Week 11: "Whose World is This:" Graffiti Around the Globe and the Public Space

I really liked the Spray Can book for this week. Although it did not offer a lot of text, mostly photographs through a variety of regions, I thought it really clearly demonstrated the most essential parts of graffiti as hip hop.

First of all, I loved the way the text talked about how European artists saw what this youth movement in the United States was doing, and they really dug on it. These artists from the UK, France, Spain, and lots of other places all saw the dissident nature of the art as well as the powerful visual aesthetics that these kids were pioneering. Since the abstract expressionists, the United States has been the site of fresh ideas for the arts, and this outsider culture became part of that trend. The pictures later in the book confirmed that the rest of the world could certainly hang with the styles of the New York crews. But, I could see where the authors were coming from when they said you could identity a graffiti piece that was not from inside the epicenter of the Hip Hop Nation. The global pieces lacked some of the reappropriation of imagery and symbols to suggest a political message. There was a certain bite missing, even from some of the work done outside of New York. But regardless, there was certainly diversity and a sense of commonality in all of the work; the global graffiti represented the universal and the local potential for hip hop expression.

Another thing I find really fascinating about graffiti is how it is a signification of people who do not feel a connection to the public space, or feel excluded from positions of power. I thought the quote that most directly embodied how graffiti recreates and reimagines the public space was from 3D of Bristol (interestingly a non-New Yorker): "Maybe in the eyes of the town I'm not so important... but I live here and I should have as much say as anyone else, and that's why I go out and paint" (10). To me, graffiti seems to say that the space around us is not designed by us or built with our needs in mind. Therefore, we are going to put ourselves into the mix, we are going to take on these foreign structures and make them uniquely ours. If this is going to our lived environment, then it should feel like I have say in its feel. Also the conflicts with authorities over graffiti seems to get at the fundamental question of what clean is, what defiling a public space means, and who has the power to alter the environment? If we step back and look, there is nothing functionally that graffiti can do to a building or train side that will hurt it, baring covering vital windows or something security items. If it's just a plain, blank wall, why does society feel like this cannot be used as a spot for artistic expression? "Invading" this space is very political, and often the messages related to the plight of outsiders trying to find legitimacy.

That legitimacy they are looking for is interesting, too. As we have talked about in class, often getting legitimacy is double edged, because with too much legitimacy, the cultural capital of being a dissident art form sort of wears away. Does the legitimization of graffiti in the form of college design classes or (from last week) the use of poetic meter to describe rap lyrics take away from the culture of resistance? Does this make hip hop part of mainstream, and thus, destroying some of its potency? The article on Shaping Visual Culture seemed to suggest to me that if graffiti is now just another type face, then does it still have the strong political message of invading the public space/respectability?