Graffiti and Street Art

Reading, Writing and Representing the City

Konstantinos Avramidis, Myrto Tsilimpounidi, Konstantinos Avramidis, Myrto Tsilimpounidi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317125044
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Graffiti and street art images are ubiquitous, and they enjoy a very special place in collective imaginary due to their ambiguous nature. Sometimes enigmatic in meaning, often stylistically crude and aesthetically aggressive, yet always visually arresting, they fill our field of vision with texts and images that no one can escape. As they take place on surfaces and travel through various channels, they provide viewers an entry point to the subtext of the cities we live in, while questioning how we read, write and represent them. This book is structured around these three distinct, albeit by definition interwoven, key frames. The contributors of this volume critically investigate underexplored urban contexts in which graffiti and street art appear, shed light on previously unexamined aspects of these practices, and introduce innovative methodologies regarding the treatment of these images. Throughout, the focus is on the relationship of graffiti and street art with urban space, and the various manifestations of these idiosyncratic meetings. In this book, the emphasis is shifted from what the physical texts say to what these practices and their produced images do in different contexts.

All chapters are original and come from experts in various fields, such as Architecture, Urban Studies, Sociology, Criminology, Anthropology and Visual Cultures, as well as scholars that transcend traditional disciplinary frameworks. This exciting new collection is essential reading for advanced undergraduates as well as postgraduates and academics interested in the subject matter. It is also accessible to a non-academic audience, such as art practitioners and policymakers alike, or anyone keen on deepening their knowledge on how graffiti and street art affect the ways urban environments are experienced, understood and envisioned.

Part I
Reading graffiti, street art and the city

1 Graffiti, street art and the dialectics of the city

Jeff Ferrell

Introduction

As graffiti and street art have proliferated globally over the past half century they have become all the more complex and contradictory. This is in part a matter of scale; with the expanding cultural and geographic range of contemporary street art and graffiti has come an expanding variety of meanings and interpretations. It is also a matter of global politics. Often emerging in situations of economic inequality and social upheaval, graffiti and street art regularly come to embody the contested cultural dynamics of these situations (see for example Bushnell 1990; Lennon 2014). But above all it is a matter of the city; it is the urban character of street art and graffiti that guarantees their continued complexity and contradiction. Graffiti and street art are deeply urban phenomena, certainly the most visible forms of global urban culture and urban cultural transgression (Bofkin 2014). More than this, they are urban folk art – the distinctive folk art of the contemporary global city. To read street art and graffiti, to understand their nuances and their negations, then, we must read the contemporary global city as well. When we do, we find that the city is itself a tangle of emerging contradictions, and a place of mutating political economy. In fact, it is the changing economic and political dynamics of the global city – and the messy conflation of street art and graffiti with these new forms of urban economy and control – that shape graffiti and street art today. Caught up in the dynamics of the contemporary city, graffiti and street art unfold as a series of dialectical tensions, crisscrossing between legality and illegality, visibility and invisibility, art and action, ephemerality and elongation. In the street, the dynamics of the contemporary city are encoded in the dialectics of its art; to read one is to read the other.

Law, crime and economy in the contemporary city

During roughly the same period that street art and graffiti have emerged as global cultural phenomena, urban life has been redefined by two powerful trends. First has been the evolution of a new regime of urban social control that includes the exponential growth of urban surveillance and street policing strategies, expanding micro-governance based on risk management ideologies, and the spread of restrictive environmental designs. The global city is now permeated by motion sensors, CCTV/security cameras, sonic tracking devices, and other technologies of surveillance. Urban authorities contend that the surveillance-saturated urban environments that they engineer promote safety and reduce risk, all while enacting a form of preventative policing that obviates the need for ‘reactive’ policing. Beyond the pervasive surveillance cameras and sensors, this orientation is further encoded in the materiality of the city, designed into new or newly reconstructed urban environments by way of barrier planting, building sight lines, restricted walkways, closed public facilities, and other forms of what advocates call CPTED – ‘crime prevention through environmental design’. Complementing these many forms of spatial and technological control is the widely used ‘broken windows’ approach to street policing, with its focus on physical deterioration (‘broken windows’), panhandlers, loiterers, and other alleged signs of urban decay. According to the broken windows approach, and to the plethora of politicians and police chiefs who advocate and utilize it, instances of seemingly harmless, low-level urban disorder in fact dispirit everyday urban citizens, embolden more hardened criminals, and inaugurate a downward spiral of incivility, urban violence and neighbourhood destruction. By this logic, then, low-level, non-violent ‘quality of life’ street crimes must in fact be the focus of law enforcement, to be monitored and policed aggressively if every day urban civility is to be maintained and urban life is to prosper.

A second development in contemporary urban life might seem wholly independent from the first, occurring as it does not in the harsh realm of street policing and surveillance, but in the more indulgent worlds of shopping, dining, entertainment and fine living. This is the trend towards what its advocates call ‘consumption-driven urban development’ (Markusen and Schrock 2009). Under this new political economy of the city, the traditional forces of urban economy and growth – the solid sectors of urban manufacturing and production, now largely relocated elsewhere in a global race to the bottom of wages and production standards – are replaced by new forms of urban economic development founded in cultural creativity, privatized city spaces, and exclusionary zones of consumerism and residence. Here ‘quality of life’ emerges as a symbolic commodity to be sold to prosperous urban residents, and in turn as a signifier of urban vitality and success. Because of this the city becomes its own simulacrum, a Disneyland redesign of its former self, its image of urban hipness and metropolitan style now meticulously manufactured and marketed to those young professionals whom city leaders hope to attract. Anyone who has toured Berlin or Boston or Birmingham has seen it: in one area the old factories, warehouses and workers’ quarters now repurposed as specialty shops, locavore restaurants and trendy lofts; in another the shuttered factories and working class neighbourhoods now razed and replaced with gated communities and stylish guard houses.

The first of these urban trends centres on social control, and the second on social class – but in the contemporary practice of urban life, as in the contemporary practice of street art and graffiti, the two are thoroughly entangled. Regimes of risk management, surveillance and environmental design are used to manipulate those who participate in the privatized and highly profitable night time economy of dining, dancing and music; these regimes are also deployed against those marginalized populations who would, by intention or desperation, intrude on such privatized consumption spaces. At the level of the urban simulacrum, these approaches serve more broadly to police the city’s image – that is, to make invisible those who might, by their poverty or illicit mobility, sully the city’s manufactured image of itself. Likewise, the aggressive ‘broken windows’ policing of low-level ‘quality of life’ crimes works to criminalize and erase unregulated urban interaction, and to criminalize and exclude outsider populations, in this way promoting an image of urban safety while protecting the privileged urban lifestyles of young professionals and other consumers of the contemporary city (Ferrell 2001; Mitchell 2003; Beckett and Herbert 2009).

For urban graffiti and street art generally, and for those urban citizens who work as graffiti writers and street artists, the growing confluence of these two urban trends produces something else: a series of powerful contradictions that animate the contemporary practice of street art and graffiti. In an urban environment permeated by fine-grained social control and by image-conscious consumerist arrangements, street art and graffiti come to be defined as criminal threat, as creative and commercial endeavour, and more often as some odd combination of the two. In this environment street art and graffiti emerge as all-too-visible markers of urban decay, and at the same time as hip signifiers of youthful urban culture and urban revitalization. They lead some of their practitioners to jail or prison, some to the gallery or the design firm, and many into some odd interstitial life that hangs between the two. In the contemporary global city the pervasive visibility of street art and graffiti all but guarantees that they will be attacked, eradicated and erased on the grounds that they undermine urban safety and urban quality of life – and that they will be celebrated, made all the more visible and culturally inescapable, as signifiers of stylish quality of life in a consumerist urban environment.

It’s a bit too cynical and simplistic, but in this urban context one even begins to wonder whether graffiti and street art are today distinguishable mostly by where they fall along this confluence – that is, if ‘graffiti’ or ‘graffiti vandalism’ is that which gets caught up in the panoptic gaze of urban surveillance and street policing, and ‘street art’ that which is appropriated into new economies of urban consumer ism. Certainly it is the case that aggressive anti-graffiti campaigns have carefully and intentionally constructed graffiti and unsanctioned street art both as crimes and as broken windows-style harbingers of further criminality. Nor have these campaigns been simply about street policing and arrest rates; as researchers have shown, they have employed sophisticated forms of media manipulation to portray graffiti writers as violent vandals, gang members and community threats (Ferrell 1996; Austin 2001; Young 2012). Yet it is also the case that many business owners, gallery patrons, advertisers and city developers have increasingly come to see – and more importantly, to promote and commodify – street art and even certain forms of graffiti as essential components of commercial appeal and urban creativity (Snyder 2009). Consequently, the ongoing contradictions: around the world today, in the same city at the same time, graffiti and street art are legal and illegal, celebrated and condemned, objects of both fear and infatuation. And notably, these are not contradictions amenable to being sorted out and resolved; they are contradictions that define the very nature of contemporary street art and graffiti.

An existentialist might even call these contradictions absurd. Banksy (2005), for example, is both stubbornly invisible and pervasively visible, legal and illegal, his illicit work of such commercial value that the walls on which it is painted are stolen away to be sold at art auctions, or otherwise protected by Plexiglass lest some graffiti writer ruin them with an illegal tag. Shepard Fairey is arrested in Boston for tagging – around the time of his show at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art – then arrested a few years later for illegally putting up posters in Detroit while in town to complete an enormous mural commissioned by a real estate company and a gallery. The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s highly publicized ‘Art in the Streets’ exhibition is followed by loud criticism of the ancillary street graffiti that the show generates – and also followed by liberalization of Los Angeles’ public mural laws. Promoting high-end tourism as part of ‘The Europe Issue’ of its travel section, The New York Times highlights ‘12 Treasures’ that the European traveller must experience. Alongside Copenhagen design and Brussels chocolate is the street art of Berlin, where ‘elaborate murals still decorate firewalls’ and ‘images by sprayers and stencilers pop up everywhere else’ (Bradley 2014). And when the co-creator of the broken windows model, James Q. Wilson, passes away, his front-page New York Times obituary highlights his model and its unquestioned categorization of graffiti as crime, crime progenitor, and symbol of disorder (Weber 2012; see Wilson and Kelling 1982). Also in that edition of the Times: an article about Kingston, New York, where illegally stencilled graffiti images have become so popular that the local newspaper endorses them as ‘a great symbol’ and the mayor argues that they are ‘good for Kingston’s image’ (Applebome 2012).

In the absurdity of these accounts we begin to see something else as well: that the contradictions are also dialectical. It is not only that graffiti and street art are both legal and illegal, condemned and encouraged; it’s that these contradictory processes entangle and intertwine, with each remaking the other as part of the ongoing cultural dynamic by which graffiti and street art are produced and perceived. To begin with, graffiti writers and street artists don’t simply accept the dilemma of legality and illegality in which they are caught; they regularly negotiate it, contest it, and prank it, in the process reshaping the very nature of what they do. This is the dynamic that underlies much of the work of Banksy, Shepard Fairey, and other well-known graffiti writers/artists, and it is a dynamic that has been in play for decades now, with graffiti writers and street artists painting public commentaries on anti-graffiti campaigns, tagging city halls and police cars, and otherwise converting their own criminalization into forms of accelerated artistic adventure (Ferrell 1995, 1996, 2001). Negotiating the contradiction on a more practical level, some graffiti writers and street artists carry letters of permission from property owners, knowing that they still may be arrested even while painting a legal mural if they can’t prove it to be so; others carry fake letters of permission, a subterfuge and safeguard if confronted while painting an illegal piece.

On a grander scale, street artists Workhorse and PAC recently organized a secret, illegal two-year Underbelly Project in which they snuck some 100 street artists, gallery artists and graffiti writers from around the world into a disused subterranean New York City subway station, where those involved over time created a wonderland of graffiti, murals, stencils, installations and artistic manifestos. When they eventually revealed the secret project, The New York Times’ very public front page coverage noted that the project ‘defies every norm of the gallery scene’ and ‘goes to extremes to avoid being part of the art world, and even the world in general’ (Rees 2010) – though at this very moment, of course, the project had now become very much part of the world in general. Later on, the Underbelly Project became part of the gallery scene as well, with an Underbelly gallery show staged at Art Basel in Miami and a glossy photo book brought out with art publisher Rizzoli (Workhorse and PAC 2012). Workhorse and PAC are well aware of this unresolved dialectic of legality and illegality, and Workhorse suggests that it will only continue. ‘I think it’s our goal for the future that each year we do two different Underbellies’, he says. ‘One of them is legal, one of them is illegal. The sole point of the legal one is to finance the illegal one. So with Miami, that’s essentially why we did that’ (in Ferrell 2013).

The work of ESPO has likewise dealt directly with this dialectic of legality and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Graffiti and street art: reading, writing and representing the city
• Part I Reading graffiti, street art and the city
• Part II Writing graffiti, street art and the city
• Part III Representing graffiti, street art and the city
• Index