The Street as Gallery

Published in Alessandro Mininno, “La strada, come galleria”, in Elena Del Drago et al., Contemporanea. Arte dal 1950 a oggi, vol. 8, pp. 163–173. Milano: Mondadori Electa, 2008.

The street is a vital space open to all — the quintessential public space, demarcating the boundary between what belongs to everyone and what is relegated to private initiative and responsibility, between the common and the personal. That it can be the preferred site for many-to-many artistic expression is a direct consequence of its nature: artists have often chosen to interpret, alter, or use it as a medium, and the tendency has intensified over the past thirty years.

The will to mark territory is certainly nothing new: we find evidence of it from caves to Mount Rushmore, from land art installations to the present. From Basquiat (in some ways related to the subject of this essay) to Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger (who for a period pasted her prints on New York streets), the street has become by turns the object of artistic action, the vehicle of a message, or its intended recipient.

The privatisation of public space

The exploitation of the street as advertising space has drawn justified criticism about the commodification of a place that should belong to everyone and therefore offer equal expressive possibilities to all, regardless of ability to pay. Initiatives to reclaim vertical surfaces are countless: from California’s Billboard Liberation Front to the Canadian Adbusters and the Reclaim the Streets groups, to more recent projects like Delete, in which a group of artists concealed all advertisements, signs, and logos along the entire Neubaugasse street in Vienna under yellow paper.

Every day pedestrians are exposed to more than 3,000 commercial stimuli, and Delete sought to demonstrate that their sudden disappearance alters the cognitive landscape, blurring what have become certain, indispensable reference points. Passers-by, disoriented or unsettled, expressed their dissent by writing protest phrases in marker on the surfaces returned to anonymity (from “give us back our signs” to a sardonic “it was better in blue”).

Public space (in both the topographical and toponomastic sense: we meet at the Fila Forum, at the PalaVobis) is now inextricably embedded in a pattern of commercial symbols whose advertising meaning is almost inseparable from their functional role. The purported defence of this space by public administrations, in the name of decorum, cleanliness, and hygiene, too often merges with the vigorous defence of commercial monopolies over a space that is public only when the municipality is collecting display fees — prostitutable always and in any case, as demonstrated by the countless historic buildings encased in eternal sponsored scaffolding.

Writing and the style wars

Systematic and incisive remix of public imagery did not arrive until the 1970s, with graffiti writing. Writers, children of the nascent mass society of the Seventies, write — and write their name. Hence the designation writer. The intent, narcissistic and stylistic, is as far as could be from bison-hunting propitiation, from Pompeian wall communication, and even from Keith Haring’s street art, from which he quickly distanced himself.

“A symbol that we lost control,” remarked the chief executive officer of the New York subway in the documentary Style Wars (Chalfant and Silver, 1983). An apt title: those were precisely the style wars being fought in the New York subway tunnels from the late 1960s onward.

Wars fought with letters and techniques — positive challenges in which vandalism is not the goal but the tool for achieving fame among other writers, by writing one’s name ever better and ever larger. Competition in letter design is bounded by precise rules that the community of vandals observes: the primary rule is respect for others’ names, others’ signatures and pieces.

The criteria of judgement are distinctly stringent: style, quantity, and a disposition toward risk. Modern writers drip, bleed, make intentionally blurred lines. Hitting impossible targets in industrial quantities and having a personal style, however technically poor, are often the primary objectives.

Writing is a stylistic philosophy, an extreme sport played outside established playgrounds — a subculture with tremendous force and charge that has survived three decades of social and cultural change, spreading despite the friction of policing and cleaning. For a more detailed account of writing’s New York origins and its entry into the art system, see Graffiti Writing, Haring, Basquiat and Writing the Name: Between Inclusion and Repression.

Children of repression

Limits, repression, stiffer penalties, arrests, and pursuits all have an effect on the style and quality of graffiti, just as every shift in political and social context affects “traditional” artworks. At one extreme we find walls produced for the patron-commissioner in an embarrassing way — to the point of constituting an entire branch of street marketing: Germans like Daim and Loomit, or founding fathers of writing like the New Yorkers FX, have made it a genuine profession. When marketing mixes with graffiti, the local scene often unmasks the fraud (as in the recent case of the illegal Sony PSP billboard campaign, rightly defaced by the movement’s more serious fringes).

In the streets and train depots, the controls of hygienic fundamentalism have certainly produced stylistic mutations: where time is short and watchmen are pressing, styles simplify somewhat and colour schemes grow more uniform.

One of the most significant results of repressive strategies is the shift to other techniques and media: if producing a spray piece of any size requires many minutes, the same cannot be said of stencils or poster pasting. Banksy admits to having switched to stencils — after years of writing — to lower his risk profile and reduce production time in an increasingly Orwellian London, and thus focus more on the message than on style. Similarly, Obey the Giant’s enormous fly-postings in San Francisco allow him to attack different spaces and fully express ideas and orientations that belong to a well-defined current of public and political art.

As with the Bolognese artist Blu who, having set aside the spray he used with mastery, embraced brush and roller to create characters tens of metres high, executed on social-centre facades, enormous disused buildings, and the industrial-era shells scattered throughout our cities. “The studio artist is a profession like any other,” says Blu, “but for now I do a lot of bombing because I enjoy it, because I want to communicate with people on the street and I enjoy seeing the reactions of those who observe my drawings.”

Stickers, stencils, posters

Stickers, stencils, and posters have proliferated to a sometimes alarming degree: easy to make and reproduce, they have taken hold — sometimes to the point of conveying mere formalism, a replication of previous ideas that would have been (and was) poorly tolerated in the environment of writers proper, where originality is an indispensable value.

Banksy has called this new wave brandalism — brand vandalism: artists assimilate the logic of marketing and turn it back on the system. Where the layering of signatures empties them of meaning, the recourse to a symbol or logo can guarantee levels of awareness long hoped for.

The pattern of stickers, posters, logos, and faces that has spread in recent years is not an evolution of letter writing, nor a derivative, nor a different and opposite current. It is simply one of the many possible ramifications street art is undergoing, thirty-five years on from its explosion.

Take the Italian Basik, who after a long career as a writer decided to bring his parallel painterly discourse onto the street too, realising with a brush precious characters in white, black, and gold, repeated to the point of obsession. “This more or less evident seriality of street art,” Basik notes, “draws inspiration from tagging. The letters have simply been replaced with one’s own icon.”

Reinterpreting the fly-posting techniques used in election campaigns, the Palermitan artist Lino began in 2007 gluing onto city walls graffiti executed on paper. The idea is to use against the city the propaganda methods and techniques that commercial and political communication deploy on us, reversing the balance with a near-zero budget.

The Italian scene

Milan was for several years one of the most active poles of the international scene: between 2000 and 2005 a powerful gust of creativity was perceptible on the street, walking past posters by Abbominevole, Ozmo, Bo130, and Microbo, among others. Santy and El Gato Chimney, among the few still active (at night) in a movement that appears dormant, continue to paste hand-painted paper posters — pursuing innovation while remaining anchored to a strong style.

Classed by Hakim Bey among the TAZ, Temporary Autonomous Zones, abandoned buildings and disused factories are among the favourite sites for urban art: “the cemetery of human endeavour becomes a museum of public art, free to anyone who wants to experience it” (from the Re-edit group manifesto). Dem, who over recent years has painted numerous characters in abandoned sites, believes the boundary between public and private space should favour the public: “My starting point is that the street belongs to people and has no owner.”

Writers like Dumbo, on the other hand, inhabit the street in an entirely different way: “Personally, in the street I don’t make art; I do tags, walks with my wife and son and fool around with friends.”

If the phenomenon of street art is comparable to an artistic current, it is certainly not destined for galleries: much of its force derives from the shock, the surprise of seeing a character, a logo, an abstract form pasted where it shouldn’t be — on the street, five metres up, on building walls. For the related question of documenting and preserving these ephemeral works, see Preserving Decay.

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