RSS
Home
Street art and civic space
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
Graffiti on a Permission Wall, East Colonial
Street art has been around since ancient times, with the triple theme of craft, sabotage, and branding. Paris’ “Blec le rat” and New York’s Taki 183 were early pioneers in street art. Today, street art has spread into nearly every city with artists, media, and collectors. Skateboards, tattoos, stickers, and spray paint are but a few examples of the craft of the street. The adrenalin rush an artist feels in executing his work is augmented by the urban thrill of working at night before the police come, leaving behind their signature. The chief aim of most street art is branding, as the artist’s main form of expression is to create a recognizable personal logotype.
On the street, the city's public space in general has slowly been eviscerated by our culture of consumption, for it provides an antiquated, nearly obsolete physical format for civic discourse. Long ago proclaimed dead by noted architect Daniel Liebskind, physical public space has precipitously declined in value to most of the citizens of the city, in favor of virtual public space – first television, which was a one-way path, and then the internet, which provides a two-way path.
Yet it is this very physical public space that is the medium of the new Street Art form. Stickers, tags, skateboards, and tattoos are all viewed on the street, and it offers an excellent medium to carry this new art form into the next century. While the so-called "cutting edge" artists have retreated into their private studios to conceive their next moves in video or computers, street artists have taken over the city to proclaim their brand of art as supreme. Globalism is achieved by hard work: Artists like Barry McGee or Banksy are no longer confined to one city; Space Invader, having successfully placed his own particular brand across the face of Paris, now has spread to London and New York, making his own global art tour as a form of civic art.
Viewing a piece of graffiti at once causes a reaction of fear and a perception of danger. Can anyone claim the same immediate, visceral reaction to anything seen in a gallery or museum? This art form reaches people at such a gut level that it already trumps most of the work of other artists being exhibited and discussed in the art world. This trump card is being used by street artists to their own advantage, and their craft reinforces what McLuhan described so well in his epigram "the medium is the message." The content of the piece is almost irrelevant; the viewer's reaction is the same regardless of the tag's content or author.
Street art is tied into a larger urban culture, and expresses the visual aspect of this larger milieu. As Western mainstream culture retreats from the street into the air-conditioned, connected bubbles of the suburbs, street art and its culture expands to fill the empty space. The zone emptied by the suburbanites does indeed reek of death, more so today, as public investment in our own city form dwindles in the New Economy to almost nothing. Budget cuts in schools, government facilities, and even basic street maintenance all translates to an acceptance of a higher level of decay and disrepair, of neglect and abandonment of our shared space, and those who inhabit this space are simply documenting what they see and returning it back to us. We cannot escape the messages of street art, for they are everywhere, embedded into the context. Some are more overt, and some are covert – only noticed, for example, when waiting for a red light – but they are there, reminding us of the other side.
Graffiti’s barrage of skulls, vacant-eyed cartoon children, and other signs of death and destruction are easy to ignore, but they are telling us something important about the urban environment. The sooner we stop and examine this evidence, the sooner we can begin a process to find common ground, and to seek out a shared vision that does not divide the urban world into an us-and-them mentality. Street art simply puts visual form to the voices we have so long shut out of the urban conversation.
In Orlando, the trend of giving street artists “permission walls,” or walls where they have permission to paint their work, has tamed some of the sabotage. By allowing graffiti artists to work with permission, they are free to develop their craft without fear of getting caught before completion, and the artwork becomes a colorful, mural-sized effort to which the artists can point with pride. These permission walls encourage friendly competition between teams, or crews, and there is a sense of pride among them for having created something with great exposure.
Two permission walls exist to the east of downtown, but it is the cluster of warehouses at 630 E. Central that showcase graffiti 
artwork at its best. Artist Robin Van Arsdol owns part of this cluster and has been sponsoring an international graffiti conference for several years, bringing in artists from Europe, the Caribbean, and North America for a weekend of painting at his studios. Driving by his property is a study in converting urban form into art, and perhaps suggests the urban future of more than one city.
For the graffiti artists have offered a philosophical change-up that should not be overlooked. The conversation about postmodern art seemed to have reached a dead end some time ago; artists first threw out figure, then form, then color, then the frame, and then wandered into their process itself as an art form. Graffiti artists begin with the end: their signature, or tag, becomes the art, and by using this as the starting point, and the city as their canvas, they unconsciously offer a new beginning to think about the relationship between art and the city.
We must accept the challenge that graffiti artists offer us; we must confront this takeover of the physical urban form and push back. While street art is a fresh, interesting language, it should not be mistaken for the language of knowledge or power. Instead it is the language of a city that is weak and divided. We must hear what graffiti says to us as a society, and retake our physical urban character as a common, broad place that offers security, sacred, and special places for all citizens, not just the privileged few who, by choice, enter the physical realm. By ignoring graffiti art, we postpone our treatment of the urban malaise. By confronting it and bringing it into the mainstream, we can better treat our urban condition and improve the city as a dwelling place for the benefit of all.
Related Articles:
Comments
