Ubiquitous, these images proliferate all over Manhattan, with a rhythm of their own: black and white posters pasted up high: on brick walls, on glass, on metal: block letters by COST and kimono ladies, wolves, and other animals by his partner ENX. Urban desires in common: to cut a stencil / to write / to print it / to go up high / to raise your arms, to paste / to walk in the streets / to run into the posters / to raise your head, your eyes / to take a picture. The body, the artifact, the city: a relationship of affect. “Affect,” observe Alison Young and Mark Halsey, “has to do with intensity rather than identity” (“Our Desires are Ungovernable,” 2006: 278). “Affect,” proposes Brian Massumi, “is the virtual co-presence of potentials” (2002a: 213 in Halsey and Young, 259). The figure of the pack: to walk in the streets / to go into the alleys / to search the walls / to run / to inhabit the city / to be in the middle / to leave behind your name, your face, your profession / to form a pack / to disintegrate even for that second / to breathe / to live.
Enx & Cost. Manhattan, 4 Jan. 2015.
Ethan Armen, Enx, Invader, Cost. Broadway, 8 Jan. 2015.
Enx and Cost. Bowery, 5 Jan. 2015.
Cost, Enx & many others. Bowery, 5 Jan. 2015.
Cost and Enx. Bowery, 5 Jan. 2015.
To see more pieces, check out their Instagram accounts: @Costkrt and @enx108. A few posts not to miss, among many others: in the interview “COST is Up” by Bucky Turco and Marina Galperina, Cost talks about his collaboration with ENX. And this post on Invader’s collaboration with COST and ENX back in 2013. And these great shots by Jacqueline M Hadel. And about COST’s comeback, “The Return of COST.”
