Dynamic Street Art

This Review is Shaped by the Discourse and Organizational Strategies
Presented by Edmund Feldman (text and photos by David Ensminger)

Figure One: Alleyway Art Diptych: A Culturescape.

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 on the back porch while holding a ceramic coffee cup. After a few minutes enduring 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, reflecting a frenetic, temporary, living museum of the streets. Feldman posits that 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, which is home to student co-ops, sorority houses, cottage homes, and apartment complexes includes stickers placed about public street signs, foam cut-outs glued to 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 concrete, graffiti that has been painted over or partially erased located on fences and brick walls, paintings made in the side section frames 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.

Figure 2: The Hasty Tag of Wayward Youth?

Secondly, Feldman asks a viewer to attempt a basic formal analysis, including address 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 eve.n 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 (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. On the other hand, the dinosaur was placed in a curbside flower planter, in the entrance to an art co-op. Also, green cut-out 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 syncretic 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,” three figures caught in play in the middle, a blurry stencil of Bach with the pun tag “I’ll Be Bach,” and a star that may be associated with Converse shoes juxtaposed next to 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, likely representing a stylistic flourish, such as foam bubble, loopy letters and brighter colors than the tags, which looked little more than paint drips or cursive magic marker scrawls on industrial Dumpster 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 was the mark of an official cover-up. In either case, the paint formed a nuanced gray/white expressionism enveloping the official eagle logo of the U.S. post office found on a sticker. The surface of the emblem was partially raised (perhaps in an attempt to remove it), making the work three-dimensional

.

Figure 3: The Unconscious Art of Graffiti Removal

or a sidewalk Rauschenberg?

The third step in Feldman’s critical performance is for a viewer to engage in interpretation, partially by locating a problem that the work seems to be addressing. I believe the central problem that this art address is: how do community members personalize or reclaim space in a relatively nondescript neighborhood that lacks vernacular touches, or contest domestic and industrial sites/spaces with vernacular touches? The approach of people from within or outside the neighborhood (which is not verifiable in this case), although likely not welcome by all residents, fits models already partly established by writers like Joe Austen, who suggested in the graffiti chapter of his book Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth-Century America that such street art is a method by which youth, typically rendered invisible and marginalized by local hegemony, 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 agit-prop slogans but through a colorful, though perhaps no less ideological, format.
For years, graffiti has been studied by all ranges of academic disciplines, incuding linguists attempting to reconstruct the everyday language of the city of Athens, which can be read in graffiti on temples and other sites, to folklorists studying the markings left on park benches during the 1920s, to a recent Berkeley student who examined the bathroom graffiti (latrinalia) of the local university system and presented his finding at the spring Western States Folklore Conference. The style and form has also been heavily linked to music cultural over the last 40 years, most prominently rap and hip hop, but I argue that such street style was also prevalent within punk culture, although the signifying style is quite different. To me, graffiti also recalls a key concept, culled from Henry Jenkins, of “contested spaces,” or if we were to poach one phrase from Trudier Harris-Lopez’s genre theory, “sites of contestation” (such phrases for instance, have been used to describe the meaning of Australian graffiti, see here: http://www.graffitistudies.info/aesthetics.html). Hence, to discuss graffiti is to enter into a discourse involving the politics of space, not merely a discourse that frames an appreciation or loathing of aesthetics.

Figure 4: Placing Homespun Vernacular Art Skin on a

Prefab Industrial Mobile.

In Jenkins’ view, the World Wide Web has become the new public commons, in which individuals are vying for agency and expression while increasingly being under pressure by the forces of business and government regulation (perhaps this can also be construed as surveillance too). Still, democracy feels much more participatory on the Web; for instance, it is a pull medium, in which people have to locate and capture ideas, unlike TV, which pushes information. Hence, the new net citizen in such spaces tends to express hybrid ideologies that are not confined to the old sense of ideologies that were static and all encompassing. They cross borders, and their identity is likely more rooted in lifestyle rather than precinct politics. However, while one side may see the public commons as decentralized, unevenly dispersed, participatory, and fulfilling a promise of reciprocity (the metaphor of a two way street), providing a sense of a libertarian electronic frontier, others feel that it is an information superhighway, federalized as such. Hence, this reflects an intense tension over the definition and dynamics of the space, catalyzing a generation of renegades, hackers, culture jammers, and open source grassroots activists.

Figure 5: The Impure Chalk Hybrid? Cave paintings,

child-like doodles, and Art Brute meets Daniel Johnston.

Graffiti, stickering, and stencils act much in the same way, though immersed in the physical world, in which youth contest the space of cities (the public commons), jamming official (say, by sticking, stenciling, or putting graffiti over municipal utility boxes, light poles, highway overpasses and signage), commercial (business buildings, parking garages, sites under construction etc), or domestic sites, such as homes. Hence, the locals — often youth who are marginalized and outcasted, disaffected and denigrated — place their vernacular expression, usually entirely illegal and likely condemned by locals, over the skin of commerce and the status quo. The entire city can often become a “site of contestation,” a fissure between hegemony and freedom seekers, lending such spaces to “ludic recombination,” since the spaces becomes inverted, metamorphisized, and given a new identity (perhaps facelift) by the art. Such zealously stylish artists often exhibit a sense of communitas, bonding over a subcultural-shared knowledge about paints, style, and urban topography, providing counter narratives to the current narratives of a city.

Fugure 6: Spontaneous Vandalism, Speaking Back,

and the Site of Contestation.

Normal Mailer once called graffiti “their text on our text,” meaning that by the 1970s and 1980s young urban Americans had recaptured inner city argot from the not-so-clean hands of business, trade, and commerce. Though not exactly an indictment of the advanced technological Superstate, graffiti forced people to realize that the eyes and hands of the sub-proletariat – wild kids, banditos – are right around the corner with spray cans, ready to delineate America’s underbelly. The authorities, and even neighborhood residents, often abhorred graffiti as the reckless and ferocious habits of the “natives,, casting them into the roles of outlaws and saboteurs. Yet, Joe Austin has placed such identification within a wider context, suggesting that these insurgent art actions elicit meaning well beyond being mere marginalized, antiethical activity, are shaped by: The specific ways in which “youth” has been historically shaped has left young people without legitimate spaces in which to live out their autonomy outside of adult surveillance. Young people are pushed to either “Take Place” by appropriating nomadic, temporary, abandoned, illegal, or otherwise unwatched spaces with the landscape, or to “hide in the light” (14:1998).

Figure 3: Revisiting Warhol in the Dirty South,

Utility Boxes as Urban Folk Art Installations in Houston.

Austin further argues that the wild style was a keenly felt response to alienation: the aftermath of the Cross Bronx expressway construction, which dislocated entire communities; steady white flight from the boroughs; landlords burning buildings for insurance money; a changing and even hostile economic landscape (such as graffiti artist Futura learning printing press skills right as the industry became automated); urban renewal that tended to ghettoize people further; a 1977 power outages that inspired looting; and crass Hollywood portrayals that normalized the Bronx as “Fort Apache” while silencing local voices. Hence, graffiti was a means by which youth could dismantle a neighborhood’s invisibility, of youth taking place, or vying for contested spaces, and seeking fame in “an alternative economy of recognition and prestige” (242: 1998). In short, graffiti offers and street art, including that found on Alder Street, provides an opportunity for youth to seek appropriation, authorship, agency, and autonomy.

Figure 8: The Epitomy of Planned

Obsolescence, the Not-So-Temporary Art of the

DIY Xerox generation, late 1970s.

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 – judgement. I believe 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 the pre-Dada, even pre-Impressionist standard. Instead, I adhere to a different vision of perfection — perhaps outlined in works such as John Keat’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn” — in which 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, 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, revealing a dynamism and democracy. By embodying and exhibiting such a process, the aesthetic and artistic merits are profound, and profoundly distressing, to some..