lighting and installation, life-size cast of a boy with rabbit, and large-scale painted work were familiar formal carryovers from earlier exhibitions Lost in Glimmering Shadows notably introduced freestanding, functional prayer wheels, circular disc paintings, and stacks of multifaceted apple boxes, all emblazoned with brightly hued text and found imagery. Moreover, the show introduced a leitmotif of heroic Native American figures in conflict with a consumption-mad America, their world "lost in glimmering shadows."
The work within the exhibition derived much of its force from ironic juxtapositions, such as a reworking of the American flag in the style of a Navajo ceramic in the acrylic on canvas Star Spangled Shadows, and the textual interplay on the prayer wheels of phrases like "In search of sacred" and roadside advertisements for "cold beer" and "snacks." This irony is redoubled by the construction here of functional religious devices overlaid by FAILE's own international brand. At other times, the work is more explicit, depicting a suit-wearing kachina figure amidst the backdrop of a pulp serial promising "A Betrayal Story," in the painting of the same name, or implying an alternate America in It Could be Beautiful. Consistent FAILE themes such as the Challenger shuttle and urban signage were featured alongside new figures and decorative elements derived from traditional figurines and baskets, as well as appropriated 20th-century imagery and pictures from the American southwest.