Special Issue: Street Art's Politics and Discontents

Journal of Urban Creativity, 2023

This special issue delves into the profound and transformative influence of a variety of artworks within urban environments characterized by political contention, with a particular emphasis on their capacity to facilitate activist engagement and dialogue. By challenging prevailing power structures, advocating for inclusivity, and reshaping the dynamics of public spaces, street art emerges as a potent political force in the process of democratizing public spheres. These unconventional modes of artistic expression, when situated in the public domain, serve as influential platforms for amplifying the voices of marginalized communities, thereby promoting civic engagement and reimagining the contours of the public sphere. Through an in-depth exploration of the communicative, participatory and political potential of street art this thematic issue entitled Street Art and Political Aesthetics in the Contested Urban Contexts seeks to shed light on the intricate interplay among. art, urban culture and civic rebellion. This exploration delves into the unique capacity of art to thrive within urban spaces that are perpetually fraught with uncertainty, challenges, and political instabilities. It encompasses discussions pertaining to the critical domains of freedom of expression, public protests, social critique, political engagement, aesthetic tactics, and urban commons in the realm of street art. These discussions underscore the remarkable ability of street art to nurture the aesthetic foundations of political and social actions within the public sphere.

Art’s practical place in reconstituting the urban space as one of the defining elements of urban culture renders a twofold role. The role of art in the neoliberal urban planning shows that art is an integral part of current capitalist processes that are turning the neoliberal art subject in a source of capital—both as a resource for tourism and a real estate investment. However, recent research has found that arts and art establishments are not as significant in gentrification processes as before (Grodach, Fostor, Murdoch 2018). Indeed, art has been both a product of and a response to the unequal distribution of resources and visibility in the city through the processes of new urban planning. For example, a growing resistance against neoliberal urbanism in Europe (Colomb & Novy 2016) demonstrates the relationship of artist communities and neighborhood organizations and challenges the prescriptive approaches to art’s role in neoliberal aestheticization.

Horizontes Antropologicos, 2019

This paper addresses the current co-optation of street art into an uncritical aesthetic supplement to the process of neoliberal urbanisation, by focusing on its unresolved relation with its own site. This is done in three steps. First, via a perambulating immersion into the complexity of a specific site. Second, via a critical engagement with the form and politics of contemporary street art. Third, via a strategic speculation on the relation between the notions of art, urban and site. Street art’s current impasse, I argue, paradoxically depends on its incapacity to become properly urban. A urban-specific street art, I contend, is not a decorative veneer nor an enchanting disruption to dramatic processes of urbanisation: it is a force-field in which these processes are made visible, experienceable, and thus called into question. The ‘Olympic’ works of JR and Kobra in Rio de Janeiro, and the iconoclastic performance by Blu in Berlin, are used to illustrate and complement the argument.

User Experience and Urban Creativity Journal , 2020

Rebellious artists have always engaged with issues of oppression and exploitation–by-products of colonialist and capitalist systems–throughout history from slavery and resource extraction; to exploitative labor practices and the environmental consequences of industrialization; and human rights movements and climate change anxieties of the past century. Arts that take place in urban struggles are not about igniting a change but are about creating unmediated spaces and instances of emancipated subjects. The authors in this issue analyze various forms of art within economic, cultural and social urban contexts to shed light on the complexity of modern urban life and struggles for more just cities. Perhaps now it is more pressing than ever to acknowledge, examine, and reect upon both historic and perpetuating inequalities in urban social life. It is imperative to talk about art and its involvement with urban struggles as pertaining to the re-creation rather than the consumption of the city. Therefore, this special issue’s contributors engage in key areas of the socio-political relationships with new urban poetry--what the reconfiguration of dierence, equality, and equity entails at present moment in the urban space for art and artists. . This issue further aims to construct bridges between the contemporary practices of art for the urban public and the critiques of the city generated in disciplines such as urban sociology and human geography, informed by critical theories of urbanism, society, and culture. The issue opens with Philipp Shadner’s discussion of the 1970s punk movement, which not only questioned and provoked aesthetic values but also has had a major influence on the multitude of styles of urban art until the present. Shadner gives us insights into the history of the punk movement, the symbols and slogans punks used and still use not only for tagging urban spaces, but also put temporarily or permanently on their skins and/or their clothes to create a visual struggle against the conformist mainstream society. Arthur Crucq’s article analyses the social and political role of collaboratory art in an urban community in The Hague, Netherlands. Using examples of textile installations, Crucq’s discussion centers on recognizing community art projects as autonomous platforms for the development of political agency in the urban space. Jeni Peake looks at street art activism from the perspective of linguistics. Peake explores English graffiti found in urban spaces in the city of Bordeaux, France. With a large number of graffiti examples adhering to many themes of social struggle, Peake’s article seeks to establish to what extent the use of English could be understood as a political or at least rebellious and creative act. Angelos Evangelidis examines the political posters on the walls of the streets in Athens that worked as both a visual and political platform for the anti-austerity movement in Greece (2010-2015). Furthermore, Evangelinidis’ literature review shows that the dialectical relationship between urban space and visual practice is the key to map the process of art’s role in social struggles.

2019

The proliferation of visual practices, engagements, and tactics on the streets and plazas of the cities connect art to the political constitution of local struggles on the one hand, and the global grassroots politics of the social movements, on the other. This project investigates the ideologies, relationships, meanings and practices that arise from the diverse interactions among the three social spheres: urban space, art, and social movements. In an innovative and multidisciplinary fashion, it addresses the pressing question in humanities and social sciences : How does art, as a cultural form, partake in contemporary urban transformations and social struggle ?