2MED443
Approaches to Media
Week Six
Art and Space
Session Topics
The Gallery Space
Graffiti and Street Art
Graffiti and the City
The Gallery Space
“The ideal gallery subtracts from the artwork all
cues that interfere with the fact that it is ‘art’.
The work is isolated from everything that
would detract from its own evaluation of
itself. This gives the space a presence
possessed by other spaces where conventions
are preserved through the repetition of a
closed system of values” (O’Doherty 1999:
14).
The Gallery Space
“A gallery is constructed along laws as rigorous as
those for building a medieval church. The outside
world must not come in, so windows are usually
sealed off. Walls are painted white. The ceiling
becomes the source of light. The wooden floor is
polished so that you click along clinically, or
carpeted so that you pad soundlessly, resting the
feet while the eyes have at the wall. The art is
free, as the saying used to go, ‘to take on its own
life.’” (O’Doherty 1999: 15).
Graffiti and Street Art
By ‘graffiti’, it is generally understood that we
mean any form of unofficial or illegal
application of a medium onto a surface.
‘Graffiti writing’ is the movement most closely
associated with hip hop culture (though it
precedes it), whose central concern is the ‘tag’
or signature of the author.
Graffiti and Street Art
Graffiti writing, particularly tagging or ‘bombing’
points to the idea of destruction as a form of
creativity, an ‘anti-art’. Despite all of its
destructive tendencies, tagging is a highly
aestheticised form of vandalism…
…graffiti writers spend years practising and
cultivating their personalised alphabets,
primarily to write the same word over and
over again!
Graffiti and Street Art
“This new graffiti started to appear on the walls of
buildings, at playgrounds, in subway stations, on
commercial vehicles, and even inside subway
cars. Unpopular with subway riders, beginners’
crude scribbles were helter-skelter, invading the
public’s space with what appeared to be no more
than vandalism. However, as the writers became
more inventive, graffiti developed and matured
as quickly as it was produced” (Stewart 2009: 1920).
Graffiti and Street Art
The ‘aesthetic code’ of graffiti exists in such
an internalised language that the main
group of people who can fully appreciate it
are other graffiti writers. This language that
no-one else understands is then used for
destroying or defacing cities.
Street art and graffiti both have the peculiar
ability to exist in the mainstream of culture
and at the same time on its margins.
Graffiti and Street Art
Graffiti writing is an almost always involves ‘tagging’. The
majority of street artists, however, are not involved in
tagging, even though they may have a pseudonym.
Graffiti writing generally revolves around typography and
letter formation. This is sometimes combined with
figurative elements or ‘characters’. Graffiti characters
are generally done with spray paint. Street art
embraces a much wider range of media than graffiti,
such as stenciling and painting, and breaks with the
tradition of the tag.
Banksy (2007) Untitled, Bethlehem barrier
Graffiti and Street Art
“Street art is more about interacting with the
audience on the street and the people, the
masses. Graffiti isn’t so much about connecting
with the masses: it's about connecting with
different crews, it's an internal language, it's a
secret language. Most graffiti you can't even
read, so it's really contained within the culture
that understands it and does it. Street art is much
more open. It's an open society” (Falie, in
Lewisohn 2008: 15).
Graffiti and Street Art
Graffiti writers can be argued to work in a similar way to
major corporations: they reduce themselves to a brand
– or ‘tag’ – that comes to have a far greater meaning
than the actual word itself.
Graffiti writers, through their use of tags, are reducing
content down to an absolute minimum. They then
expand on this purified form. This is achieved through
scale, by enlarging the tag to massive proportions with
elaborate designs or ‘pieces’, or through repetition, by
placing the tag in as many spaces as possible.
Graffiti and the City
Both graffiti writing and street art incorporate the urban
environment; as such, the city is a space that is ‘claimed’ by
the artist. Graffiti takes an anti-modernist position against
urban developers and architects.
The largely illegal practices of graffiti can be seen to oppose
official and corporate culture; the authority manifest in the
police, local administration and the train authorities who
define graffiti as a form of vandalism.
Cultural resistance is signified in the militaristic language of
graffiti: writing graffiti is ‘bombing’; a tag is a ‘hit’, and
advanced letter formations are ‘burners’.
Graffiti and the City
“The quality of a hit was the most important
thing, followed by the difficulty of accessing
the location. However, even if a writer made a
particularly difficult hit, his reputation would
die out if he failed to produce enough hits.
From the start, the primary objective was to
get one’s name up in as many places as
possible” (Stewart 2009: 31).
Graffiti and the City
The ideal of modernism was the design of social
architecture, such as the productions of the Bauhaus,
aiming for the perfect living space in post-war
reconstruction. One Bauhaus member, Henri Le
Corbusier (1887-1965), became a pioneer in the design
of ‘mass production housing’ and urban planning.
For Le Corbusier, good modern design should be a rational
fusion of new technology and classic ideals: it can have
the socially beneficial effect of helping people adapt to
the conditions of modern life; a house is a ‘machine for
living in’.
Unité d'habitation, Marseille, 1947-1952 [example of Bauhaus modernist
design, by Henri Le Corbusier]
Graffiti and the City
In practice, many mass-produced buildings and urban spaces
which were developed in accordance with modernist
principles translated into ‘concrete jungles’, cheaply made and
badly designed housing projects; spaces which suggested
exclusion and isolation.
Those involved in the graffiti of the 1970s were members of the
first generation to grow up in and around this social
architecture.
The tags and images of those working can be seen as a direct
reaction to their architectural surroundings, fighting for a
sense of individualism and territory in the face of an everexpanding metropolis; a by-product of a failed rationalist
system.
Graffiti and the City
Graffiti writing in particular was extremely inward-looking,
and a major element that developed early on in its
history was the complex typographic forms of ‘wild style’
lettering, which were intended to be indecipherable to
the general public.
Like Pop Art, its images are often drawn from popular
culture, such as Fab 5 Freddy’s Campbell’s Soup train
(1979), which alludes to Warhol’s own images of
Campbell’s Soup tins. This serves to question the
corporate ownership of popular cultural signs and
images, as well as to undermine traditional ideas about
authorship and originality.
Andy Warhol (1962) Campbell’s Soup Tins
Fab 5 Freddy (1979) Untitled, New York
Tracy 168 (1979) The Darkness Surrounds Us, New York
Zephyr (2009) Untitled, New York, Lower East Side
Graffiti and the City
In the early 1970s, individual artists began to work in
isolation from crews.
Some of the most well-known tags featured numbers at
the end of names. These turn the writer’s address
into a stylistic accessory.
Graffiti has also been examined as a form of abstract
anti-representation in urban spaces which are seen
as centres of commerce and sources of cultural
language and discourse.
Graffiti and the City
“The city was first and foremost a site for the
production and realisation of commodities, a
site of industrial concentration and
exploitation. Today the city is first and
foremost the site of the sign's execution...
radical revolt effectively consists in saying ‘I
exist, I am so and so, I live on such and such
street, I am alive here and now’...” (Baudrillard
1993: 77-78).
Graffiti and the City
“…SUPERBEE SPIX COLA 139 KOOL GUY CRAZY
CROSS 136 means nothing... Such terms are not
at all original, they all come from comic strips
where they were imprisoned in fiction. They
blasted their way out however, so as to burst into
reality like a scream, an interjection, an antidiscourse, as the waste of all syntactic, poetic and
political development, as the smallest radical
element that cannot be caught by any organised
discourse” (Baudrillard 1993: 77-78).
Graffiti and the City
“Hip hop replicates and re-imagines the experiences of
urban life and symbolically appropriates urban space
through sampling, attitude, dance, style, and sound
effects. Talk of subways, crews and posses, urban
noise, economic stagnation, static and crossed
signals leap out of hip hop lyrics, sounds and themes.
Graffiti artists spray-painted murals and (name) 'tags'
on trains, trucks and playgrounds, claiming territories
and inscribing their otherwise contained identities
on public property” (Rose 1993: 22).
References
Baudrillard, J. (1993) Symbolic Exchange and Death, London:
Verso.
Lewisohn, C. (2008). Street Art: the Graffiti Revolution, Tate
Publishing: London.
O’Doherty, B. (1999) Inside the White Cube: the ideology of the
gallery space, Berkeley/London: University of Columbia Press.
Rose, T. (1993) Black Noise: rap music and black culture in
contemporary America, Middletown: Wesleyan University
Press.
Stewart, J. (2009) Graffiti Kings: New York City mass transit art of
the 1970s, New York: Melcher Media.
Seminar Questions
Spend 5 minutes discussing each question.
How important are galleries for giving meaning
and value to art?
Is graffiti a form of legitimate art or urban
vandalism?