Street Art Rising Marshall Soules—[email protected]

Vol 1 No 2 (Autumn 2020) Online: jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/nexj Visit our WebBlog: newexplorations.net Street Art Rising Marshall Soules—[email protected] This illustrated article discusses the various manifestations of street art—graffiti, posters, stencils, social murals—and the impact of street art on urban environments. Continuing perceptions of street art as vandalism contributing to urban decay neglects to account for street art’s full spectrum of effects. As freedom of expression protected by law, as news from under-privileged classes, as images of social uplift and consciousness-raising, and as beautification of urban milieux, street art has social benefits requiring re-assessment. Street art has become a significant global art movement. Detailed contextual history includes the photographer Brassai's interest in Parisian graffiti between the world wars; Cézanne’s use of passage; Walter Benjamin's assemblage of fragments in The Arcades Project; the practice of dérive (passage through diverse ambiances, drifting) and détournement (rerouting, hijacking) as social and political intervention advocated by Guy Debord and the Situationist International; Dada and Surrealist montage and collage; and the art of Quebec Automatists and French Nouveaux réalistes. Present street art engages dynamically with 20th C. art history. The article explores McLuhan’s ideas about the power of mosaic style to subvert the received order, opening spaces for new discourse to emerge, new patterns to be discovered. The author compares street art to advertising, and raises questions about appropriation, authenticity, and style. How does street art survive when it leaves the streets for galleries, design shops, and museums? Street art continues to challenge communication strategies of the privileged classes and elected officials, and increasingly plays a reconstructive role in modulating the emotional tenor of urban spaces. Two cases studies of Christchurch, NZ and Hanoi, Vietnam illustrate how street art is being used to heal tragic wounds and inspire hope. I want to dedicate this article to J.S. Porter—friend and writer—who took a keen interest in my photographs of street art, interviewed me for Hamilton Arts & Letters, and wrote about my work in his blog. Please see the References for links to his writing for further context. All photos (except Figure 1) are by the author. 1 Marshall Soules Dark Times It is 2020, the year of seeing clearly, and ill-famed streets around the globe are buzzing with dissent, cracking with violence, choking on tear gas. Signs, posters, murals, and graffiti plaster urban walls, calling out their messages: “Black Lives Matter…I Can’t Breathe…My Daughter is Missing or Murdered…Me Too…Extinction Revolution!” Greta Thunberg’s words hang over the scene: “But I don’t want your hope, I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic, I want you to feel the fear I feel every day” (Foer, 2019, np). Fake news seeps out of print, radio, television and social media onto the streets, back alleys, and gathering places where narratives are being written by moving bodies, splashes of vivid paint, strong words on paper and walls. Flashback to the 1933 edition of Figure 1: Brassai, Graffiti, Paris, circa 1933 Minotaure (3/4), where the Hungarian photographer Brassaï (Guyla Holasz) famously described Parisian graffiti as Figure 1: Brassai, Wall Propositions, Paris, 1950 “l’art bâtard des rues mal famées” (Gautrand, 2008). Brassai’s fascination with bastard art and ill- famed streets was not a new obsession; at the time, he was earning his reputation as an acknowledged master of capturing his urban subjects in the moody chiaroscuro of the City of Light. Why is graffiti a bastard art? Is it a mongrel artform? Was unsanctioned procreation uniting mismatched lovers? Could degenerate art be consorting with the high life? Between the great wars, were Parisians witnessing the death-rattle of their culture, the ill-famed streets populated by criminals, orphans, refugees, the illegitimate? In the context of Minotaure, Brassaï’s photographs of gouged and scratched graffiti (from sgraffito, to scratch, and graphein, to write) contributed to the Surrealist project of placing the archaic image at the heart of modernism. Ruin, violence, and displacement had carved deep wounds. Tribalism was stirring. Discovering remnants of the primitive in the streets of Paris appealed to the ethnologist and documentarian in Brassaï, and expressed the kind of improvisation, spontaneity, and ad hoc happenstance André Breton and other Surrealists admired in pure 2 Street Art Rising psychic automatism. Perhaps chance operations would help them plumb the unruly depths of the human psyche. Picasso commented: “It was a brilliant idea to collect these images…. These walls are as rich as the façade of any cathedral!” (qtd.Gautrand, p.14) For his part, Brassaï discovered a new source of inspiration: “Thanks to my endless walks through Paris, I was able to go on and do a kind of social study of the creatures who peopled the city at night. I was familiar with all the low life, and even with the criminals of that time” (p.12). Figure 2: What You Say, Downtown East Side, Vancouver, 2010 Subterranean Arcades Urban exploration is “adventurous trespass in the built environment. Among the requirements for participation are claustrophilia, lack of vertigo, a taste for decay, a fascination with infrastructure, a readiness to climb fences and lift manhole covers, and a familiarity with the varying laws of access across different jurisdictions” (Macfarlane, Underland, 2019, p. 153). Origin stories of street art (or more appropriately “wall art”) vary from prehistoric cave paintings and petroglyphs going back at least 44,000 years (in Indonesia), to the walls of Pompei, streets of Paris in the late 19th century, the Berlin Wall, and blooming into tagging, (master)pieces, and wild style graffiti of Philadelphia and NYC in the 1970s. [Two fine films capture the graffiti scene from the 1970s on: Style Wars (1983 / 2004) and Bomb It (2007)]. In Underland (2019), Robert Macfarlane wanders the world to take us below the planet’s surface, including the streets of Paris and New York, into the excavations and passageways where artists perform below the public gaze. He describes a secret map he will use to explore these subterranean passages: 3 Marshall Soules The plan of the above-ground city is traced carefully in pale silver-grey ink, such that if you trick your eyes to read only for the grey, you can discern the outline of this upper city as a specter-architecture: the faint footprints of apartment blocks and embassies, parks and ornamental gardens, boulevards and streets, the churches, railway lines and the train stations, all hovering there, intricate and immaterial (p. 129). In setting his scene of the underworld below the specter-architecture of the above-ground city, Macfarlane reverses figure and ground so we may see more clearly hidden human passageways and places to escape, bury, forget, preserve. The visible city is spectral, an artifact of illusions; the hidden excavations ground these illusions in historical reality. Macfarlane recounts how Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project (Passagenwerk), written between 1927-1940, attempted to document the “topography, history and humanity of Paris” (p. 133). Benjamin’s unfinished, fragmentary book “was a gigantic, futile, magical attempt at historical comprehension, which understood the city’s past in part to be a collective dream and the city’s structures to possess a metaphysical aura as well as a material presence” (p. 133). Media ecologists will understand Benjamin’s conflation of physical with metaphysical and affective environments. The Arcades Project is an early example of “history from below.” It retrieves “anonymous beings,” from the working class to politicians and aristocrats. “He made his book from scraps, gleaning it into existence as an archive of the stories of the city’s unsung masses rather than those of its rulers” (Macfarlane, p. 133). Benjamin’s “subterranean city” shadowed the social consciousness illuminating the city of the surface. With his collage style of assemblage, Benjamin was shadowing the dark haunts of future graffiti writers and wall artists in those cities built over the underground architecture and quarries of the past. These “temporary autonomous zones” (Bey, 1991) provide a haven for artists to etch their signs and patterns that connect beyond the public gaze. The ability to circulate freely within urban spaces has become indelibly associated with the meanderings of Baudelaire’s decadent flâneur, borrowed by Benjamin. However, Benjamin's urban wanderer is also a cultural fabricator whose choice of materials reveals assumptions about cultural production, class, and privilege. Guy Debord's critique of the "society of the spectacle" continues Benjamin's wanderings with the notion of the dérive (literally "drifting"), an important technique in the Situationist International's toolbox of subversion: In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into

Load more