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Graffiti Is An Art Dagnamit!

article 0036 added 06.09.03 words Marie Hollands technical: QED

Graffiti is an art to some and it's definitely a subculture, but is a spin off of Hip-hop really an aesthetic movement, and should it's place in galleries be accepted?

Why do some not want to look in depth at certain art simply because the artist has chosen to work in an unconventional medium or chosen a different receptacle to put his/her work on? After all, few can argue the art when it is legally sanctioned. These artists have taken the spray cans' technical possibilities to where they are quite parallel to those of a paintbrush or pencil. A graffiti artist makes a sketch, plans characters, chooses colours and surface to work on, does initial outlines, fills in colours and any ornamentation, then completes the outline - much the same way any other artist might. Graffiti provides the kind of artistic training required for a productive art career. Graffiti has the 'high art' characteristics of a 'strong and identifiable aesthetics theory' and a similarity to such recognised art movements as abstract expressionism, pop art, conceptual art, and new realism (Handbook of American Popular Culture pg556.)

It's a radical art with radical methodology because it's illegal. It's radical because, mostly the artists are non-artists. Formally, it's not like anything else. It's art that falls out of the social condition, and that helps us to find out about what the art means to everybody (Has Modernism Failed? Pg112)

Graffiti was a kinetic presence in the urban landscape but the police and the law were the first to deny the youth of graffiti their recognition. But the truth is, graffiti does have the decorative and conceptual dimensions that approach many things that we see in galleries, however, it is the location and context of it that is unconventional. It crosses the conventional line of the physical boundaries that are established for aesthetic experience, as well as social expression.

After it moved into the sophisticated world of Soho galleries in 1973 and was aesthetically institutionalised with a book about New York graffiti in 1979, then Haring, Basquait and George Lee Quinones achieved official recognition in 1982 (Documenta VII exhibition at Kassel), all this became the entry of Graffiti into mainstream movements. Organisations were set up around that time also, such as the National Organisation of Graffiti Artists (NOGA) and in 1972, the United Graffiti Artists (UGA) set up by Hugo Martinez, a Puerto Rican sociology student in America. Martinez had persuaded graffitists to legitimise their work and to put it on canvases; some went on to receive scholarships to study at formal art schools.

Looking at the idea of graffiti as art, it must be compared to other outdoor/urban art. The particular example here is a work of Christo, a Bulgarian born artist interested in the presentation of objects and the twentieth-century preoccupation with packaging, he began to wrap entire buildings.

Christo pointed to the often cumbersome political process that was needed to obtain the requisite permissions in order to be totally free of obligation to any external authority (Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art Pg505). One particular work, Running Fence, 1976, crossed fifty-five parcels of privately owned land, for which sixty contracts (easement agreements) were obtained from owners and lessees. Both counties [Marin and Sonoma, North California] required building permits... (Theories and Doc Pg548).
However, when the Coastal Zone Conservation Commission granted a permit it was appealed and immediately revoked, so Christo constructed the shore portion of his 24.5mile long fence without a permit. Nine lawyers represented the fence through legal hurdles. The fence ran across public and private roads as well as state highways. The total cost of the work was estimated to be more than $3 million. The fact is, permission or not, and whether the local communities were for or against, this was still a work of art.

In Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, Robert Irwin 'roughs out' the working categories for public/site art, he states that any art work can be put under one of the following headings: Site dominant, Site adjusted, Site specific, or Site conditioned/determined. It seems that graffiti art fits into the context of the Site dominant. Site dominant: This work embodies the classical tenets of permanence, transcendent and historical content, meaning, purpose; the art-object either rises out of, or is the occasion for, its "ordinary" circumstances - monuments, historical figures, murals, etc. These "works of art" are recognised, understood, and evaluated by referencing their content, purpose, placement, familiar form, materials, techniques, skills, etc.
Artist Steven Gontarski (represented with others by the White Cube in London) is one of few current artists to have entered this boundary of putting graffiti into galleries. He creates sculptures in various plastic materials of quite commercial looking figures, interpreting the secret world of skateboarders, re-experiencing his own youth, but into this he introduces a defacing element of graffiti - 'completely bombed' by his friend Butch, making his work charged with what he calls a guts feeling that graffiti has to it.

Brian O'Doherty describes in his book Inside the White Cube - The Ideology of the gallery space, that there are constructed laws and principles that are put into effect in most gallery spaces. The outside world must not come in, so windows are usually sealed off. Walls are painted white. The ceiling becomes the source of light... The art is free, as the saying used to go, 'to take on its own life'... ... The work is isolated from everything that would detract from its own evaluation of itself.

So what is the artist who accepts the gallery really accepting? Do we as spectators see art, or attitudes, or something else just put into a certain context? Brian O'Doherty goes on to write... things become art in a space where powerful ideas about art focus on them. Indeed, the object frequently becomes the medium through which these ideas are manifested and proffered for discussion - a popular form of late modernist academicism... ...Never was a space, designed to accommodate the prejudices and enhance the self-image of the upper middle classes, so efficiently codified.

Graffitist Banksy is one of the latest of Britain's young and well-known artists. His large stencilled paintings are found on walls all around the U.K. He's even used his work to support Greenpeace's recent anti-deforestation campaign, and has started publishing a series of books of his works. Banksy's canvasses have sold for Ł10,000, and although he may not ever show his work in the Tate, he has stencilled on the Tate's steps MIND THE CRAP, bringing the traditional subway feel of graffiti to the galleries, and although most of his work is illegal, even groups such as the Electoral Commission have borrowed his powerful style for campaigns encouraging young people to vote.

Anti graffiti groups have begun sharing their points of view openly too by the use of the World Wide Web. Interestingly they acknowledge the passion that graffitists have, for instance: 'Time has proven that "free walls do not work", graffitists paint the areas around these walls also, "Banning the sale of aerosol paint cans [...] 95% of the people responsible for graffiti were too committed to be deterred by the ban", "Information on the net [...] predominantly pro-graffiti", "Even in communities with plenty of things for kids to do there are graffiti[sts]". (The Anti-graffiti FAQ - http://www.dougweb.com/faq.html) These often-patronising anti-graffiti activists claim that they 'know the difference between graffiti and art', and that they know what art is. They claim that 'the difference between graffiti and art is permission'. So does this imply that with permission they acknowledge that graffiti is art?
So does Graffiti + Context = Art?
We know that graffiti has been, and is still, treated as a 'symptom' of the urban experience by some, but equally it is theorised and deconstructed by others in many disciplines. Some argue that it is difficult to accept when put on the white walls of a gallery situation, as its social context and its essential meaning is taken away - it was created outside of the system, art has a system. For others though, a move to the mainstream is no surprise, and it 'beats' the system by working both inside and out of it. It is a fact that most of the opposition towards graffiti is because of its unconventional location and presentation. Arguably, the unfortunate and negative undertone that graffiti has acquired could be eradicated itself if people were more knowledgeable of the different elements graffiti is made up of. Graffiti has already lasted longer than many other art movements and that should perhaps be acknowledged more. We know that there are a lot of arguments for justifying the graffiti that is seen as vandalism, but how stronger case have they got when defending it as art? Traditional arguments are typically like these: "cave men did it - what's the difference?". "It's a right protected by the first amendment - freedom of speech.", "making the cities prettier makes people feel better.", "rather them paint or commit 'real' crimes?", "it's no different to bill-boarding.", and more plausibly: "it's a social problem that is a result of a disaffected, bored and alienated youth, it should be tolerated as a safety valve for youth as a distraction from serious crime." But how about this one - If an established artist such as Gavin Turk (or even Picasso!) painted on your wall, wouldn't you then recognise it as art rather than pure vandalism?

- Marie Hollands BA