Graffiti News

This week one of Paris’s chicest contemporary art spaces threw open its doors to the Vermeers of vandalism: graffiti (ouch, the next word is reluctantly typed) artists.

At Fondation Cartier, amid the high-end boutiques of the French capital’s Left Bank, pictures of vandalised walls, cars and billboards have been neatly gathered into neat displays under titles such as “Action Writing’’, which looks at the scribblers’ penchant for “tagging” (street’s equivalent of an autograph) as a way of claiming their territory.

The show may be visually flamboyant, but the premise is flawed. Removed from their natural homes – in Amsterdam, São Paulo, Santiago, New York, Berlin and Paris – and placed in the white cube of an art gallery, what were spontaneous exclamations and violent slices of expressionism are reduced to curiosity wallpaper.

Born in the Streets – as the show is, somewhat condescendingly, called – is an ultra democratic exhibition in that it incorporates the least talented sort of graffiti artists, essentially doodlers, alongside some whose works have sold in international auction houses (to the likes of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, two of street art’s best-known collectors). At worst, graffiti is loud, obvious and unsophisticated. Selfishly perhaps, it uses public spaces for a studio, eats up public funds, and revels immaturely in the police chase. Should gallery owners know better than to promote all this? Well, probably.

Part of me, though, can see why Fondation Cartier has fallen for street art’s irresistible appeal. The first time a piece of street art made an impact on me was in one of East Berlin’s busiest streets. A real bed had been dumped on the pavement in an act of rage. Painted onto the sheets was a stick person; where his heart should have been, the mattress had been ripped open and painted red so that crimson feathers erupted from the hole. Sprayed onto the bed were the words: ”you tore my heart out’’. Full of purged teenage hurt, the bitter message stood in everyone’s way that day – and was removed the next morning.

At best, street art has the effect of poetry. It’s a colourful celebration of the freedom of speech and can unexpectedly transform a banal space or a mundane journey into something rather more thoughtful. One photograph in the new French exhibition shows a life-size painting by Evan Roth of a homeless man sleeping on the side of a pavement in Paris. While we might stop to stare at this depiction, rarely would we give the same consideration to a real homeless person. Graffiti makes its impact by playing with our expectations when we are going about our business. Occasionally, it has the ability to inspire a whole community, as did Shepard Fairey’s now iconic image of Barack Obama’s block-coloured face, which, in the run-up to the last US presidential elections, was stencilled all over downtown New York above the letters H, O, P and E.

However, as politically fuelled as street art may be, one could argue that the only thing it has ever really revolutionised is advertising. Long ago, graphic designers and advertisers hijacked the ”street’’ aesthetic. The populist appeal of the distinct design-friendly graffiti scrawl, and the simplicity of the block-colour stencil was cleverly used to sell stuff to people, like trainers, jeans – and now Cartier luxury goods. Branding and exhibiting graffiti deprives it of its saving grace: mystery. Street art should revere anonymity, the very thing that most other art genres despise.

Street art still has its place: on pee-stained ugly buildings in cities where dissidents reshuffle the power balance on the pavement. And on railway routes through suburban hell, where grit and grime – rather than destroying the pictures – actually add to their dirty aesthetic. If we wanted to look for enlightening and unexplored social history in Paris’s illustrious graffiti scene, we would skip the Louvre on our weekend city breaks and amble through the rough streets of the 18th arrondissement. We would take cameras, and our kids, and a slang dictionary to help translate the French expletives so that we could appreciate the artworks’ full meaning.

Given the current market interest in street art, you can count on Born in the Streets pulling in the crowds. But the rebel in me hopes that on my next visit to Paris, I’ll find an enormous Day-Glo saucisson sprayed down the side of Fondation Cartier’s pristine glass walls.

Via:www.telegraph.co.uk/

It’s not quite the same as having one of your paintings in the Louvre, but a French exhibition, above, is enhancing the international recognition of graffiti artists. Among those honored in the show, called “Tag,” at the Grand Palais in Paris, are four New York pioneers who have been active since the 1970s: Toxic, Quik, Seen and Rammellzee, the last of whom showed up for an opening event in a Darth Vader-style mask. The exhibition, which runs through April 26, was commissioned and organized by Alain-Dominique Gallizia, a French architect who became interested in graffiti as an art form when he encountered examples of it at his work sites. Some 150 graffiti artists prepared works for display in the show; most are from the United States or France, but countries including Australia, Brazil, Chile and Japan are also represented.

Via:NYTimes