Dynamic Street Art

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.

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By J.W.

On the section of the bike path betwixt and between Willamette and Danebo, there is a plethora of canvases in which to choose from. Technically, but no formally, this section of Eugene is basically the industrial side. It’s easiest to find the back of buildings that no one would notice, or perhaps care to notice. There is also what could be called a “free yard” along the bike path where many hone their skills, a liminal space in which you are safe to create.
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Folklorist Joseph Martin O’Connell just sent in this large-eyed view of graffiti in Indiana, which begs the question: does such graffiti operate within the same symbol systems and reference points as urban graffiti — the mediated context? Likely not, yet there still may be equal parts authorship, appropriation, agency, and autonomy imbedded not-so-latently in the work. Are these writers also “hiding in the light,” offering visual “booby-traps,” and creating DIY media? Perhaps re-colonized storehouses turned into bulletin boards of love and aspiration? Are they working within an alternative system of prestige, attempting to disseminate a sense of self and desire?

by G. M. R.

While most people today in America might not mention stencils when discussing graffiti, the rise of unsanctioned public stencil artwork correlates with the rise of graffiti in the 1970s. Cities like Baltimore, Maryland, New York, London, and Paris became the new centers for public artwork, and it is no coincidence that graffiti blossomed in age of political and social strife (Howze). In the 1980s and 90s, graffiti became associated with hip-hop culture, especially in connection with music. The most popularized form of graffiti was “tagging,” or insignia done free-hand with spray paint. Stencils were virtually left out of this popularized graffiti, and this exclusion allowed stencil artists to remain anonymous and outside of the public’s outcry against graffiti as vandalism: “street stenciling has less in common with other graffiti, being more akin to the samizdat tradition of poster and sticker propaganda…while maintaining its low-tech immediacy and independence,” (Western Cell Division, 2). Unlike a scrawled nickname in sharpie, stencils could be beautiful, funny, clever, or just plain invisible to the average person who didn’t know to look. (This isn’t to ignore the obvious artistry of tags, just an exploration into the reasons why stencils have been almost overlooked). Many businesses use stencils for their logos or on buildings, and stencil artists can carefully use this authoritative form to create works of art and protest. Today, the stencil remains an avenue of protest for anonymous, usually individual artists, although popular figures like Banksy complicate and elaborate on what it means to be an anonymous stencil artist who sells in museum art shows. Today, the medium of a stencil has entered into a new historical arena, one that operates within the dominant cultural hierarchy. Yet even in a small college town like Eugene, Oregon, the stencil serves as an ant-war protest within artistic images. The stencil’s clean aesthetics allow artists to “blend in” with everyday corporate insignia, to “hide in the light,” thus giving the stencil the ability to appropriate and offer social and political protest.

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by J.R.

Graffiti can be complex, beautiful, dynamic, and controversial, but even more interesting than the art is the artists themselves. To create without desire for fame or recognition, knowing that the art will be removed or painted over, is an admirable trait credited to all graffiti artists. For my project, I decided to document the graffiti behind a local tattoo parlor. A wooden fence that runs about 30 feet long, in an area that is only open to employees and hardly ever viewed by customers, is completely covered with various tags, doodles, and giant murals behind the High Priestess Piercing and Tattoo parlor on 13th St. The artists go behind the store and tag while on smoke breaks or in between appointments. The wood of the fence is covered in layers and layers of paint; once the artists run out of space, they simply go over the old stuff. A 5 gallon bucket full of spray cans lies by the door, and every so often one of the guys will pick up a few more cans to replenish the stock.
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By G.R.

http://www.dictionary.reference.com states that a stencil is:
(n) a device for applying a pattern, design, words, etc. to a surface, consisting of a thin sheet of cardboard, metal, or other material from which figures or letters have been cut out, a coloring substance, link, etc. being rubbed, brushed, or pressed over the sheet, passing through the perforations and onto the surface;
(n) the letters, designs, etc. produced on a surface by this method;
(v) to mark or paint a surface by means of a stencil
http://www.etymonline.com gives the etymology of the word “stencil”:
(n) 1707, not recorded again until 1848, probably from Middle English “stencellin” – to decorate with bright colors, from Middle French “estenceler” – cover with sparkles or stars, power with color, from “estencele” – spark, ornamental spangle, from Vulgar Latin “stincilla” from Latin “scintilla” – spark.
(v) “to produce a design with a stencil” not recorded until 1861
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Figure 2

by J.B.J.

For my project, I chose to look at the differences between male and female graffiti art. I primarily looked at tags and murals. What I found was that there were not so many differences between them; however, they did have a few distinctions. I did my research primarily on the web and I looked through a lot of different pieces of art and picked the examples I thought would best represent the differences I found in them.
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by L.H.
Art is the product of a passionate creator; it defines the nature of an individual and his or her contributions to the culture. Though generally not defined as art by mainstream culture, graffiti is the passionate outcry of artists determined to unsettle and challenge the status quo. Throughout this presentation, I will explore the significance and presence of graffiti in Brazil by utilizing my experience and research from my trip to Brazil in October of 2006.

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by J.S.

For my fieldwork project I decided to look at two bars in the “Barmuda Triangle” of Eugene – The Horsehead and John Henry’s. The reason I focused on these two bars is because of their diversity. Each one has a wide range of people who frequent them and I felt the Latrinalia would reflect that diversity.

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by M.M.

Urban graffiti’s uprising in Manhattan, New York in the 1970s and 80s was promoted in many different ways as artists showed their abilities away from the canvas, trading for any surface available. Large populations of young traggers in New York were able to show their work of graffiti art, stenciling, and tagging as they pasted the city’s subways cars. This canvas was known as automigration as art was then given the ability to show throughout town, border crossing from urban ghettos to downtown Manhattan. This underground culture of tags involved much of New York’s urban populations but quickly grew to a larger crowd as all riders of the underground metro were exposed to the spray painted murals.

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