Graffiti as a Limit Case for the Concept of Style: A Genealogy of Aesthetic Impropriety

Abstract

SummaryThis paper examines graffiti as an object that has historically confounded stylistic or formal analysis proper, although elements of this deviant form of mark making have been appropriated as expressive resources within the recognizable styles of modern and contemporary art. Critiques of the concept of style are now well established and this formerly dominant method of approaching the analysis of art historical objects has largely fallen out of favour in current scholarship. Beyond rehearsing these familiar critical points, it will be argued that a consideration of the limitations of this foundational disciplinary concept may be a paradoxically productive exercise if an approach is taken that examines the boundaries, or limits, to the kinds of objects and images to which the concept of style has been applied. It will be argued that a number of historically liminal categories of person – children, primitives, the mentally ill and criminals – inform the genealogy of perception of the contemporary liminal “styles” of graffiti, post-graffiti and street art; and that these limit cases, rather than being marginalized exclusions not worthy of analytic attention, are generative of the very coherence of the notion of style. Following Rancière [Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, London, 2013], it is argued that contemporary applications of the concept of style may lie in attending to the contingency and primacy of the processes of perception itself, an essential component of seminal approaches to style (e.g., Wölfflin, Principles of Art History. The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, Translated from 7th German Edition into English by M.D. Hottinger, New York 1932 and reprints, 1929[1915]) in determining our practices of looking.