This Time the "Taggers" Become the Tagged

The Scion film series comes to an end Tuesday night at the Harvard Exit with Pablo Aravena's graffiti documentary Next: A Primer on Urban Painting, featuring interviews with the likes of Futura, Lee Quiñones and Doze Green, as well as younger art collectives like the Inkheads, the Barnstormers and Heavyweight.

Apparently Aravena scoured the globe, talked to like-minded artists from North and South America, Europe, and Japan, and collected an oral history that traces an evolution from the stylized vandalism of 1970s-era New York to what is now an international, hip hop-influenced aesthetic exhibited in the art world's hipper galleries or profiled in Juxtapoz magazine. Hopefully the film will be smart enough to reach a litlte further back and recognize Vaughn Bode's dominating influence.

Hyping his documentary with the Montreal Mirror, Aravena exudes:

Imagine hanging out with the Impressionists before Impressionism got big. This is a movement that is arising, and I wanted to grab the moment before the academics and media jumped on it, and I wanted the artists themselves to define it.

Success can, and probably should, attract scholarly eggheads and their buzz-killing effect on otherwise subversive media - cough, cough - but doesn't work like this have a built-in resistance to pretentious petrification? The Impressionists weren't exactly getting their aesthetic thrills from random property damage and endless rave parties with strung out teenage girls. Or were they?

The film screens at Harvard Exit, doors and free beer at 8, film starts at 9. Admission is free with RSVP, and here is the link to the Scion site where you can RSVP.