You are an artist. You have a painting you want to share, but fear it would lose
impact if shared exclusively on the Internet (you do not want to shrink your
design to iPhone dimensions). If
you want to share your painting with a broad audience, there are a few options:
A).
Fight the market for gallery space
B).
Fight vandalism laws and risk exhibiting your painting in a public space.
If
you choose A, your success might depend on your name—your relevance and talent
are important, but there are hundreds of artists who want your gallery
space who are just as relevant and talented as you are. They could be from anywhere in the
world. They could have never
stepped foot in your gallery—they might be dead---but their names are known, and
this can be enough to secure them space.[1]
Still, there are ways of
getting your painting into a gallery.
Your drawing professor in art school might know a curator, in which case
you are fortunate to have the combined
$180,000 to pay for 4 years of tuition, room and board at the art
school. You are also a minority. According to the U.S. News World Report, tuitions of the top art schools in the
United States range from $22,270 (Tyler School of Art) to $32,858 (Rhode Island
School of Design) per year. The median yearly household income for Americans is
$50,211 (2).
For many, art school--and
all the professional connections it secures--is not an affordable luxury. Hence the appeal of option B. Though often dismissed as punk
graffiti, alleyways and bathroom stalls can offer more accurate pictures of a
culture than galleries, especially because so much of what is left in these
places is left unsigned.
This erases any preconceived notions the viewer might have based on the
artist’s name. In Death of the Author, Roland Barthes says
of anonymous texts:
“We know that a text does not consist of a line of words,
releasing a single "theological" meaning (the "message" of
the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and
contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a
tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture.” (1)
Barthes is a true sociologist. In this passage, he suggests that
authors—and artists---do not go about their business in sterilized bubbles. Their work is a direct result of the
conventions their culture has established based on age, race, sex, education
level, and a million other factors.
Like the texts Barnes describes, street art functions in “a space of
many dimensions.” The fact that it
is often anonymous strengthens its legitamity as a cultural artifact, a “tissue
of citations”. The artist could be
anybody: They could be your mother, brother, or neighbor---they could have been you. The intimacy this creates is disarming, and can
strengthen the aesthetic or poetic experience of the viewer who might feel
distanced by the cold sophistication that is so often the stereotype of
galleries in America. For
instance, to be a street artist, you do not have to be a college graduate. You do not need to know somebody or
knows somebody. What get you noticed
are priceless attributes: Courage, and a flippant regard for authority.
In his essay, Barthes
suggests the goal of a text should be “to reach, through a preexisting
impersonality” any reader or viewer. (1) An unsigned image presents this very
“impersonality.” Graffiti is art in the now. It is experienced for a moment (a lot of street art is
designed to look good from a moving car or train) before vanishing again,
traceless. If it is successful, it will leave an impression without the
intrusion of the artist, whose biography can be found only when diligently
sought out.
Here are two unsigned
street poems:
We do not know if the author is a man or a woman. We do not know their race, how old they are, or if they went to college. We have no idea where the poems come from, and so focus on their content—and context. The poems share a theme of neon grief, the strange loneliness that comes with being surrounded by bright lights in a city of unknowns. They are appropriately located in busy, well-lit urban areas, and are stylistically similar, taking up spaces traditionally reserved for adverts. Coming across the poems in the same city, it is safe to assume they have the same writer. In this way, says Barthes, “the modern writer (scriptor) is born simultaneously with his text.” (1) Coming across the poems, we, the readers, assign them personality and meaning. There is no artist---no history, biography, or tradition to guide us. The “message” of the poems depends on us.
It
is in the spirit of giving credit where credit is due that I reveal the name of
the writer: Robert Montgomery, who, according to his website, “works in a poetic
and melancholy post-structuralist tradition.” (3) Montgomery is known for
hijacking advertising spaces and using them as platforms for his poems, which
are almost always left unsigned.
He has made himself easily available for interviews, but speaks only of
his work—his biography is avoided with careful precision.
Not all street artists
are so willing to reveal their identities. Banksy, by now well known, was determinedly elusive in the
80s, when his images first appeared on Bristol walls. Since then, Banksy’s work has turned up on walls from London
to Los Angeles—as well as in galleries and auctions.
I want to talk about
Banksy because he is an unusual case: A street artist who, despite all efforts
to maintain anonymous (Banksy is a street name) lost control of his reputation when a
culture, seemingly at random, decided that his work was worth selling, and was
therefore valuable. Banksy did not
try to sell his paintings. People scrapped his images from walls,
plastered them on canvas, and sold them on their own accord. In his essay, Barnes stresses “the necessity of substituting language
itself for the man who hitherto was supposed to own it.” The culture separated
Banksy from his art, and it is the culture, not Banksy, who owns his
images.
Keep It Spotless, a 2007 Banksy piece
that sold for $1,870, 000
The
Rude Lord, a 2006 Banksy sold for $658,025
The Rude Lord, pictured
above, was first exhibited in Barley
Legal, an anti-art show put together by Banksy in the Hunter Street
warehouse in Los Angeles. By
putting his work in a warehouse—a neutral, unpretentious space—and by not
charging admission, Banksy was able to draw a considerable crowd (needless to
say, the artist was absent from his own show). That The Rude Lord,
a painting made in the spirit of lowbrow fun, sold for more than half a million
dollars is a testament to the power viewers can bring to an image. Roland
Barthes would attest: “The true locus of writing is in its reading.” The same goes for art. To this day, Banksy only appears in
interviews with his face hidden, voice electronically altered. Yet his
paintings continue to sell. If the
artist is anonymous, the culture is free to make of him what they will—and
because art is, for better or worse, married to the laws of economics, we have
chosen to make Banksy a commodity.
“A text,” says Barthes,
“consists of multiple writings, issuing from several cultures and entering into
dialogue with each other.” (1) What
makes street art truly open to the viewer is it’s interactive nature. A viewer
can add to it, much in the way that comments are added to Internet
threads. Because street art is
wholly uncensored, these comments can range from profound to obscene to
completely ridiculous. Here is
some graffiti I photographed in an alley behind the Castle Arcade in Cardiff,
Wales:
I noticed a name
scribbled on one of the St. David prints:
Who is Becky?
Becky is whoever I want her to be.
Because I know a Becky, I am imagining a girl with short blonde hair who
likes David Bowie, and who could take better care of her teeth. Reading the name Becky, not every one will think of the Becky I know. Deciphering Becky as anything other than a name is useless. Everyone will think she is someone
different; Barthes would call her an “open text.” With street art, it is often impossible to “close the
meaning”; texts seem to dangle as open-ended questions. Here
is some graffiti I photographed by the railroad tracks in my hometown of
Indiana, Pennsylvania:
It is strange how a specific name can be anonymous. I don’t know the Chris the artist is referring to, but have, in my head, a concept of who I think he or she is.
I do not know what the writer of this
intended, but I interpret it as a beautiful statement on the syllabic
disintegration within language. Or
it could be a waste of paint.
“The
unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination,” says
Barthes. “…this destination can no
longer be personal: the reader is a man without history, without biography,
without psychology; he is only that someone who holds gathered into a single
field all the paths of which the text is constituted.” (1) If, as an artist,
you share your design anonymously in a public space, you are erasing your
biography. Because there is an intimidating pretense in galleries (supposed
“high” art) that does not exist on the street, your viewer is, more than ever,
liable to relate with you: To make a direct and honest connection with your
work. Your viewer could be a child
or a very old man. They could be
homeless.
They
could be you.
Word Count: 1,650
Works
Cited:
Primary Text:
1.
Barthes,Roland, ‘The Death of the Author’, in The
Routledge Critical and Cultural Theory Reader, ed. Neil
Badmington and Julia Thomas (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 121-125.
Secondary
Text:
2. "Income." - U.S. Census Bureau. U.S.
Census Bureau, 15 Mar. 2012. Web. 13 May 2012.
<http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/income.html>.
3. "ROBERT MONTGOMERY." ROBERT
MONTGOMERY. Web. 13 May 2012. <http://www.robertmontgomery.org/robertmontgomery.org/ROBERT_MONTGOMERY.html>.
[1] Monet never went to
Pittsburgh, but a section of his water lilies hang in the Carnegie Museum of
Art on Craig Street
