'Graffiti' and 'Street Art'

The scope of G&SA Chapter 1 A Family Affair? Framings of the concepts ‘Graffti’ and ‘Street Art’ in a diachronic perspective Dr. Jacob Kimvall Senior Lecturer Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University, SE-106 91 Stockholm [email protected] Introduction. Questions and methodological approach Most research describes the relationship between the contemporary phenomena graffti and street art as complex. For example, graffti and street art have been described in terms of a development, where street art has developed out graffti, as well as closely related but different sociocultural contexts. However, the wider public discourses on graffti and street art differ widely, and street art is, in contrast to graffti, not stigmatized and rarely framed as primarily a criminal activity. Consequently, there are also many cases where graffti and street art are framed as a dichotomy, where the latter is positioned as creative and beautiful while the former is described as unsophisticated and ugly. In contrast to such polarized understandings, ‘street art’ has also been used as an umbrella term, denoting various kinds of informal image production in the public realm – including pieces and throw-ups that in other cases would be defned as graffti. Thus, while most research suggests that the terms ‘graffti’ and ‘street art’ denote partially different phenomena, it is also diffcult to pinpoint a clear delineation between them. This article departs from the assumption that the concepts ‘graffti’ and ‘street art’ themselves should be regarded as a part of the studied cultural context, and as such, empirical material rather than preconditioned categories from where the research departs. The concepts themselves are thus viewed as cultural phenomena in their own right, and as such, negotiated in time and space, similarly to the content that they in a certain context denote. The article thus focuses on how the relationship between ‘graffti’ and ‘street art’ has been contextualized in various media from the mid 1980s to the mid 2010s, and departs from the following two questions: How have the concepts ‘graffti’ and ‘street art’, as well as the content they denote been described by contemporary research? How have the concepts ‘graffti’ and ‘street art’ been used in the surveyed material? The intention is not to fnd a fnal defnition of the concepts, nor that the study will discuss every possible usage of these concepts, but to survey multiple meanings and usages in different cultural and historical contexts. The objective is rather to contribute to a critical awareness of the concepts ‘graffti’ and ‘street art’, and to advocate that such awareness is activated in the contemporary usage of the concepts. To some extent the approach is semiotic, in the sense that it follows Ferdinand de Saussure’s famous description of semiology as the study of “the life of signs within society” (Saussure, 1916/1966). A semiotic perspective however often implies a synchronic approach, and the article is interested in diachronic and historical dimensions of usage of the concepts ‘graffti’ and ‘street art’ and how these concepts become productive and meaningful. The methodology is inspired by Johan Fornäs’ description of cultural meaning as the result of a triangular hermeneutic process of contexts, texts and subjects (fg.1, Fornäs, 2017). The study is hermeneutic in this sense on two different levels. First, in the material approach, looking at “contexts” (popular books, subcultural magazines, previous research) where “texts” (specifc pictures and descriptions) on the “subjects” of ‘graffti’ and ‘street art’ (as concepts denoting social phenomena) have been produced. Secondly, this triangular hermeneutic process has been used as a way of structuring the results of the discussion trough briefy pointing out contexts, texts and subjects. 17 The scope of G&SA Framing Graffti & Street Art Figure 1: fornäs’ “triangle of culture” (fornäs, 2017) 1. Visualizing conceptual ambiguity In August 2014, the San Francisco based gallery Art People posted a photo of a painting on their Facebook-page (fg. 2). The photo shows a white-painted concrete wall with four distinctive visual forms – read from left to right three light-bulbs rendered in different size and degrees of realism, and furthest to the right a small splash of paint in the same yellow color as the light in the previous two bulbs. Under each visual form is a stenciled caption, suggesting a categorization of the form above as different aspects of art: “mural art”, “street art”, “graffti” and fnally just “art”. The posting contained little information about the context of the painting, disclosing neither its purpose nor where the painting was. The Facebook- caption simply stated that the painting was by Pichi, Avo and 3Fountains, three fairly easily identifable artists. Despite the lack of context, the post seems to have struck the audience, rendering more than 14000 likes and 2500 shares1. A more detailed search for the image reveals that the depicted painting was created during UtsirArt, a street art festival at Utsira, Norway, a small island and municipality with approximately 200 inhabitants. When the painting, produced in a rural village, has been remediated as a digital photo and posted online, it has reached thousands of beholders all around the world. The image is thus an instructive example of how Internet functions as a central vehicle for distribution and archiving of pictures in graffti and street art contexts (Neef, 2008; Glaser, 2016). Figure 2: screen-shot from art people [retrieved 2015-08-04]. 18 1 facebook.com/artpeople1/photos/a.111082962297362.15944.109328009139524/725543914184594/?type=3&theater [retrieved 2018-02-27] The scope of G&SA Framing Graffti & Street Art The image could with W.J.T Mitchell concept be classifed as a metapicture – “a picture about pictures” (Mitchell, 2005, p. 301). In the context of this article it is an intriguing visualization of the possible relationships between ‘graffti’ and ‘street art’, framing the two concepts as siblings or close relatives, and also related to the concepts ‘mural art’ and ‘art’. The scope of the present paper does not allow a detailed interpretation of the work, but apart from the framing of these four concepts as related, it is also important to point out that, as in any kind of distinction between concepts involving sociocultural practices, it also implies a possible hierarchy. In fact, issues of hierarchies and values – social, artistic, aesthetic, cultural, historical, etcetera – are implicitly and explicitly present in many discussions regarding the defnitions of ‘graffti’ and ‘street art’. This is something that probably most people who have been engaged in these areas have experienced. This has also been addressed in previous research, for example the different social status. Peter Bengtsen frames graffti and street art as partly different sociocultural contexts - and points out that graffti (in contrast to street art) “has long been heavily stigmatized as a social problem” (Bengtsen, 2014, p. 116). Cameron McAuliffe (2012) suggests that the separation between the two concepts and the cultural contexts they denote are partly arbitrary, and that it “has allowed an embrace and even valorization of the power of ‘street art’ to activate space, at a time of increas- ing criminalization of ‘graffti’” (McAuliffe, 2012, p. 190). The intriguing aspect of Pichi’s, Avo’s and 3Fountains’ image however, is that the order in the hierarchy remains uncertain, and I would suggest that the public appeal of the image has its foundation in this uncertainty. The uncertainty lies both on a typological and an axiological level; typological since it is unclear whether the possible strata may be social, qualitative, chronological, developmental, artistic, logical or conceptual (or perhaps several of these possible typological discourses at the same time); and axiological since the possible ratio remains undefned. The image of the light-bulb, used in comics and visual illustrations to indicate how someone gets a creative idea, or fnds a solution to a central problem, is here used to visualize a conceptual ambiguity. Paradoxically, it does not suggest any solution or logical explanation to the ambiguity, but rather underlines the uncertainty, and thus primarily offers a moment of playfulness. The beholder is invited to partake in a play that with Sigmund Freud’s words is associated with possibility “to withdraw from the pressure of critical reason” (Freud, 1905/1960, p. 126). It is thus possible to see the artwork as a visual joke, almost as a kind of a gag cartoon. This is also an example of how the defnitions of the concepts ‘graffti’ and ‘street art’ are not only issues within academic research, but also engage many practitioners of and audiences in the felds of graffti and street art. 2. ‘Working defnitions’ of graffti and street art Even if issues of how to defne ‘graffti’ and ‘street art’ are not restricted to academic research, the ambiguity has special implications in these contexts, as academic research demands refective and often consequent usage of concepts. Many scholars in the area address the issue by adopting pragmatic working defnitions, and at the same time acknowledging that these defnitions are far from defnite. Ulrich Blanché presents such a working defnition that he points out as not being conclusive, where street art “consists of self-authorized pictures, characters, and forms created in or applied to surfaces in the urban space that intentionally seek communication with a larger circle of people. […] It differs from Graffti and Public Art” (Blanché, 2015, p. 33). Blanché also differs between graffti as an older expression and contemporary subcultural graffti that he refers to as ‘Style Writing’ (Blanché, 2015, p. 32). 19 The scope of G&SA Framing Graffti & Street Art When lecturing on graffti and street art, I often similarly make a simplifed distinction rooted in the concepts of ‘context’ and ‘visuality’.

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