Thanks to recent patronage and recognition by historically holier-than-thou academies — to wit, JR’s TED Prize, Banksy’s Oscar nomination for Exit Through the Gift Shop, even Shepard Fairey’s moonlighting turn as political propagandist — street art is under a mainstream microscope like never before. Grimy subversion is trendy again among the artistic aristocracy, and this time the momentum isn’t limited to a couple New York City crossover street artists with interesting names and/or marketable minority status. Rest assured that, just as disco supplanted the longhair political ballad, as Eminem’s daughter replaced Eminem’s homicidal mushroom trips, as the Macarena hokey-pokeyed all over Cobain’s grave, pretty shiny things will soon return to favor — Jeff Koons, breath easy.
Until then, however, the masses need to prep for First Thursdays and Third Firstdays in Soho and Soma, in Silver Lake and the Marigny and the Pearl, at Moma and Lacma and the De Young and other venues and warehouse neighborhoods where the promise of free Rossi and cocktail wieners attract the more self-respecting and educated of the city’s impoverished alcoholics. They need banter material, and to banter passably, one must know enough to feign expertise — preferably in something current, hip, and, crucially, appealing to attractive members of the desired sex.
Herein, as always, enters Taschen: In Trespass: A History of Uncommissioned Urban Art, the iconic publishing house provides an encyclopedic overview of 150 of the most influential and relevant players in the game today. In profiling the core of the famously insular clique, Trespass sheds light upon an esoteric world dominated by semi-anonymous characters and complex discourse over the last few decades.
The book, released worldwide earlier this year, features context and commentary from the likes of Marc and Sara Schiller (Wooster Collective founders) and Carlo McCormick (senior editor at Paper magazine) alongside sprawling images tracking the evolution of the art form from its emergence in the early 1980s through the present day. The inconsistent quality and chronological distribution of the book’s photos would seem to owe much to advances in technology: Due to its ephemeral nature, urban art has long proven difficult to document, but thanks to the ubiquitous camera phone and the viral immediacy of twitter and its ilk, most works by today’s prominent artists are captured, disseminated and critiqued by the graph-geek crowd long before city workers or property owners get a chance to paint over them.
Portraying works by Keith Haring, Richard Hambleton and Paolo Buggiani, Trespass traces the roots of modern street art to Banksy and other contemporaries while posing a fundamental question about the motivation of its practitioners: Is street art an evolutionary step in the progression of human visual communication, or simply an instinct to mark territory as a dog would with its urine? This latter notion of human “aesthetic territorialism,” editor Ethel Seno asserts, dates back to the Paleolithic, in the form of cave paintings. And thus the crux of the debate is clarified: Is street art intended to push boundaries and awaken a systematically numbed public, as many of its major players claim, or is it merely “Kilroy was here” delivered in ever-more-elaborate forms? In other words, for all the artists’ grandiose proclamations of subversion and iconoclasm, is the basic motivator really just a yearning for recognition? In the case of NYC train bombers, BNE guy, Neckface, and your average neighborhood tagger, the answer would appear to be a resounding “yes.” When it comes to Banksy and Swoon, among others, the verdict is “uhhhh…well, that, uh…depends?”
To step backward for a moment — and not to get too abstractly philosophical up in here — many artists do seem to crave recognition and its attendant trappings of respect and, with the right medium and image, riches. Banksy can spit in the face of collectors and authority all he likes, but he’s no fool — he knows the best way to make a name (and a few enemies) is to upset the status quo. So when street artists attribute their work’s inspiration to principled flashpoints like “promoting the First Amendment” or “speaking truth to power,” digest this with the knowledge that controversy and artistic emergence are often symbiotic.
This, as outlined in Trespass, is where the prospect of publicity and mainstream acceptance threatens to endanger the multifaceted medium: Street art began as a form of protest — against the galleried art world, against municipal intrusion on freedom of expression, against crooked politicians, against the concept of rules and authority in general (although the anarchist angle rings hypocritical considering that old-school street artists operated under rules of etiquette so revered that they were often backed up with the promise of violence). Now, with its international profile on the rise and its most prominent artists on display in chic galleries and auction houses on both sides of the Atlantic, street art must accept the fact that it has become, in large part, a contributor to the art-world status quo. While perhaps not a full-privileges member of the establishment just yet — with Warhol’s Marilyn portraits in mind, let’s wait five or so years before issuing such a declaration — the subculture has surrendered some measure of its power to subvert simply by virtue of gaining acceptance. As the authors of Trespass point out, a fundamental tenet of street art is that it question general consensus from an outsider’s perspective — from the viewpoint of the willful nonparticipant oppressed by the whims of society’s majorities. The question is, will the medium’s leading artists retain the ability to effectively speak truth to power if they’re on the inside looking out? Can street artists still subvert now that their work has been sanctioned by the powers that be (cops excluded, of course)?
To that end, street art’s celebrities must reassess the impetus behind new work: With a newly-informed public finally thinking critically (and en masse) about street art — that is, dismissing authorities’ adorably outdated blanket condemnations of street art as vandalistic rubbish — the audience for such artworks has grown dramatically of late. Whereas street artists originally painted and drew with only their fraternity in mind, striving to out-do the next guy in terms of innovation and — perhaps more importantly — base prolificness, the primary audience of today’s stars has expanded to include the art establishment and the general public. With this in mind, street artists stand to make money (and plenty of it). One must assume that this will affect the intentions of some street artists while encouraging more persuadable (or desperate) practitioners of classically acceptable artistic genres to try their hand at street art.
The relationship between street art and the gallery crowd has recently undergone a radical reinvention, both following and stoking renewed public interest in, and acceptance of, prominent artists and works. This, in turn, is placing successful street artists in a conflicted position, one in which commercial success may prove groundbreaking while simultaneously calling into question the artist’s ability to carry out one of the original aims of their craft. How this will all play out is anybody’s guess, but Taschen’s Trespass does well to supply readers with the street-art background necessary to formulate such a prediction — a prediction, we remind you, that should prove très useful at the gallery next week when you’re trying to impress that waif with the regrettable fixie tattoo. And don’t forget a Ziploc: Nothing screams “breakfast!” and “free!” like a pile of soggy celery sticks and picked-over cheese wheels. Godspeed.
