Street Art and Graffiti

Why is there so little graffiti in Northern Ireland compared to cities in North America and Europe – including Great Britain, to which it is constitutionally connected, and Ireland, with which it is geographically connected? This question is particularly perplexing given the highly developed political mural tradition on both sides of the sectarian divide in the North, and the almost 15 years that have passed since the signing of the Peace Agreement ending some three decades of militarized conflict. This paper explores the connections between the absence of graffiti, and the street-level structures and processes of reconciliation or conflict –with a specific focus on the geopolitics of paramilitary control within communities throughout Northern Ireland. The contributions of the paper are three-fold: (1) it highlights the importance of graffiti as a (usually neglected) lens for assessing the degree to which the
expected benefits of a peace agreement are experienced at the street level; (2) it addresses the methodological challenge of how to examine something that is not there (specifically, it studies the absence of graffiti in Northern Ireland by comparing it to the logic, mechanics and meanings of graffiti elsewhere); and (3) it questions the well-marketed representation of Northern Ireland as a unqualified case of successful post-agreement peace.
Keywords: graffiti; political geography; Northern Ireland; political murals; ethnic conflict; paramilitaries

Główny cel artykułu to zaprezentowanie i weryfikacja podejścia badawczego, możliwego do zaimplementowania w badaniach street artu na gruncie nauki o komunikacji społecznej i mediach. Dzięki skoncentrowaniu się w trakcie analiz na czterech wymiarach: przestrzeni (gdzie), temporalności (kiedy), reprezentacji (kto) i przekazie (co), możliwe jest pozyskanie kompleksowej wiedzy na temat kluczowych aktorów, propagowanych idei, postulatów i wartości, nakreślenia głównych linii podziału, punktów zapalnych, punktów odniesienia, ikon i postaci symbolicznych. Sztukę uliczną traktujemy tu jako formę społeczno-politycznego komentarza na poziomie lokalnym, przestrzeń miejską jako kanał, a poszczególne przejawy street artu medium komunikacji. Użyteczność propozycji metodologicznej zostanie zweryfikowana na bazie korpusu 195 zdjęć przedstawiających różnorodne formy sztuki ulicznej tworzonej w trakcie protestów w Chile zrobionych przez autorów w grudniu 2019 roku.

The majority of scholarly research on graffiti and street art has examined this phenomenon in terms of its distribution and the nature of the perpetrators. Rarely has the law enforcement response been investigated. To better understand this neglected aspect, the investigators constructed a survey that they administered to a sample of officers in a large Mid-Atlantic police department to determine their attitudes, in particular their perceptions, regarding graffiti, street art, and perpetrators of this behavior. The survey takes into consideration important police-related variables and situational factors to provide a portrait of officer perceptions. The major finding indicates that the shift and race of police officers might have an influence on their decisions to stop, question, and arrest suspects on graffiti and street art vandalismrelated charges. This is consistent with other studies of police perceptions of illegal behavior.

In Athens and Istanbul, two cities that have emerged as epicentres of protest within the broader conjuncture of contemporary political mobilization across the Mediterranean, the transformative potential of political street art has become particularly evident. Staging a dialogic encounter between the two cities, this chapter examines how in each case interventions into public space as well as their circulation in the digital realm create "hybrid space[s] of resistance" that sustain political performances both grounded in the real world and beyond. Attentive to the resonances as well as the differences between the two cities and their respective political configurations, I reflect on manifestations of political street art in the context of contemporary social movements.

Brazilian favelas and peripheries are constantly threatened by the state, from the promotion of extreme precariousness to outright extermination. Yet, the working class therein, especially the young and mostly black, continue to turn everyday life into language so as to account for their world, survive and dream. Drawing on fieldwork as well as on the writings of Jacques Derrida and Homi Bhabha, we arrive at the notion ofsurvival arts, which we use as a descriptor for their artistic production. Through descriptions of funk carioca and xarpi we analyse how survival arts can defy the logic of the commodity-city and present dreams of possible futures.

Graffiti is a popular topic in the sociological, criminological, and linguistic literature with several book length treatments of various types of graffiti including tagging, gang graffiti, murals, and ''bombings''. Yet, political sociologists have paid little attention to the role of graffiti as a form of contentious politics despite the often political nature of graffiti messages. As a result, most of the political research on graffiti is by non-sociologists. We believe this is an oversight and that both political sociologists and social movement scholars need to seriously consider this form of microlevel political participation. In this review we (1) demonstrate why some forms of graffiti should be considered a serious form of political participation; (2) compare and contrast graffiti to other forms of resistance including squatting and culture jamming; (3) review research findings on graffiti; and (4) discuss some of the conceptual and methodological challenges for doing graffiti research. Sociology Compass 7/5 (2013):

Multimodal graffiti are constrained by the environment in which they are
written and by the activities in which graffiti writing takes place. This article examines graffiti collected in Graffiti Park and Nam Van Lake Underground in Macao. The graffiti in the two sites display systematic differences in topics, objectives, subjects, affordance, texture and framing, which are attributed to varied activity types and the multimodality/materiality of public space. Specifically, those in Graffiti Park – a small and secluded area – are products of one-off activities attended by professional writers, ordinary citizens and tourists. Nam Van Lakeside has a more visible space, and yet the graffiti there – largely murals painted by a few commissioned writers – display limited topics/themes under institutional appropriation. The materiality of the wall space also contributes to the variations in styles and contents of graffiti in the two sites.

La ciudad francesa de Nantes y su área metropolitana son reconocido epicentro mundial en cuestiones de arte público, pero también puede buscarse allí un referente en la distinción entre arte "participativo" y "colaborativo", dos adjetivos entre los que cabe una diferenciación tanto social como terminológica. Aquí se ejemplifican por un lado con singulares instalaciones escultórico-arquitectónicas realizadas por artistas internacionales con la participación de la gente local, y con plurales murales de arte urbano pintados en co-laboración por colectivos de artistas, estudiantes de arte, etc.

In the imaginary of nation-states, and in much (forced) migration and border studies, the wall is the metaphor par excellence of ‘hardened, securitised’ and, ultimately, ‘violent borders’ (Jones 2016). It is not incidental that the previous US President’s attempts to further institutionalise virulent anti-immigrant racism found purchase in the rallying cry ‘Build a Wall.’ While they function to restrict movement, walls, fences, and other border barriers are much more than a physical infrastructure separating the interior from the exterior of nationalised space. Although they appear to be a visual synecdoche for national sovereignty, Wendy Brown has argued that the frenzied construction of walls actually coincides with the ‘waning’ of national sovereignty in light of the penetration of neoliberal capitalist globalisation (2010, 23-24). In this introduction, we approach the ‘instability’ of walls (and state power) from another direction: we underscore the ways in which walls, in times of crisis, are repurposed as canvases of resistance, which communicate, amplify, and incite embodied resistance to authoritarianism and state violence. Not only walls built on borders—such as the wall at the Evros/Meriç border built by the Greek government—but walls inside nation-states proliferate, which form part of the hard fabric of our daily bordered reality.

This volume explored the ways mobility, spatiality, resistance, literature, and politics intersect and inform each other. At various points of contact, these concepts can be seen to open up new spaces, highlight possibilities of new becomings, and create new approaches to reading movement. While literature serves as the primary means to discuss these ideas throughout this volume, I would like to end by reflecting on an image that encapsulates all of these ideas and embodies what I believe is at the heart of this collection. While Tatyana Fazlalizadeh's mural on Public School 92 in Harlem, NY may appear to simply depict a young Black woman reading, there is much more occurring in this piece, with much greater implications and relevance to the discussions found in this collection. My concluding remarks, therefore, will be directed toward Fazlalizadeh's mural, but will also be a means to reflect back on the various topics and themes that comprise the volume. I believe the best way to end this collection is to look toward the future. The image of a hopeful future is going to (and ought to) look different than previous images of our history, as Walter Benjamin did with Paul

Cedar Lewisohn, curateur de l’exposition de Street art à la Tate Modern (2008), déclarait dans une conférence internationale à Lisbonne en 2014, que les chercheurs spécialistes de Street art étaient plutôt des fans que des chercheurs critiques. Selon lui, la plupart des chercheurs s’occupant de Street art n’écrivent pas sans distance critique, mais la grande majorité des interventions lors de conférences scientifiques reste de l’ordre du descriptif. Les projets de Street art sont souvent décrits sans qu’il n’y ait une tentative d’explication de ce terme.
Quand Lewisohn affirme que la recherche sur le Street art est le fait de fans, il pourrait avoir raison pour ce qui est de la littérature anglo-saxonne. Cependant, Lewisohn n’a probablement jamais lu de contributions sur le Street art en français, suédois, allemand ou italien. Par conséquent, la question des « fans » se révèlerait un simple problème de communication.Qu’est-ce que c’est le Street art ? Telle était la question des appels à contributions pour deux conférences, l’une à New York en mars dernier et l’autre à Nice, dont cet article est tiré. Depuis environ 2005, des chercheurs ont essayé d’y répondre. Plusieurs d’entre eux n’écrivent pas en anglais. Ma contribution est une courte introduction et discussion du terme Street art, ainsi que des concepts liés à ce dernier, du point de vue d’un chercheur travaillant sur la culture visuelle. Je discuterai la tentative suivante de définition : le street art consiste en des images auto-autorisées, personnages et formes créés ou appliqués aux surfaces de l’espace urbain, qui cherchent à communiquer avec un vaste public. Le Street art est réalisé d’une façon performative et in situ (site-specific), éphémère et participative. Dans la plupart des cas, il est vu sur Internet. Il diffère des graffitis et du Public art.

Political street art and slogans appear as visual markers of the shifting, complex discourses of power struggles, marginality and counter-cultures that establish a new reality that must be seen and heard. As an art form, it is largely connected to and inspired by the existing social conditions. The central Athens of previous years is now a terrain of conflict and metamorphosis and the city’s walls are screaming a thousand stories. In other words, city walls are the canvas and social conditions the paint in a gallery of untold stories. Redefined symbols, decomposed stereotypes, re-visioned aesthetics, and antiracist slogans are the tools for the transformation of walls into social diaries. In this light, street art is examined as a form of social diary, a visual history of marginalised and minority groups. Street art captures the need for self-expression in a changing environment, and street artists actively participate in the production of culture in the micro-level by consciously contributing to the need for urban re-visions.

http://www.soclabo.org/index.php/laboratorium/article/view/460

Resumen: El análisis de manifestaciones artísticas en el espacio público hace necesario ordenar el panorama. Se conocen con la etiqueta
generalista de “graffiti” y “arte urbano“ aunque estas dos fórmulas definen manifestaciones diferentes que solo tienen en común el espacio.
Después de cincuenta años de existencia del graffiti (escribo mi nombre incansablemente) y algunos menos del arte urbano (interpreto
y/o decoro el contexto), han sido asumidos por las instituciones y el mercado del arte, haciendo desaparecer las diferencias que los
separaban, por más que en el ámbito académico estén ampliamente documentadas. Finalmente, el mercado del arte y la administración
pública se han dado la mano apropiándose e intercambiando a voluntad ambas etiquetas “arte urbano” y “graffiti” que han resultado
reapropiadas vaciando su contenido. Esto ha llevado a la creación de “museos de arte urbano”, unos productos híbridos que pervierten
tanto el primer concepto (museo) como el segundo (arte urbano). Para este estudio se propone un espacio imaginario común, el espacio
intermedio, que ofrece la posibilidad de compartir propuestas artísticas. El único límite lo marca el uso de su particular terminología.

The Intermediate Space of Street Art
Abstract:The analysis of artistic manifestations in public space makes it necessary to order the phenomena. They are known by the
generalist label of “graffiti” and “urban art” although these two formulas define different manifestations that have only their location in
common. Over the past fifty years, graffiti (I write my name tirelessly) and urban art (I interpret and/or decorate the environment) have
been assimilated by cultural institutions and the art market, making the differences that separated them disappear, more so than in the
academic fields in which they are widely documented. Finally, the art market and the public officials have agreed to appropriate and
exchange at will the labels “urban art” and “graffiti” and by appropriating them, emptying them of meaningful content. This has led to the
creation of urban art museums, hybrid products that pervert both the first concept (museum) and the second (urban art). For this study a
common imaginary space is proposed, the intermediate space, which offers the possibility of sharing authentic artistic productions. The
only limit is the necessary use of accurate and appropriate terminology.

Cette étude tente, à travers une approche compréhensive, d’analyser les aspects micropolitiques du street art. Dix-huit artistes ont été observés et interviewés individuellement. Les résultats suggèrent que cette pratique artistique est un « objet clivé » (Certeau 1984) qui oscille entre « artivisme » et coopératisme. Si de nombreux street-artistes contestent fortement les normes de la ville contemporaine, d’autres participent plus ou moins directement à leur renforcement. D’après les auteurs, les décideurs, artistes et chercheurs devraient prendre en compte cette hybridation.

Following a comprehensive approach, this study attempts to analyse the micro-politic aspects of the street art world. The data were collected from 18 artists, in participant observations and individual interviews. Results indicate that this artistic practice oscillates between « artivism » and cooperation. If many street artists strongly challenge the norms of the modern cities, others participate more or less directly to their strengthening. According to the authors, decision makers, artists, and researchers should take into account this hybridization.

Shaped in the shadow of colonialism and post-colonialism, visual arts in Hong Kong have wrestled with issues of identity, locality, and international recognition. The lengthy process of the transfer of sovereignty, initiated in 1984 by the signing of the Joint Declaration, inspired contemporary artists in Hong Kong to assert their locality. In the 1990s in particular, since the trauma of the Tian'anmen Incident in 1989, '[a] psychic decolonization occurred which marked out a distance from both of these larger contexts [Western and Chinese art] without simply denying either' (Clarke 2001: 8; also pp. 38-69). The ideological struggles were visible in architecture and offfijicial public art too, which celebrated the reunion both during and after the Handover in 1997. It can also be argued that offfijicial public art in Hong Kong to a certain extent marks an ongoing cultural mainlandization of the urban space by the People's Republic of China (PRC). But how do urban art images, such as street art and contemporary grafffijiti, survive the discourses of post-colonialism in its specifijic forms of de/recolonization and mainlandization, and debates of cultural heritage and indigenous identities? How do they engage with the complex situation? I seek to explore these questions by modifying Henri Lefebvre's (1991) defijinition of space as a continuous process in which the physical, mental, and social aspects of the space are intertwined. 1 In this process of creating the space of urban art images, we need to consider the agency of the creators of urban art images as constructors of the space and its norms, the nationality/ethnicity of the creators, as well as the contextualized formal analysis of the images and the site-responsiveness. 2 Based on intensive periods of fijieldwork research in Hong Kong since 2012, extensive 1 This approach was initially introduced in my conference paper in the Joint Conference of AAS and ICAS '70 Years of Asian Studies', Honolulu (Valjakka 2011b). 2 In order to emphasize the actual interaction between the site, the work(s) and the creator(s), and the continuous impact of this interaction on the meaning of works through a visual dialogue (where one work is created as a response to an already existing one), I prefer using the concept of 'site-responsive' instead of site-specifijic (cf. Kwon 2004/2002 and Bengtsen 2013, Bengtsen 2014. For more see Valjakka 2015c.

This article argues that contemporary street art (or graffiti) uses a unique set of resistant techniques to foreground the contours and shapes of different kinds of structural violence inscribed into, and perpetuated by, the infrastructural layouts of the twenty-first century's increasingly global cities. Graffiti can resist structural violence as it is shaped and exacerbated by-even embedded within-the physical walls of city spaces, ricocheting off into alternative and on occasion more democratic modes of urban habitation. Through a discussion of examples from urban spaces as diverse as revolutionary Cairo, divided East Jerusalem and the West Bank in Palestine, and South African townships and gentrifying East London, the article shows that street art can transform the violent infrastructural strategies of oppressive state governance into a canvas that articulates calls for democratic and political freedom.

Raising the persistence question about architectural entities consists in asking what is necessary and sufficient for a past or future architectural entity, like a building, to exist now. In this paper I investigate how the persistence question about buildings is affected by their spatial relocation. Why do we normally doubt that Notre Dame can survive its meticulous stone-by-stone transfer to Las Vegas? I argue that, since architectural plans are not capable of specifying all the constitutive properties of a building, the source of differentiation among constitutive and non-constitutive properties for buildings lies in a property’s being eligible or not eligible to be aesthetically relevant in the aesthetic judgements about them. As a matter of fact, our aesthetic judgements about buildings often concern, and are grounded on, extrinsic contextual properties. This explains why buildings can usually not survive relocation: because normally there is no basis for ruling out any extrinsic contextual feature of the building as inessential. I also try to explain why the change from thirteenth century Paris to contemporary Paris proved not to be lethal to Notre Dame’s persistence, in spite of its being more significant than other imaginary context changes that we would easily count as fatal.

This article is presented in the form of an illustrated memoire from the Greek bicentenary day (25 March 2021) and the way it was celebrated in Athens. As the Greek capital was under strict lockdown at the time, in view of the COVID-19 pandemic, most of the festivities were cancelled, with the exception of a military parade carried out through empty streets. The city's desolate landscape on that most symbolic day helps rethink Greek biopolitics in the days of postdemocracy.

Details are presented of a recent research project undertaken to ascertain the documentary and descriptive practices associated with graffiti artwork from within the graffiti art community as evidenced by 241 graffiti websites. Domain analytic methodologies following a pragmatic approach to knowledge organization and using evidence obtained from within an artistic community are extremely useful ways to provide insight into what are the most important facets of information to capture for works not often documented from within libraries, archives, and museums. This paper will discuss various methods used to analyze community-driven graffiti art collection, organization, and description in the online environment, the results of which form a part of the basis upon which a faceted KOS can be built.

This article examines graffiti as the illicit strategy of contemporary urban space formation and presents the non-conventional cityscape perception of the graffiti subculture members. The findings of the study based on detailed interviews with graffiti writers from Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, reveal their motivations towards illegal spatial practices and their attitudes towards politics of urban structure and design. The main difference between traditional perception of urban space and the views of graffiti writers lies in the distinction of ‘free’ and controlled, public and private, striated and smooth space experience. The social context of the struggles over ‘free’ urban space is determined by the emergence of symbolic economy in post-industrial city and its hyper-aestheticised and commercialized cityscape that enables the visual resistance – a subversed form of production of symbols known as illegal graffiti practice.

In this chapter, I propose that indigenous graffiti and street art are interconnected with the political mobilization of indigenous groups who actively oppose the structural and systemic histories of violence suffered by indigenous people under settler colonialism. Indigenous graffiti and street art work to destabilize colonial occupations of indigenous territory, by drawing attention to the ways that the existence of settler colonial infrastructure and architecture operates as material evidence of indigenous suffering. By attempting to reclaim the constructed spaces of colonialism through modes of socio-aesthetic intervention, I maintain that the work produced by indigenous graffiti writers and street artists unfold productive strategies of decolonization. My analysis raises questions about the radical potential of indigenous graffiti and street art to delegitimize oppressive social conditions inflicted upon indigenous people by colonial powers.

The present paper focuses on the concepts of urban and linguistic space. It considers the city as a diamesic melting pot. Graffitism is seen as a communication channel that needs to be examined in order to better understand the urban language and its many forms.
Key words: graffiti, linguistics, diamesia

Graffiti is a short-lived form of heritage balancing between tangible and intangible, offensive and pleasant. Graffiti makes people laugh, wonder, angry, think. These conflicting traits are all present along Vienna's Donaukanal (Eng. Danube Canal), a recreational hotspot – located in the city's heart – famous for its endless display of graffiti. The graffiti-focused heritage science project INDIGO aims to build the basis to systematically document, monitor, and analyse circa 13 km of Donaukanal graffiti in the next decade. The first part of this paper details INDIGO's goals and overarching methodological framework, simultaneously placing it into the broader landscape of graffiti research. The second part of the text concentrates on INDIGO's graffiti documentation activities. Given the project's aim to create a spatially, spectrally, and temporally accurate record of all possible mark-makings attached in (il)legal ways to the public urban surfaces of the Donaukanal, it seems appropriate to provide insights on the photographic plus image-based modelling activities that form the foundation of INDIGO's graffiti recording strategy. The text ends with some envisioned strategies to streamline image acquisition and process the anticipated hundreds of thousands of images.

Small towns in Spain’s depopulated areas are currently seeking ways to promote their cultural heritage in their bid to create wealth. Francisco de Goya’s birthplace—Fuendetodos in the region of Zaragoza, Spain—holds a significant ensemble of public art which has not been analysed up to now. It is our purpose to examine the historical evolution of public art in this town from the erection of the Monumento a Goya by artist Julio Antonio in 1920—a major landmark in the history of Spain’s public art—to the creation of the Goya Street Art Museum, an open-air urban art museum that extends throughout the village. Our research work is based on newspaper and periodical material as well as archive documentation and photographs in order to render an accurate account of the history of Fuendetodos’ urban monuments and murals. The analysis of the fieldwork carried out in situ reveals the potential of this town as its collection of open-air contemporary art may serve to revitalize the area and assist in the struggle against depopulation.

In this paper we will analyse street art by focusing on the effects of meaning that this form of art produces in its relationship to urban elements and spaces and, conversely, how these enter significantly into artistic representation. In other words, the central theme will be the complex relationship between pieces of street art and the surfaces used (walls, shutters, barriers, buildings, etc.), which are anything but neutral loca- tions. This structural relationship – which is an internal mechanism of the urban text – raises broad and specifically semiotic questions such as the representation of a city, its internal conflicts and the subjectivities that seek to re-write it.

At the beginning of the (brief) history of street art there was no more bitter enemy than the museum for an art that was born subversive and vandalistic. With time the distances have shortened and the relationship between street art and museum institutions has become more and more ambiguous and incandescent in both directions. From the "museophobia" of the beginning - in part still proudly practiced by some artists such as the Italian Blu, who decided to "sacrifice" some of his historical murals from Berlin and Bologna in order to take them away from the "urban art business" - we have passed to a rampant "museophilia". Attempts at mutual seduction abound: many works by street artists have been exhibited in galleries and museums, while other pieces, such as those by the English artist Banksy, have been sold at exorbitant prices. On the other hand, many museum institutions have organized suggestive exhibitions dedicated to street art, as spectacular as they have been discussed, given that often the pieces exhibited were stolen from public streets without the artists' permission. The aim of this essay is to investigate a) how indispensable the "criminal" element is to guarantee the language of street art production and how much it is therefore possible to musealize street art pieces, considering b) what new fruitful declinations this conflict can imply in rethinking the museum institution and what are the consequences of the widespread aestheticization generated by street art, in order to reconsider the places of the urban.

Murals have become a familiar element in urban landscapes around the world, providing benefits for individuals, communities, and cities. Many murals have been co-opted by city administrations as part of broader municipal policies. Despite the benefits associated with murals, they provoke tensions and contradictions that challenge policymakers, owners, communities, and those involved in their creation. This paper explores and maps the difficulties and challenges associated with placing murals in the public realm, providing a theoretical framework and highlighting their complexity. Additionally, we demonstrate how these challenges may turn into real-life disputes, cause public outrage, and create tensions between stakeholders in a manner which affects cityscape and urban development. Through case-examples from Portland and Philadelphia, we demonstrate how our theoretical framework can be used to better understand these challenges, and to explore how a range of interests might clash in the face of said challenges.

Street art is defined as a contemporary artistic work within an urban landscape created by artists that are part of the broader art community as a whole. These works appeared for the first time in the 1960’s in New York. Street artists are distinctively different from graffiti artists as the engagement is targeting an audience within specific subcultures. Both works vary in visibility, durability, availability, seriality and intensification. Starting in 1976, Ted Stamm made street art work that he labeled “Designators”. The primary methods used in the “Designator” series were stencils sprayed or brushed with paint or stamped adhesive labels. The stencils took the form of the “Dodger”, “T” or “TT” shape and the adhesive labels originated from the “Wooster” shape. Stamm continued the series until 1980 and documented these works extensively over time. The photographic documentation included different one point street perspectives at various locations in New York City. The “Designators” series was created simultaneously with his paintings and works on paper, which were included in galleries, museum exhibitions and included in press articles. The “Designators” works as part of the street art context, could be perceived as a form of resistance to the typical interior formal art structures and the inclusion of alterations within the public urban environment. Stamm’s peers included many artists creating work in relation to the streets of New York City. Richard Artschwager began his “Blps” street art series in 1968 in various street locations. In 1973, Forrest Myer installed “The Wall”, a minimal large scale street mural a few blocks from Stamm’s studio, questioning the concept of public space and scale. In 1976, the same year that Stamm started his Designator series, Richard Hambleton’s police “chalk” outline, part of a “crime scenes” series, started appearing in Lower Manhattan. Also, in 1976, Richard Artschwager installed a number of his “Blps” at the recently opened PS1 in Long Island City. Two years later, in 1978, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “SAMO” tags started appearing around New York City and Sol Lewitt explored “Photogrid” photography documentations of Doors bringing the street inside the art gallery. In 1980, Keith Haring started his graffiti art in subways and was included in a major “Post-Graffiti” exhibition in 1983 at the Sidney Janis Gallery. These are just a few examples of the work that could be found in the streets and subways predominantly in Lower Manhattan at the time.

In this article, the question ‘Why Can't Banksy Be a Woman’ is a point of departure to approach some of the pressing challenges regarding sex and gender in graffiti and street art studies, in order to contribute on the matter of the presence/absence of women graffiti and street artists in this epistemological field. To this aim, I summon feminist contributions on the invisibility of women in the established art world, namely from art historians Linda Nochlin and Griselda Pollock. I map important contributions on the question of women in graffiti, by referring to graffiti scholars Nancy MacDonald and Jessica Pábon-Cólon. As street art has been considered more gender inclusive in regards to conditions of production, I locate restrictions mainly in terms of reception. Finally, I suggest that the question of women in graffiti and street art studies is larger than sex and gender.

“Since the emergence of the global contemporary graffiti and street art, urban spaces have become filled with a variety of techniques and art pieces, whether as a beautification method, commemorative and community art, or even activism. Ecology has also been a small part of this, with growing concern over our environment’s health (as well as our own), disappearing living species and habitats, and trying to imagine a better, less destructive humankind.

But, how can this art – based mostly on aerosol spray cans and thus not very eco-friendly – in urban spaces contribute to ecological awareness? Do nature, animal and plant motifs pave a way towards understanding the environment, or simply serve as aesthetic statements? This paper will examine these questions with the example of Belgrade, Serbia, and several local (but also global) practices. This text is based on ongoing research as part of Street Art Walks Belgrade project (STAW BLGRD) and interviews with a group of artists.”

Key words: street art, graffiti, ecology, environmental art, belgrade

The term Graffiti comes from the Latin being the plural of the verb graffiare (to scratch), it reminds of the way in which the Roman or Greek "vandals" recorded their political beliefs, love statements or even simple protests, on the walls of buildings. This practice is of course common in other civilizations, with more or less the same goal. Printing a text using colored spays and repeating it in a contemporary context, acquires an independent force. The association of casual letters, that seem to be accidental and implicitly their obsessive repetition have an exponential visual impact, but at the same time they contribute decisively to the general ensemble of the public space. Graffiti Art does not require the permission of civil society or the authorities, it is not associated with an ideology or belief but impregnates in the public consciousness a suite of characters that over time become part of it.

Artiklis on tähelepanu all sooline aspekt grafitis ja tänavakunstis kui konteksti- ja kommunikatsioonikeskses kultuuriilmingus. Põhiküsimused on, kuidas soolisus ja sooline kommunikatsioon grafitis avaldub ning milline on grafiti soolisustatud esteetika. Analüüs osutab soolistele klišeedele grafitis ja näitab stereotüüpseid arusaamu laiemas sotsiokultuurilises tähenduses. Teisalt toob uurimus esile ka grafiti ja tänavakunsti rolli sooliste stereotüüpide vaidlustajana ja uudsete tähenduste esiletoojana. Uurimus põimib grafiti ja tänavakunsti käsitlused soouurimusliku lähenemisviisiga ning kasutab uurimismeetodina grafiti ja tänavakunsti kui efemeerse kultuuriilmingu kontekstualiseerimist vaataja perspektiivist. Artikli allikmaterjali moodustavad põhiliselt aastail 2010–2020 jäädvustatud grafitid, mis on koondatud internetiandmebaasi „Grafiti andmebaas“.

Domain analysis is useful for examination of individual spheres of intellectual activity, both academic and otherwise, and has been used in the knowledge organization (KO) literature to explore specific communities and uses, including web pornography (Beaudoin and Ménard 2015), virtual online worlds (Sköld, Olle 2015), gourmet
cooking (Hartel 2010), healthy eating (McTavish 2015), art studies (Ørom 2003), the Knowledge Organization journal (Guimarães et al.
2013), and domain analysis itself (Smiraglia 2015). The results of domain analyses are useful for the development of controlled vocabularies, taxonomies, ontologies, metadata schemas, and other systems for the documentation, description, and discovery of resources, as well as for knowledge discovery in general (Smiraglia 2015; Hjørland 2017). This research describes a methodology for the elucidation of knowledge organization systems (KOS) currently in use on image websites that document graffiti, graffiti art, and street art around the world.

Despite its massive presence in our cities, the accusations of vandalism have caused scholars of Italian language and culture to shy away from the analysis of graffiti. Another factor might also have been a certain traditional elite perspective, to the detriment of ordinariness and of the everyday. In today's society of widespread control of both physical and virtual spaces through capillary video surveillance and online monitoring which sees the usable spaces for dissent reduced graffiti art still represents an opportunity for free communication. Documenting and studying graffiti means participating in a work of democratization of linguistics, lightening it from the redundant burden of the classics, by the rigid reference to standard Italian compared to popular Italian (intended as a variety of speakers from the lower social classes characterized by poor social prestige), and by a certain purism that translates into fear of those evolutionary dynamics of the language that find representation in graffiti, not by chance creator and diffuser of numerous neologisms and linguistic contact.

The present study re-evaluates the relationship between street art and the value-based approach to heritage conservation. The research presents the limitations of the value-based approach, which relate to its conceptualisation of stakeholders, experts and tangible preservation, as well as its distinction between present and past, and tangible and intangible heritage. In response, the paper suggests a performative approach to street art heritage conservation theory and practice. First, the paper introduces the notion of performativity within non-representational theory and its temporary, affective and relational aspects. Drawing further on the performativity approach, street art and urban studies, the paper illustrates and argues that the aesthetic experience of street art does not distinguish between past and present or tangible and intangible; instead, the experience is relational, socio-spatial, temporary and affective. Finally, the research offers a performative methodology for practising relations between street art and heritage.

En el presente trabajo se realizará un estudio de los procesos culturales existentes en la ciudad de Alcalá de Henares en la actualidad a través del arte urbano. Concretamente, se analizarán las representaciones del Quijote, personaje universal de Miguel de Cervantes, en el casco antiguo y en los barrios periféricos de la urbe. Se demostrará cómo la figura del Quijote es un medio para la autorrepresentación de la ciudad. Más allá de las decisiones políticas sobre el arte urbano en el centro histórico de la ciudad, se verá cómo la iconografía del Quijote se consolida como un elemento cohesivo para la creación de un espacio idiosincrásico común para los alcalaínos, que aúna tradición, modernidad y que se debate entre la reivindicación del espectáculo turístico y la autoexpresión vecinal, adaptándose los valores que emanan del centro histórico al uso real del espacio urbano en la periferia.

Im Athen der Gegenwart, getragen von einer städtischen Landschaft geprägt von Krise und Austerität, haben sich Street Art und Graffiti als gesellschaftlich bedeutsame Medien politischer Subversion im öffentlichen Raum etabliert. Die Wände der Stadt legen Zeugnis ab von einem anhaltenden Ausnahmezustand: politische Slogans und Symbole, Portraits von Protest und sozialen Kämpfen sowie expressive Darstellungen des gelebten Alltags der Krise formen ein lebendes Archiv des historischen Momentes. Entlang des empirischen Beispiels Athen widmet sich dieser Beitrag dem politischen Potenzial von visuellen Interventionen im urbanen Raum. Der Fokus liegt dabei explizit auf Arbeiten, die sich kritisch mit dem symbolischen Erbe der Antike auseinandersetzen.

Wie wirken die Worte und Bilder an den Wänden der Stadt auf den urbanen Alltag sowie das kollektive politische Bewusstsein ein? Und welche politischen, womöglich subalternen Möglichkeitsräume entstehen in der Begegnung zwischen Stadtbewohner_innen und Street Art innerhalb der materiellen Konfiguration der Stadt? Die Bedeutung von Street Art und Graffiti liegt hier nicht allein in ihrer repräsentativen Funktion, stets gebunden an den gegebenen sozio-politischen Kontext. Als performative Praxen gestalten sie aktiv den öffentlichen Raum um und schrei- ben alternative Vorstellungen und politische Möglichkeiten in die Oberfläche der Stadt ein.

My essay focuses on the notion of artification, recently emerged in the philosophical and artistic debate. Some case studies show that “public wall paintings” work as an artifying strategy of public space both at a superficial and at a deep level. As regard to the first, a mere decorative effect is produced; while the second, by launching projects which require the coordination of several professional skills and social actors, produces a more radical transformation. The latter notion of artification is more significant than the former because it better expresses the educational value of art and its ability to produce improvement not only of urban areas – made aesthetically more enjoyable – but also of the quality of life of their inhabitants.

Stan 153 is often mentioned as a source of inspiration for the first generations of writers. He has followed the development of graffiti from the tags of 1969 to the 3D pieces of today. In the classic book Getting Up, he helped to tell the story of graffiti, here is his own story.

The focus of this  research is an exploration of aspects of liminality and how it manifests in selected unsanctioned public art interventions in ‘urban places’, specifically, the Johannesburg Central Business District. Liminality informs my own art work and to contextualise my practice I investigate Steven Cohen’s performance/intervention entitled Chandelier (2001-2002), and Alison Kearney’s The Portable Hawkers Museum (2003). I argue that unsanctioned public art maintains a liminal identity, a fluidity of ‘repurposing a space’ that is in constant shift between different dimensions of liminality. Such works create a zone between physical and conceptual space, challenging the relationships between people and places, the artist and the audience. Liminal spaces (such as the underside of bridges for example) provide the platform for new mediation to happen outside of the normal social structures.  Homi Bhabha (1994:54) refers to this as a “third space” where transformation may occur, and it is this transformation of space and experience that I aim to explore in my work. 

In my practical component I present a body of unsanctioned public art interventions consisting of ceramic sculptures placed in urban liminal spaces in Johannesburg. I populate the chosen spaces with imaginative objects that playfully reflect my own cultural hybridity, and resultant liminal existence, in a post-colonial urban society. My practical work thus draws on analyses of the liminal aspects of Cohen and Kearney’s works as well as on aspects of my hybrid existence arising from my status as an immigrant in Johannesburg. Through my art works I attempt to engage with the local inhabitants without the restrictions of institutionalised arenas, allowing for a new experience of both the space and the artwork. Finally I record my own interventions in detail and compile an annotated photographic catalogue to document the sculptures in situ and the ephemeral life span of these unsanctioned public art interventions.

Tatyana Fazlalizadeh is a contemporary African American illustrator whose practice engages with portraiture as a means of addressing social injustices. The artist utilizes the medium of illegal wheat pastings, and her feminist series Stop Telling Women to Smile (STWTS) has won her international acclaim. By integrating an illegal practice into her work, Fazlalizadeh focuses on the reclamation of public space as a social issue, and brings wider public engagement with her activist cause. Her illegal pastings and murals can be throughout Mexico, Europe, and the United States.
I contrast Fazlalizadeh’s illegal street art with her legally-sanctioned murals. In doing so, I ascertain how and why working illegally is integral to her message of reclaiming space. To do this, I look towards other artistic movements which incorporated protest and illegal acts into their aesthetic as a basis for Fazlalizadeh’s work. Key moments of influence for my paper include the British suffrage movement of the early 1900s and the 1968 Paris uprisings. As my conceptual and theoretical framework, I examine the aims of the third wave feminist movement in order to draw out precisely how Fazlalizadeh’s illegal work articulates particular iterations of these goals within the tradition of activist protest. It is the duality within Fazlalizadeh’s STWTS project that I wish to examine, this push and pull between legal and illegal distribution of her activist message. On a more philosophical level, I ask if public space can be reclaimed by women when they must seek and be granted permission to speak.

Street Art & Urban Creativity Scientific Journal – Methodologies for Research, November 2015, 1(1).

Co-authored by:
Gemma Galdon Clavell, Liliana Arroyo Moliner, Eticas Research & Consulting
Marcus Willcocks, Gamze Toylan, Adam Thorpe, University of the Arts London Central Saint Martins

This article is linked to the EU Commissioned 'Graffolution' project and partly discusses  the unique methodology developed by the team at UAL for this project. This methodology utilises design thinking practices and processes to social science research in the context of street art and graffiti within the discussions around art, public space, vandalism, criminology, law and sociology.

La escena actual del arte callejero es amplia y compleja: coexistiendo con prácticas vernáculas, otras formas de hacer graffiti y arte en la calle han venido ganando terreno desde los años noventa, dando lugar a un tipo de arte fuera de los lindes de las instituciones tradicionales. La práctica del graffiti se considera hoy en día una variante de lo que ampliamente es dado en llamarse Street Art, arte callejero o arte urbano, siendo estas categorías confusas y poco exploradas a nivel teórico, susceptibles de incluir manifestaciones estéticas variadas, tales como la música, la danza y el teatro, además de los medios mixtos . Debido a que mucho del arte actual se está realizando en la calle por y para sus usuarios directos, y el carácter marginal respecto del mercado y del circuito tradicional del arte, resulta de gran interés profundizar en los conceptos que serán fundamentales para entender parte de la actividad artística que tiene lugar en nuestra ciudad, cuya escena es cada vez más preponderante y reclama atención. El término “arte urbano” se utiliza comúnmente para referirse a la actividad de carácter artística o expresiva que se realiza en la ciudad. Como consecuencia de utilizar el mismo término se ha dado lugar a un uso indiscriminado que oscurece el significado que cada tipo de actividad tiene de específica: Si entendemos que todas estas manifestaciones estéticas / expresiones son de índole diferente y de intenciones también claramente diferentes, tenemos que repensar las categorías que estamos utilizando.

Lo que en la actualidad denominamos neograffiti se inició como práctica de una subcultura definida, sufriendo cambios conceptuales, formales y fácticos. Hoy en día se incluye tanto una pieza de tipo Hip Hop, como los murales al aerosol o medios mixtos, stickering, stencil art, y otras formas de intervención. Se asocia al arte urbano no sólo a grupos adolescentes sino a comunidades y agrupaciones artísticas, algunas de las cuales promueven activismos y otras totalmente por fuera de esos intereses. Algunas de las realizaciones se han insertado en un mercado de arte tradicional y han llegado a museos, otros se han posicionado dentro de un circuito propio y otras tantas permanecen en los lindes o bien totalmente fuera del circuito artístico.
Este trabajo propone reunir, comentar y comparar una serie de términos y categorías frecuentes en los estudios sobre arte urbano, poniendo en contexto su uso con la práctica artística local, para posibilitar un análisis crítico de los mismos y proporcionar una plataforma de discusión que vaya en paralelo con la investigación de campo. Con la intención de aportar al estudio del postgraffiti y
Street Art  algunos lineamientos sólidos sobre los cuales trabajar y generar consensos con la comunidad académica interesada en el tema.

Palabras clave: Street Art – graffiti – arte en la calle – arte público – intervenciones urbanas.

Putting up color photographs with captions is a rare trend in urban art images. So is engaging with the less fortunate people from developing countries. Through visual dislocation that highlights the stark juxtaposition of content and the site, Canadian artist Kaid Ashton has managed to raise awareness of social inequalities. Furthermore, by establishing the Home School Project, Ashton has employed art teaching to interact with local communities especially in Manila. In this article, I will examine the art projects of Kaid Ashton to reveal how the multiple forms and levels of interaction between arts, public space and art teaching come together in his oeuvre.
Keywords: Kaid Ashton, Home School Project, photographic series