David Ensminger
Art and Society
Prof. John Fenn
11 Sept. 2007 (re-edited 26 Sept 2010)
This Review is Shaped by the Discourse and Organization
of Edmund Feldman
When I poked around the corner of an Alder Street co-op last Friday in pursuit of documenting the plentiful and discordant street art that I noticed surrounding the alleyway of the building, a young lady dressed entirely in black sat languidly holding a ceramic coffee cup on the back porch. After a few minutes watching me photographing close-ups of beams, panels, walls, and doorways, she asked, “What are you doing?” I replied, “I am documenting the street along this section of the city for a class I will teach.” Little did either of us know that in fifteen minutes I would capture 70 images within six blocks, tracing a series of varied street art that embodies a frenetic, temporary, ‘living museum’ of the streets.
According to Feldman, the first step in a critical performance is simply “to see what is there,” which seems to reinforce what novelist and poet Jack Kerouac once said: “Stop only to see the picture better.” Street art located along Alder Street road, an area filled with student co-ops, sorority houses, cottage homes, and apartment complexes, includes: stickers placed on public street signs; foam cut-outs glued to metal street sign surfaces; a green plastic dinosaur toy placed in a flower box; stencils of phrases and figures; child-like naïve chalk drawings made with a variety of colors; etchings made in freshly poured concrete; graffiti that has been painted over or partially erased located on fences and brick walls; paintings ringing the sides of multi-apartment dwellings; and graffiti located on apartment support beams, industrial waste bins, post office issued apartment mail boxes, light poles, fire hydrants, and bus stop signs.
Secondly, Feldman asks a viewer to attempt a basic formal analysis, like addressing principles of color, space, and texture – elements of basic design. Very few of the graffiti examples expressed the features known as wild style, a form associated with the syncretic street style of the 1980s, replete with highly stylized “electric boogie” lettering, spashy, vibrant colors, and even Disney, comic book, or album art images. The Alder Street graffiti seemed more akin to tags: quick, territorial markings, off-the-cuff and hurried, in which form or utility (telling viewers “this is my turf”) is more important than artistic impression. Some of the street art utilized prefabricated materials juxtaposed against both municipal or domestic contexts. For instance, a sticker reading “End Racism” (plain black letters on white background) was posted on a bus stop sign, with its own minimal information (basic bus information) and graphics. A plastic dinosaur was placed inside a curbside flower planter, in the entrance to an art co-op. Also, green soft plastic stickers of a dinosaur were placed on yellow street signs and on a standard gray metal light pole, almost too small to be noticed. The panels of a house were transformed into a small tableaux featuring: a bright orange soft square, beige backdrop, some smudges of gray, and stencils of a 1970’s looking skinhead with the tag “The World Kicked Back”; a blurry stencil of the classical composer Bach with the pun tag “I’ll Be Bach”; and a star (that may be associated with Converse shoes) with the slogan “Alder Street Allstars.” This represents just one single panel.
Some of the graffiti, which was nearly removed in some sites, took on a ghostly hue and aesthetic, a kind of shadow presence marked by rubbing and very faint colors — hints of blue against a wooden fence and hints of black against a beige brick wall. In both cases, the art seemed to signify something beyond mere tagging. It reflected stylistic flourishes, including foamy, bubbly, loopy letters and brighter colors. Tags looked little more than paint drips or cursive writing on trash bins and utility poles. In addition, I found it hard to tell whether the graffiti on one of the official post office boxes was intended to match the slate gray color of the box, or if that effect was the result of an official cover-up. In either case, the paint formed a nuanced gray/white expressionism encircling the official eagle logo of the U.S. post office. The surface of the emblem was partially raised (perhaps in an attempt to remove it), making the work three-dimensional.
The third step in Feldman’s critical performance is for a viewer to engage art through interpretation, partially by locating a problem that the work seems to be addressing. The central problems the art addresses includes:
A) How do community members personalize or reclaim space in a relatively nondescript neighborhood that lacks vernacular touches?
B) How do they contest or offset domestic and industrial sites/spaces with vernacular touches?
The approach of the artists, likely not welcome by all residents, fits models already partly established by writers like Joe Austen. In the graffiti chapter of his book Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth-Century America, he argues such street art is a method by which youth, typically rendered invisible and marginalized by local power brokers, seize opportunities by “taking place.” In the case of the panels painted on the side of the house, the clever sense of play, inter-textuality, and pop sensibility is readily apparent, thus this “taking place” doesn’t have to be revealed by political slogans but through a colorful, though perhaps no less ideological, format.
As I recall wandering the street during the unusual heat of a Eugene spring, I try and engage Feldman’s last step in his critical performance overview – judgment. The aesthetic of street art is not necessarily tied to a sense of pure form and a quest for some sublime perfection, which might be a fine art standard. Instead, it projects a different vision of perfection — perhaps outlined in works such as John Keat’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn.” He offers the lines, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” For me, the truth of street art lives within the vernacular, unsanctioned freedom of expression, and the empowering gesture, revealing at times crude, unstable, and “impure” forms. The beauty of these forms, or their merits, lies not within the final product as much as the process – the reclaiming, poaching, and cultural jamming, which reveals dynamism and democracy. By embodying and exhibiting such a process, the aesthetic and artistic merits are profound and profoundly distressing.
