sTReEt aRT
sTReEt aRT
sTReEt aRT
sTReEt aRT
Street Art is a diverse, constantly evolving art form, one that
moves across the derelict buildings, bus shelters and hoardings of
cities across the world. Graffiti galleries on the internet take the
street art scene from local to global, in your face but transient. The
genre is as difficult to pin down as is to define - shifting rules
apply. Street art has its roots in history, echoing cave paintings and stenciled slogans and images in political campaigning. The work
collected by the V&A is figurative, rather than based on writing.
Urban art delivers social commentary while illustrating the
subconscious of the 21st century city. Traditional genres are newly
interpreted: portraiture, surrealism, pop art. Random references and
symbols run through the street art story: Warhol's kids stencil film
stars, arte povera students recycle free stickers, political
propagandists take on the self-promoting signature taggers. Narratives
emerge, visual worlds are created. Politics are less discussed, more
shouted. A psychedelic sense of visual humour bounces through.
Everything is a fair subject: spiky comments on the state of the world
exist alongside images of forgotten celebrities of yesteryear. There is
no common aesthetic, more an attitude: irreverence, democracy and
freedom.
The V&A collected these works in an effort to capture an
ephemeral contemporary aesthetic and a form of printmaking that have
influenced mainstream graphics. Most notably recent advertising has been
using the language of street stencils, plundering underground visuals
in an effort to appeal to the young consumer.
There exists an energetic production of websites and magazines that
archive this work, created by a network of peers. The one defining
feature of the genre is its accessibility. It is unexpectedly available
for view on the boarded up windows on your high street, or shared on the
internet for all to see. Although street art is a genre defined by its
outsider status, some galleries are now exhibiting it, bringing it in
from the outside.
The V&A has traditionally collected new forms of printmaking, as
well as ephemera and various forms of graphic art. Artists seen here use
varying methods of image-making, ranging from simple stencilling to
digitally printing multiple stickers, all of which can be grouped
together under the heading 'printmaking'.
No comments:
Post a Comment