Reflection of the lecture and my curatorial project
The lecture considered how the qualities and layers of space/place add to, interact with and shape the work. Primarily, places were categorised into the physical aspects of space and the layers of historical context and use, with my project focusing on the latter aspect. Street art has a strong relationship with the cultural aspects and history of the city, such as street culture. Hughes (2009) describes street art as an inclusive and diverse artistic expression in an urban context directly derived from the graffiti revolution. Powers (1996) indicates that graffiti was often an imitation of hip-hop culture and that it attracted the most media attention of all elements of the hip-hop subculture in New York. Therefore, it can be argued that street art has aspects of street culture inherited from graffiti. In addition, street culture shares space with diverse disciplines, including anthropology, art (both art history and visual arts), community social work, criminology/criminal justice, cultural studies, fashion, film studies, human geography, popular music studies and sociology (Ross et al., 2020). The ‘street’, the space occupied by these disciplines, is an independent entity where people live, move and sometimes work, as it refers to a specific site as a living cultural collective, and within the boundaries of the street a myriad of economic, political and social activities and interactions are found. I think that the themes addressed by street art have a deep connection to this site of the street.
Moreover, a process-oriented approach to street culture releases the essentialised, singular or static notion of spatialised culture into its place and instead understands street culture as a spatialised connection point between a broader series of flows. If the space in which street art is installed is represented as part of a fluid and open public space, it can be conceptualised as a ‘site (stay)’, a public space in which people can stay, interact and develop different activities. (Massey, 2005) Accordingly, street art in public space should be in a space that is accessible to everyone because it belongs to that place. For street art, the concept of site is one of the crucial elements for its authenticity.
References:
Hughes, M. L. (2009). Street art & graffiti art: developing an understanding.
Massey, D. (2005). For Space. Thousand Oaks, Sage Publications.
Ross, J. I., Daichendt, G. J., Kurtenbach, S., Gilchrist, P., Charles, M., & Wicks, J. (2020). Clarifying street culture: Integrating a diversity of opinions and voices. Urban Research & Practice, 13(5), 525-539.
Powers, L. A. (1996). Whatever happened to the graffiti art movement?. Journal of Popular Culture, 29(4), 137.
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