UFO [Paperback]

Combustive Motor Corporation (Creator)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2006

Beneath the dark highway overpasses of Brooklyn, within the forbidden rail yards of Queens, and along the rooftops and stairwells of Manhattan, four urban explorers record and decode the work of one of New York City’s most vilified and elusive graffiti artists: UFO. Using historical and scientific documentation, government records, personal narratives, and photographic evidence, the Combustive Motor Corporation thoroughly documents the markings of their elusive obsession in U.F.O. A seamless blend of fact and fiction, art and enterprise, U.F.O. is a wild goose chase, after a figurehead of underground art that appears only in the form of his spray-painted avatars.

U.F.O. connects the contemporary markings of one underground artist, known only as UFO, to a far greater creative tradition, linking his artwork to an expressive history of communication, sublime and supernatural, dating back some 10,000 years. In its obsessive, often frantic, accumulation of theory and fact, belief, and evidence, U.F.O. passes through our collective understanding of graffiti into a place where our most common expectations of art and experience collide with the deepest unanswered mysteries of our human history.

Begun in 2004 as a treatment for a feature film, U.F.O. has become the first major book for the art collective Combustive Motor Corporation. It has documented UFO’s artwork around New York City for over three years, and its members describes themselves as having a “second nature” for finding his often hidden symbols.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Four authors from the Combustive Motor Corporation, a New York-based artist collaborative, journey through the streets and alleys of New York City in search of works by UFO, "one of the city's most elusive and prolific graffiti artists," famous for a ubiquitous, deceptively simple glyph: a balloon-headed extraterrestrial riding in a flying saucer. What they find goes far beyond the confines of cheeky vandalism or artist monograph; this illustrated volume also unearths historic evidence of extraterrestrial sightings in the far-flung corners of the world, from ancient paintings in antipodal caves, to Los Angeles street art from the early 1940s. The basic image of the alien is constant: a round head with beady eyes; thin arms and torso; and a saucer-shaped rocket-ship propelled by flickering flames. Like expert sleuths, the authors analyze each specimen, identifying commonalties in color, symmetry, material and surface. Included are photos of the art and the investigation, reproduced notes, a pull-out "Field Guide to UFO Classification," and letters from the authors to such thinkers and artists as Stephen Hawking, Darryl McCray and David Bowie. No answers are provided, but the imagery is provocative and the scope of artistic and scientific inquiry is stunning-appealing to math and religion, to aboriginal dreams and shamans, to Tesla and Jung-the results of which make for compulsive page-flipping and disquieting rumination.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Combustive Motor Corporation is a collaboration of New York City–based artists, including Alex Wright, an underground culture photographer whose work has appeared in music, art, and fashion periodicals as well as national advertising campaigns; Caleb Scott, a writer and actor who has produced and exhibited over twenty plays, short films, and performance pieces; producer and filmmaker Chris Noble, whose most recent work includes a feature documentary film for Wieden + Kennedy; and Jack Warren, a painter and multimedia artist who has recently been exhibited in solo shows in Geneva and New York.

Product Details

• Paperback: 196 pages
• Publisher: powerHouse Books (October 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 157687334X
• ISBN-13: 978-1576873342
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 7.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,379,851 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "The alien feeling many people have today", November 8, 2006

By 

Miette "Miette" (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: UFO (Paperback)

You turn the pages and seek it out, there it is! Staring back from the grime of a window, from above the receipt slot at an ATM, smeared on a wall, punctuating an ad for the lottery. Now you put the book down and it's still everywhere. You close your eyes and it's still there, figure eighting around your sorely depraved head (which itself is transfixed hoping on behalf of the rest of you that you don't miss a transmit of mercury, itself a communiqué, in situ (and out)). These guys, in a word, wrung the very necks of chaos until it produced fruit. Wanna cheat death? This is your book. You should trust me (I've seen it).

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Idea Whose Time Has Come, November 27, 2006

By 

Jeremy Vaeni "www.valiens.com" (New York, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: UFO (Paperback)

Hello potential Amazon customer. If you've read this far you already know what the book you're contemplating forking over your hard-earned dough is about. It's a coffee table book, right? About a graffiti artist, yes? That will either appeal to you on those merits or it won't. But there's another view, one you might not have thought of and that is what this book represents to ufology (the study of all things UFO). As a ufologist (nerd) and alien abductee (oooh!--crazy nerd!), I'm fairly qualified to address this. Ready? Here goes....

Ufology has yet to enjoy another surge in public hunger for information. Most of our efforts seem masturbatory: preaching to the converted, as it were. Where's the big event, damn it? Where's the new layer of weirdness that keeps this subject chugging?

Happy New Year, truth seekers, the new event has arrived in the form of an idea whose time has come. We couldn't have known it until right now but the peaks and valleys of odd events that have captured the public's imagination, from possible spaceship crashes to crop circles, all served to bring us to this moment when the cumulative effect of impressions left by such topics births into existence the latest mutation of the UFO phenomenon quite different, quite more evolved, than all that came before it. Yes, let it be known that 2007 heralds the arrival of the new phase: The complete integration of ufology into normal everyday acceptance by the average person.

Gone are the days of paranoia and demanding the truth. Gone are the days of highs and lows, the peaks and valleys of public clamoring. Now is the time of acceptance. Is this good for business? Definitely not in the short term, maybe not in the long--and that's an excellent indicator that the merits of ufology transcend the term "cottage industry."

Enter the Combustive Motor Corporation. Who are they? From their don't-miss website: "[S]ince the fall of 2001, the CMC has worked in many different, often disparate, mediums and disciplines developing individual `pieces' and ongoing projects which, by nature of their design and presentation, cannot be defined solely by rules of artistic engagement. Combining elements of performance, visual art, film, music, and other graphic media, the CMC seeks to present original works that transcend and defy the common expectations of art and audience."

They've now turned their gaze on ufology.

We've been trying to shovel legitimacy down the public's throat for decades now, haven't we? -- This is real! This is real! Pay attention! This is real!

They did; they didn't; did; didn't, like a tide. Then the tide stopped. We thought the field was dead. Alas, it is only evolving. The Illegitimate parts slough off and the real is what's left. What's left is now being integrated into the system, into the collective. This is, in fact, what we've been waiting for all along, where smart sane average people go: "Yeah, there are aliens here" and look at you funny if you don't know otherwise. That is why U.F.O. is an important book. Interesting in content, extraordinary in what it represents.

This is what happens when levelheaded outsiders think they're going to write an exploratory on an artist with a quirky interest and that interest happens to be aliens. They find out right quick that there's more in the can of worms than worms and they immediately need to share the revelation with the public. The difference between today's public and that of yesteryear is that we're now ready to hear it.

Plus it's an art book. So... cool.

Anyway, you've made it this far. Ya got that wad of cash burning a hole in yer pocket. Why not pick up the book (the layout of which makes it an art object in and of itself)? See if it's all it intends to be. See if it's anything near what I described. Wonder why it is there's this bobble-headed alien sitting atop a fiery rocket ship blasting off from the cave paintings of our ancient past straight into the wall art of the present.

Ask yourself what this means for our future.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A long Yawn fest...with some interesting pics, December 29, 2008

By 

Dominick - See all my reviews

This review is from: UFO (Paperback)

I got this book because I'm interested in the graffiti artist UFO, who by the way hates this book....but anyway decided to see what all the drama was about between the artist and the writer of the book. I didn't really get what the writer was going for, like I said it had some good flicks in it but failed horribly to try and make it something more than it was, which is a book with pictures of UFO graff