While graffiti owes its name to ancient Greek and Roman wall scribbling, and there is an argument to be made that it represents – in, for example, the Lascaux cave drawings – humanity’s most primal urge toward graphic expression, graffiti as we know it today is generally acknowledged to be a product of urban youth in crisis: specifically, like rap, emerging out of the concrete jungle dystopia of 1970s New York. It is perhaps appropriate, then, that in the midst of economic distress not experienced since those days, the world is now taking notice of graffiti in a new light.
Born in the Streets Exhibition
One exhibition at the Fondation Cartier d’Art Contemporain in Paris seeks to establish the gritty roots of contemporary graffitists who have achieved not only widespread notoriety, but an artistic cachet that ironically places them within the establishment their artform is designed to contradict.
Born in the Streets - Graffiti emphasises the phenomenon of “tagging” or “writing” that is the hallmark of early graffiti as practiced on the derelict buildings and beleaguered subway cars of New York City from the early 1970s until tough security measures stamped them out (with varying degrees of success) in the ‘80s and early ‘90s.
A striking paradox of Born in the Streets is the inclusion of commissioned works. Regardless of the street cred of the artists involved – including such illustrious global practitioners of the urban craft as Sweden’s Nug and Brazil’s Vitché – the very act of bringing their work into a gallery context – indeed, the very act of commission – must surely remove the work from its realm of intrinsic banditry to such an extent as to negate its roots entirely.
Rough Cut Nation - Graffiti as Mural
Taking Street Art one big step further into the establishment – while still quirkily preserving important elements of the original graffiti ethos – is the Scottish National Portrait Gallery’s summer 2009 exhibit Rough Cut Nation.
Presented as a “project” rather than “show,” Rough Cut Nation sprang from a happy confluence of opportunity and innovation. With the Scottish National Portrait Gallery undergoing extensive renovations, and due to be closed through November 2011 - rendering the space wasted during the important Edinburgh Festival art season - the idea was mooted to invite street artists to let loose in the venerable building’s ground floor exhibition space.
National Galleries outreach officer Richie Cummings, whose role with the institution largely centres on making artwork more accessible and relevant to contemporary audiences, was placed in charge of the project. Rough Cut Nation intermingles street artists with more traditional media artists like painter Kirsty Whiten in what amounts to an overlapping, large-scale mural in counterpoint to William Hole’s 19th-century Main Hall depiction of famous Scots.
Street Culture Influences in Contemporary Art
In Born on the Streets and Rough Cut Nation, both high-culture venues make imaginative nods to graffiti’s birthright. Fondation Cartier installed a structure specifically designed to be “graffiti'd” in visitors’ workshops; while the Scottish National Portrait Gallery supplements the viewing experience with DJ spin-offs harking back to the same cultural heritage shared equally by the Sugar Hill Gang and early New York taggers.
But can engineered concessions to the spirit of the street replace the actual street? Does graffiti in an organised (not to mention indoor) context not cease to be graffiti, and instead, through implicit legitimisation as illustrated by the National Galleries show, morph into mere murals? Further, when addressing the necessary distinction between art and vandalism with the convenient yet problematic label “street art,” does that not explicitly preclude the exhibition of this medium in art galleries?
Graffiti - Medium or Movement?
When is graffiti not graffiti? This may be an even more contentious query than its fraught corollary, the eternal “What is Art?” What is increasingly celebrated as Street Art occupies a narrow space between public defacement and de-fanged legitimacy. On the one hand, graffiti may be seen to distinguish itself from crude tagging with varying degrees of sophistication in design, aforethought, and politically charged or philosophical meaning. On the other, graffiti seems more bound to its own tradition by context than by form. Keith Haring’s work, for example, is never referred to as actual graffiti, only as bearing its mark as an obvious cultural, aesthetic and formal influence.
In fact, the question of graffiti’s place in our culture may come down to whether it is in essence a medium, or a movement. At first glance, with the binding characteristic being graphics applied to an unorthodox public surface, graffiti appears to be essentially a medium - albeit with a wide scope (the application may take many forms - from actual carving, to the classic spray paint, to the paste-up technique put to such effective use by the illustrious Banksy).
Yet on top of this material flexibility, there also exists a singularity of character binding together a multiplicity of purpose and personality - on a global scale - that suggests a well-defined movement.
Artistic Rebellion
If it is a spirit of outspoken rebellion that most generally characterises Street Artists, equally important is an egalitarian commitment that stands in contrast to the elitist tradition of fine art, both real and perceived. And while showing at the Fondation Cartier or the National Galleries may seem at odds with this disestablishmentarian ethos even to the point of negating it, it may in fact be more accurate to view these shows as a pointed exercise in a determined, widespread effort by the establishment itself to deflate the elitist tradition and embrace the egalitarian ethos.
Resources:
- Ganz, Nicholas and Manco, Tristan. Graffiti World, London: Thames & Hudson, 2004
- Lewisohn, Cedar. Street Art: The Graffiti Revolution, London: Tate Publishing, 2008
- Ruiz, Maximiliano. Graffiti Argentina, London: Thames & Hudson, 2008
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