|
March 05, 2007
I'm looking for graffiti in Adelaide that moves beyond the lowly tagging and throwups--- for signs that go beyond graffiti writers symbolically taking possession of the space that is denied them, and can be considered to be pieces or some form of artistic expression. An example:
Gary Sauer-Thompson, faces, Adelaide, 2007
Sarah Giller in Graffiti: Inscribing Transgression on the Urban Landscape defends tagging. Her argument is that what is central to graffiti's power to establish identity in an urban space is the predominant role of one's name. This doesn't strike me as very plausible, so we need to look at her argument.
Giller says that:
Espousing self-chosen identities, urban youth use graffiti to reclaim and transform the denied space closest to them, the neighborhoods and communities which surround and shape their lives. Employed by those with few avenues for formal arts training and production open to them, graffiti is a visual means of resisting the privatization of public space. These "parasitic" art forms create "openly contested terrains." In "bombing" as many sites as possible with one's chosen identity, graffiti is art attacking architecture, the marginalized attacking the mainstream. In painting your name on a "public" space, graffiti writers symbolically take possession of that which society has made inaccessible to them. Simply stated, name plus place equal possession. In reappropriating an urban built environment engulfed by skyscrapers and privatized spaces, graffiti is a declaration of identity and an assertion [of] power. In the middle of spaces that have excluded them, graffiti empowers the marginalized to inscribe signs of their own.
Well there are signs and there is art. Giller goes on to argue that graffiti is an art of letters. Letters are symbols of written language. In reinventing the appearance of these symbols, graffiti reinvents written language itself.She says that some writers work to distort the letters as much as possible to ensure non-writers will not understand their internal code. By repeatedly inscribing distorted text on the urban landscape as a means of asserting identity and power, visual slang becomes "a new kind of visual rhetoric."
'Writers' and 'visual rhetoric ' strikes me as odd. Why not see some graffitists as artists creating a visual street language that is a part of public art of the city. I've seen lots of images in the city of Adelaide --not just reworked letters. It's graffiti as images--often poetic images-- that indicates the significance of graffiti as street art. In a city that has forgotten its commitment to contemporary public art in the 1970s, it is an artistically informed graffiti in the south and western parts of the city that is the placeholder for public art in Adelaide that has faded.
start previous next
|
Not all bombing is worthy. Some tags are just crap no matter how benign one wans to be.
Funnily I know seem to mentally block out the bad tags and only see the art.
I and many others long for a return to the art trams of melbourne. Seems as if it was something for a street artist to aspire to. And they looked great. Now we just have inspid grey trams or ones with ads all over them.
see; http://www.angelfire.com/ca/austelec/decotram.html