Graffiti Fall 2018

I am researching Outsider Art for my senior capstone, so it was really interesting for me to read these articles and to think about the term “appropriation” within this context. By definition, outsider art is dependent on the marginality of artists. These are works of art created by so called ‘outsiders’, who can be people on the fringes of society who lack formal artistic education and training, and who are not exposed to contemporary culture and society. Dubuffet was inspired by the works of surrealists and those of patients in psychiatric facilities. He came up with the term ‘art brut’ in the 1940s-50s to define art that was ‘untainted’ by the culture and norms of the academy. Outsider art was proposed as the American equivalent of the term in the 70s, but has evolved significantly since then.

One issue that arises with outsider art (besides its incredibly broad definition over who and what are included), are the ethics behind collecting and curating outsider art.  One issue that Plesch and Ashley mention in their article (which fits well with the practice of ‘insiders’ curating the work of ‘outsiders’), is that there is always a relationship between cultural unequals, where a dominate culture will appropriate a weaker culture, leaving the latter with no control over its representations/products. This reveals a question of moral legitimacy of taking art from a less powerful source/culture, at what point do we draw the line when generally, this art is being taken and exhibited for the financial gain and aesthetic pleasure of others? 

It is interesting then that Plesch and Ashley argue that appropriation is aimed at creating and/or consolidating identities, and that that is usually a collective identity. I’m not sure if this was the intention, but it made me think of how Outsider Art has come to be its own category. For decades, we have looked to outsider artists to satisfy our desires and interests in the ‘other.’ We are inspired by their raw creativity and talent, but for many of these artists, they are creating art for themselves and for most of the early artists at least, would not consider themselves to be ‘artists’ at all. So looking at it this way, we are ‘appropriating’ their art and backgrounds to create a new culture/artistic catch-all category to fit our ‘dominant’ culture’s market and aesthetic values. 

In Alexandra Duncan’s essay, “From the Street to the Gallery,” Duncan questions the role graffiti plays in a gallery. She uses Zevs, a street artist turned art world phenomenon, as an example. She argues that when street art is put into a gallery, the new setting dictates the meaning of the art; the art might be the same formally, but the meaning is completely different. In the gallery, the work is commissioned and is seen as a commodity. In the street, graffiti is illicit and for the people of the street. Graffiti is universal, democratic, and accessible. However, once the the graffiti is put into a gallery, it is no longer universal or accessible. Rather, it is now a commodity to be seen and ultimately bought. Furthermore, Duncan states that graffiti’s meaning comes from its location. We have seen this in almost every reading we have done for the semester. Graffiti interacts with and feeds off of the street, but in a gallery, the graffiti becomes static and stagnant. In the street the graffiti changes every day by the nature of the way people interact with it; in the street, people can touch it, add to it, and find their own meaning in the work. In the gallery, there is no interaction with the work, and therefore, less of a connection with the work.

***thoughts from class

I think Basquiat created a nice dialogue with the reading. It illustrated all the concerns that Duncan brings up in her essay. In Basquiat, there is a clear distinction between his street art and the art he started creating for the gallery; Basquiat completely changed his style in order to sell to a broader audience. Although still using a spray can, once the work is no longer on a wall, it is no longer graffiti. We see this manifest when Basquiat starts painting on a canvas on the floor, instead of  on a wall.

This chapter in Understanding Graffiti forces us to examine the ever evolving placement and market of graffiti. In almost every paper we have read in this course, each one starts with a definition of what graffiti is. And while definitions vary in specificity, the most common theme is that they are on surfaces which were not originally intended to receive it. Meaning, that graffiti is supposed to be site specific, as there is an “important sociopolitical aspect linked to a work’s geographical location, and as such, the work’s placement within a community, and within a system of relations is much more crucial to its meaning than aesthetic form alone” (135).

Graffiti is praised for giving voice to marginalized groups and for helping to bring together communities. Which is why I think it is so interesting that the French street artist “Zevs” is so comfortable with his work being displayed in art galleries. His work is all about speaking out against big corporations, especially his work with liquidating logos. He does not believe that taking his art out of their original contexts changes anything, when in reality, it is changing everything. “The only prerequisite for creating street graffiti is the desire to be heard” (135). But, by taking his art out of the street,  the audience and art is being restricted to the inside of a gallery. Institutions are deciding what kinds of art should be “heard”, and that is not what graffiti is about at all.

One question we keep coming back to throughout this seminar, is what circumstances encourage or inspire people to create graffiti? The readings from this session showed us that graffiti can be made as a way to pass the time, show proof of visit, or as a form of political protest.  But to me, the reason depends entirely on circumstance, which is why graffiti struggles to be categorized and defined, which sometimes allows for it to be such a broad catch-all term.

Additionally, when the space changes, so does its viewership and context. We tend to think of graffiti as mainly occurring on a local level, but in the case of Cairo, when conflict graffiti is shared via the internet, there is a new “global street” that emerges. Instead of just a community unifying together against violence, the world is also sharing in their anger and fear.  As the graffiti becomes such a dominant presence on the internet, the space that people are interacting and viewing the graffiti is changing. When the space changes to the internet, how do people interpret and experience this graffiti differently, if at all?

This chapter by Alexandra Duncan prompts deeper inquiry into site-specificity and the ways in which site––as a “problem-idea” (137)––situates and informs interpretations of the graffito. Through the transferral of image from one space to another, the potential meanings, interpretations and primary affective experience of viewing a graffito are transformed.

Duncan, in quoting Michael Glover for The Independent, highlights the important factors of street graffiti: its uncertainty, spontaneity, ephemerality, and urgency (130). These factors are not present when transferred to a gallery space. Duncan writes that “in a gallery context, the imagery remains static and unchanging” (130). Thus, through engaging in a close reading of an image’s situation in space––”smooth” or “striated” (135)––temporality and ephemerality transform the affective qualities of image interpretation.

This week’s readings and discussion invited me to think critically about graffiti in relation to cultural geography. Should we think about production of graffiti in a global context, we are prompted to consider the ways in which space and place are constructed and accessed in differing ways. While the readings for this week brought cases of graffiti in varying contexts into our consciousness, the underlying question of access to space inform my interpretation and comparison of these cases. As Hannah stated in class, decoding the graffiti presented in the text “‘We’ve got better things to do than worry about whitefella politics’: Contemporary Indigenous graffiti and recent government interventions in Jawoyn Country” by Ralph and Smith is telling of the ways certain groups and individuals are able to access and negotiate a relationship to space.

A question that arises for me is: How does infrastructure (or lack of) enable or invite graffiti making? When I consider the ways in which many of the cases we have studied include instances of waiting, I am prompted to consider the words of Carolyn Steedman in Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives, in which she argues that “to wait is to want.” Waiting implies a lack––of agency or control over time and action. When we wait in line, we are at the whim of a system of which we are not actants. In applying this idea to the study of graffiti, I can infer that the graffiti made by the horse-lads was produced when they had no control over the weather. They were literally waiting out the storm. Similarly, the graffiti made in Jawoyn County in the article by Ralph and Smith was produced by those waiting for the bus. With no control over its schedule, frequency, urgency––over the transportation infrastructures offered in Jawoyn County––the graffiti writers enacted agency in their inscriptions.

Steedman writes about “what has been made out on the margins”––in the study of graffiti, we might decode the marks made through the narratives they tell of access to space and control over infrastructures. Margins and tensions of agency/actants exist in a global context. How does this same lens of waiting–wanting lend itself to decoding graffiti in global contexts? How does this lens enable the study of subaltern narratives that expose agency despite and through the margins?