SAUC - Street art & urban creativity scientific journal, vol.2, nº2 (Nov. 2016) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Special Issue: Street Art's Politics and Discontents
Journal of Urban Cultural Studies , 2020
Street art, with its subcultural character and sociability, has been looked upon for its anti-cultural potential. While some accounts have diverted attention to street art's utopia with its creative dissidence and regenerative potential, others have insisted that street art has already been coopted by the aesthetic and institutional order of the neoliberal economy. This special issue aims to contribute to the critical perspectives of cultural geography, urban sociology, art history, visual studies and critical theory through analyses of the urban space and street art. The prolific significance of this issue is in its multi-perspective approach to bring together social, political and aesthetic dimensions in the intersection of art and the changing urban environment. Recently, activist art, social practice and socially engaged art are just a few terms that have been popular for describing art that attempts to attract public attention to the current social and political landscape. This thematic journal issue explores the potential theoretical and empirical inputs that a spatial and urban approach of art can bring to the understanding of both arts and the urban space. It offers a multi-geographical, multi-dimensional and interdisciplinary perspective to analyze how street art, as an aesthetic dispositive, functions as an integral part in the socio-political space of the urban landscape. Street art contests two main regimes of visibility-legal and governmental on one side, and artworld or social aesthetic on the other-which creates the conditions within which it must compete for visibility. How can we interpret the politics of street art from the perspective of subcultures, freedom of expression, and limits of criminality? Are street artists obliged to be a part of the urban resistance against neoliberalism? How does street art reveal, delimit or question the complexity of neoliberal urbanization? How is street art activism perceived by the authorities, politicians, businesses, and the wider public? What prompts street artists to communicate with urban dwellers with their marks on the city's surface? How does street art partake in social movements? This special issue hopes to continue academics' and artists' conversations on street art's relationship with the urban space and the public as a defining element of urban culture, but also offers a critical look at the spatial and political dynamics that reflect territorially embedded mechanisms that generate particular social and cultural processes.
Street Art – questioning power and control in urban spaces
Folie) "The difference between sender and receiver, between producer and consumer of signs, must remain total, as within it lies the real form of social power." Beaudrillard, 1978 The title of this paper "Street Art -questioning power and control in urban spaces" evokes the question: who's the one in charge in public spaces?
Aesthetic Energy of the City. Experiencing Urban Art & Space, 2016
To say that art usually depends on its context would be a truism. Nowadays there are fewer and fewer theorists who defend its absolute autonomy as if a work of art was a stand-alone being, entirely independent of place, time and even its author. Even if we tried to claim that, in the words of Clement Greenberg, a work of art is "something given, increate, independent of meanings, similars or originals" (Greenberg 1971: 6), and even if it is fully abstract, at the moment when it appears in the public space, it falls within an entire network of relations with the surface, space, time, motion and above all with the recipient. Whether it is a simple tag or a mural, a monument or an installation, regardless of individual intentions, the trace left by the artist in the public space will be always received in a particular environment. Street art is a particularly contextual type of art as its very source derives from interacting with a city, a street, a wall or a passer-by 1. Moreover, these contexts are always changing. Official art of a public nature-architecture, monumental sculpture, urban design-is supposed to intentionally build the public space in a certain manner and is usually created in the space provided. Street art-on the contrary-is created where it is not expected, it changes the existing space in an unpredictable way and surprises. This change, however, is usually not fundamental or permanent. For this reason, Alison Young uses the term "situational art" (Young 2014: 32-33) 2. Street art introduces minor changes 1 For the purpose of this text, the term "street art" is widely understood as various forms of artistic activities, legal as well as illegal, in the public space, excluding architecture and traditional monumental sculpture. I am, however, fully aware of conflicting opinions and the difficulty in defining this type of art, especially if its boundaries are placed based on the sociological point of view, in which street art is derived from illegal activities aimed at reclaiming the public space (Compare: Gralińska-Toborek, Kazimierska-Jerzyk 2013: 19-20). 2 Although I do not agree with the author that the main two reasons why street art "provokes affective intensities within the spectator herself " are: "the artist's desire to make unauthorised images in the face of their prohibition" and "the fact of trespass in the transgression of lines drawing distinctions between »your« property and »mine«" (Young 2014: 32). The knowledge of the illegality of an image need not affect
Special Issue: Street Art and Political Aesthetics in the Contested Urban Contexts
Journal of Urban Creativity, 2023
This special issue delves into the profound and transformative influence of a variety of artworks within urban environments characterized by political contention, with a particular emphasis on their capacity to facilitate activist engagement and dialogue. By challenging prevailing power structures, advocating for inclusivity, and reshaping the dynamics of public spaces, street art emerges as a potent political force in the process of democratizing public spheres. These unconventional modes of artistic expression, when situated in the public domain, serve as influential platforms for amplifying the voices of marginalized communities, thereby promoting civic engagement and reimagining the contours of the public sphere. Through an in-depth exploration of the communicative, participatory and political potential of street art this thematic issue entitled Street Art and Political Aesthetics in the Contested Urban Contexts seeks to shed light on the intricate interplay among. art, urban culture and civic rebellion. This exploration delves into the unique capacity of art to thrive within urban spaces that are perpetually fraught with uncertainty, challenges, and political instabilities. It encompasses discussions pertaining to the critical domains of freedom of expression, public protests, social critique, political engagement, aesthetic tactics, and urban commons in the realm of street art. These discussions underscore the remarkable ability of street art to nurture the aesthetic foundations of political and social actions within the public sphere.
2011
The rapid development of the big European cities in the XXth century and the change of the traditional city into a metropolis ga ve birth not only to an extraordinary dynamic artistic culture but also to a culture of i nterpreting, dedicated to the study and explanation of these urban phenomena and their soci al effects. The aim of this paper is to build a bridge between various practices of contemp orary art as they can be found in public art (to be more specific: site-specific art, as we ill see) and a series of disciplines dealing with the studying of urban space: urban sociology, human geography and the anthropology of the everyday, all inspired by critical theories of culture and society. From this point on, we will be able to meditate upon public art’s role in the urban public space.