Although he's been active in the Houston street art scene for almost a decade, the work of the artist known as Give Up has only recently begun to gain wider attention within the larger extreme art underground. His work has been featured on numerous blogs over the past year such as Hammer Smashed Sound (which is where I learned of him) and Cvlt Nation, and he has created several shirt designs and record sleeves including one for the UK hardcore band Rot In Hell. When I saw his stuff posted on HSS, I was instantly attracted to Give Up's stark, high-contrast black and white images. They reminded me of old hardcore punk 7" sleeves from the 80's, or the ascetic designs of Industrial cassettes, or the heavily saturated black spaces found in Xeroxed black metal fanzines. Once I investigated his stuff further and found that there were a couple of books and zines that Give Up has produced, I snatched up everything that I could get my hands on, and found that this guy has produced a hefty amount of work, ranging from extensive and ambitious guerilla-style street art pieces to xerox-damage collages to abstract landscapes. And it's all consumed with visions of urban decay, Satanic symbols, death and dissolution, drug abuse, eroticism, violence, and an overall nihilistic attitude that appeals to my general worldview. The bottom line is that I love feeding my eyes with Give Up's art, and his massive softbound book collections are filled to the brim with this stuff. He's received most of his accolades for the actual street art that he has plastered all across Houston, but fans of grimy zine art, nightmarish Xerox atrocities, and graphic design steeped in both occult and dystopian ideas would probably be hooked by Give Up's negatory, inky hallucinations.

Hate Fuck: Collection One 2005-2009 is a monster tome. Perfect-bound and loaded with four hundred and thirty-four pages of stark black and white art, this book collects the first seven issues of Hate Fuck, the art zine produced by the Houston street artist that operates under the tag "Give Up". These zines were originally published between 2005 and 2009 and are reprinted here in their entirety, with new introductions and background info from Give Up that traces the evolution of his work and of the zine through the years. In his signature style of pilfered collage imagery, carcinogenic Xerox abstractions, and satanic visuals, Give Up loaded these art zines with one grimy, nightmare vision after another. The pages are filled with simple photo-copied images of box cutters, razorblades, claw hammers, and semi-automatic hardware that are blown up and blackened by playing with the contrast of the image, inferring the images with seething unspoken violence. There are stark pictures of urban decay and megalithic electrical pylons, collage re-mixes of demons and tortured humans cribbed from the Malleus Maleficarum, dead animals, scenes of rural depravity, and lots of blasphemous, anti-Christian imagery along with references to the Process Church of the Final Judgment. These images all look distressed, damaged, as if the original source image had been obtained from a camera still of a screen from some clandestine video cassette, or a page ripped out of an underground, "members only" magazine that has been Xeroxed over and over again. The one thing that runs through each and every piece that has been collected here is a bleak, nihilistic worldview. Whenever I pick this book up, I find it impossible not to get sucked into the piles of apocalyptic visual dread that Give Up has produced.