Defining ‘street art’
The question What is street art? might seem easy
to answer. We have all seen it: graffiti, scribbled
names, and murals. It is just art placed on the
street, where ‘the street’ is taken in a very broad
sense to denote, roughly, any urban public space.
However, this commonsensical answer cannot be
right. Imagine a gallerist bringing in new works
who leans a painting against her car before opening the gallery doors. The painting was placed
in the street but clearly is not street art. In art
fairs around the world, paintings are placed in the
street, but they are not thereby street art. The notion that street art is art placed in the street is
also misleading insofar as it suggests that street
art is made and subsequently placed in the street.
This is true of some works, but as we will see, in
many cases, the street is employed in the production of the art. It does not help to add that the art
must be in the street for at least a certain length
of time. Aside from being ad hoc, it is false. Street
art spans works that are utterly ephemeral and
relatively enduring.
Consider Josh Allen Harris’s inflatable sculptures. Harris creates inflatable creatures out of
diaphanous plastic material and tapes them to subway air ducts on the sidewalks of New York City.
When the subway passes, air shoots out of the
ducts (Remember Marilyn Monroe?) and inflates
the animals, casting them into a short and frenzied
existence. The inflatable sculptures last about as
long as it takes for an average-sized chain of subway cars to zoom by.
On the other side of the
temporal spectrum are the works of “Stikman”. One of Stikman’s projects involves
placing little thermoplastic stickmen in the middle
of the street (normally in crosswalks). Unless they
are deliberately destroyed, they will be there as
long as the crosswalk is. Invader’s work is equally
enduring. With powerful glue, he affixes colorful
mosaics depicting digital-style space creatures to
various surfaces. Stikman
whom I discuss in more detail below, welds or
bolts medium-sized metal sculptures of his name
to loading docks, iron beams, sidewalks, and other
city surfaces.
Other street artworks have a far less direct connection to the street, which raises the question of
whether street art must be physically in the street.
The artist Blu created Muto, a fascinating piece of
animation that uses the street as a drawing board.
Blu painted characters in his distinctive style on
various street surfaces, took a photograph, shifted
the character slightly, took another photograph,
and so on. He then stitched the images together
and added sound effects. Human-like figures walk
along walls, crawl under windows, and kick over
logs; they morph into bugs, lose their heads, expand, split in half, and multiply; teeth crawl along
the sidewalk and up walls. One really must see it
to believe it.
Invader’s mosaics
are placed all over various cities, but the finished
product is normally a map that details the location of each work. Invader prints the maps and
Invader distributes them in the “invaded” city. The Paris
and Los Angeles invasions are detailed in books
sold on Invader’s website. These maps and Muto
are arguably street art even though they are not
physically located in the street.
It cannot be a necessary or sufficient condition that street art be art-in-the-street. Still, street
art obviously has some strong connection to the
street. A different suggestion is that street art is
art that employs the street as an artistic resource.
Now, there are different kinds of artistic resources.
One kind of artistic resource is the physical material artists use to create their works. Just as
painters use canvas, paint, frames, galleries, and
walls, street artists use elements of the street. The
subway and its brief shots of city air are literally
part of Harris’s sculptures; the street is the drawing board for Blu’s animation; doorways, windows,
sidewalks, signposts, rooftops—all are used to create street art. Another kind of artistic resource is
the context in which the work is displayed. Some
artists use the gallery, studio, or museum; street
artists use the street. So perhaps an artwork is
street art if, and only if, its creator uses the street
as an artistic resource in at least one of these ways.
This definition gets something right, but it is
too inclusive. Commercial art uses the street as an
artistic resource in both senses—mass stenciling by
movie production companies, posters, billboards,
projected advertisements—but none of it is street
art. That an artwork uses the street is not sufficient
for its being street art. But given that it covers all
our examples thus far, it does seem necessary. Our
definition should entail the material requirement:
an artwork is street art only if it uses the street as
an artistic resource. (I will often say that artworks
that satisfy this requirement make a material or
artistic use of the street.)
For a work to use an artistic resource, it is necessary that the creator of the work intentionally
use it in the creation of the work. (It is not necessary that the concept of the material feature in
the intention. For example, an artist can “intend to
use iron” in a work by intending to use this stuff,
which is iron.) When this material is the street, a
further commitment is at least implicitly (but normally explicitly) incurred. This is a commitment to
ephemerality. In using the street, artists willingly
subject their work to all of its many threats—it
might be stolen, defaced, destroyed, moved, altered, or appropriated. This is not to say that all
street artists expect their work to be short-lived;
surely Stikman expects his works to endure. It is
to say that, in using the street, they relinquish any
claim on the work’s integrity, or on the integrity of
the part of the work that contributes to its being
street art. (So, for example, Blu’s use of the street
in creating Muto involves the commitment.)
A notable feature of much street art is that its
meaning is severely compromised when removed
from the street. Josh Harris’s inflatable sculptures
would lose something important if they were inflated by an industrial fan in a museum or gallery,
presumably because the artist’s use of the street
plays an important role in the interpretation of
the work. The regular movement of the city brings
Harris’s sculptures into existence and introduces
them to a brief and animated life. As the subway
passes on, so do the sculptures. In Harris’s work,
the life of the city just is the life of the sculpture.
The artist C. Finley beautifies rugged steel dumpsters by covering them with pretty wallpaper.
The
fact that the wallpaper is on a dumpster—a veteran
denizen of the street—is what makes it significant.
By covering dumpsters with such homely decor, ´
Finley draws attention to the fact that the street is
also a kind of living room. Her work reveals that
the elements of our commonplaces need not be so
uninviting. The dumpster—like the kitchen trash
bin or the home toilet—need not reflect its contents. Wallpaper alone is merely pretty. Wallpaper
on a dumpster: that is street art.
In contrast, the meaning of an advertisement
does not change if it is removed from the street.
Its message is generally buy this or see that no
matter where it is. Of course, that the ad conveys
this message might depend on its use of the street,
and the rhetorical effect of an ad is often severely
diminished when removed from a public location;
if removed, it might be ineffective commercial art,
but it would still mean the same thing. If C. Finley’s
wallpaper is removed from the dumpster, or if the
wallpapered dumpster is placed in a warehouse
(or a gallery), the meaning of the work will be
severely compromised, if not entirely destroyed.
This indicates that, for street art, the artistic
use of the street must be internal to its significance, that is, it must contribute essentially to its
meaning. Features of artworks can be either external or internal to their meaning.
Think of the
meaning of a work as given by an interpretation.
The size of Odilon Redon’s Guardian of the Spirit
Waters is an eliminable feature of any interpretation—one need not discuss it to make sense of the
work. However, the size of Barnett Newman’s Vir
Heroicus Sublimus or of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty must play a role in their interpretation.
Duchamp’s Fountain is pretty because it is made of
glossy white porcelain, but its prettiness has little
to do with its meaning (contrary to what some formalists have thought). In contrast, the loveliness of
C. Finley’s wallpaper dumpsters would play an essential role in any reasonable interpretation. This
suggests that any reasonable interpretation of a
piece of street art must refer to the way in which
the artist uses the street to give meaning to the
artwork. Call this the immaterial requirement: If
a work is street art, then its use of the street is
internal to its meaning.
Notice that the immaterial requirement implies
the material requirement. If an artistic use of the
street is internal to the meaning of a work, then,
obviously, the work uses the street. Perhaps, then,
the immaterial requirement is also a sufficient condition. Thus,
An artwork is street art if, and only if, its material use of
the street is internal to its meaning.
It is a virtue of this conception of street art that,
given certain facts about the street, it implies
that street art is at least likely to have properties
that it in fact often has. The definition implies that
street art is likely to be, among other things, illegal, anonymous, ephemeral, highly creative, and
attractive.
The street is composed largely of surfaces and
objects owned by the city and other people; the
artistic use of these surfaces is normally an act
of vandalism. This fact forces many street artists
to be anonymous or to use pseudonyms. Many
street artists are notoriously unidentifiable and
difficult to contact. Also due to the illegality, and
partially as a result of exposure to the forces of
nature, street art is highly ephemeral—some of
it exists for only a couple of hours before it is
buffed out, scrawled over, or naturally erased.
Furthermore, street art does not exist in a designated “artspace”—a place like a museum or
gallery specially reserved for art. As a result, it is
much more likely that the public will notice these
works if they are visually striking—street artists
are pressured to make their works pop out of the
street and call on passersby and other artists to
pay attention. They employ various strategies to
achieve this. They make their works visually stunning, examples of extraordinary skill, highly original and imaginative, or all
at once. As a result, most pieces need
not be placed in a gallery, reviewed by a critic,
or blessed by the artworld to be appreciated as
art.
This way of thinking about street art also helps
make sense of the experience of seeing street art
in designated artspaces—it invariably feels dead
and inauthentic. When a work is moved into an
artspace, the one thing that changes is the very
thing that made it street art; at best it looks like
street art. One could experience it as street art
only by imagining what its use of the street might
have been. At best, then, one could imagine how
the work seen in the gallery might have been street
art.
In Style Wars (Henry Chalfant and Tony Silver,
1983), the early documentary of the culture that
gave birth to contemporary graffiti, art dealers invite young graffiti artists to produce and sell works
on canvas. In one scene, which Arthur Danto callsRiggle Street Art.
“the most dispiriting sequence” in the film, the
viewer is witness to a savage gallery opening where
the writers’ distinctive styles are exploited in an
attempt to make them viable in the artworld.
Danto’s words are chosen carefully. It is the “most
dispiriting sequence” because it is the only place in
the film where we see graffiti outside of its proper
context, cut off from the street, and thereby devoid of its distinctive meaning. It has literally been
stripped of its spirit.
Street art is deeply antithetical to the artworld.
That is, for each part of the artworld, street art
resists to some appreciable extent playing a role
in it. Consider a museum. There could be an exhibition of street art only at great cost to the significance of the works exhibited. By pulling them
from the streets the curator eliminates their material use of the street, thereby destroying their
meaning and status as street art. What is exhibited in the museum is at most a vestige of street
art. Imagine, if you can, a gallery that deals solely
in street art. Street art is done on owned property. What is there to sell? Legally speaking, it is
Of course, it would be possible
to create a temporary gallery in the streets full
of ephemeral art that cannot be sold. Artist Erik
Burke has done just that with his (Con)temporary
Gallery in Reno, Nevada.
But such a “gallery”
hardly has the institutional structure required of
an artworld gallery.
Even some of the thought-driven realms of the
artworld—art criticism and the philosophy and history of art—look different when directed at street
art. I think many art critics evaluate street art
by relating it to the history and critical background of institutional art. Critics tend to assess street art in terms of how such work would
fare in a gallery or museum setting. Unsurprisingly, such assessments are invariably negative,
but they do little more than point out the obvious fact that street art makes bad institutional art.
This is not to say that criticism of street art is
impossible, or that it must ignore its relation to
institutional art. Below, I discuss the relevance of Barnett Newman’s paintings to a specific piece of
graffiti.
Street art raises problems for justifications of
the museum that appeal to the purported uniqueness and power of the works it contains. Street art
is largely ephemeral art that is usually cheap to
make, free to experience, and owned and overseen
by no one (or, rather, everyone). Museums often
contain art that is extremely expensive (to make
and own), costly to experience, and overseen by an
elite few. One reason for visiting a museum, and a
reason to maintain the expansive, expensive, and
exhausting network of artworld roles that sustain
them, is that what is in the museum is supposedly
sufficiently different from what is outside it—it is
more powerful, full of complex meaning, more
beautiful, challenging, and rewarding than the everyday. This is indeed true of art like Brillo Box,
which carries a significance that Harvey’s everyday boxes lack. But when the everyday includes
street art, the reason loses bite. Danto, in a discussion of this very issue, asks what art must be like to
justify a newcomer’s trip to the museum. He says,
“[Y]ou want to make sure that they will not, upon
entering the museum, find something that strikes
them as just like what they saw on Broadway and
145th Street, for then they will ask what the point
of going to the museum was.
That question—
What’s the point of going to the museum?—is especially pressing in the face of a flourishing street
art practice.
Not only is street art antithetical to the artworld, but it also is at odds with the Modern vision
of art and art criticism. Our definition implies that
it is impossible to employ solely formalist principles in a critique of street art. The very thing
whose use contributes essentially to the meaning
of street art, the street, itself has meaning. The
doorways, windows, alley walls, dumpsters, sidewalks, signs, polls, crosswalks, subway cars, and
tunnels—all have their own significance as public,
everyday objects. These are shared spaces, ignored
spaces, practical spaces, conflicted spaces, political spaces. To make sense of street art, the critic
is forced to discuss the significance of a work’s
use of these inflected spaces. This violates the
formalist principle, derived from the principle of
aesthetic autonomy, that to appreciate a work of
art the critic must attend to its aesthetic features
alone. According to our definition, making sense
of street art requires attending to a nonaesthetic
feature of the work, namely, its material use of the
street.
A formalist critique of a street artwork would
not be a critique of it as such. This is not to say
that street art is formally uninteresting. (I have
already provided examples of formally accomplished street art.) It is to say that strictly formalist
art criticism cannot handle street art, in spite of its
often dazzling aesthetic qualities.
The ubiquity of these qualities indicates how
street art respects at least one formalist tenet. Formalists thought that art should lift us out of the
everyday. They thought it should have the power
to disengage us from our practical concerns and
lift us to a higher place of disinterested contemplation—contemplation of art itself, apart from
the quotidian concerns of everyday life. Clement
Greenberg, the preeminent formalist critic and
theorist, made sure he would have such experiences. On gallery visits, he would shut his eyes and
have artists guide him to their new works. When
he was correctly positioned, he would abruptly
open his eyes to bring the work into view and
inundate himself with aesthetic stimuli.
Greenberg’s “pure aesthetic experience” often formed
the basis for his critical opinion of the work. One
can only wonder whether Greenberg would have
preferred to have a stranger jump out at him on
the street holding the fresh artwork, flashing it violently before his eyes. He would not even have
been thinking I’m about to look at art; I’m about
to look at art. The experience could not be more
“pure” or “unmediated” than that.
Yet this is how street art often enters one’s
stream of consciousness. Walking down the street,
on the way to work, a friend’s house, dinner, a bar,
a lecture, one haphazardly glances in the right direction and BOOM!—an unsolicited aesthetic injection. One is jolted out of whatever hazy cloud
of practical thought one was in; one is forced to
reconsider one’s purely practical and rather indifferent relationship to the street, and a curiosity
to explore the work develops. However, the experience is not, contrary to formalism, the primary
ground for a critical opinion. Criticism appropriate to street art requires further consideration of
the work’s meaning, especially the significance of
its use of the street. (The critic, too, must return
to the cave.) The aesthetic features of street art250 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
Figure 6. Swoon (photograph by Luna Park).
are often guides to that significance. The meaning
of street art outstrips the power of its manifest aesthetic properties. There is no necessary
tension between a work’s beauty and its philosophical, critical, religious, or moral force
I defined street art, showed that it is deeply antithetical to the artworld, and argued that formalist
principles cannot adequately address it. It follows
that street art embodies a response to modernism
that is interestingly different from the postmodern, or post-historical, response. Modernism separated art and life. It exalted art to extinction. The
post-historical artists corrected this by allowing
the everyday a place in the gallery. Art and life
were conjoined in the world of art. Consequently,
we lost the ability to recognize art by its visual
properties; to grasp an object’s art status, the story
goes, one is forced to consider its possible relations to the artworld. This is not the case for an
art practice that rebuts modernism by incorporating art into the everyday. Not only can such art
retain artistically distinguishing visual properties,
but it should—if it does not call on the viewer to
appreciate it as such, it risks blending into the undifferentiated scene, sinking to the bottom of the
fractured stream of life.
No comments:
Post a Comment