Street Art as Active Place Marking
The antiquity, continuity, and cross-cultural prevalence of inscription as a means of emplacing ideology are undisputed. "Early humans were drawn to express themselves by draw- ing on cave walls, producing the first evidence of guerrilla art. People have always felt the need to share and express themselves in a public way, sometimes by telling a story or posing a question, many times by presenting a political ide- ology" (Smith 2007, 11 ). Place marking is thus an evocative form of place making, ranging from pure resistance and contestation (David and Wilson 2002; Ferrell 1995; Stenson 1997) to public place beautification (Banksy 2006).
Street decorations and inscriptions have largely domi- nated Westem towns throughout history (Quintavalle 2007). Forms shift from prehistoric cave graffiti to the Roman cities rich in signs, adomments, and writings such as those re- vealed at the archeological sites of Pompei and Ercolano. In the colors of churches and noble buildings that crowd the asymmetrical European streets of the Middle Ages, holy iconography is merged with civic engagement. The Re- naissance—a high point of beautification and embellishment extended to pubhc places—testifies to the spirit of patron- age, extending the ideology of art as private and disposable matter. The neoclassical codes (based on symmetry and or- der), which dominated European urban geography until the late twentieth century, comprise an aesthetic imaginary.
Nowadays, by conceiving urban landscapes as screens, street artists update the heritage of the Renaissance and stim- ulate dwellers to establish a critical relationship with city place reclaimed from space. By overthrowing the established visual urban stmcture, artists embody Mary Douglas's ( 1966) theory of dirt as "matter out of place" and the tra- ditional overlapping between cleanliness and order (Shove 2003). Confirming Douglas's idea that diri is in the eye of the beholder, rival positions about what is clean and what is dirty coexist. Dwellers, art experts, and government of- ficials may actually look at street interventions as acts of beautification or even public art (think of Banksy or Haring) but also as the ultimate defacement of urban order.
The history of street art movements is a fascinating tale of evolution fueled by political and aesthetic ideologies in constant cross-cultural hybridization (Gastman, Rowland, and Sattler 2006; Rose and Strike 2004). Over time, street art movements have incorporated multiple and sometimes conflicting forms of marking, accounting for a variety of views, intents, and actions (fig. 1). Briefly speaking, we acknowledge the following ideal-types of marking (Borghini et al. 2010): (i) tags represent an early expression of street art meant to spread an individual's name, originating in New York in the 1970s and contesting the marginality and ug- liness of social life through the repetition of nicknames or words of rebellion on public walls; (ii) highly stylized writ- ing is a pure practice of aesthetic exercise related to the need for self-affirmation within a community of peers; (iii) sticking is the practice of pasting drawings and symbols in public spaces so as to spread short messages to a broader audience; (iv) stencil mimics the marketing practices of ad- vertising and branding by replicating the same form or sym- bol (e.g., personal logos) in multiple places; (v) poetic as- sault is one of the emerging practices of street art, consisting in the writing of poetry on dull public spaces (e.g., walls, parapets, rolling shutters, mailboxes) to infuse them with lyrical and graceful content; and (vi) urban design mostly relates to an aesthetic practice applied in favor of the beautification of public architecture and urban style.
Street art marking encompasses several dichotomies: in- dividual versus collective acdon, self-affirmadve versus al- truistic aims, self/peer versus public audience (Hirschman
1983), critical versus celebratory purpose, protesting versus aesthetic language. While we recognize the extensive variety of street art expressions, we constrain our inquiry in two ways.
First, the street art we address comprises durable forms of aesthetic transformation of public settings (e.g., walls, floors, urban design, metro stations, traffic lights, signposts). Thus, we exclude forms of: (i) street performance ranging from traditional forms of street theater and clownery to emerging forms such as the parkour movement in the ban- lieues of Paris; (ii) the primarily performance-based prac- tices that may range from the evangelical culture jamming services staged by the Reverend Billy (2006) to the flash- mobbing and genre-rampaging bottlenecking that local ac- tivists promote to disrupt mundane urban activity; and (iii) indoor practices such as shopdropping, or media practices such as mockedng (ClOO 2006; Moore 2007).
Second, so as to contribute to the literature on consumer agency, we concentrate solely on those street marking prac- dces imbued with multiple ideologies of reclamadon of pub- lic place. Thus, we elaborate upon forms of street art sharing a critical reflection about the meaning and u.se of public space, which include both primarily pictorial (e.g., painted.
postered, stenciled, or stickered images) and primarily lit- erate (e.g., poetry and slogans) representations.
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