The Aesthetician

The Rise of the Urban Inbetweener

 

Rebellion, anarchy, anti-establishment, anti-authority…this is the tone set by art of the street, an art form that, in it’s making creates famous yet anonymous personalities whilst making a formerly taboo art form mainstream.

Is there still a ‘kick’ in the soul of street Art and if so where does it go from here?

Recently there has been a definite focus on street art as the genre to be active in throughout the world. This has had has had the effect of normalizing the process of the craft whilst elevating the status of the craftsman. It is interesting to note how we got here, what created the monster that is street art and more importantly how it has changed the way we view and use the voids within our cities.

So what is the point of street art in the net savvy, globe without borders times that we live in?

 Is it still a form of rebellious communication or has it transformed into the commercial aesthetic retrospective reverence that many an artist fears?

 The fascination with street art that has emerged in recent years, culminating in a year of exhibitions and street art projects has brought with it a sense of normality, bringing a formerly taboo art form into the wealthy realms of the mainstream. The public and even institutional support of street art means that it has become a legitimate and acceptable form of visual expression, that formerly held a spot among the urban underground and subcultures.

 Street Art is the antithesis to the commissioned public art that governments and institutions believe will improve our surroundings, carefully selected for their intellectual and emotional impact. Public art, often produced in memorial or celebration, has an agenda that is governed by its commissioner, a form of cultural control that when compounded with other projects forms the larger body of political propaganda (whether it be morally sound or questionable).

 Consider the regeneration of public spaces in London, the increase and regeneration of public squares and parks, huge commercial gentrification projects such as the O2 in Greenwich and ultimately the Olympic construction project in the East. Public space is given far more importance and emphasis within environmental development than ever before, clearly marking the power that public space has over its occupants.

 The realm of public space has become, to many city workers, the void between destinations, a space were lucent consciousness evaporates. Very rarely does a city dweller travel to a public space, they seem to act more as punctuations along an automated journey. An exception is the romantic and vaguely modern idea around what Baudelaire termed the ‘flâneur’, a street wanderer, a person living within the city but outside it simultaneously. To the flâneur, these spaces form the basis of their habitation, spending more time absorbing the city than passing through it.

 The concept of the flâneur, a notion that arose from the rebuilding of the Parisian way of life following the 1848 Revolution, can, in part, be applied to the audience of street art today. The flâneur has the ultimate freedom of the city, is not bound by social pressure or rules of decency, is able to wander and observe the city without participating, can absorb, process and understand their surroundings rather than passively digesting without prejudice.

 The un-herded folk of the city are in the best position to truly understand the process and reason behind many works of art that can be found amongst the poorest and most debris and detritus laden parts of London. The German sociologist Georg Simmel interpreted the origin of the flâneur as a deep rooted psychological response to the weight of cultural and social existence.

“The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life. The fight with nature which primitive man has to wage for his bodily existence attains in this modern form [Flâneur] its latest transformation.”

Simmel is talking about the flâneur as an expression or rebellion against the nature of the Human collective, stepping out of the ring of social acceptance and obediance and floating between the borders of culture and shared an interesting idea of the creation of the flâneur as a look into the face of social struggle and autonomous herd-like behaviour. It is also interesting to pose the question, who fits the description of flâneur in a greater sense, the artist or the viewer?

 The artist exists within an ephemeral space, appearing and disappearing without announcement or fanfare, capturing stolen moments of solitude to perform their vandalist act, abusing and ‘owning’ the surfaces of the streets whilst elevating them from oblique insignificance.

 The viewer, in observing this phantom art, is then pulled out of social activity, tied to the moment, outside the buzz of the streets and for a moment exists as an inbetweener.

Existing in-between the norms, in-between the constant flux of the city and in-between the hives of consciousness that merge to form the “urban” the viewer takes on a new understanding. The viewer of street art, if only for a moment, is granted a sense of realisation. The city has surfaces, the city can be moulded and manipulated, the city is inhabited, the city is all encompassing and the city is alive.

 It has become clear that most street art does not have a specific political agenda, neither in anarchistic nor protestant terms and tends to parody or comment on society rather than try to change it. So can street art be described as, ‘an attempt to preserve the autonomy and individuality of the creators existence’?

 The monuments of the now are temporary, ephemeral, and are forgotten more quickly than they are discovered. The monuments to the past are always, in many ways, worshipfully retrospective, the preservation of which is paramount to the understanding of the narrative behind the monumentally worthy figure or event. Street art, however, seems to be asking the viewer to discover its story, our concerns with preservation and conservation are not excited by street art (in the general sense) and we can easily lead straight to why?

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