Art in the Streets

Art in the Streets on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles from mid-April to August, 2011, asserted itself as the first major survey of graffiti and street art in the United States. I visited the exhibition in the first few weeks with, I admit, somewhat biased notions. Antithetical was a word that kept bumping around in my head. 

Living in Philadelphia in the 1990s I hung out with graffiti writers. In 2011 I was having a hard time syncing the phenomena of making marks in places where one shouldn’t with institutionalization. Once institutionalized, graffiti conforms—or sags, you might say—to an existence it just nearly escaped. 

The crowds at Art in The Streets. Photo by Gregory Bojorquez, from MOCA.

My sister was with me. As we made our way through the exhibit between high flyaway walls covered, painted on, and pasted with street art, she said she felt like we were at a trade show and that all of this was for sale. We emerged from a aisle that opened onto a Banksy installation. How did he get in here without anyone knowing him? I wondered. The anonymous Banksy’s irony-infused stencils show up in towns like crop circles—contrarian icons that both rankle officials and bestow joy upon those whose properties have been “defaced.” His work has occasionally been covered—protected—with Plexiglas. 

I am told the art of graffiti was unintentionally invented by a man with the moniker “Cornbread” in the late 1960s. Cornbread spray-painted tags across Philadelphia professing love for a woman names Cynthia. Perhaps, however, if you’re splitting hairs, the Paleolithic cave paintings executed over eighteen thousand years ago in Lascaux, France, may serve for a suitable origin. But who’s to say all of this is not some form of cosmological graffiti?

The culture of late capital affectionately embraces street art precisely for the authenticity it represents. Graffiti has a brash brand of conscientiously oblivious naïveté—there’s a whole documentary on the phenomenon and its DIY origins in the 1990s. Ostensibly, street artists paste their names and pictures on the wall for nothing other than recognition. They don’t want money for that stencil. But what becomes of certain brands of this brute repetition? Shepard Fairey pasted his Andre the Giant stickers all over the world. You saw them on newspaper boxes, bus stops, train stations, and the restroom at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence (maybe). This dynamic of connecting the dots is exciting and satisfying if for no reason other than it becomes familiar. (No reference to Damien Hirst’s eleven simultaneous exhibitions at Gagosian intended—but on second thought...). 

What’s wrong with this picture?

Every once in a while the canon of art, existing as it does in an ideological vacuum, springs a hole, seems incomplete, and starts taking in air. Plug the hole! someone exclaims. And Barry McGee, Shepard Fairey, and Banksy are stuffed in to fill the hole. 

However, an exhibition of street art on the cusp of canonization becomes an anthropological exhibition as well. Perhaps this is why I liked the installation Street best of all the works I saw in Art in the Streets. In Street, Todd James, Barry McGee, Stephen Powers, Devin Flynn, Josh Lazcano, Dan Murphy, and Alexis Ross, rather tongue-in-cheek-ly, created a mini-world of detritus and urban living in one corner of the Geffen. This installation reproduced the canvas onto which street art is put—down to the can on a bodega shelf—like a diorama in a natural history museum. 

Street on Vimeo

Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” written in the mid-1930s, is the go-to essay for those who want to understand—and have the fortitude to unpack—the academic use of the word “aura.” Benjamin defines aura as “a strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be.” (source, p. 23) Benjamin’s version of “technological reproducibility” does not ruin art, as one might assume in our slow-everything, DIY-loving era, but allows for a progressive critique of the elitism that had wormed its way into the tradition of “high” art. In other words, Benjamin was happy to chip away at the hierarchy that protected “art,”—that imprisoned art—for the benefit of any1%.   

Street art on the street is devoid of the aura of which Benjamin writes. Escorting street art inside states that an elite invitation has been extended. Yes, even Benjamin could not finish chipping away at what has become of the art market. The art market would not be a market without its hierarchy. Graffiti artists, whether they know it or not, are now on the payroll.