A paper I did for my advanced reporting class that I got a B in. I must have gotten an A or a high B for this paper, because those were the grades I usually got on my reports. I interviewed a lot of friends and artists that I know, but I couldn't use all of the quotes I got. For this, I apologize (and also for taking so long to publish this). I hope you find this interesting, somewhat.
Street Art Movement Grows Stronger
An unlikely contender, graffiti and street art has grown more respected by the modern art world. An illegal and once unappreciated form of art, the medium has now moved into galleries, including the prestigious Tate Modern museum that covered their riverside façade with street art from artists around the world.
“I think [street art] is influencing the art galleries to open their eyes and actually view it as a modern art form,” said Mad One, a street artist from Phoenix.
The most famous graffiti artist of today, and possibly in history, is the anonymous stencilist, Banksy. The artist has left is mark all over the world, including the Israeli West Bank Barrier, Disneyland, decaying sections of post-Katrina New Orleans and his hometown of London.
His art has ranged from sculptures installed in public to towering murals with strong political messages to a “pet shop” in New York City with animatronic food representing the exploitation of animals, but Banksy is best known for his signature stencil work.
"I use whatever it takes,” Banksy stated on designiskinky.net “Sometimes that just means drawing a moustache on a girl's face on some billboard, sometimes that means sweating for days over an intricate drawing. Efficiency is the key."
Banksy has sold canvases to celebrities Brad Pitt, Keanu Reeves and Christina Aguilera and other artworks have far exceeded expected prices at auctions, making Banksy one of the most popular - financially speaking - artists of his time. A piece called Space Girl & Bird, depicting a child wearing an antique diver’s helmet, sold for £288,000 (US$576,000).
Banksy’s art is so popular that his street work is sometimes stolen, literally chunks of walls chipped out and sold on eBay for large amounts of money. In 2004, Banksy’s statue The Drinker, a parody of Rodin’s The Thinker, was kidnapped and held for ransom by a group who called themselves AK47. They demanded £5,000 but Banksy only offered £2, told them to buy some gasoline and set it on fire.
Banksy’s fame has opened doors for other street artists to get a chance inside popular galleries but not everyone sees the movement as positive. Some people, especially government organizations, see graffiti as an eyesore. An iconic piece by Banksy imitating Pulp Fiction showed Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta holding bananas instead of guns. Transport for London, the local government transportation bureaucracy, painted over the graffiti and claimed in a BBC News article the work created a “general atmosphere of neglect and social decay, which in turn encourages crime.” Banksy defiantly repainted the scene with the characters instead wielding guns and wearing banana suits.
But judging from the reactions street art can have, positive or negative, art or not, graffiti clearly has influence.
“I was always just aware of graffiti without paying attention to it, until a friend showed me some stuff and I began to realize it had more meaning and expression than just vandalism,” An anonymous graffiti photographer said.
“I don't do it, [but] I photograph it and write about it,” the photographer said. “I want to provide a better quality of descriptive writing with more positive balance about the art and the significance, the symbolism, the history of the genre and anything I know about the writers and artists.”
There are many different types of graffiti, including stickers, installed mixed media objects such as sculpture, paste-ups or wheatpaste (posters that can be adhered to almost any surface) and the best-known type – spray paint.
But modern graffiti does not limit itself. Organizations such as the Graffiti Research Lab have strived to invent new forms of street art, blending technology and public space. GRL invented LED “throwies,” a combination of LED lights, a lithium battery and a magnet, which can be thrown onto any metallic surface and will light up the area.
GRL also invented the L.A.S.E.R. Tag system, a huge laser pointer system that projects an image or phrase onto something as large as a 25-story building front. Such types of street art don’t work as well in a gallery.
“Street art is at its best when it is illegal and created on the street,” the photographer said. “[My favorite kind] is wildstyle writing done without permission. A significant piece of stencil art, which is well-placed, well-cut and thought-provoking is always good. At the other end of the spectrum, paste-ups and stickers are not really street art, there was almost no adrenalin invested in their placement.”
“Graffiti writing is art, tagging isn't,” He said. “When the writer has set out to propagate their message or their ID using their own highly stylized form then the image is simply ‘art’.”
“For me graffiti is what it is.” Prof. Shawn Skabelund, an art teacher at NAU said. “I see it as a form of vandalism. I am all for protest art or what we call guerilla art, art against the corporation and or the art establishment, but I question the need and/or validity of an art form that marks or tags something. I'm not even sure I would go so far as calling it art.”
Crunchy Pickle, an artist from Phoenix, disagrees.
“Anything a human does, in one way or another, is a form of art,” he said. “Of course graffiti is an art. Pure vandalistic destruction is an art too. As with painting, most anyone can fling paint at a canvas, but it takes practice to make something pleasing. With graffiti, it takes practice to achieve the desired result. And, yes, even breaking windows is an art. It is all creative destruction.”
Pickle doesn’t even identify himself as a street artist.
“I'm a graffiti writer,” he said. “In a way they are the same - the creation of unauthorized images - but the "street artist" isn't taking as much risk in a spot. Pasting pre-printed images isn't the same statement as wielding a spraycan in your hand. Street art is like cheating at graffiti.”
“For me it satisfies the urge to Create, and the urge to Destroy.” Pickle said. “Perhaps that's the primal hunt-kill instinct, applied to modern society. And if you ever hear writers sitting around a table of beers, it sounds an awful like the Hunt and War Stories that men have told since before history began.”
Graffiti comes from the Italian graffiato, which means, “scratched.” Graffiti is prehistoric, as old as ancient Egypt, where the Romans carved obscene messages into the walls and monuments. Graffiti has been discovered in Pompeii, including Latin profanity, magic spells, political slogans and famous literary quotes, all of which gives archaeologists clues into Roman street life. The Mayans, the Vikings, and even Renaissance artists such as Michelangelo and Raphael did graffiti, according to an article by The Atlantic Online.
Modern street art is a bit different, since the invention of the aerosol can and heightened security against the act. In the ‘60s, political activists used graffiti, mainly because it is an appropriate medium to get a message across.
“It’s really in people’s faces,” as D3ADM3AT, an artist from Concord, New Hampshire put it. “It’s on almost everyone’s street.”
But graffiti began to be used by gangs to mark territory and soon gained a negative connotation. At the same time, it grew into an element of hip hop culture, mostly because it was practiced in areas where elements of hip hop were evolving.
The golden age of graffiti was from the 1970’s to the early 80’s. From 1985 to 1989, new reforms greatly changed the culture of graffiti by making it more difficult to tag. Many taggers quit, but others saw the obstacles as a challenge. This made certain tagging areas more coveted and the movement became violent, possibly the most violent period in graffiti history. Strength in numbers became much more important and artists that went out alone were often beaten and robbed.
Graffiti calmed down once many artists started getting shows and gallery exhibits. Street art moved from darkened alleys into the cultural spotlight and with that shift came commercialization. In 2001, IBM launched an advertising campaign in the streets of Chicago and San Francisco to promote Linux using stencils but several of the “artists” were arrested and IBM was fined more than $120,000 in damages.
In 2007, Adult Swim tried a promotion for their TV show “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” by installing LED light boards (similar to the LED throwies) around Boston. The installations triggered repeated bomb scares across Boston, prompting bridges and a stretch of the Charles River to be closed. Adult Swim paid $2 million in fines; $1 million to the city of Boston and another million toward charity.
Graffiti has even been the main theme of several video games, such as Marc Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure, a game that pits the player against a totalitarian government. The main character, Trane, fights back using graffiti protest. The game is controversial and was banned in Australia for giving a basic how-to on graffiti. The legal action greatly disappointed Mark Ecko, the urban clothing designer whom the game was named after.
“Graffiti is without question the most powerful art movement in recent history and has been a driving inspiration throughout my career,” he said.
Despite the popularity graffiti is receiving, even if it moves into galleries and becomes more accepted by communities, it will probably always stay on the streets.
“I paint the streets because I want to participate in the development of free urban space,” 500m, an artist from Montreal, said. “And I want my practice to be interdisciplinary. Street art is not just painting, its contextual painting. Always using different spaces and textures and working according to them. I think street art has the role of democratizing the arts; it makes people feel that they need to live with art. They need to embrace their creativity. It has a liberating role.”
No comments:
Post a Comment