viz. - street art

Graffiti? I'll Know It When I See It. Or Not.

clsloan — Tue, 17 Sep 2013 14:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: Personal Photograph

When approaching a situation from a place of unfamiliarity or doubt, long-standing habit takes me to the Oxford English Dictionary. According to this semi-sacred text, graffiti (noun), means “words or images marked (illegally) in a public place, esp. using aerosol paint.” I etched this definition onto a spare wall in my brain and set out, quite purposefully, to find some street art. I knew from casual observation that some fences outside my apartment complex, the bus stations along my street, some building walls and even the backs of some signs sport small splashes of graffiti. All that remained was determining and documenting which offerings qualified as real graffiti (once again, “words or images marked (illegally) in a public place, esp. using aerosol paint”). Simple, right?

Oh, so wrong.

A friend tagging along, wielding our camera, first pointed to some text stretched along a newspaper stand.

Image Credit: Personal Photograph

“Want me to get that?” He asked, good naturedly.

“Yeah! That's...Hang on.” Uncertainty immediately clouded my mind. I was pretty sure the bold red letters weren't exactly sanctioned by the government, but they bore little to no relation to the elaborate sketches I'd seen decorating other walls in the city. This was just...a name? Maybe? I leaned closer. I couldn't even make out the letters properly, but it certainly meant something to someone. Perhaps even several someones. But could it be called street art in any sense of the term? And here my OED training sort of fell apart.

What, exactly, is the nature of graffiti? Is it a type, a definable item? That didn't seem likely, given that tagging, text, names, splashes of color, images and designs all seem to qualify as graffiti. Or is it an artistic style? That seemed a little more promising, given that each example we passed as we trekked down Cameron road bore a distinct family resemblance, but that didn't seem fair, either. Is it defined by its illegality, then? Can we safely say that any display erected against the law qualifies as graffiti? Well, then, what about art done anonymously on sanctioned public walls? The OED itself includes (illegally) parenthetically, an additional, smirking bit of the denotation added, almost as an afterthought superimposed upon (and altering) the baseline definition. Maybe legality wasn't the way to go.

Is graffiti, then, none of the above? Better yet, can graffiti, by its very nature, be properly codified? Classified? Defined? Graffiti has always been one of those words I associated with rebellion, heroic individualism and youthful risk. Was it fair of me to go to a dictionary in an attempt to understand the phenomenon better? Maybe not. Perhaps graffiti was more about an ambiance instead of a definition. Perhaps I needed to trust my gut, not a rationalist approach. Surely, now I would fare better.

Oh, so wrong.

Image Credit: Personal Photograph

As I turned from example to example, I found myself snapping multiple pictures but disregarding any highly personal messages with some embarrassment. If I could make out a legible name, I avoided a photo. If the message was hateful, I passed it by. I was drawn to samples I could a) decipher and b) appreciate. But was that fair? How can we discuss graffiti in toto without accounting for, well, every mark on every brick on every corner? At the end of an afternoon of searching, I was left with more questions than answers.

Is that the nature of graffiti?

For more on graffiti, see this week's other contributions:

What is graffiti and who does it belong to?

Graffiti as Advertisement

Jeremiah the Innocent Icon

What is graffiti and who does it belong to?

Laura Thain — Mon, 16 Sep 2013 20:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: Geoff Hargadon

This week on viz. we'll be exploring graffiti culture in Austin and beyond, beginning with an interactive graffiti map that we'll use to begin archiving graffiti in and around the community in which we live. Please visit and contribute!

In this post, I'd like to introduce some issues central to reading graffiti as both a performative and political act. I take as my primary examples the HOPE Outdoor Gallery on 11th St. and Baylor in Austin's Clarksville neighborhood and graffiti from inside a now-demolished bicycle shop that once operated in West Campus. Using these examples, I'd like to explore definitions of graffiti and raise questions of property and ownership in public spaces. Join our interactive mapping project and follow our posts this week as we take a closer look at Austin graffiti.

The HOPE Outdoor gallery was founded 2011 on the site of an abandoned condominium construction site. At 2011’s SXSW festival, Shepard Fairey, renowned street artist and creator of the iconic HOPE poster for the Obama campaign, contributed the first murals, pictured above. The project hopes “to provide muralists, graffiti artists and community groups the opportunity to display large scale art pieces driven by inspirational, positive and educational messaging.”

Most people in Austin, however, refer to the installation as the “free wall” or the “Baylor street art wall.” Within weeks, Fairey’s mural was tagged by local graffiti artists, and the HOPE foundation began to lose control of the mural. Although both the property owners and HOPE make consistent attempts to control contributions to the site, its current façade is a constantly-rotating parade of vibrant Austin graffiti culture alongside (and often, on top of) commissioned art.

The remains of Fairey's mural, late 2011 Image Credit: Super Sonic Electronic

Such political battles represent a larger discussion of “street art” vs. graffiti. “Street artists” often cite their desire to escape the negative connotations attached to graffiti and those who create graffiti, who go by a variety of names (tagger, bomber, writer, or simply artist). The editor of a LA street art blog Melrose & Farfax represents this point of view. She explains, "Both graffiti and street art use the re-appropriation of public space. But with graffiti you are limited to what you can do with a spray can on the spot. Street art might employ some of the application techniques, but most often, it is a finished product that is brought ready-made to the location, so the artist's message is much more developed. Street art is not so much about making a name and leaving a mark as it is getting people to interact with and view something in a new way, and that is a big difference."

Current state of Fairey's mural as of Sept. 2013. Image Source: Personal photograph. Click to enlarge.

Street art, at least, in the case of the "free wall," represents the commissioned, publicly-sanctioned offspring of graffiti culture. And the battle between graffiti and street art on Austin's Baylor St. represents a larger battle over ownership of public spaces. That conversation often revolves around aesthetic value--that is, that public art is of higher value to the community (and, less abstractly, the surrounding property) if it comes from a commissioned artist. Differences in quality are difficult to determine and always rely on subjective aesthetic criteria, though attempting to set out those criteria clearly demonstrates that the aesthetic and the political go hand-and-hand in public spaces. Often, the "quality" of an art installation relies heavily on our ability to name the artist. It is anonymous or psuedonymous art that holds less aesthetic value. Graffiti shows us in clear and interesting ways the connection between art and power.

Issues of ownership influence indoor spaces as much as outdoor ones. I'd like to close by raising some questions about ownership as well as definition. The images below come from the shop bathroom and workspace of one of the oldest bicycle shops in Austin which closed in May of 2013, citing high property taxes in West Campus. The building that once housed the shop was demolished within days to make room for a student-housing high rise.

Image Credit: RED

Unlike most photographs of graffiti, this documentation represents not a stage of graffiti production on a particular architectural object but the final stage of graffiti in this place. Rather than reminding us only of the ephemeral nature of street art, it points to the temporality of urban landscapes, as well.

As far as I know, this is the only surviving photograph of this graffiti--a lone entry in an archive. Bathroom graffiti is a peculiar example of public art. It holds a particular type of captive audience, but exists in a private space within the public (that is, the public space of the restroom itself.) This particular graffiti came from a bathroom that was used exclusively by bike mechanics and perhaps a few special regulars, but like most bathroom graffiti, still functions on some level as an insider text.

Image Credit: RED

I'd like to close with this image in the hopes that it can help us both expand and refine a definition of graffiti. This is the mechanics' bathroom door, heavily decorated with objects removed from punctured tires over the course of many years. Like the bathroom wall, it is an ever-changing landscape that documents specific events and experiences to a larger audience. If graffiti is collaborative, largely anonymous or pseudonymous inscription geared toward communicating presence and experience in a public space, the nail wall certainly qualifies--it in fact goes beyond the experience of the mechanics and additionally documents the experience (and presence!) of the cycling community of which they are a part.

For more on graffiti, see this week's other contributions:

Graffiti? I'll Know It When I See It. Or Not.

Graffiti as Advertisement

Jeremiah the Innocent Icon

Street View Art

catherine_c — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 03:10:20 +0000

Image Credit: Apres Garde, by way of Google Maps Mania

The above image is the Saturday, November 13th entry from the Tumblr photo blog of local writer Matt Bucher, Apres Garde, where he collects picturesque images from Google Street View. Apres Garde is one of several Google Street View art sites featured on Tuesday by the Google Maps Mania blog along with Montreal-based artist Jon Rafman's 9 Eyes Tumblr which presents a mixture of scenic views and interesting or suggestive situations captured by the Google Street View Camera alongside Lehel Kovács Google Street View inspired cityscapes and Bill Guffrey's Virtual Paintout. All of these blogs use the images captured by Google Maps street view as (or for inspiring) their work.

In exploring this body of street view (inspired) art, I was particularly struck by the question posed in the title of the Google Maps Mania post, "It's Street View but is it Art?" The selection and recontextualization that shape Bucher's and Rafman's collections particularly intrigued me. The images that they select are essentially random, taken by the nine cameras on a pole attached to the roofs of Google's hybrid vehicles.

Image Credit: 9 Eyes Tumblr logo

Bucher and Rafman have both given recent interviews on other art and Google Sightseeing blogs. Bucher describes the origins of Apres Garde in an image of the Texas coast with an directional arrow pointing off into nowhere. Other such transcendent or subliminal experiences like the trip to inferno posted on Reddit and reposted on Gizmodo last year have been made possible by the nature of Google's image capturing. For Bucher, this image from Port Lavaca, TX was the spark that culminated in Apres Garde:

Image Credit: Matt Bucher, by way of Google Sightseeing

Bucher writes off the aesthetic interest of the image in his post on Google Sightseeing, claiming that it is a "throwaway image" and an example, like the inferno, of the not uncommon "idiosyncrasies" of Google imagery (Google Sightseeing). However, it led him to post screenshots like the following while asking a question similar to that posed by Google Maps Mania -- "is this just cool or could it be art?"

Image Credit: Apres Garde

In his entry on Google Sightseeing, Bucher justifies his decision not to "link to the map of the location or embed a zoomable map" because he finds Street View to be a tool for "exploring the world" and he chooses to simply report back. Bucher finds static images taken "out of context" to be "more powerful than the embedded map" where instant locatability "takes some of the fun out" of exploring.

Image Credit: Apres Garde

Similarly, Rafman writes in an essay on his Street View collections that the presentation of images (for which he also, at least on 9 eyes, does not provide locations) that Street View "reflect[s] the excitement of exploring this new virtual world" which seems "more truthful and more transparent because of the weight accorded to external reality" and "the perception of a neutral, unbiased recording" as well as "vastness" of the Street View project (AFC).

Image Credit: Rafman's The Nine Eyes of Street View Essay at AFC

Rafman explains the artistic qualities of the Street View images themselves, as well as the act of recontextualizing when he describes them as "a cultural text like any other, a structured and structuring space whose codes and meaning the artist and the curator of the images can assist in constructing or deciphering" (AFC).

Visual resistance

erinhurt — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 17:30:05 +0000

While scrolling through HollaBackNYC, a site that allows users to post pictures of those that harass them on the street, I came across two websites that seemed like great visual rhetoric resources. The Just Seeds Visual Resistance Artists' Cooperative offers a blog, resources, as well as information about current projects and artists. The picture below comes from a 2004 project from the Street Art Workers entitled "Whose Media?" You can also find archived material from the group's previous website here.
Just wanted to share!