Speculating on (the) urban (of) art: (un)siting street art in the age of neoliberal urbanisation

Andrea Pavoni

doi:10.1590/s0104-71832019000300003

Abstract

Abstract This paper addresses the current co-optation of street art into an uncritical aesthetic supplement to the process of neoliberal urbanisation, by focusing on its unresolved relation with its own site. This is done in three steps. First, via a perambulating immersion into the complexity of a specific site. Second, via a critical engagement with the form and politics of contemporary street art. Third, via a strategic speculation on the relation between the notions of art, urban and site. Street art’s current impasse, I argue, paradoxically depends on its incapacity to become properly urban. A urban-specific street art, I contend, is not a decorative veneer nor an enchanting disruption to dramatic processes of urbanisation: it is a force-field in which these processes are made visible, experienceable, and thus called into question. The ‘Olympic’ works of JR and Kobra in Rio de Janeiro, and the iconoclastic performance by Blu in Berlin, are used to illustrate and complement the argument.

Highlights

This paper addresses the current co-optation of street art into an uncritical aesthetic supplement to the process of neoliberal urbanisation, by focusing on its unresolved relation with its own site
This paper addresses the current impasse of street art, and its ongoing reduction to an uncritical aesthetic supplement to the process of neoliberal urbanisation, by focusing on its unresolved relation with the complex ontology of its own site: in other words, on street art’s current inability to overcome its static relation with the city and become properly urban
While an in-depth analysis would require an effort of its own, this section intends to provide a snapshot of this remarkable waterfront regeneration project, tracking some of its intersecting rhetorics, histories, erasures and aesthetics, as well as the ambivalent role street art plays in the process

Summary

Introduction

This paper addresses the current co-optation of street art into an uncritical aesthetic supplement to the process of neoliberal urbanisation, by focusing on its unresolved relation with its own site. Said impasse is better understood as not the result of the usual ‘recuperation’ of a radical aesthetic practice by the commodifying logic of the capital, but as the consequence of street art’s incapacity to address the relational, power-structured and normative complexity of its site in the age of neoliberal urbanisation.

Results

Conclusion