Unsanctioned Art

In the reading, Two Way Street, Lydia Yee discusses photography from New Documents. She argues that this photo exhibit explored personal style rather than conveying a social message. The photographers involved with New Documents were more interested in living life than reforming it. Other artists involved in the Information exhibition embraced mass media and used photography to document their art. The banal is discussed again as Yee references to Ed Ruscha’s, Every Building of the Sunset Strip. In the late 60’s, Acconci, like Ruscha, balanced his work between street photography, photojournalism, and Conceptualism. Lee Friedlander's work influenced Acconci's Following Piece. By including his shadow, Friedlander's photographs exerted philosophical and reflective characteristics. 

New York City, 1966. Lee Friedlander.

In Martha Rosler’s, The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems, she photographs the area in New York known as “skid row.” She includes words along with her photographs in an effort to criticize. The existence of the words breaks the debate between documentary and conceptual photography.

 The Bowery In Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems, Martha Rosler. 

Using photography to archive the urban transformations in China, photographer Sze Tsung Leong documents historic areas reduced to rubble using a large format camera. Photographer Zoe Leonard has been archiving small shops disappearing in gentrifying neighborhoods. Nils Norman photographs in commercial and financial districts that include barriers toward its inhabitants. Francis Alys created a photographic archive through walking. All of these photographers utilize the street in their art. The complexity and ever shifting movement of the street provides artists with subjects being reinvented and paths to be remapped on a daily basis.

No. 3 Huashizhong Fourth Lane, Chongwen District, Beijing, 2003.  Photo credit: Sze Tsung Leong. 

Francis Alys created a photographic archive walking through the streets of Mexico City. In a similar work, Green Line, he creates a metaphor about the history of Jerusalem. Using his body and a can of green paint, he emulated the concrete partitions separating Israelis and Palestinians by walking through a divided country. Alys' direct contact with the land was a performance that revealed the complexity of the inhabitants of the space. This work has been argued to blur the distinction between art and documentation.

http://techtv.mit.edu/videos/2918-sometimes-doing-something-poetic-can-become-political-and-sometimes-doing-something-political-can-become-poetic

Robin Rhode also used a simple line to create stop-action videos. He physically engages with his work, as Alys does. Both artists approach the representational power of the street by direct interaction with it.

Catch Air: Robin Rhode @ Wexner Center.

In the reading, The Urban Event: Spectacle, Resistance, and Hegemony, Karen Jones addressed the powers of removal in historical terms by noting the Native American practice of Potlatch, which was the “destruction of property to an act of communal social exchange/negotiation value.” She stated that the practice of the potlatch is very similar to the riot. The 1965 Watts Riots challenged the systems of power and the modes of transformation within the city of New York. The merger of art practice and social behavior politicized events.

Merriam- Webster Dictionary.

Graffiti art emerged as urban youth claimed the streets as public spaces available for representation. Graffiti artists used public space to gain cultural validation and as a forum to comment on the social order. Their art was a representation of the experience of the postmodern city. The urban social conditions in New York during the late 70’s and early 80’s were unequal and graffiti art politicized these conditions. Jean-Michel Basquiat used graffiti to address and critique the dominating influences within the art world. His work revealed the separations within classes in a postmodern city. 

Untitled, Basquiat.

The City of Chicago considers all types of graffiti vandalism and therefore, the gesture of graffiti is not a welcomed one.

http://www.cityofchicago.org/city/en/depts/streets/provdrs/graffiti_blasters.html

The argument between graffiti as vandalism and graffiti as art continues to be an ongoing debate. But who is to decide what is considered art and what is considered vandalism?

A scene from Beat This! A Hip Hop History, 1984.

According to Jones, the word “riot” is synonymous with the re-negotiation of power. The act of resistance challenges an existing order and becomes social domain. Riots are political, social, and activate public space. She addresses the Tompkins Square Riot of 1988 as a significant conflict. The East Village art scene forced rents up and displaced residents who had been living there for a very long time, similar to what has happened in the Pilsen neighborhood. This transformed the neighborhood and displaced people, creating a recycled neighborhood. Because of gentrification, there were a large number of homeless people who had taken up residence in the Tompkins Square Park. The police tried to enforce a curfew, which they felt would clean the park of the homeless. The riot occurred through the effort of people to claim access to public space. 


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfvwUYQUwjM&feature=related


Wicker Park experienced a similar cycle of change in the 1990’s. Many of the artists that I knew, including myself, who lived in Wicker Park, moved to Pilsen because the rents in Wicker Park sky rocketed and the rents in Pilsen were more affordable, creating yet another cycle of gentrification.

http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/2159.html

The restructuring of the Tompkins neighborhood left its inhabitants feeling abandoned. According to Jones, homelessness is a result of urbanization and a technology based economy. This is a topic of discussion that has existed within all of the readings so far, and is a reality in society to this day. Gary Simmons's Everlast Champion is a comment on identity within the hip-hop culture which, according to the documentary, Beat This! A Hip Hop History, grew out "devastation, bad housing, gang wars, and desperation." In Beat This!, Dj Kool Herc takes a drive through the Bronx ghetto, exposing the abandoned. 

An scene from Beat This! A Hip Hop History

Just as art practices reclaim agency for people who are oppressed by the realities imposed by the postmodern city, the riot has become an urban event, and street art has become a form unrestrained revelry.