Art
in public space, art for the public or public art are all terms synonymous
with work that is physically outside the gallery or museum, and signify
different ways in which art can contribute and relate to a discourse of
spatial and social relationships. Whilst such art created through
institutions, corporations or governments might visually enhance the
environment, as an emissary of powerful tastes and ideas it functions as a
reminder of exclusion rather than a symbol of dialogue. On the other hand,
it can have a specific relationship to the community in which it is located
– whether made within an ethnic tradition or as a reminder of a unique
history – its meaning dependent on a pre-existing link between the work and
its surroundings. Sitting uncomfortably between these two socially endorsed
models, however, is a form of public art more usually known as graffiti.
While not all graffiti is art, that which aspires to art’s status serves a
theoretical purpose, one that transcends even while it transgresses social
norms.
Created outside of the micro-power discourse of the art world or a
particular community, graffiti addresses the macro-power issues of how an
urban populus relates to the communal space and the powers that govern it.
Today, Shepard Fairey, Barry McGee (aka TWIST), Stephen Powers (aka ESPO)
and Todd James (aka REAS) are developing art that addresses the conceptual,
social and aesthetic concepts of graffiti while often displaying it in a
gallery context.
‘I find most public art nauseating’, claims McGee. ‘It rarely raises the
public’s awareness or stirs controversy. There are exceptions, but most
advisers and art commissions are carefully trying to balance corporate and
public interests. However, there are beautiful acts of non-sanctioned public
art happening in almost every urban city worldwide. It can be a rock soaring
into a plate glass window at Starbucks or a message spray-painted across the
façade of Exxon’s headquarters. To me, this is public art.’
Midway through Mathieu Kassovitz’s 1995 film Hate (La Haine), three Parisian
ghetto boys wander into a gallery opening. Confronted by a Jeff Koons
look-a-like doggy sucking its paw, one boy asks whether the artist is
famous, to which another responds ‘he will be when he grows up’. Later in
the film, one of the boys passes a billboard carrying the slogan ‘Le Monde
est à Vous’ (The World is Yours). With a spray can, he changes the ‘V’ to an
‘N’, thus making the slogan read ‘The World is Ours’.
Like the boys in Hate, graffiti is often seen as the smaller, dirtier
Dionysian brother of the hip, savvy art world Apollo. In the postmodern
digital age the notion of the artist’s hand or the artist’s unique touch has
become a critical pariah. Graffiti stands in contradistinction to this
trend, for here the artist’s touch is an intrinsic element. ‘Graffiti art is
about appropriation of private property’, says Hugo Martinez, head of
Brooklyn’s Martinez gallery. ‘A graffiti writer is engaged in a
collaboration, though unwilling, with the architect’. Graffiti restores a
sense of human touch to the urban landscape. As with performance art it is
the act itself that predominates, advertising the artists’ existence at the
moment of creation and extolling their unique personalities. As contemporary
street and gallery artist McGee/TWIST declares, ‘Graffiti is performance.
Every act is performative. Each mark is evidence of that act’. Despite
repetition and mass exposure, most graffiti images are unique, individual
acts of personal expression, instead of a replica of a cloistered original.
The impetus to write on walls is as old as civilisation, although graffiti
as an organised subculture in the contemporary sense dates back to the
seventies when young boys – and a few girls – began developing their
renegade art on the walls and subways of New York and Philadelphia. In the
eighties, a pocketful of artists, such as Futura 2000, Zephyr, Ken Scharf,
Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lee and Lady Pink, who either began
working on the street or whose work was inspired by the street graffiti,
gained popularity within the art world. These artists worked primarily on
canvas because, as Zephyr explains, ‘once having decided “I do trains, but I
am going to do other things”, the parameters are that it has to be movable,
be displayable and be archival. Canvas is the medium of gallery artists’.
While some artists successfully shifted from the street to the gallery by
painting on canvas, the ethos of graffiti proved difficult to translate to
an inherently static, marketable medium. As Futura notes, ‘when an artist is
used to working on the scale of a subway car, it is a very difficult
transition to a three-by-three foot canvas’. After art world interest went
into hibernation with the late eighties stock market crash, graffiti art
continued to evolve on the street as the culture expanded to global
proportions. Today, younger artists are developing means of diversifying the
aesthetic parameters of illegal street art.
Shepard Fairey expands the definition of street art by powerfully
deconstructing and mocking the omnipresence and nonsensical potency of our
era’s visual vernacular: advertising. Fairey replicates the stark graphics
of Russian Constructivism, mixing this with the style of Dada-esque slogans
born in the streets and cafés of Europe more than eighty years ago.
Fairey has described his work as ‘an experiment in phenomenology’. Heidegger
defined phenomenology as ‘the process of letting things manifest
themselves’, enabling us to clearly see things that have become muted by
familiarity. Fairey’s Obey/Giant campaign attempts to stimulate curiosity,
encouraging us to question both the poster itself and the relationship with
our surroundings. Fairey’s posters, stickers and stencils have no intrinsic
meaning and carry ambiguous slogans; because we are unused to seeing
advertisements in which the product or motive is less than overt, encounters
with them tend to be both thought-provoking and frustrating in equal
measure. Searching for meaning, we are forced to re-examine our necessarily
subjective interpretations and what they reveal about us and our
relationship to the environments in which we live.
Since 1989, Fairey has used the arbitrarily chosen but arresting face of the
late professional wrestler Andre the Giant, juxtaposed with what seem to be
equally random slogans that frequently command us to ‘obey’. As a
significant urban presence, the images offer a counterpoint to advertising
which asks the viewer to buy instead of react and question. Fairey invites
an interactive approach by widely distributing his stickers and stencils.
Aside from his many gallery exhibitions, the success of Fairey’s campaign is
astounding and his images are globally pervasive. Walking through certain
neighbourhoods in Manhattan, one sees his images at least once on every
block. Like Keith Haring, Fairey has incorporated his imagery into
merchandising through his own design company, adding another medium through
which he can represent Obey/Giant and the concept it signifies.
Collaborative installations between Barry McGee/TWIST, Stephen Powers/ESPO
and Todd James/REAS have been shown at The Institute of Contemporary Art in
Philadelphia (Indelible Market) and New York’s Deitch Projects (Street
Market), the latter being recreated last year for the Venice Biennale.
Vibrant, gritty urban dystopias, they not only bring the mark of graffiti
into the gallery but simulate the environment where graffiti is created.
Mocking the art world’s desire to transform an artist’s style into his or
her signature or brand, the artists fabricate products adorned with their
trademark characters or street names. Advertisements for such abstract
desires as ‘Street Cred’ and ‘Handmade Myth’ adorn the gallery space and are
endorsed by the artists. Indelible Market and Street Market succeed
brilliantly because, like street graffiti, they rely on the interplay
between innocuous ‘public’ surfaces, the intrusive and pervasive imagery of
advertising and the bold statement of artistic rebellion.
Inspired by the monikers of hobos and rail-workers, McGee’s street and
studio work is characterised by images of working-class dissent, with ‘sad
sack’ figures representing archetypal male oppression. Hulking mass and
slackly featured mugs make them simultaneously repugnant and sympathetic.
Bereft of the sentimental grandeur of Thomas Hart Benton’s noble American
workers who soldier towards a glorious realisation of American mythologies,
McGee’s faces are those of men drained of what Jean Anouilh termed ‘dirty
hope’. His is the pictorial equivalent of the Native American war hero
turned wino in Johnny Cash’s Ballad of Ira Hayes or the factory workers in
Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. McGee’s figures have racially ambiguous
features signifying how race and class oppression are irrevocably married,
as they embody the fatigued visages of the persecuted from slavery to
serfdom to the destitute masses of the urban homeless. As Foucault pointed
out, today’s urban streets have taken on the role of Sebastian Brant’s
Narrenschiff or Hieronymus Bosch’s Ship of Fools, where mad and rejected
members of society are relegated. Working on the streets, TWIST reminds the
passerby of society’s ubiquitous yet neglected rejects. In the galleries,
TWIST’s work brings these characters into a discourse occurring at the
opposite end of the class divide.
Playing on the authority of the word and the delineation of public versus
private space, Stephen Powers’ street art is physically and conceptually
larger and clearer than most graffiti, yet still represents its core ethos.
When questioned while painting on the street, Powers declared that he was
painting over graffiti as a representative of a fictitious community
activist organisation called the ‘Exterior Surface Painting Outreach’ (ESPO).
But as the law makes no allowance for aesthetics or artistic motives, ESPO’s
work, like all graffiti, is considered pure vandalism. As he says, ‘legally
it is OK to be a community-minded activist, but using that as a means to
broadcast a message is a crime’. While Fairey’s art addresses the semiotics
of abstract political and corporate power, ESPO’s art visually represents
the dominance of language over space, which turns the physical into an
abstract concept. By marking the space with a name, Powers does not claim
ownership but rather draws attention to his lack of ownership, and in so
doing represents the viewers’ own lack of dominion over the space they
inhabit.
Barry McGee/TWIST, Stephen Powers/ESPO and Todd James/REAS showed Street
Market at the Venice Biennale,
10 June – 4 November 2001.
Barry McGee was in Widely Unknown at Deitch Projects,
10 November – 22 December 2001.
Ana Honigman is a freelance critic based in New York