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Arlen Dilsizian cautions against interpreting graffitti as a collective, homogenous whole and claims that its ability to inspire people who have never thought about producing art, to do so (however briefly) is its most radically important gesture.


The rise of art as a distinct, partially autonomous sphere within capitalism has been analyzed many times, most notably by thinkers such as Marcuse, Adorno, Burger and Habermas. Art was seen to have failed to create a public, given its institutionalization within an ethos of modernism, where constant revolutions of style within a largely static conception of art was seen as constituting an autonomous aesthetic realm which acted as an alternative to everyday life.


Within the artistic avant-garde, in the ideas of Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, the Dada movement, Surrealists and Situationists, there has been a strong strand of continuity in that they were all attempting, one way or another, to transgress the boundaries between art and everyday space, to explore the street and the public realm through artistic practice.


‘Graffiti’ and more recently ‘street art’ are two forms of art (often conflated as one) that have been seen as a vindication of such ideas. They both involve artists illicitly appropriating public space for their art works, outside the conventional artistic locations of museums and galleries. Furthermore they pose challenges to normal art world conventions, in that anyone can be an artist. No formal training is required, and entry costs are simply a can of spray paint and a willingness to break the law. They are both ephemeral and have produced an informal network of fanzines and websites to catalogue the respective ‘scenes’. However, the similarities stop here.


By graffiti, I am referring to the community of writers (the native term for Graffiti artist) that developed in the Bronx and other New York City boroughs during the 1970’s and which later spread throughout the world. Its logic was based essentially the artist writing his signature (‘tag’) as often as possible in as many parts of the city as possible, the more visible the location and the harder it was to reach the better. Furthermore, the emphasis was on developing and refining one’s personal style, that is, the aesthetics of the lettering of the signature.


One of the key problems with graffiti has been that it has rarely been appreciated on the terms of the writers themselves. It is usually interpreted as a collective, homogenous whole. Whether seen as meaningless vandalism, or the activity of a spontaneous creative youth, it is rarely appreciated on the artist’s terms, that is, of his individual success in going ‘all city’ (the native term for covering as much of the city with one’s tag as possible), or on the qualities of the writing style. In this sense, graffiti writers are most concerned with communicating within their own subculture and code of meaning rather than with an external audience.


‘Street art’ or ‘Post-Graffiti’ can be described as an umbrella term that includes all illicit art placed on the streets for direct public interaction. It differs from Graffiti in terms of the media used as well as its concerns with using public space. It most often comes in the form of stencils (such as pioneer Blek le Rat and Banksy), free hand acrylic paints and/or aerosol spray paint (artists like BLU, Jace, OS Gemeos), wheat pasted posters (used often by ‘street art’ collective Faile and by Shepard Fairey of the famous OBEY poster campaign), stickers (often used by London based artist D*Face) as well as less common media such as ceramics (Space Invader), street sculptures (Mark Jenkins) and guerilla video projections.


Street art is more concerned with particular and tactical placement of pieces within the city. In one sense, street art can be seen as Graffiti without its malignant character; that is without graffiti’s urge to spread throughout the city in constant repetition. It is perhaps for this reason, that certain city authorities have been much more tolerant of these kinds of work, than they have been with traditional graffiti writers.


Street artists often intentionally aim to surprise their audience, catch there attention or make them reflect on a certain political or social issues. Spread onto the streets, it bridges the gap between the every day routine, and the time we leave (if any at all) for reflecting, thinking and experiencing art.


In the last few years a plethora of coffee table books, lifestyle magazines, journalistic articles and documentaries that have covered the topic of ‘street art’, have all jumped to paint a picture of a rebellious artistic practice; I believe however that a more muted appraisal is required, for several reasons.

II


In the opening pages of his latest book, the infamous British stencil artist, Banksy, juxtaposes a short summary of the ‘broken windows theory’ with a letter of complaint addressed to the artist from a resident of the East London borough of Hackney. In the letter, the resident expresses concern that the high concentration of Banksy’s street art has associated his neighborhood with urban hip-ness and is attracting yuppies and students, and consequently driving rents up. This could not stand in starker contrast to the ‘broken windows theory’; devised by two sociologists J.Q. Wilson and G.L. Kelling in the 1980’s; it argued that the very presence of signs of visual decay such as litter, broken windows and graffiti can lead into an escalation into further and more serious crimes. The theory was widely adopted by the New York City Transport Authority in 1985 with ‘Graffiti vandalism’ intensively targeted, and later adopted by Republican Mayor Giuliani after his election in 1993 under the rubrics of ‘zero tolerance’ and ‘quality of life’.


Between these two vignettes we see two polar opposites. ‘Graffiti’ as urban decay and crime, while ‘Street Art’ is being associated with gentrification, with all the nefarious consequences it often entails for working class residents of such areas. Indeed, wherever one looks, street art is most likely to be found in certain types of neighborhoods. In Athens around Psirri and Gazi, in Rome it is San Lorrenzo, in Milan it is around Corso Ticene, in Barcelona it is the El Raval area, in Berlin it is Prenzlauer Berg, London it is Shoreditch, Hackney and Hoxton, and in New York it is in the East Village, Soho and Williamsburg.


Many of these areas share a similar history in that they were inner city industrial areas often left to decades of neglect that have experienced rapid gentrification over the past ten or more years. Initially attracted by inexpensive rents and derelict industrial spaces that could double as studio spaces, students and artists tended to be the first to move into these areas, followed by art galleries, ‘new media’ company offices, bars and lastly Young Urban Professionals.


Many scholars have already noted the role that artists play as the vanguard of a distinctive sort of gentrification . The East village of New York is an early example, one of the first places where graffiti-as-art made its appearance. Artists like Futura2000, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat (considered by many as some of the pioneers of the street art genre) began to exhibit in informal looking commercial gallery spaces such as the Fun Gallery opened up in 1981, which was quickly followed by a number of bars and other galleries in the area. Often packaged as art from an ‘uncorrupted street culture’, artists, critics, art dealers all contributed to the ‘East Village’ look, with its associations of bohemia and ‘urban decay as glamour’ that proved so attractive for the middle class residents who moved to the area thereafter.


Let us bear in mind that Haring and Basquiat were themselves second generation ‘graffiti artists’ who painted infrequently on the streets and were often seen by other graffiti artists as capitalizing on their earlier efforts (Joe Austin, “Rewriting New York City”, in Connected: Engagments with Media). Their token street works were seen as a marketing ploy for their work in the gallery. (Haring himself was physically attacked outside of the Tony Shafrazzi Gallery in the more up market Soho area of New York before his 1985 show, by a group of East village artists who were offended by his commercialization).


While art in the streets may in itself not be commodifiable, (though with increasing prices for works by acclaimed street artists in galleries and auction houses, many pieces are literally torn off the streets), many commentators and street artists complain at blatant corporate exploitation of the ‘street art’ aesthetic and tactics. Guerilla marketing techniques used by firms such as Nike, Levis, MTV and Adidas, is seen as yet another manifestation of Corporate interests mining a vibrant artistic subculture for ideas of how to market its products to an increasingly image conscious youth market. This is of course nothing new. As art historian Thomas Crow has argued, functionally the avant-garde has always served as ‘a kind of research and development arm of the culture industry’ (“Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts”, in Modernism and Modernity: The Vancouver Conference Papers). Yet we should be careful in overstressing a strict binary of street artists versus capitalist corporate culture. While we should not over generalize, many street artists have had some formal training in art or graphic design and often work for, or freelance for the boutique media, design and advertising sector, (very few artists are able to make a living solely out of their art work). For a subculture like skate boarding or street art, which embody a strong ‘do-it-yourself’ ethos, the central object around which they structure there oppositional attitude is often not ‘Capitalism’ itself, but forms of corporate culture that are seen to stifle creativity and impinge on artistic freedom. Work arrangements in the type of companies that these artists work for are usually very flexible, and artists are given considerable space to express there creativity, (usually in return for less material security).As long as they are given the creative space they do not see a problem with working for clients like Nike, often seeing it as a continuation of their art in an other media. It is what urban sociologist Richard Lloyd has called the ‘bohemian ethic and the spirit of flexibility’. Perhaps the starkest example is the marketing firm BLK/MRKT founded in 1999 by two world famous street artists and pioneers in the genre, Shepard Fairey and Dave Kinsey with marketing tactics aimed at ‘appeal(ing) to the hard-to-reach trendsetter’.

III


It is not my aim here to suggest that ‘street art’ and its practitioners are cynics (though the dominance of cynicism as a predominant mind set of the post- 1960’s era and especially amongst art practitioners is a serious topic for exploration for anyone interested in contributing to radically democratic artistic project) . Nor can the arguments made here be generalized to everyone who decides to pick up a can of spray and use the urban landscape as his canvas. Part of what makes street art so powerful are the thousands of anonymous people who decide to try it a few times and might not return to practice it. That an artistic form can inspire people who have never thought about producing art, to do so (however briefly) is surely its most radically important gesture. The main point is that in order to extend the radical potential of this practice, we need to be aware of some of the ways that ‘Street Art’ is intimately embedded, directly and indirectly into webs of capitalist accumulation in the contemporary city.

Special issue: art and democracy, recent articles
Tags: arlen dilsizian, creativity, graffiti, street art

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