Faile |

Butterfly met up with the infamous Brooklyn-based art collective Faile to discuss more about their Deluxx Fluxx Arcade project with Bast in London and New York, and what’s coming up.

The Faile Bast Deluxx Fluxx Arcade
How did the Deluxx Fluxx project come about?

We were talking to Lazarides last October. He wanted us to do a small show in the Greek street space at the beginning of spring. So we immediately thought of Bast. He is a great friend and it was a good opportunity to do a project together again. We went over to his studio and he had some tables that were kind of shuffled together, a sort of assemblage. We just got talking about this idea of an assemblage piece that we could collaborate on. While we were throwing ideas, somebody mentioned a ping pong machine, and from there somebody mentioned an arcade machine. It was wow, that could be really fun. We all have a lot of fun memories spending time in arcades. And really, it just went from there. It was like “We could get the cabinets, we could paint on those, we could print on those …we can make these kind of interactive pieces in the inside… we could do tokens…and we talked table fussball. With lot of help from a lot of people, we made it happen.

And knowing Lazarides space, the two floors were really going to be a contrast.
From the floor to the ceiling, everything was decorated so that it took you to another dimension. With the black light, the way some paints are, layers tend to become almost 3D.
You are disoriented in space, like floating a little bit.

After we did the show at Lazarides, we don’t know if we’ll ever do a show that will be as universally enjoyed and appreciated. It was just a show that anyone could walk into, appreciate and really have fun with. There was not much to be critical on, there was so much to see and it was fun. It was an arcade, totally different from a painting show. We had a great time with it.

We knew we wanted to bring it back to New York. It was important for us to do it ourselves, as we try to do it independently when we can. We found that space and converted it, and just went for it. We had a lot of fun with it. Through the support of everyone, again got out there in a great way.

Did you get any feedback from people that came to the Arcade without really knowing?

Oh my god, everyday! It was so much fun to be there…You are in the Lower East Side, so you’re getting broad mix of people, with a lot of foot traffic, specially at night. A lot of people love to go out in that area.

It was an amazing response, from people being totally confused… A lot of times you have people looking in, unsure what is going on. You invite them in, and they would not really get in, or touch anything, but then, they would leave with the biggest smile and thank you. And for us as artists, it’s great to experience this. It was really enjoyable on every level and age group.

And it was very well received from a press stand point, plus the public, collectors. For us it’s been a lot of fun.

The games in the arcade machine were so abstract and more about manipulating the art and sort of discovering what would happen.Where people still wanted a winner and looser, the fussball table offered that.

We feel it’s a show we could do almost anywhere. It’s hard at this point because we have the experience, but at the same time it definitively slowed down other projects, like the paintings, the large sculptural projects.

Butterfly: Are we going to see more street work?

Faile: “We took a break for quite some time. We put stuff here and there. It seems that when we travel, we do it more, but in the last year we both had kids.

After the Lost in Glimmering Shadows show, it was such an intense amount of work that we wanted to slow things down a little bit. Even though we were working on projects within the studio, we were spending a little more time with the family and taking a bit of a break.

And also the street is gone through Street Art, Urban Art whatever a big transition and on some levels there’s so much more out there. I think there was a saturation point for us. We needed to step back from it. We had put so much energy into the street, and it’s only one part of what we do. We do like making studio work too. It was nice to have a little bit of a break.

So this spring we’ve been back cutting stencils and going out on the street and it’s been great. After taking a break, there’s a lot of energy towards it again.

So this summer definitively again we’re gonna spend some time and really putting work on the street. But I don’t think we have any ambition or desire to go crazy.”

Tell us more about your upcoming project?

“People very soon will see this project in Portugal, that’s July 16^th 2010 . It opens in Lisbon.

It’s a massive sculptural project that we’ve been working on for almost two years. It is the complete antithesis of the arcade, which was as you know this electronic wonderland. Now it’s gonna be very earth driven. Stones, ceramics, metals, and different tiles.
The show is up for a month, it’s part of a biennale, where there are many large projects that are a part of. The piece will travel to few other cities already and we’ll see from there. It’s gonna be in Europe, but we hope to be able to bring it to the States at some point.
It’s a very different experience, but hopefully as enchanting and enamouring as the other projects that we’ve done.

What we like and what we hope for Faile is that you never know what to expect.”

Faile temple