Journal of Urban Cultural Studies - 2-3: Street Art’s Politics and Discontents, Sept 2020

In recent years, individual street artworks have been framed as cultural heritage. However, attempts to integrate street artworks and graffiti into formal heritage frameworks have not provided solutions to the philosophical and practical problems associated with their preservation. Rather than focusing on street artworks as passive objects to be conserved, preserved or managed, this research analyses the conservation of Dolk’s street artworks as an example of lively theatrical performance emerging from embodied actions, lived processes and social practices. Applying non-representational theory, heritage studies and cultural studies, the research argues that the conservation of street artworks is not passive, but active – a process in which humans, social media and artworks, themselves, are active, relational and equally important actors contributing to ‘heritagization’. The case illustrates that acts of destruction – as well as social media debates and street art performances that oppose conventional heritage practices and commodification – can serve as stimuli for not only reconsidering the meanings and values of street art but also protecting the rights of city commons.

This article argues that Beat poet Allen Ginsberg and unauthorized street artists perform a common function in regard to urban intervention. In the first place, they respond to a shared historical context, namely the ruthless shaping of the American urban landscape to obey the logic of capitalism. They also use similar artistic methods to critique this violent process, as I show through a comparative analysis of Ginsberg’s Moloch and the Obey figure designed by street artist Shepard Fairey. In both cases, a monstrous figure is placed within the city to show the urban landscape for what it really is. At the same time, the work of poets such as Ginsberg and various street artists suggests that the city can be redeemed from its fallen state, by representing it as a space where a vast number of potentially liberating behaviours are possible. Furthermore, I will argue that the common function performed by Ginsberg and unauthorized street artists can help explain the mutual reverence that exists between them.

The article considers the critical potential of both graffiti and street art using Berlin as an example, where these forms of urban creativity have flourished. It offers an interdisciplinary, context-related analysis by combining visual and spatial theories, which highlight both their critical agency as well as their affirmative potential in processes of gentrification. In this way, the study takes up the question of Avramidis and Tsilimpounidi about what graffiti and street art actually do in urban space. Thus, they are understood as spatial and visual forms of critique and protest, as also historic positions within the discourses on architecture and the city show, where graffiti, in particular, appears as a critical term. This applies to the general notion of graffiti being a confrontation with the capitalist system and its hegemonic spectacle, as well as the abject view, comparing them with dirt within a racist discourse. Finally, these contestations of and within the democratic city dissolve themselves in the post-urban paradigm. This implies a notion of the city under complete private ownership and control where there is no place for dialectics anymore and the ‘urban’ is seen as a threat to society.

In the last decade, the city of Delhi has witnessed a surge in urban artistic practice – particularly street art – that draws its conceptual and art-historical ‘virtue’ from being in the public sphere. The changing socio-economic, infrastructural and aesthetic set-up of the city bears many similarities to what has been called the cultural regeneration of cities across the globe. Interpreting it as symptomatic of the neo-liberalization of the Indian city, this article examines the spatial implications of the burgeoning contemporary street art movement in Delhi. It contextualizes the art movement within place-making initiatives in Indian cities that have been attempting to attract the middle-class to city spaces to cater to their consumption patterns. The article suggests that there are two ways in which commissioned street art in neoliberal Delhi closely ties up with the neoliberal agenda of uneven redevelopment and regeneration in the city: (a) by instrumentalizing its form to revitalize decrepit areas that need capital investment in order to garner cultural tourism and trigger capital investment; and (b) by invoking a narrative of beautification and cleanliness that has been seen to emerge from a dominantly middle-class perspective in Indian cities. Looking at the unique ways in which urban space in Delhi interacts with local-political situations and responds to such place-making initiatives, the article attempts to interrogate what art-led gentrification implies in the economic and sociopolitical context of cities of the global South.

This article focuses on the Bank of Greece headquarters building in Athens, which has been a site of recurring political expression in contemporary crisis. It is based on a corpus of graffiti writings from the particular building gathered over the span of five years (2010–15), a rather politically dense period. Mapping the constant appearance, removal and reappearance of the writings through a series of architectural drawings, the aim of this article is to explore visual means of understanding graffiti as a palimpsestic phenomenon. The article is structured after the scale of the drawings – from the city scale, to the building and finally the surface – introducing an architectural method of reading and writing graffiti.

This article is concerned with exploring the politics of street art and graffiti in Egypt in the aftermath of the uprising against former President Hosni Mubarak in 2011. Rather than viewing street art and graffiti as mere by-products of the revolutionary period, the article centres them as important elements of political and social struggle. I put forward a reading of Egypt’s street art and graffiti as sites of politics through both aesthetic and spatial approaches. To do so I draw on Jacques Rancière’s concept of ‘dissensus’, a term referring to a political and aesthetic process that creates new modes of perception and novel forms of political subjectivity. In various writings, Rancière argues that part of the work of ‘dissensus’ is the creation of spaces where political activity can take place. As spatially bound practices, street art and graffiti can allow a visible ‘dissensus’ to take place. Through a semiotic analysis of several street art and graffiti works, the article makes a further contribution to scholarship on Egypt’s revolutionary street art and graffiti scene. Instead of focusing on the figure of the ‘rebel artist’, I centre the works in relation to the history of Egyptian nationalism, and argue that we need to complicate our understanding of street art and graffiti’s potential as modes of resistance.

The proposed article questions how a group of women (age 15–20 years) from different ethnic backgrounds in working-class settlement in New Delhi, who individually and collectively tries to reclaim and create their own spaces through wall painting on the street. This is to respond and to adapt to the pressures of the constantly changing urban ecology, within the larger contemporary discourses and experiences of risk and vulnerability negotiated by them in public space. Thus the article foregrounds the ‘relational’ approach and collaborative ethic with the trajectory of ‘dialogue’ as key method within the socially engaged art project. The idea of reclaiming spaces to negotiate the changes of local ecology, which accommodates the change of perception of men regarding women in public, has been initiated through creating wall painting in the streets. A wall painting initiative evolved through series of discussion sessions with a group of young women in Khirki and Hauz Rani, an urban village in New Delhi. The idea was to paint a series of ordinary women doing daily activities and engaging in work that is customarily done by men in the locality. The intent was to draw men on the street into a dialogue about the gender equality in terms of the acceptance of women in male-associated professions, as well as a dialogue about the visibility of women in public spaces.