Style Wars

COHESIVE

These ‘Hip-Hop’ kids are changing the face of the city by portraying their testimonies of social injustice as peaceful, yet active expressions of their desire to be acknowledged. Public spaces, mainly those in suburban settings and metro network lines, are chosen sites strategically exposed for their work which impacts millions of people everyday.

They are re-imaging and reconstructing the aesthetics of the city with powerful and cryptic symbols, words, concepts and messages revealing their rebellious and revolutionary emotions. The alteration of the city is a two-folded scenario in which the Hip-hop gangs allude to the more accommodated social sectors. Their work intimidates and reprehends them individually and collectively. Individually, by affecting white people’s longing for the status quo, and collectively because beholders of their expression acknowledge their combined work as the result of powerful eagerness to imprint a message over publicly owned belongings.

 A wall, a public transportation system, a train, the bus, anything becomes the media or the target for these Hip-Hop culture “bombs.” A spot in the city is suddenly affected, as an infectious disease growing over the cells of a tissue, without control or rational justification.

The city is remapped because the artistic work is the result of several conquers over diverse territories which contract or expand in unimaginable ways. Overall, anger is the prevailing palette used to reclaim control in an otherwise powerless demographic.

The presence of body work such as break dancing plays the language of freedom, its rhythm, choreography and tone emphasize the reluctance to need a stage other than the daily routine of an urban setting. Break dance focuses on the inner power of the individual; the oppressed becomes empowered by the vibrant support for their own, and rivalry with other gangs.

Graffiti and tagging are an attempt of ownership established trough a well defined code of symbolisms. Ownership is not only about territoriality but also about audience, since the media is the strategic possibility of producing artwork which will be capturing the attention of a greater amount of viewers.

This trend, movement or art evolution is born from the demographic that owns close to nothing historically. Most Afro-American citizens are victims of equity traps whish deprive them from the opportunity of higher education or formal education, however their formation as artists is authentic and their methods date circumstances of the old Egyptians, Chinese, and Hindu, as talented masters who would take few apprenticeships for life, who would live closely and would produce art spontaneously, without the need of a Maecenas to sponsor them.

These circumstances, in contrast with the modern Bansky, whose works are collected all over the world, reveal the lack of education on the means rather than the ends that a general audience may have on a particular trend. If the public is unable to understand the igniting force of the art, it is not valued.

Bansky continues to chose corporate spaces or “security” of the Israeli occupation in the West Bank as site for Graffiti because in contrast with the Hip-Hop culture, he addresses a different kind of audience and when he chooses these sites to express his art he is acknowledging a need of prestige within this prestigious wealthy sector. By allowing the art in their buildings they accept exposure and thus prestige.

In a context of social ranks, tagging and defacing public/private property can be judged as a means for exercising power at various scales; the Afro-American demographics acquire presence and openness. This message reaches every politic agenda and could be an intimidation tool if politicians, aware of the crescent movement, equate the demographic trends in age, gender and education in the long and short term. Power is acquired by gender as well, this trend is leaded by me; even women who are directly involved in the movement as wives or mothers of the artists could be reluctant to the confrontation involved in this collective endeavor.

From an ethical perspective this movement does not extend, nor rebel or redefine the meaning of owning because the trespassing act is enacted on purpose. If anything used as a media would change property rights the moment it is worked upon then the meaning of the art would change automatically. The strength of this movement, which I am still reluctant to qualify as artistic,  is precisely in trespassing and disrespecting ownership as an illicit act which generates  a sample of the helplessness the marginal demographic have enacted in their lives for centuries.

How does the imaging of Hip-Hop culture defy societal expectations and stereotypes of social scales? Why do we believe affluent/white kids are attracted to graffiti?

Hip-Hop artists use their own body as a means to activate, penetrate and shift the physical, social and political space of the city. They do it by structuring a multidimensional visual and acoustic vision. Their impact is produced with Afro-American combinations of sight and sound, choreography, lyrics and rhythms. Graffiti is only one element of the puzzle of the Hip-Hop culture on these aforementioned spaces. They achieve the blasting effect upon an audience as the result of individual and collective performance. We can trace these elements in the greatest king of Pop: Michael Jackson. His death will have a greater effect on the future of Hip-Hop because this artist dared to portray his art upon his own body taking beyond the limits any idea of freedom.

The point in highlighting vandalism as the underlying principle of this movement sets its existence out of the artistic domain. Art is not war regardless of the emotions and means intended to communicate with an audience and these expressions are battles and when caught, are sanctioned.

This war in terms of social space more than quality have been paralleled by clothes, fashion, tattoos, body piercing, and language transformation, only this time the threatened demographic is the leading force and whites are beginning to follow. Two aspects differentiate this social expression and appreciation of the resulting works of art: deep understanding is required and a sense of belonging. In this way the end is justified by the means.

It is hard to agree whether this art holds the same intensity when it is pealed off the train because art is a message, and as such it consists on an emissary, a recipient and a decoder, so the intensity is assessed in different ways: the eyes of beholder, the art, the expression and form. Or does it only exist in the high stakes theater or illegal activity and clamming of public private spaces?

The way artists claimed the public spaces will certainly evolve, maybe society will yield slowly and this act of impunity will become a wider path of redefining ownership, human rights and self expression. Right now we need to share in other dimensions, to respect before we ask for respect, to be instruments of peace and sources of light. We must have faith it in a better world. This movement will certainly lead us all to a higher platform.