Graffiti, street art and the dialectics of the city

Abstract

As graffiti and street art have proliferated globally over the past half century they have become all the more complex and contradictory. This is in part a matter of scale; with the expanding cultural and geographic range of contemporary street art and graffiti has come an expanding variety of meanings and interpretations. It is also a matter of global politics. Often emerging in situations of economic inequality and social upheaval, graffiti and street art regularly come to embody the contested cultural dynamics of these situations (see for example Bushnell 1990; Lennon 2014). But above all it is a matter of the city; it is the urban character of street art and graffiti that guarantees their continued complexity and contradiction. Graffiti and street art are deeply urban phenomena, certainly the most visible forms of global urban culture and urban cultural transgression (Bofkin 2014). More than this, they are urban folk art – the distinctive folk art of the contemporary global city. To read street art and graffiti, to understand their nuances and their negations, then, we must read the contemporary global city as well. When we do, we find that the city is itself a tangle of emerging contradictions, and a place of mutating political economy. In fact, it is the changing economic and political dynamics of the global city – and the messy conflation of street art and graffiti with these new forms of urban economy and control – that shape graffiti and street art today. Caught up in the dynamics of the contemporary city, graffiti and street art unfold as a series of dialectical tensions, crisscrossing between legality and illegality, visibility and invisibility, art and action, ephemerality and elongation. In the street, the dynamics of the contemporary city are encoded in the dialectics of its art; to read one is to read the other.