It's Reigning Men, Urban Art's Robin Hoods by Rebecca Geldard

4 September 2008

For Rebecca's historical analysis of the Urban Art movement, we have added a few Saturday@Phillips lots coming up for auction as a reference to the artists she discusses below.

Auction details:
Saturday 6 September 2008 12pm
Howick Place London SW1P 1BB

As the Weather Girls unwittingly forecasted in their 1982 anthem ‘It’s Raining Men’, once again, as far as contemporary art is concerned, "the street's the place to go". Urban art, street art, vandalism, call it what you will, ‘post-graffiti’, this emergent genre is moving ever further from its gangland origins and into new areas of socio-political and art historical critique. An art-savvy graphic street language has materialised out of the chemical residue of the mass “bombing” of public surfaces during the Hip Hop hey day of the 1980s, as rudely political as the tag and tactically placed around the city as any fine art intervention. The current breed of urban artists, like their predecessors Haring and Basquiat, appear to move without compunction between media, creative disciplines and sites – from the street to the museum by way of the gallery. These shape-shifting shadow people are riding roughshod over the rules on interdisciplinary collaboration and public protest.

Keith Haring, Untitled on Houston Street New York, 1982. Original no longer existing.

Within the urban art dust storm, whipped up by the media around the international activism of Banksy (Lot 243), is a divergent mix of (almost exclusively male) practitioners playing with the laws of the street. From city to city the issues of the day, and means and modes of dissemination may differ, yet a conceptual approach to message placement provides a temporal thread through them all. Naturally CCTV and criminal damage legislation have changed the ways in which artists are using public spaces. Echoes of the calligraphic spray-paint aesthetic associated with Hip Hop, remain yet, more recently, the focus has been on (more speedily executable) stencilled imagery made famous by influential Parisian Blek le Rat and, later, Banksy. But urban art is evolving as quickly as the built environments out of which it has emerged; each new form of expression made in response to and immediately contextualised within an appropriated mix of stylistic conventions and radical gestures.

Lot 267, Blek le Rat, Desert Storm, 2007

The gradual drift of urban artists towards the pictorial indicates a desire to communicate to a wide audience, separating them from exponents of modern graffiti whose bold handwriting has traditionally been all about local sub-cultural territorial boundaries. Text and image are employed with an art-historical knowingness to deconstruct everyday signage, commercial and political propaganda. The studio has become a test-site for the public execution of ideas, the gallery and the web, intellectual spaces within which to communicate their aims as artists and provide revenue for their efforts. But when urban art moves off the streets, some of the cultural fabric and politics of the public sphere is inevitably dragged with it – with problematic but undoubtedly interesting results. For there is a sense of satirical play to the way these artists operate between the public and private sphere – they often appear to acknowledge the shifting plates of art and commerce without fear of the fault lines.

Lot 271, Faile, It Happens Everyday , 2007

Take Brooklyn-based international art collective Faile and the LA-based Shepard Fairey, for example, who, since the 1990s have worked their way into the American consciousness with very different brands of fly-posted critique. The printed aesthetics favoured by both appear openly derived from the work of Pop artists such as Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. Since the 1990s, Faile has been developing a series of comic-book antiheroes out of a mish-mash of loaded cultural symbology, which they then recontextualise as propaganda, art and advertising through the languages of the party political poster, gallery installation and even the free ads. The most recent work to come out of Fairey’s portentous ‘Obey, Giant’s sticker project, which began with the mass wheatposting of an image of wrestling legend Andre the Giant (Lot 272), is that call-to-arms limited edition poster of Barack Obama labelled with the tagline “HOPE”. A portion of the sales proceeds has reportedly gone into a national poster campaign for the presidential candidate.

Lot 269, Shepard Fairey, Two Works: (i) Andre the Giant Leopard Print, 1994; (ii) Original Giant Fax , 1995

Shepard Fairey, Barack Obama campaign posters, 2008

But it’s not all about spray-painting or papering society’s wall. Objects are now playing an increasingly important part in these artists’ activation of the street, particularly in London. Anonymous art collective CutUp is best known for the subversive splicing and reconstitution of billboard posters into pixelated images of urban social stereotypes, such as the hooded youth. Adam Neate, meanwhile, flouts the legal conventions of the city by littering the place with his cardboard paintings – dropped willy-nilly like rubbish as opposed to art, bringing to mind the trash works of Robert Raushenberg. Another urban art man of the moment, D*Face, has circulated a series of banknotes printed with Chapmans-esque skull motifs (the brother duo are also famous for making money into art – during last year’s Frieze, for a limited time only, they could be found signing banknotes proffered by the visiting public). All these artists have gallery representation, some selling works for serious sums of money, so how does this fit with their guerrilla activities? Contradictorily, whatever way you look at it, but nonetheless providing an equally reactive ingredient to art-critical as socio-political debate.

CutUp, Poblenou, Barcelona, 2006

Whether art-world Robin Hoods giving something back to the streets that made them famous or multi-disciplinary creators having it all, by putting their art into the gallery, or onto the institution (as the Tate Modern will testify), these artists are proving that urban art is more than just a temporary blot on the metropolitan landscape.