The Work On The Street: Street Art and Visual Culture Martin Irvine

The Work on the Street: Street Art and Visual Culture
Martin Irvine
Georgetown University
Pre-press version of a chapter in The Handbook of Visual Culture, ed. Barry Sandywell
and Ian Heywood. London & New York: Berg, 2012: 235-278. This version for personal
use only.
Introduction:
The Significance of Street Art in Contemporary Visual Culture
Street art, c. 2010, is a paradigm of hybridity in global visual culture, a postpostmodern genre being defined more by real-time practice than by any sense of
unified theory, movement, or message. Many artists associated with the urban
art movement dont consider themselves street or graffiti artists, but as
artists who consider the city their necessary working environment. Its a form at
once local and global, post-photographic, post-Internet, and post-medium,
intentionally ephemeral but now documented almost obsessively with digital
photography for the Web, constantly appropriating and remixing imagery, styles,
and techniques from all possible sources. Its a community of practice with its
own learned codes, rules, hierarchies of prestige, and means of communication.
Street art began as an underground, anarchic, in-your-face appropriation of
public visual surfaces, and has now become a major part of visual space in many
cities and a recognized art movement crossing over into the museum and gallery
system. 1 This chapter outlines a synthetic view of this hybrid art category that
comes from my own mix of experiences and rolesas an art and media theorist in
the university, as an owner of a contemporary gallery that has featured many
street artists, and as a colleague of many of the artists, curators, art dealers, and
art collectors who have contributed to defining street art in the past two
decades. 2
The street artists who have been defining the practice since the 1990s are
now a major part of the larger story of contemporary art and visual culture. Street
art synthesizes and circulates a visual vocabulary and set of stylistic registers that
have become instantly recognizable throughout mass culture. Museum and
gallery exhibitions and international media coverage have taken Shepard Fairey,
Banksy, Swoon, and many others to levels of recognition unknown in the
Irvine, The Work on the Street
institutionally authorized artworld. Street art has also achieved a substantial

bibliography, securing it as a well-documented genre and institutionalized object
of study. 3 This globalized art form represents a cultural turning point as
significant, permanent, and irreversible as the reception of Pop art in the early
1960s.
For contemporary visual culture, street art is a major connecting node for
multiple disciplinary and institutional domains that seldom intersect with this
heightened state of visibility. The clash of intersecting forces that surround street
art exposes often suppressed questions about regimes of visibility and public
space, the constitutive locations and spaces of art, the role of communities of
practice and cultural institutions, competing arguments about the nature of art
and its relation to a public, and the generative logic of appropriation and remix
culture (just to name a few).
Street art subcultures embody amazingly inventive and improvisational
counter-practices, exemplifying Michel de Certeaus description of urban
navigators in The Practice of Everyday Life 4 and Henri Lefebvres analyses of
appropriations of public visual space in cities. 5 Street artists exemplify the
contest for visibility described by Jacques Rancire in his analysis of the
distribution of the perceptible, the social-political regimes of visibility: the
regulation of visibility in public spaces and the regime of art, which policies the
boundaries of art and artists legitimacy. 6 However the reception of street art
continues to play out, many artists and their supporters have successfully
negotiated positions in the two major visibility regimes--the non-art urban public
space regime and the highly-encoded spaces of artworld institutions. Street art
continues to develop with a resistance to reductionist categories: the most
notable works represent surprising hybrid forms produced with the generative
logic of remix and hybridization, allowing street artists to be several steps ahead
of the cultural police hailing from any jurisdiction.
By the early 1990s, street art was the ghost in the urban machine becoming
self-aware and projecting its repressed dreams and fantasies onto walls and
vertical architecture, as if the visible city were the skin or exoskeleton of
something experienced like a life form in need of aesthetic CPR. A visually aware
street art cohort in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Paris and London
began to see the city as the real teacher, providing a daily instruction manual for
the visual codes and semiotic systems in which we live and move and have our
being. A call went out to hack the visually predatory codes of advertising, the
rules of the attention economy, and the control of visibility itself. A new
generation of art school-educated artists heard the call and joined the ranks of
those already on the ground; they combined punk and hip-hop attitude with
learned skills and knowledge of recent art movements. By 2000, street artists had
formed a global urban network of knowledge and practice disseminated by
proliferating websites, publications, and collective nomadic projects.
Whether the street works seem utopian or anarchic, aggressive or
sympathetic, stunningly well-executed or juvenile, original or derivative, most
street artists seriously working in the genre begin with a deep identification and
empathy with the city: they are compelled to state something in and with the city,
whether as forms of protest, critique, irony, humor, beauty, subversion, clever
prank or all of the above. The pieces can be ephemeral, gratuitous acts of beauty
or forms of counter-iconography, inhabiting spaces of abandonment and decay,
or signal jams in a zone of hyper-commercial messaging. A well-placed street
piece will reveal the meaning of its material context, making the invisible visible
again, a city re-imaged and re-imagined. A street work can be an intervention, a
collaboration, a commentary, a dialogic critique, an individual or collective
manifesto, an assertion of existence, aesthetic therapy for the dysaesthetics of
urban controlled, commercialized visibility, and a Whitmanian hymn with the
raw energy of pent-up democratic desires for expression and self-assertion.
Whatever the medium and motives of the work, the city is the assumed
interlocutor, framework, and essential precondition for making the artwork
work. (See especially the examples in Figures 10.110.7, 10.1410.22, and 10.27,
10.28.)
In the context of art theory in the institutional artworld, street art and artists
seem made-to-order for a time when there is no acknowledged period identity
for contemporary art and no consensus on a possible role for an avant-garde. 7 Yet
the reception of street art in the institutional artworld remains problematic and
caught in a generational shift: the street art movement embodies many of the
anti-institutional arguments elaborated in the artworld over the past fifty years,
but it hasnt been adopted as a category for advancing art-institutional
replication, the prime objective of the art professions. Artworld institutions
prefer their avant-garde arguments and institutional critiques to be conducted

intramurally within established disciplinary practices. Even though no art
student today experiences art and visual culture without a knowledge of street
art, most art school programs continue an academic platform invested in playing
out some remaining possibilities in a postmodern remix of Performance Art,
Conceptual Art, Appropriation Art, Institutional Critique, and conceptual
directions in photography, film, and digital media. Critics, curators, and
academic theorists now routinely discuss art forms that are post-medium,
post-studio, and post-institutional, precisely the starting point of street art.
Street art is also a valuable case for the ongoing debate about the material
and historical conditions of visual culture, and whether the concept of visual
culture, as constructed in recent visual culture studies, dematerializes visual
experience into an ahistorical, trans-media abstraction. 8 The pan-digital media
platforms that we experience daily on computer and TV screens and on every
conceivable device create the illusion of a disembodied, abstract, transmedia, and
dematerialized visual environment, where images, video, graphics, and text
converge and coexist in the field of the flat-panel frame. Street artists are making
statements about visual culture and the effects of controlled visibility in the lived
environment of the city, where walls and screens are increasingly intermingled.
Shepard Fairey frequently remarks that one of his main motivations was
inserting images in urban space that challenged the corporate-government
monopoly of visible expression, creating a disturbance where there can be other
images coexisting with advertising. 9 Street art inserts itself in the material city
as an argument about visuality, the social and political structure of being visible.
Street art works by being confrontationally material and location-specific while
also participating in the global, networked, Web-distributable cultural
encyclopedia.
The social meaning of street art is a function of material locations with all
their already structured symbolic values. The city location is an inseparable
substrate for the work, and street art is explicitly an engagement with a city, often
a specific neighborhood. Street artists are adept masters of the semiotics of space,
and engage with the city itself as a collage or assemblage of visual environments
and source material. 10 (See Figures 10.7, 10.8, 10.19, 10.21, 10.22, and 10.27.) A
specific site, street, wall, or building in London, New York, Paris, or Washington,
DC is already encoded as a symbolic place, the dialogic context for the placement
of the piece by the artist. The practice is grounded in urban operational space,
the practiced place as described by de Certeau 11not the abstract space of
geometry, urban planning, or the virtual space of the screen, but the space
created by lived experience, defined by people mapping their own movements
and daily relationships to perceived centers of power through the streets,
neighborhoods, and transit networks of the city. Street art provides an intuitive
break from the accelerated aesthetics of disappearance, in Paul Virilios terms, a
signal-hack in a mass-mediated environment where what we see in the regime of
screen visibility is always the absence of material objects. 12 The placement of
works is often a call to place, marking locations with awareness, over against the
proliferating urban non-places of anonymous transit and commerce--the mall,
the airport, Starbucks, big box stores--as described by Marc Aug. 13 Street art is
driven by the aesthetics of material reappearance (see Figure 10.8).
Contexts of Street Art 1990 - 2010: Reception, Theory, and Practice
The genealogy of street art is now well-documented. 14 Every art movement
has its own myths of origin and foundational moments, but the main continuity
from the early graffiti movements of the 1970s and 80s to the diverse group of
cross-over artists and urban interventionists recognized the 1990s (Blek le Rat,
Barry McGee, Shepard Fairey, Ron English, Banksy, WK Interact, Jos Parl,
Swoon) and the new cohort of artists recognized since 2000 (for example, Os
Gemeos, Judith Supine, Blu, Vhils, JR, Gaia) is the audacity of the act itself. The
energy and conceptual force of the work often relies on the act of getting up-the work as performance, an event, undertaken with a gamble and a risk, taking
on the uncertain safety of neighborhoods, the conditions of buildings, and the
policing of property. 15 As ephemeral and contingent performance, the action is
the message: the marks and images appear as traces, signs, and records of the act,
and are as immediately persuasive as they are recognizable.
The history and reception of street art, including what the category means, is
a casebook of political, social, and legal conflicts, as well as disputes in the artists
own subcultures. Political tensions remain extreme over graffiti, and urban
communities worldwide are conflicted about the reception of street art in the
context of the graffiti and broken windows debates, 16 and whether there can be
any social differentiation among kinds of street works. Many street artists
working now have graduated from simple graffiti as name or slogan writing to a
focused practice involving many kinds of image and graphic techniques. 17 By
2000, most street artists saw their work as an art practice subsuming mixed
methods and hybrid genres, executed and produced both on and off the street.
The street is now simply assumed and subsumed wherever the work is done.
A useful differentiator for street artists is the use of walls as mural space. By
the early 1990s, the mass media had disseminated the graffiti styles in New York
and Los Angeles, and some of the most visually striking images of the fall of the
Berlin Wall in 1989 were its miles of graffiti and mural art. Throughout the
1990s, street art as city mural art was spreading across Europe and to South
America, especially Brazil, home of the Os Gemeos brothers, who combined
influences from hip hop, Brazilian folk culture, and artistic friendships with Barry
McGee and other artists from Europe and the US. 18 In the past fifteen years,
many street artists have gone from underground, usually anonymous, hit and
run, provocateurs pushing the boundaries of vandalism and toleration of private
property trespass to highly recognized art stars invited to create legal,
commissioned wall murals and museum installations (see Figures 10.1210.17
and 10.2310.26). Banksy, though by no means a paradigm case, went from
merry prankster, vandal, and nuisance to an artworld showman and postWarholian career manager with works now protected on the streets and studio
objects in high demand by collectors, auction houses, and museum curators. The
global community of artists is now a network of non-linear relationships that
grow and cluster nodally by city identity, techniques, and philosophy of art
practice.
While artists as diverse as Blek le Rat, Barry McGee, Dan Witz, Jos Parl,
Shepard Fairey, Swoon, David Ellis, and Os Gemeos have developed important
conceptual arguments for their work, this cohort of artists mainly work intuitively
in a community of practice, not through formalized theory. But the levels of
sophistication in their work reveal conceptual affinities and sometimes direct,
intentional alliances with prior art movements. Where Pop opened a new
conceptual space anticipated by Duchamp and Dada, inaugurating new
arguments for what art could be, street artists took those arguments as already
made (and over with), and ran with them out the institutional doors and into the
streets. Street art became the next step in transformative logic of Pop: a
redirected act of transubstantiation that converts the raw and non-artdifferentiated space of public streets into new territories of visual engagement,
anti-art performative acts that result in a new art category. Like Pop, street art
de-aestheticizes high art as one of many types of source material, and goes
further by aestheticizing zones formerly outside culturally recognized art space.
The extramural zones of non-art space and the logic of the art container are
now turned inside out: what was once banished from the walls of the art
institutions (schools, museums, galleries) is reflected back on the walls of the
city. Street art is now the mural art of the extramuros, outside the institutional
walls.
Street artists are also being discussed as inheritors of earlier art movements,
especially the ideas that emerged within Dada and Situationism: 19 viewing art as
act, event, performance, and intervention, a dtournementa hijacking,
rerouting, displacement, and misappropriation of received culture for other
ends. 20 Street artists reenact the play and spontaneity envisioned by Debord and
described by de Certeau, escaping the functionalism and purposiveness of urban
order by deviation and wandering (deriv) across multiple zones, rejecting and
modifying the prescribed uses of the urban environment. 21 Parallel with some
forms of performance and conceptual art, street artists are at home with the
fragment, the ephemeral mark, and images that engage the public in time-bound
situations. Street art extends several important post-Pop and postmodern
strategies that are now the common vocabulary of contemporary art: photoreproduction, repetition, the grid, serial imagery, appropriation, and inversions
of high and low cultural codes. Repetition and serial forms are now embedded in
the visible grid of the city.
Street artists take the logic of appropriation, remix, and hybridity in every
direction: arguments, ideas, actions, performances, interventions, inversions, and
subversions are always being extended into new spaces, remixed for contexts and
forms never anticipated in earlier postmodern arguments. Street art also assumes
a foundational dialogism in which each new act of making a work and inserting it
into a street context is a response, a reply, an engagement with prior works and
the ongoing debate about the public visual surface of a city. As dialog-in-progress,
it anticipates a response, public discourse, commentary, new works. The city is

seen as a living historical palimpsest open for new inscription, re-write culture in
practice (see Figures 10.1, 10.410.7, 10.20, 10.27, 10.28).
Street art continually reveals that no urban space is neutral: walls and street
topography are boundaries for socially constructed zones and territories, and
vertical space is regulated by regimes of visibility. Leaving a visual mark in public
urban space is usually technically illegal and often performed as an act of nonviolent civil disobedience. The artists understand that publically viewable space,
normally regulated by property and commercial regimes for controlling visibility,
can be appropriated for unconstrained, uncontainable, antagonist acts. From the
most recent stencil works and paste-ups on a city building in publically viewable
space to formal objects made in artists studios or site-specific projects in
galleries and museums, each location is framed by institutions, legal regimes,
public policies, cultural categoriesfrequently overlapping and cooperating,
often contradictory in a non-harmonizing co-existence.
Several techniques, mediums, and styles now converge in practice: stylized
spray-can graphics and spray drawings from graffiti conventions; found and
appropriated imagery from popular culture, advertising, and mass photographic
images re-produced in stencil imagery or other printing techniques; design,
graphics, and illustration styles merging everything from punk and underground
subcultures to high culture design and typography traditions; many forms of
print-making techniques from Xerox and screen printing to hand-cut woodblocks
and linocuts; direct wall painting, both free-hand and from projected images; and
many forms of stencil techniques ranging from rough hand-cuts to multiple
layers of elaborate machine-cut imagery. A wall piece in New York, LA, London,
or Paris can combine stencil imagery with spray paint, pre-printed artistdesigned paste ups, photocopy blow-ups and collage imagery, and all imaginable
hybrids of print making, drawing, and direct wall painting. Unifying practices are
montage and collage, shifting scale (up or down), and using the power of serial
imagery and repetition in multiple contexts. The photographic and digital
photographic sources of images are taken for granted.
Many artists associated with the movement are beyond category, and
experiment with installations, material interventions, and many hybrid genres.
Vhils carves imagery into walls and buildings, recalling some of Gordon Matta-
Clarks deconstructions of built spaces. Jos Parl creates wall murals and multilayered panels and canvases as visual memory devices, palimpsests of urban
mark-making, material history, graffiti morphed into calligraphy, and a direct
confrontation of AbEx action painting with the decay of the streets and the life of
city walls. David Ellis makes films of extended action painting performances and
creates kinetic sculptures programmed to make found materials and instruments
dance in a call and response with the rhythms of the city. Shepard Fairey
channels popular culture images through multiple stylistic registers, including
Socialist Realism, constructivist and modernist graphic design, rock poster
designs, and Pop styles all merged and output as posters and screen prints for
street paste-ups, murals, and hand-cut stencil and collage works on canvas,
panel, and fine art papers. While there is no easy unifying term for all these
practices, concepts, and material implementations, theory and practice are as
tightly worked out in street art as in any art movement already institutionalized
in art history.
Street Art and the Global City: All-City to All-Cities
Society has been completely urbanized The street is a place to play and
learn. The street is disorderThis disorder is alive. It informs. It surprises
The urban space of the street is a place for talk, given over as much to the
exchange of words and signs as it is to the exchange of things. A place where
speech becomes writing. A place where speech can become 'savage' and, by
escaping rules and institutions, inscribe itself on walls.
--Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (1970) 22
Street art is truly the first global art movement fuelled by the Internet.
Marc and Sara Schiller, Wooster Collective, 2010 23
Over 75% of the developed world now lives in cities and urban
agglomerations; lesser developed regions are moving in the same direction. 24 The
future is the global networked world city. Although the globalization of the
network society is unevenly distributed, globalization is primarily enacted
through a network of cities. 25 One of its effects is a change in the idea of the city
itself, a regional site incorporating vast amounts of population mobility, flows of

intellectual and material capital, expanding beyond historic and local identity
politics. All art movements have developed in cities, but street art is distinctive in
having emerged as a direct engagement with the postmodern city: the artists and
the works presuppose a dialogic relationship, a necessary entailment, with the
material and symbolic world of the city.
Though closely tied to locations and the temporal performative act, the
practices of street art as well as the works themselves vacillate between the
specific materiality of urban space, street locations, local contexts, and the
exhibition, distribution, and communication platform of the Internet and Web.
Street artists since around 2000 continually code-switch back and forth between
the city as a material structure and the city of bits, 26 the city as information
node, the virtual space of flows, 27 networked and renderable in multiple digital
visualizations. With proliferating websites and popular media coverage, most
street artists are not only aware of being seen on a global stage, speaking locally
and globally, but they actively contribute to the global Web museum without
walls, documenting their work digitally as it is executed. First and foremost, there
is the material moment, the physical act of doing the art in a specific location and
with specific materials (spray paint, stencils, print and poster paste-ups, direct
painting, and every conceivable variation). But more and more, street art is being
made and performed to be captured in digital form for distribution on Websites
and YouTube--the work of art in the age of instant digital dissemination. 28
Street art has emerged in this moment of accelerated and interconnected
urbanization, and its no surprise that street art is most visible in global world
cities where concentrations of people, capital, built infrastructure, and flows of
information are the densest. In many ways, street art is a response to this
concentrated infrastructure with its unequal distribution of resources, property,
and visibility. Street art reflects globalization while resisting being absorbed into
its convenient categories. Street artists interrupt the totalizing sense of space
produced in modern cities with a local, place-bound gesture, an act that says
were here with this message now. Street artist are also known for traveling to
specific locations to do their work in as many contexts as possible, documenting
the work for Websites as they go. The work is fundamentally nomadic and
ephemeral, destabilizing in its instability.
10
For New York graffiti writers in the 1970s, having your name seen all-city
(the trains traversing every borough) was the faith of graffiti. 29 This faith has
now been transferred to visibility all cities through the many Websites and
blogs that document and archive street art, most of which are organized by city. 30
Since the late 1990s, the imagery and practices of street artists have been
spreading around the world at Internet speed, artists tracking each others work,
styles, techniques, walls, and sites. The Art Crimes website, the first graffiti site in
the Internet, launched in 1995, and the Wooster Collective, now a leading
aggregator of all categories of street art, started in 2001. 31 Through individual
and collective artists Websites, Flickr image galleries, Google Maps tagging, and
blogs, the faith of street art has migrated to the digital city, achieving visibility allcities.
Extramuros/Intramuros: Streets, Cities, Walls
The Cultural Wall System
Ive always paid a great deal of attention to what happens on walls. When
I was young, I often even copied graffiti. --Picasso 32
[Modern paintings] are like so many interpretations, if not imitations, of
a wall. Brassa 33
De Certeau cites a statement by Erasmus, the city is a huge monastery, 34 a
reference to the pre-modern image of the walled city and the walled monastery as
boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. The metaphors of intramuros and
extramuros, inside and outside the walls, run deep in Western culture. They
name both material and symbolic spaces, zones of authority, and hierarchies of
identity. 35 The premodern metaphors remain in many institutionsschools,
colleges and universities, and urban space itself. Paris, arguably the home of the
modern idea of the city, still retains the idea of metropolitan expansion zones
extramuros, the banlieu, outside the historic, and once walled, city center. In
modern cities without the internalized history of the classical and medieval
defensive walls, the structure of streets and buildings, highways, and train yards
create marked boundaries, territories, zones, and demarcations of hierarchical
11
space, a psychogeography of spaces. Street artists have a well-developed practice

for placing works in this structured space, where the well-chosen placement of a
work often builds more credit than the work itself.
Surfaces that form the visible city are vertical: visibility becomes a contest for
using and regulating vertical space. The wall is a metaphor for verticality-buildings, street layout, and boundary walls form the topography of the visible in
public space, or more appropriately, publically viewable, space. 36 Vertical space
is highly valuable in modern cities, driving the value of air rights above a
property and the vertical surfaces which can be leased for advertising. When
concentrated in spaces like Times Square in New York, Potsdamer Platz in Berlin,
and Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo, advertising surfaces achieve the status of
totalizing spectacles, walled enclaves of manufactured and regulated visuality.
One of the major obsessions of modern art theory has been the cultural wall:
the problem of institutional walls, the over-determined modernist white cube of
four gallery walls, 37 the bourgeois commoditization of wall-mountable works
representing symbolic capital in domestic space, the conceptual use of art
institution walls as an abstract surface for ephemeral works requiring no
permanent or durable material form, walls as boundaries, limits, enclosures,
territories, zones, and concepts of art on, off, or outside the walls. This theorizing
is enacted as a series of arguments that presuppose, and only make sense within,
the intramural artworld. For many avant-gardes, the bourgeois domestic gallery
or museum interior, a wall system for objects, provides the scene for irony and
subversions precisely because it is everywhere stable, entailed, presupposed,
always already there. For conceptual art, it was the question of the objecthood of
the work, its independence from wall space other than as a structure of verticality
to be used, or not, in the installation of a work. Performance art challenged
everything except the presupposition of the constitutive intramural art space for
the recognition, reception, and visibility of the art act as art. 38
In a recent essay, Mel Bochner reflected on the move in the 1970s and 80s to
draw and paint directly on walls, redirecting the question of art as object to one of
concept on surface. 39 It was still a question of intramural art institution walls,
and one that had already been raised in Andy Warhols famous show at Leo
Castellis in 1966 when he covered every wall in the gallery with Pop-colored cow
wallpaper, using actual printed wallpaper, and taking object-less flatness all the
12
way. Bochner reflects that Warhols move combined with the impact of the
graffiti written in the May 1968 Paris student uprising signaled a new awareness
of direct encounters with the inscribed surface of a wall: it is immediate and
temporal. These works cannot be held; they can only be seen. Bochners
concluding observation could easily be expressed by a street artist: By collapsing
the space between the artwork and the viewer, a wall painting negates the gap
between lived time and pictorial time, permitting the work to engage larger
philosophical, social, and political issues. 40 OK, the street artist would say, but
reverse the orientation of the walls: what was formerly a debate about work done
in institutional art space has now been turned outward into public space, or,
more fully, lets erase the zones and demarcations and acknowledge a continuum
between art-institutional space and the public space surrounding everyday life.
Lets consider a few routes through which street art wall practices were
anticipated but not fulfilled by avant-garde attempts to break the wall system. Im
not interested in developing myths of origin or a genealogy of practices that could
legitimize street art in an art historical narrative, as if street art were a longrepressed, internalized other finally bursting out on its own. Rather, when read
dialogically, the moves, strategies, and arguments being restated in street art
practice become visible as intuitive and conceptual acts with equal sophistication
and awareness of consequences.
We can trace a non-linear cluster of concepts and practices extending from
post-War neo-Dadaist artists down to the 1980s and the artworld reception of
Basquiat, Jenny Holzer, and Barbara Kruger, whose works, as different as they
are in medium and concepts, presuppose the intramuros/extramuros symbolic
system. Conceptual and strategic connections to recent street art practice are
found in Robert Rauschenbergs image transfers and assemblage works, Cy
Twomblys large mural paintings of writing and graffiti gestures, the works of the
dcollage artists begun in the late 1940s, especially by Jacques Villegl in Paris,
and the matter and wall paintings by Antoni Tpies in Barcelona in the 1950s1980s. An ur-text for the tradition is Brassas Graffiti, photographs of the paint
marks, image scratches, and writings on Paris walls from the 1930s-1950s, the
first collection of which was published in 1961 with an introduction by Picasso. 41
Known as the photographer of the Paris streets, Brassa made photographing
graffiti a life-long project. The Museum of Modern Art presented an exhibition of
13
Brassas graffiti photographs in 1956 and the Bibliothque Nationale organized a

Brassa retrospective in Paris in 1964, both of which had a major influence on
artists and the modernist discourse about primitivism, outsider art, and the
unselfconscious expression of the untrained savant. The artworld debate about
walls, graffiti, and the authentic outsider provided one context for the reception
of Basquiat and Haring in the post-Pop 1980s. Also beginning in the 1980s,
Barbara Kruger extended the debate about walls and appropriated images for a
feminist conceptual critique that both crossed the wall boundaries and disrupted
the white cube of gallery space by presenting all walls, ceilings, and floors as a
continuous surface of image and text.
Artists in the Abstract Expressionist and Neo-Dadaist traditions quoted or
appropriated the look or the Romantic myth of graffiti as a gesture to be
incorporated in large, mural paintings. The appropriation made sense only as a
move in a specific kind of argument about painting that involved breaking down
the pictorial surface with graphism, writing and symbols, usually with a downskilling or deskilling of mark-marking and other non-pictorial elements. Cy
Twomblys works in the 1950s show the transference of street wall acts and
gestures, surrogate graffiti, like anonymous drawings on walls. 42 Twomblys
allusions to writing on walls and blackboards were a means to smuggle graffiti
gestures into painting as a sign of the primitive, raw, spontaneous, and preformal, writing overtaking pictorial space. 43 Rauschenberg, who initially
appeared in shows with Twombly, constructed combine and collage works
incorporating nearly all possible graphic gestures and image appropriations in
wall-like systems. 44
Rauschenbergs deconstructed image- and sign-bearing
materials were the escape hatch that launched appropriation art as an ongoing
encounter with what is found in the city. As Leo Steinberg noted,
Rauschenbergs picture plane is for the consciousness immersed in the brain of
the city. 45 At the time, a similar move inside painting was developed by Antoni
Tpies in Barcelona, whose paintings appropriated the materiality of the city wall
with its codes for communal inscription and palimpsest history.
What emerged in the 1950s-60s as a formal argument about painting
degree-zero, a reduction of means to the baseline materiality of surfaces, a
reduction down to the bare walls as a minimal signifying unit of plane space, was
converted into a material practice by street artists in the 1980s-90s. Instead of
14
smuggling in non-art acts on walls as a disruptive move within the grand

narrative of painting, street art starts from the reversed wall, the interchange and
promiscuous mix of cultures intra- and extramuros, as the now always-already
state of the worlds imaging system. The reversal reveals the urban wall as weve
already known it, though often occluded in misrecognition: the wall as the
primary signifying space of the human built environment, the picturing plane par
excellence, a kind of deep structure in the generative grammar of visuality, part of
a centuries-long cultural unconscious. We cant get over the wall.
This awareness of the signifying materiality of the urban wall was explored
persuasively by two other artists in the 1950s-1960s, Jacques Villegl and Antoni
Tpies, artists who have continued their practice to the present day. Villegls
works are made of, or from, torn street posters, a move that both scaled up and
reversed the process of Dadist collage and redirected the anonymity of posters
pasted and torn away by the hands of passersby. 46 Villegl usually named his
decollage pieces by the streets, squares, or metro stations from which he
extracted the found and torn posters, many of which had graffiti and other pasteup additions added by others. He deglued the street-scale posters and papers
and then re-applied them to canvas and paper supports to be mounted on
exhibition walls, thus reversing non-art/art wall spaces and allowing the
extramural realm of anonymous, layered public walls to penetrate the intramural
space of the gallery, museum, and art collection. It was a move that inserted a
sign of the ephemeral, public street experience without engaging in its practice.
This technique is now used by many street artists who create studio-produced
canvases and wood panel works using various collage techniques with found and
prepared papers.
Antoni Tpies, the Catalonian artist known for his interpretation of Dada, art
brut, and art informel (formlessness), transposed the function of city walls onto
his canvases, often marking them with raw graffiti gestures, crosses, Xs, and
ritual and territorial marks. 47 His appropriation of the city wall went back to
growing up in Barcelona and experiencing the city walls as both a cultural
identity and a tableau on which the daily violence of fascist oppression was
inscribed and memorialized in the 1930-40s. For him, the direct marks in matter
were signs of the undeniable presence of human action, the traces of history and
memory imposed materially and directly, and not through illusionistic images
15
which can only be signifiers of absence. He turned the external inscribed surface
of walls inward, into interior space and the inward space of symbols and
meditation. In the 1950s he discovered Brassas photographs of graffiti and the
theories accompanying the reception of Brassas work, further motivating his
move to making paintings as quotations from walls.
Tpies inserted the materiality of old, marked city walls into painting, using
marble dust, sand, and clay; he marked the materials like territory identity signs,
but limited to the demarcated surface of a painting. In his essay Communication
on the Wall (1969), he recalled a turning point in the 1950s: the most
sensational surprise was to discover one day, suddenly, that my paintings had
turned into walls. 48 Reversing exterior walls to interior reflection, Tpies
represents walls not simply as material barriers but as the medium for public
marks of human struggle, presence, mortality, and collective memory. The
secular extramural ritual of adding human presence to the palimpsest wall in
non-art space has been turned around to present itself in the intramural art space
of the studio, museum, gallery, and art collection. Mutatis mutandis, street
artists in Barcelona have extended Tpies project by executing some of the most
striking street mural art in the world (see Figures 10.27 and 10.28). 49
Around 1980, Basquiat made the transition from graffiti and his SAMO
street identity to working out his famous street/studio fusion with lessons
learned from the early Pollock, Dubuffet, Twombly, Rauschenberg, and Picasso.50
He reversed the walls again, eagerly joining the prestige system of the artworld,
and was at home with large-scale mural paintings, creating paintings that were
walls of brut imagery, graphics, and writing. When Basquiat abandoned his street
work for the intramural artworld, there was an enthusiastic embrace of his
outsider cross-over status, as if he came from a curatorial central casting agency.
He emerged at a moment when outsider and primitive art were established as
art market and curatorial categories, and when the first wave of graffiti art had
crossed over into the gallery system. Basquiats and Keith Harings works were
also received as viable moves within a post-Pop continuum, both artists
benefiting from artworld and popular culture myths of the Romantic outsider
artist. The next generation of street artists moved beyond the wall problematic of
the artworld, and energetically embraced working as outsiders. The non-art space
of city walls remained open for intervention, and the rest is now history.
16
Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger, important wall-breakers in other

directions, should be cited as concluding examples of artists who intervened in
the mediated city and the urban wall messaging system. Both artists rose to
international attention in the 1980s simultaneously with Basquiat and Haring,
and both began by responding to the cultural messaging system of New York City.
Jenny Holzer began her LED aphorism and posters in the late 1970s as
interventions in public space, and she then developed her signature style of largescale text projections on city buildings and messages on appropriated
billboards. 51 Barbara Kruger has produced a large body of work that combines
collaged or photomontaged appropriated images from mass media with slogans
in the Futura Bold type font directed toward a feminist critique of consumer
culture. Her works are like scaled up magazine advertising spreads, and she often
installs her work like walls of posters and billboards, at times covering entire
floors and ceilings of gallery rooms. 52 She has also produced works installed in
public spaces, including billboards, posters, bus stops, and exterior museum
installations. 53 Shepard Fairey and others have acknowledged Holzer and Kruger
as major influences for using text messages and appropriated, stylistically
encoded mass media imagery in works created for multiple spaces of reception. 54
Street artists have broken the wall system even further by including the
social intramuros/extramuros partitions as part of their subject matter. Public
spaces and city walls have become a heuristics laboratory for experimentation
and discovery, the results of which are brought back into studio art making, and
vice versa. For many artists today, making new art is not only about negotiating
with "art history," but about engaging with the history of every mark, sign, and
image left in the vast, global, encyclopedic memory machine of the city. The
street, studio, and gallery installation spaces now continually intersect and
presuppose one another; art works are made for the spaces that frame them. As
Alexandre Farto (Vhils) explains, I don't discriminate between outside and
inside. I think its more about the way you embrace a particular space and what
you want to question with it. 55 Likewise, Jos Parl never saw the difference
between doing his illegal street work and his experiments on canvas when he
started painting in the late 1980s: my generation grew up seeing Jean-Michel
Basquiat, Futura and Phase2 and their gallery exhibitions around the world
Regardless of the surface, for me it was all just art and thats it. 56
17
The cultural wall system is capable of many reversals and inversions

precisely because the major art and property regimes are defined by secular
extensions of the rule of intramuros and extramuros. Within the institutional
boundaries of the artworld system, we learn what the category of art is, what is
excluded and excludable (the extramuros) and what is included and includable.
Visibility regimes remain embedded in our material and symbolic wall systems
like resident software always functioning as a background process. The artworld
had a dream of art forms that subverted the received structures and boundaries,
but never imagined that outsiders would actually be doing it. Dada didnt
overturn the intramural idea of art; it required and presupposed it. Dada was the
theory; street art is the practice.
Street Art and Rewriting the City
The way I look at the landscape is forever changed because of street art. -Shepard Fairey, 2010 57
Much
of
street
art
practice
follows
the
logic
of
transgressions,
appropriations, and tactics described in Michel de Certeaus, The Practice of

Everyday Life. 58 De Certeau describes how ordinary urban citizens navigate and
negotiate their positions in power systems that mark up city space. Breaking up
the totalizing notion of those dominated by power as passive consumers, de
Certeau shows that daily life is made, a creative production, constantly
appropriating and reappropriating the products, messages, spaces for expression,
and territories of others. For de Certeau, the term consumer is a useless,
reductionist euphemism that obscures the complexities of daily practice.
Consumers are more appropriately users and re-producers. Everyday life invents
itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others. 59 Street art and
urban artist collectives are acts of engagement and reorganization, a therapeutics
based on reappropriations and redeployments of the dominant image economy
and hierarchical distribution of space experienced in metropolitan environments.
De Certeau described the strategy of city dwellers in their reading of
received culture with its normative messages and the active writing back of new
and oppositional uses that become community identity positions. 60 He
18
anticipated the idea of read-write culture, the post-Internet context of all art
practice, which involves reading transmitted information and rewriting it
back to the cultural archive, reusing it by interpretation and new context, the
remix of the received and the re-produced. 61 Street art lives at the read-write
intersection of the city as geo-political territory and the global city of bits. Not
only are the material surfaces of buildings and walls rewritten, but street art
presupposes the global remix and reappropriation of imagery and ideas
transferred or created in digital form and distributable on the Internet. Remix
culture scans the received culture encyclopedia for what can be reinterpreted,
rewritten, and reimaged now. Displacements, dislocations, and relocations are
normative generative practices.
Many street artists are nomads, moving around when possible in this
connected and rapidly continuous intermural global city. This is a very new kind
of art practice, doing works in multiple cities and documenting them in real time
on the Web. Nomadic street artists are now imagining the global city as a
distributed surface on which to mark and inscribe visual interventions that
function both locally and globally. The act and gesture performed in one location
can now be viewed from any other city location, and documented, archived,
compared, imitated, remixed, with any kind of dialogic response. Banksys stencil
works have appeared on Palestinian border walls as well as on the walls and
buildings of most major cities, instantly viewable through a Google image search.
Reading and rewriting the city has been globalized; the post-Internet generations
of artists navigate material and digital cities in an experiential continuum. The
art of the extramural world has reconceived both material and conceptual walls
and spaces: the extramural has become post-mural.
The Contest of Visibility
The future of art is not artistic, but urban. -- Henri Lefebvre 62
New York, London, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Paris, Melbourne, Rio, and
Sao Paulo are palimpsests of visual information in the consumerist attention
economy, every visual signifier discharged in a real-time competition and rivalry
for observers attention. World cities have known territories and hierarchies,
19
peripheries and zones for industry or marginalized classes, all of which are
assumed and exploited in street art. For street artists, a city is an information
engine: the daily flows of people for work, leisure, and consumption are
information; the invisible communications network infrastructure not only
transmits information but its very density is itself information; streets, alleys, the
built environment is information; the presence or absence of buildings are
information; the commercial messaging systems in signs, advertising, logos,
billboards, and giant light panels both transmit and are themselves information.
Some of the information becomes communication, addressable messages to
passers-by, advertising hailing us all to look and receive. Ubiquitous, street-level,
vertical advertising spaces are a normative experience in every city, a protected
zone of visuality now nearly inseparable from urban life itself (see Figures 10.10
and 10.11).
Street art is thus always an assertion, a competition, for visibility; urban
public space is always a competition for power by managing the power of
visibility. 63 To be visible is to be known, to be recognized, to exist. Recognition is
both an internal code within the community of practice of street artists, and the
larger social effect sought by the works as acts in public, or publically viewable,
space (see Figures 10.1510.26). The acts of visibility, separable from the
anonymity of many streets artists, become part of the social symbolic world, and
finally, of urban ritual, repetitions that instantiate communal beliefs and bonds of
identity.
Street art contests two main regimes of visibilitylegal and governmental on
one side, and artworld or social aesthetic on the otherwhich creates the
conditions within which it must compete for visibility. Street art works against
the regimes of government, law, and aesthetics as accepted, self-evident systems
that normalize a common world by unconscious rules of visibility and
recognition. In each regime, there are rules and codes for what can be made
visible or perceptible, who has the legitimacy to be seen and heard where, and
who can be rendered invisible as merely the background noise of urban life.
Jacques Rancire has noted how politics is enacted by the partition of the
perceptible (French, partage du sensible), how the regulation, division, or
distribution of visibility itself distributes power: Politics is first of all a way of
framing, among sensory data, a specific sphere of experience. It is a partition of
20
the sensible, of the visible and the sayable, which allows (or does not allow) some
specific data to appear; which allows or does not allow some specific subjects to
designate them and speak about them. 64 Advertising and commercial messaging
space are made to appear as a guaranteed, normalized partition of the visible in
the legal regime. Street artists intuitively contest this rationing or apportioning
out of visibility by intervening in a publically visible way. Street art thus appears
at the intersection of two regimes, two ways of distributing visibilitythe
governmental regime (politics, law, property) and the aesthetic regime (the
artworld and the boundary maintenance between art and non-art).
The contest of visibility is clearly marked in the visual regimes for
commercial communication. As de Certeau observed, from TV to newspapers,
from advertising to all sorts of mercantile epiphanies, our society is characterized
by a cancerous growth of vision, measuring everything by its ability to show or be
shown and transmuting communication into a visual journey. It is a sort of epic
of the eye and of the impulse to read. 65 Every day, we consume more visual
messages than products. Street advertising has to be instantly recognizable, but
with image saturation, its also instantly disengageable, a contest between
meaning and noise. All advertising messages are constructed to interpellate us,
calling us out to take up the position of the advertising addresseethe consumer,
the passive receiver. 66 Street art pushes back with alternative subject positions
for inhabitants and citizens, confusing the message system by offering the
alternative subjectivity of gift-receiver, and blurring the lines between producers
and receivers.
Street artists often talk about their work as a reaction to the domination of
urban visual space by advertising in a closed property regime. Street art is a
response to experiencing public spaces as being implicitly, structurally, forms of
advertising, embodying the codes for socialization in the political economy. In
attempts to maximize the commercial appeal of city centers, many cities have
government sponsored urban projects that turn urban zones into theme parks
with carefully controlled visual information necessary for sustaining a tourist
simulacrum. As Baudrillard noted, today what we are experiencing is the
absorption of all virtual modes of expression into that of advertising. 67 Not
merely messages for products and services, but a social messaging system,
vaguely seductive, vaguely consensual, that replaces lived social experience
21
with a fantasy of a consumerist community. The code of advertizing is

socialization to the message system: a sociality everywhere present, an absolute
sociality finally realized in absolute advertising a vestige of sociality
hallucinated on all the walls in the simplified form of a demand of the social that
is immediately met by the echo of advertising. The social as a script, whose
bewildered audience we are. 68
Street art works to scramble this script, jam the communiqu, or expose its
falsely transparent operation, allowing viewers to adopt different positions, no
longer simply subjects of a message. Street art is a direct engagement with a citys
messaging system, a direct hit on the unconscious, accepted, seemingly natural
spaces in which visual messages can appear. Street artists intervene with a
counter-imagery, acts of displacement in an ongoing generative semeiocracy,
the politics of meaning-making through images and writing in contexts that bring
the contest over visibility into the open. Walls and structures can be de-purposed,
repurposed, de-faced, refaced, de-made, remade.
Ron English, Shepard Fairey, Banksy and many others have made explicit
subversion of advertising space one of their main tactics. Ron English has highjacked over 1,000 billboards with his Pop subvertisements, becoming the
exemplar of the culture jamming potential of street art. 69 This approach has been
the main motivation for Shepard Faireys long-running Obey campaign: images
and slogans that provoke awareness about public messages and advertising. 70
Though criticized for being simplistic, Faireys message targets the consumer
subject directly: keep your eyes and mind open, and question everything. 71
Swoon takes a subtler but still pointed approach: Lately I have wanted to give all
of my attention to reflecting our humanness, our fragility and strength, back out
at us from our city walls in a way that makes all of these fake images screaming at
us from billboards seem irrelevant and cruel, which is what they are. 72
In terms of visual communication space, privatized commercial messages are
endlessly displayed on industrial scale on billboards, street posters and kiosks,
and huge lighted signs. The visual space of many cities is given over to advertising
in protected spaces rented from property owners. As De Certeau observed in The
Imaginary of the City, an imaginary discourse of commerce is pasted over every
square inch of public walls. The visible spaces of inscription for commerce, of
22
course, can reveal precisely where artists interventions will be most visible as a
counter-imaginary language:
[Commercial imagery] is a mural language with the repertory of its
immediate objects of happiness. It conceals the buildings in which labor is
confined; it covers over the closed universe of everyday life; it sets in place
artificial forms that follow the paths of labor in order to juxtapose their
passageways to the successive moments of pleasure. A city that is a real
imaginary museum forms the counterpoint of the city at work. 73
This view is precisely what motivates many street artists: the city as a competitive
space of mural messaging, walls and non-neutral spaces with a potential for
bearing messages. Street artists seize the spaces of visibility for the messaging
system. As Swoon stated in 2003 on the methods of her Brooklyn collective, we
scour the city for the ways that we are spoken to, and we speak back Once you
start listening, the walls don't shut up. 74
Street art also exemplifies the kind of cultural reproduction that de Certeau
discovered in actions that transgress not only the spaces where messaging can
appear, but in its obvious non-commercial, ephemeral, and gratuitous form. It
takes on the politics of the gift, in direct opposition to most legal messaging on
city walls and vertical spaces. His description of popular culture tactics is parallel
to the logic of street art:
[O]rder is tricked by an art, that is, an economy of the "gift"
(generosities for which one expects a return), an esthetics of "tricks"
(artists' operations) and an ethics of tenacity (countless ways of refusing
to accord the established order the status of a law, a meaning, or a
fatality) [T]he politics of the "gift" also becomes a diversionary tactic. In
the same way, the loss that was voluntary in a gift economy is transformed
into a transgression in a profit economy: it appears as an excess (a waste),
a challenge (a rejection of profit), or a crime (an attack on property). 75
For the generation of artists in the 1990s, the walls became found materials to
work with, turning attention to what is normally, intentionally, unnoticed,
23
visually suppressed. The public gift of the street work, even if declined or
disavowed, would always be a mark of presence. As Barry McGee stated in 1995,
graffiti was all about showing signs of life. People are alive. Someone was here at
that time. 76 Visibility is presence; to exist is to be seen.
A clear statement of public intervention in city space is summed up in
Swoons description of her Indivisible Cities project that she organized with
artists in Berlin in 2003. [T]here is a struggle going on for the physical surfaces
of our cities.
Indivisible Cities is a visual and cultural exchange focusing on artistic
interventions in the urban landscape. Creating itself out of the margins of
our cities is a community of people, more precisely it is a community of
actions, a floating world of ephemera and physical markings made by
people who have decided to become active citizens in creating their visual
landscape. Every time someone reappropriates a billboard for his or her
own needs, scrawls their alias across a highway overpass, or uses city
walls as a sounding board for their thoughts and images for messages that
need realization, they are participating in this community. They are
circumscribing a link to every other person who believes that the vitality
of our public spaces is directly related to the public participating in the
incessant creation and re-creation of those spaces. [Street art is] a form of
active citizenship that resists attempts at containment I think that the
persistence of graffiti and street art in cities all over the world is evidence
of a common need for citizens to take a role in their environments. 77
Street art provides ongoing signs of environmental reclamation, marking out
zones for an alternative visibility. Both regimes of visibility are disturbed, a
disturbance that also renders their falsely transparent operations visible as the
social and political constructions they are.
24
Conclusions and Consequences:

Street Art in the Dialogical Field of Art
In providing an overview of the larger contexts of street art for visual culture,
Im painfully aware of the omissions and generalizations one must commit to
fulfill the task. I can only provide some conclusions and consequences in a brief
form here. Like all cultural terms, street art names and constructs a category
useful in various kinds of arguments, but is easily deconstructible as riddled with
internal contradictions and contestable assumptions. And like Pop after the
1960s, some critics are already declaring an end to street art as a viable
movement: street art, as the argument goes, has now received art institutional
recognition along with trivializing by media exposure and dilution by imitators
and co-option by celebrity culture. For most artists today, street art is simply a
short-hand term for multiple ways of doing art in dialog with a city in a
continuity of practice that spans street, studio, gallery, museum, and the Internet.
This continuum of practice was unknown to artists in any prior cultural position.
The term does useful cultural work when street art is viewed as a practice that
subsumes many forms of visual culture and postmodern art movements, but
played out in conflicting ways across the visibility regimes and constitutive spaces
of the city and art institutions.
Summing up, lets retrace the network array of forces within which street art
has become a connecting node:
(1) Street art reveals a new kind of attention to the phenomenology of the city, the
experience of material spaces and places in daily life, and has re-introduced play
and the gift in public exchange. Well-executed and well-placed street art reanchors us in the here and now, countering the forces of disappearance in the city
as a frictionless commerce machine neutralizing time and presence and claiming
all zones of visuality for itself. Street art rematerializes the visual, an aesthetics of
reappearance in an era of continual re-mediation and disappearance. 78
(2) Street art thwarts attempts to maintain unified, normalized visibility regimes,
the legal and policy regime for controlling public, non-art space and the
institutional regime controlling the visibility of art. It exposes the contest for
25
visibility being played out in multiple dimensions, and the internal contractions
which must be repressed for the regimes to function. Street art will remain an
institutional antinomy because it depends on the extramural tensions of working
outside art spaces that are commonly understood as deactivating art. Art space,
the heterotopia of museum, gallery, and academic institutional space, is wellrecognized in its constitutive function as part of learned and shared cultural
capital. 79 Public space, on the other hand, is understood as precisely that space in
which art does not and cannot appear, where weve learned that art cannot be
made visible as such. The spaces have been, and continue to be, reconfigured, but
the visibility regimes remain deeply embedded in our social, economic, and
political order.
(3) By subverting the cultural wall system and championing the ephemeral act of
art, street art reveals internal contradictions and crises in the parallel universe of
the artworld. In the institutional artworld, we only find unity in a consensual
disunity about the state of contemporary art, the institutional response to
popular visual culture, and the ongoing dissatisfaction with dehistoricizing,
dislocating, institutional containers. There seems to be no escape from the
intramural self-reflexive authentication operations, no outside the wall. Hal
Foster aptly describes the effect of monumental institutional spaces like
Dia:Beacon and the Tate Modern: we wander through museum spaces as if after
the end of time. 80 The artworld isnt dancing on the museums ruins (as in
Crimp, 1993), but keeps the museum without walls installed in the institution.
(4) Street art since the late 1990s is the first truly post-Internet art movement,
equally at home in real and digital spaces as an ongoing continuum, interimplicated, inter-referenced, the real and the virtual mutually presupposed. This
phenomenon is partly generational and partly a function of ubiquitous and
accessible technology in cities. Inexpensive digital cameras and laptops join the
Webs architecture for do-it-yourself publishing and social networking in a highly
compatible way. Street art as a global movement has grown unconstrained
through Web image-sharing and multiple ways of capturing and archiving
ephemeral art.
26
(5) Street art since the 1990s is a kind of manifesto-in-practice for the complex
forms of globalization, cultural hybridity, and remix which are increasingly the
norm for life in global, networked cities. Street arts embrace of multiple
mediums, techniques, materials, and styles makes it an exemplar of hybridity,
remix, and post-appropriation practices now seen to be a defining principle of
contemporary culture. Id like to expand on this issue to explore some wider
implications of street art and cultural hybridity.
Street Art and Contemporary Hybridity, Remix, and Appropriation:
The Implications of Read/Write Visual Culture
To riff on a police term, street artists have known associations with hip-hop
and post-punk cultures, a trans-urban mash-up is the message aesthetic that
values a living, performative, re-interpretation and re-contextualization of
received materials in real-time practice. If collage is arguably the major aesthetic
force in twentieth-century art forms,81 then hybridity, appropriation, and remix
have clearly become the forces for the early twenty-first. 82 The key issue, which I
will develop further in a forthcoming book, is understanding hybridity, remix,
and appropriation as surface forms of a deeper generative grammar of culture, as
visible or explicit instances of a structurally necessary dialogic principle
underlying all forms of human expression and meaning-making. 83 The
appropriative or dialogic principle in creative production is part of the source
code of living cultures. As part of the internalized, generative grammar of culture,
the dialogic principle is ordinarily invisible to members of a culture because it is
not a unit of content to be expressed, but makes possible the expression of any
new content per se.
In street art, appropriation and remix of styles and imagery extend the prior
practices of Pop and Conceptual Art genres, 84 but street artists take the
conditions of postmodernity for granted, as something already in the past,
already accounted for and in the mix. The state of art-making today is no longer
burdened with the curriculum of postmodernismmourning over the museums
ruins and the de-historicized mash-ups of popular culture, 85 cataloguing the
collapse of high and low culture boundaries, and finding uses for anxieties about
post-colonial global hybridization and identity politics. Remix is now coming into
27
view as one of the main engines of culture, though long shut up and hidden in a
black box of ideologies. Behind so much creative work in art, music, literature,
and design today is the sense of culture as being always already hybrid, a mix of
impure, promiscuous, and often unacknowledged or suppressed sources, local
and global, and kept alive in an ongoing dialogic call and response.
Nicolas Bourriaud has argued that the cluster of concepts related to remix
and appropriation can be described as postproduction: recent art practices
function as an alternative editing table for remixing the montage we call reality
into the cultural fictions we call art. 86 The editing table or mixing board (terms
from audio-visual postproduction) are apt metaphors for a time when so much
new cultural production is expressed as post-production, received cultural
materials selected, quoted, collaged, remixed, edited, and positioned in new
conceptual or material contexts. By making visible the reuse of materials already
in circulation in the common culture, much street art has affinities with
constantly evolving global hybrid music cultures, which have subsumed earlier
DJ, Dub, sampling, and electronic/digital remix composition practices. 87
Street art is visual dub, extracting sources and styles from a cultural
encyclopedia of images and message styles, editing out some transmitted features
and re-appropriating others, inserting the new mix into the visual multi-track
platform of the city. 88 The urban platform is assumed to be read/write,
renewable, and never a zero-sum game: you only take when in the process of
creating something that gives back.
The cultural logic of remix and appropriation has collided with the
intellectual property regime in the high-profile copyright case of Associated Press
v. Shepard Fairey, which hangs on the interpretation of Fair Use in the
transformation of a digital news photograph in Faireys iconic Obama poster
portrait in 2008. 89 The case is not simply a matter for theory and practice in the
arts, but for the legal regimes now at a crisis point in adjusting to contemporary
cultural practices and digital mediation. 90 Artists, writers, musicians, fashion
designers, advertising creatives, and architects all know that the active principle
named by appropriation is part of the generative grammar of the creative
process. Appropriation is not imitation, copying, or theft. Its conversation,
interpretation, dialog, a sign of participating in a tradition (lit., what is handed
down), regardless of whether the tradition is a dominant form or an outsider
28
subculture, or whether the artist takes an adversarial, affirmative, or conflicted

position within the tradition.
Of course, neither street art nor Faireys post-Pop practices are special cases
for art or legal theory. But since the AP case is based on the practice of a street
artist known for appropriation and remix, it represents a perfect storm of issues
that can be redirected to expose collective misrecognitions about art works that
lost sustainability decades ago. The misrecognitions are maintained through our
enormous social investment in the ideologies of single authorship, originality,
property, and ownership. Misrecognitions about production are further
maintained by the positivist, atomistic logic of legal philosophy on copyright and
IP in which surface similarities between works are taken as the bases for causal
arguments about copy or derivation. Specifically for visual culture, Faireys
Obama images rely on a logic of remediation, recontextualization, and stylized
iconicity that extends back to Rauschenberg and other Pop artists. Through the
strategy of the demake or down-skilled remake, a strategy observable in a
wide array of twentieth-century works prior to recent street art, generic portrait
features present in a digital photograph have been rendered as a hand-made
screenprint image. 91 Of course, the uses of the remake in Faireys and other
artists practices are only one instance of multiple kinds of expressions produced
every day in the dialogic grammar of culture. The AP v. Fairey case can generate a
larger public awareness of these urgent issues and make it possible to ask
precisely those questions that cannot be asked when collective misrecognitions
are at stake. Artists producing works in all media and the public receiving them
now live in a culture with a legal-economic regime requiring a re-syncing with
reality that will be as unsettling as the Copernican revolution.
With its ability to embrace multiple urban subcultures and visual styles in a
globally distributed practice, street art provides a new dialogic configuration, a
post-postmodern hybridity that will continue to generate many new kinds of
works and genres. Now working in a continuum of practice spanning street,
studio, gallery, installation spaces, and the Internet, street artists expose how an
artwork is a momentary node of relationships, a position in a network of
affiliations, configured into a contingent and interdependent order. The node
may have collective authorship, may have affiliations with media, images, or
concepts from other points in the network, near or far, contemporary or archival,
29
may take form in an ephemeral, material location and live on through global
digital distribution. The important thing for the artists is to keep moving and
keep proving themselves for their mentor and interlocutor, the city. The artists
are mapping out in real time one possible and promising future for a postpostmodern visual culture.
Martin Irvine
Georgetown University
irvinem@georgetown.edu
30
Notes
1
Arguments for this transition are appearing at an accelerated pace: Patrick Nguyen and
Stuart Mackenzie, eds., Beyond the Street: With the 100 Most Important Players in
Urban Art (Berlin: Die Gestalten Verlag, 2010); R. Klanten, H. Hellige, and S. Ehmann,
eds., The Upset: Young Contemporary Art (Berlin: Die Gestalten Verlag, 2008); Carlo
McCormick, Marc Schiller, and Sara Schiller, Trespass: A History Of Uncommissioned
Urban Art (Kln: Taschen, 2010).
2
It would be impossible to recognize all the friends, colleagues, and artists that have been
part of an ongoing dialog that informs many of the ideas in this essay, but I would
especially like to thank Shepard Fairey, Swoon, Roger Gastman, Pedro Alonzo, and
Jeffrey Deitch for their dedication and commitment to the art.
3
Notable books include Roger Gastman, Caleb Neelon, and Anthony Smyrski, Street
World: Urban Culture and Art from Five Continents (New York, NY: Abrams Books,
2007); Klanten, Hellige, and Ehmann, The Upset; Steve Lazarides, Outsiders: Art by
People (London, UK: Random House UK, 2009); Cedar Lewisohn, Street Art: The
Graffiti Revolution, 1st ed. (New York, NY; London: Abrams; Tate Publishing, 2008);
Eleanor Mathieson and Xavier A. Tpies, eds., Street Artists: The Complete Guide
(Korero Books, 2009); Aaron Rose and Christian Strike, eds., Beautiful Losers, 2nd ed.
(New York: Iconoclast and Distributed Art Publishers, 2005); Gary Shove, Untitled:
Street Art in the Counter Culture (Berkeley, CA: Gingko Press and Pro-Actif
Communications, 2009); Gary Shove, Untitled II. The Beautiful Renaissance: Street Art
and Graffiti (Berkeley, CA: Gingko Press, 2009); Banksy, Wall and Piece (London, UK:
Random House UK, 2007); Shepard Fairey, E Pluribus Venom (Berkeley, CA: Gingko
Press, 2008); Shepard Fairey, OBEY: Supply & Demand: The Art of Shepard Fairey,
20th Anniversary Edition (Berkeley, CA: Gingko Press, 2009); Nicholas Ganz, Graffiti
World: Street Art from Five Continents (New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, 2004);
Nicholas Ganz and Nancy MacDonald, Graffiti Women: Street Art from Five Continents
(New York, NY: Abrams, 2006); Jaime Rojo and Steven P. Harrington, eds., Street Art
New York (New York, NY: Prestel USA, 2010); Swoon, Swoon (New York, NY: Abrams,
2010); Nguyen and Mackenzie, Beyond the Street.
4
See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 1984).

5
See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford,
UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1991); Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities (Oxford,
UK; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996).
31
See Jacques Rancire, The Politics Of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans.
Gabriel Rockhill (London and New York: Continuum, 2004); Jacques Rancire,
Aesthetics and Its Discontents (Polity, 2009); Jacques Rancire, Thinking between
disciplines: an aesthetics of knowledge, Parrhesia 1, no. 2006 (2006): 1-12; Jacques
Rancire, The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge, Critical Inquiry
36, no. 1 (January 1, 2009): 1-19; Jacques Rancire, Aesthetic Separation, Aesthetic
Community: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, Art & Research 2, no. 1 (2006),
http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n1/ranciere.html.
7
A highly perceptive description of the current scene of contemporary art is Terry Smith,
What Is Contemporary Art? (Chicago, IL: University Of Chicago Press, 2009); see
especially Chap. 13, pp. 241-71; see also Terry Smith, Contemporary Art and
Contemporaneity, Critical Inquiry 32, no. 4 (June 1, 2006): 681-707; and the recent
dialogue in October: Hal Foster, Questionaire on "The Contemporary", October 130 (10,
2009): 3-124; also telling is the Roundtable discussion on "The predicament of
contemporary art" in Hal Foster et al., Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism,
Postmodernism (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 671-79.
8
This is a central question approached in various ways in Marquard Smith, Visual
Culture Studies: Interviews with Key Thinkers (Los Angeles; London: SAGE, 2008); see
also the now famous volume of October devoted to the issue: Svetlana Alpers et al.,
Visual Culture Questionnaire, October 77 (Summer 1996): 25-70; Hal Foster, The
Archive without Museums, October 77 (Summer 1996): 97-119; and the 2005 issue of the
Journal of Visual Culture, Martin Jay, Introduction to Show and Tell, Journal of Visual
Culture 4, no. 2 (August 1, 2005): 139-143.
9
Fairey, OBEY, 94.
10
See Nan Ellin, Postmodern Urbanism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press.
1999, 280-88, and Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1979.
11
de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life.
12
See Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, New Edition, Semiotexte / Foreign
Agents (New York, NY: Semiotext(e), 2009); John Armitage and Paul Virilio, From
Modernism to Hypermodernism and Beyond An Interview with Paul Virilio, Theory,
Culture & Society, 1999.
13
See Marc Auge, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity,
trans. John Howe, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2009).

14
See especially Gastman, Neelon, and Smyrski, Street World; Roger Gastman and Caleb
Neelon, The History of American Graffiti (New York, NY: Collins Design, 2010); Ganz,
32
Graffiti World; Mathieson and Tpies, Street Artists; Nguyen and Mackenzie, Beyond the
Street.
15
See Craig Castleman, Getting Up: Subway Graffitti in New York (Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press, 1984).

16
The seminal argument about "disorder" and crime was stated in George L. Kelling and
James Q. Wilson, Broken Windows: The police and neighborhood safety, The Atlantic,
March 1982, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/03/brokenwindows/4465/; George L. Kelling and Catherine M. Coles, Fixing Broken Windows:
Restoring Order & Reducing Crime in Our Communities (New York, NY: Free Press,
1996); the application of this theory on graffiti policy in New York City has been wellexamined by Joe Austin in Joe Austin, Taking the Train: How Graffiti Art Became an
Urban Crisis in New York City (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2001).
17
The transitions and hybridizations across the street art and graffiti art practices is well-
documents in Nguyen and Mackenzie, Beyond the Street.

18
See Ibid., 358-63.
19
See the essay by Alain Bieber in R. Klanten and M. Huebner, eds., Urban
Interventions: Personal Projects in Public Places (Berlin: Die Gestalten Verlag, 2010), 45.
20
The historical context for these theories is beyond the scope of this essay, but see
especially Peter Burger, Theory Of The Avant-Garde (Minneapolis, MN: Univ of

Minnesota Press, 1984); Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-garde and Other
Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 151-170; questions of relational art
in global cities is also usefully explored in Nicolas Bourriaud's essays; see Nicolas
Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les Presses du rel, 2002), 151-170; Nicolas
Bourriaud, The Radicant (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2009), 151-170; and on the
Situationist theory of detournement, see the key texts by Debord in Ken Knabb, ed.,
Situationist International Anthology, Revised & Expanded. (Berkeley, CA: Bureau Of
Public Secrets, 2006), 151-170, http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/index.htm; and overview
by Sadler in Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998),
151-170.
21
See Knabb, Situationist International Anthology.
22
Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, 19.
23
Nguyen and Mackenzie, Beyond the Street, 141.
24
See the World Urbanization Prospects, United Nations Department of Economic and
Social Affairs: available: http://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/index.htm.
33
25
I am especially indebted to the research by Manuel Castells and Saskia Sassen on the
global city; see especially Manuel Castells, The Informational City: Economic
Restructuring and Urban Development (Oxford, UK; Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989);
Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (New Edition) (The Information Age:
Economy, Society and Culture Volume 1), 2nd ed. (Wiley-Blackwell, 2000); Saskia
Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2001); Saskia Sassen, Global Networks, Linked Cities (New York;
London: Routledge, 2002); Saskia Sassen, Cities in a World Economy, 3rd ed. (Thousand
Oaks Calif.: Pine Forge Press, 2006); Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents
(New York: The New Press, 1998).
26
See the works of William J. Mitchell: William J. Mitchell, City of Bits: Space, Place,
and the Infobahn (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996); William J. Mitchell, e-topia
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000); William J. Mitchell, Placing Words: Symbols,
Space, and the City (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005); and the Website for his
"Smart Cities" project at MIT: William J. Mitchell, Smart Cities, n.d.,
http://cities.media.mit.edu/.
27
See Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (New Edition) (The Information Age;
Castells, The Informational City.

28
For example, from May 2008 to June 2010, the street art animation Muto by Blu was
viewed 6,850,920 times: BLU, MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU, 2008,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuGaqLT-gO4.
29
Norman Mailer and Jon Naar, The Faith of Graffiti, New Edition. (New York: It Books,
2010).
30
See especially The Wooster Collective as a connecting node for documenting street art:
http://www.woostercollective.com/. All City is also the name of a street art and graffiti
iPhone app launched in May, 2010. Available: http://allcityart.com/. This app allows
users to upload street art photos and tag and map them for other users.
31
Art Crimes Collective, Art Crimes - Graffiti Art Worldwide, present 1995,
http://www.artcrimes.org/; Wooster Collective, Wooster Collective, present 2001,

http://www.woostercollective.com/; Russell Howze, Stencil Archive, 2002,
http://stencilarchive.org/.
32
Brassai, Conversations with Picasso, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago, IL: University
Of Chicago Press, 1999), 254.

33
Brassai, Brassa Graffiti (Paris: Flammarion, 2002), 13.
34
de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 93.
34
35
See Andrea Mubi Brighenti, ed., The Wall and the City (Trento, Italy: Professional
Dreamers' Press, 2009); Andrea Mubi Brighenti, ed., Walled urbs to urban walls and
return? On the social life of walls, in The Wall and the City (Trento, Italy: Professional
Dreamers' Press, 2009), 63-71.
36
See the timely collection of papers Brighenti, The Wall and the City; and especially
Brighenti, Walled urbs to urban walls and return? On the social life of walls.
37
See Brian O'Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space,
Expanded ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

38
This is affirmed in the recent exhibition of performance art at the Whitney Museum; in
the curator's view, performance played out the end game of Modernism in their various
rupturings of the autonomous space of painting and its primary location the vertical
plane of the gallery wall. From The Whitney Museum of American Art, Off the Wall:
Part 1--Thirty Performative Actions (Whitney Museum of Art, May 28, 2010),
http://whitney.org/file_columns/0001/8996/off_the_wall_press_release.pdf.
39
Mel Bochner, Why Would Anyone Want to Draw on the Wall?, October 130 (10,
2009): 135-140.
40
Ibid., 140.
41
Brassai, Brassa Graffiti.
42
The first quotation is from an essay by Robert Pincus-Witten in 1968, the second from
a review in 1953 by Lawrence Campell, included in Nicola Del Roscio and et al., eds.,
Writings On Cy Twombly (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2003), 65, 25; see Jon Bird,
Indeterminacy and (Dis)order in the work of Cy Twombly, Oxford Art Journal 30, no. 3
(October 1, 2007): 484-504.
43
Twombly's "allusions" to writing were famously described by Roland Barthes in "The
Wisdom of Art" (1979); in Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays
on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (New York, NY: Hill & Wang,
1984); reprinted in Del Roscio and et al., Writings On Cy Twombly, 102-113.
44
See Robert Saltonstall Mattison, Robert Rauschenberg: Breaking Boundaries (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 41-104.

45
Leo Steinberg, Reflections on the State of Criticism, Artforum, March 1972.
46
The Pomidou Center in Paris organized a Retrospective of Villegls work, Jacques
Villegl, La comdie urbaine, September 2008-January 2009. Other important

exhibitions include L'informe, mode d'emploi, Centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris, 1996
and Le Nouveau ralisme, Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, 2007. The artist
has his own official website: http://www.villegle.fr.
35
47
A good overview of Tpies career is on the website for the Dia:Beacon exhibition in
2009: Antoni Tpies: The Resources of Rhetoric; available:

http://www.diaart.org/exhibitions/introduction/9.
48
Antoni Tapies, Communication on the Wall, in Antoni Tapies: Works, Writings,
Interviews, ed. Youssef Ishaghpour (Barcelona: Poligrafa, 2007), 117; also reprinted in
Valeriano Bozal and Serge Guilbaut, eds., Tapies: In Perspective (Barcelona:
Actar/MACBA, 2005).
49
During a visit to Barcelona in June, 2010, I was struck by the historical layers of street
mural art visible in central zones around the city, including the walls on streets opposite
the Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona, which has an extensive collection of Tpies
works. The street art was still securely extramuros in relation to the museum.
50
See Richard Marshall, ed., Jean-Michel Basquiat (New York, NY: Whitney Museum of
Art, 1992); Gianni Mercurio, ed., The Jean-Michel Basquiat Show (Milan: Skira, 2007);
Diego Cortez et al., Jean-Michel Basquiat: 1981, The Studio of the Street (New York, NY:
Charta/ Deitch Projects, 2007).
51
See especially Jenny Holzer and Creative Time, Jenny Holzer: For the City, Jenny
Holzer: For the City, 2005,

http://www.creativetime.org/programs/archive/2005/holzer/index1.html; Jenny
Holzer, Jenny Holzer: Projections, Jenny Holzer, Projections, n.d.,
http://www.jennyholzer.com/; Diane Waldman and Jenny Holzer, Jenny Holzer (New
York, NY: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1997); Elizabeth A.T. Smith and Jenny
Holzer, Jenny Holzer (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2008).
52
A recent exhibition at Sprth Magers gallery in Berlin was entitled Paste Up
(November 21, 2009-January 23, 2010), indicating affinities with billboards and street
art. See: http://spruethmagers.net/exhibitions/248.
53
She designed a city-block long installation on the faade of the Ontario Museum of Art
in 2010; see http://www.ago.net/barbara-kruger, and the installation video:

http://artmatters.ca/wp/2010/05/barbara-kruger-installation-video/.
54
See Fairey, OBEY, 34; Dorothy Spears, Barbara Kruger in Europe, Toronto and the
Hamptons: Resurgent Agitprop in Capital Letters, The New York Times, August 24,
2010, sec. Arts / Art & Design, 34,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/arts/design/29kruger.html; M Revelli and
Shepard Fairey, Barbara Kruger, Juxtapoz, November 2010, 44-55.
55
Nguyen and Mackenzie, Beyond the Street, 10.
56
Ibid., 27.
36
57
Interview in Kevin Charles Redmon, Shepard Fairey's American Graffiti, The Future of
the City, The Atlantic, May 20, 2010, http://www.theatlantic.com/special-report/thefuture-of-the-city/archive/2010/05/shepard-faireys-american-graffiti/56924/.

58
First published in French in1980 as Linvention du quotidian; English, 1984: de
Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life.

59
Ibid., xii.
60
Ibid., xxi.
61
See Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid
Economy (New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2008); Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: The
Nature and Future of Creativity (New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2005); Lawrence Lessig,
Free Culture, Free Culture - Free Content, n.d., http://free-culture.org/freecontent/;
the creative foundations of read/write and remix are explored in Paul D. Miller (DJ
Spooky), Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2008).
62
Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, 173.
63
See Andrea Brighenti, Visibility: A Category for the Social Sciences, Current
Sociology 55, no. 3 (May 1, 2007): 323-342; Brighenti, The Wall and the City; Andrea
Brighenti and Cristina Mattiucci, Editing Urban Environments: Territories,
Prolongations, Visibilities, in Mediacity (Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2009),
http://eprints.biblio.unitn.it/archive/00001481/.
64
Jacques Rancire, The Politics of Literature, SubStance 33, no. 1 (2004): 10.
65
de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, xxi.
66
Expanding in the classic model of the interpellation of the subject in Althusser's
"Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" (1970), in Louis Althusser, Lenin and
Philosophy and Other Essays (Monthly Review Press, 2001).
67
From "Absolute Advertising, Ground-Zero Advertising," in Jean Baudrillard,
Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1995), 87.
68
Ibid., 88.
69
See Ron Englishs website: http://www.popaganda.com/index.shtml.
70
See Fairey, OBEY, ii-v and passim.
71
Ibid., xvi.
72
Ganz and MacDonald, Graffiti Women, 204.
73
Michel de Certeau, The Imaginary of the City, in Culture In The Plural (Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 20.
37
74
From Swoon, Swoon Union, 2004,
http://www.fingerweb.org/html/finger/finger8_12/finger11/swoon.html; some projects

of Swoon and Toyshop from 2003-2004 are archived at: Swoon, TOYSHOP, n.d.,
http://toyshopcollective.org/.
75
de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 26, 27.
76
Juxtapoz, Spring 1995, p. 69.
77
Statement: Swoon, Toyshop Collective: Indivisible Cities, Indivisbile Cities:
Description, 2003, http://www.toyshopcollective.org/indivisible.html; additional

description of the project: Swoon, Newtopia Magazine: Indivisible Cities, by Caledonia
Curry, Newtopia, n.d.,
http://www.newtopiamagazine.org/issue11/newart/indivisiblecities.php.
78
In this context, see Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding
New Media (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000).

79
These concepts have been fully developed by Pierre Bourdieu: Pierre Bourdieu, The
Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press,
1992); Pierre Bourdieu, Social Space and Symbolic Power, in In Other Words: Essays
Towards a Reflexive Sociology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 122-139;
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard
Nice (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979).
80
Foster et al., Art since 1900, 679.
81
One version of the often-cited comment by Donald Barthelme, "'the principle of collage
is the central principle of all art in the 20th century," was from "A Symposium on Fiction"
(1975), included in his collected essays, Donald Barthelme, Not-Knowing: The Essays
and Interviews of Donald Barthelme (New York, NY: Vintage, 1999), 58.
82
See, inter alia, Jonathan Letham, The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism, Harper's
Magazine, 2007; Dick Hebdige, Cut 'n' Mix: Culture, Identity, and Caribbean Music
(London; New York: Methuen, 1987); Miller (DJ Spooky), Sound Unbound; Lessig,
Remix; Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art
Reprograms the World, 2nd ed. (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2005).
83
The literature on this topic from multiple disciplines is huge, but my view draws from
semiotics, linguistics, Bakhtin, reception theory, and theories of appropriation; see

Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World (London; New York: Routledge,
1990); Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1992); Susan Petrilli and Augusto Ponzio, Semiotics Unbounded:
Interpretive Routes through the Open Network of Signs, 1st ed. (Toronto: University of
38
Toronto Press, 2005); David Evans, ed., Appropriation (London ; Cambridge Mass.:
Whitechapel; MIT Press, 2009).
84
For a useful compendium of sources and arguments, see Evans, Appropriation.
85
The now-canonical statements by Douglas Crimp in Douglas Crimp, On the Museum's
Ruins (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1993); and Jameson, Fredric Jameson,
Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1991).
86
See Bourriaud, Postproduction; Bourriaud, The Radicant, 177-88.
87
Bourriaud expands on the question of hybridity and post-production as part of global,
nomadic culture in Nicolas Bourriaud, Altermodern: Tate Triennial (London; New York:
Tate Publications and Harry Abrams, 2009); and Bourriaud, The Radicant.
88
The dub concept, derived from Jamaican reggae studio production, is excellently
explored by Michael Veal, Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae
(Middletown. CT: Wesleyan, 2007); and Paul D. Miller, Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky),
Rhythm Science (Cambridge, MA: Mediawork/MIT Press, 2004); Miller (DJ Spooky),
Sound Unbound; Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky) and Vijay Iyer, Improvising Digital Culture:
A Conversation, Critical Studies in Improvisation 5, no. 1 (2009),
http://www.criticalimprov.com/index.php/csieci/article/viewArticle/1017/1636.
89
It is difficult to find a non-contentious summary of events in this case, but see The New
York Times coverage:

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/f/shepard_fairey/index.ht
ml. A useful context is the special issue of the Journal of Visual Culture, 8/2 (August
2009), which was devoted to the topic of Obama in visual culture and political
iconography.
90
This is one of the most urgent issues of our time, which I will treat more fully in a
forthcoming book. For background, see Lessig, Remix; William Patry, Moral Panics and
the Copyright Wars (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, USA, 2009); Siva
Vaidhyanathan, Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and
How It Threatens Creativity (New York, NY: NYU Press, 2001); James Boyle, Shamans,
software, and spleens : law and the construction of the information society (Cambridge
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).
91
This point is persuasively argued by Cartwright and Mandiberg, Lisa Cartwright and
Stephen Mandiberg, Obama and Shepard Fairey: The Copy and Political Iconography in
the Age of the Demake, Journal of Visual Culture 8, no. 2 (August 1, 2009): 172-176.
39
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What is street art and how has it evolved?

What is street art and how has it evolved?

What are some of the major themes discussed in relation to street art?

What are some of the major themes discussed in relation to street art?

The Work on the Street: Street Art and Visual Culture

Irvine, The Work on the Street

institutionally authorized artworld. Street art has also achieved a substantial

Irvine, The Work on the Street

Irvine, The Work on the Street

prefer their avant-garde arguments and institutional critiques to be conducted

Irvine, The Work on the Street

Irvine, The Work on the Street

Irvine, The Work on the Street

Irvine, The Work on the Street

it anticipates a response, public discourse, commentary, new works. The city is

Irvine, The Work on the Street

Irvine, The Work on the Street

itself, a regional site incorporating vast amounts of population mobility, flows of

Irvine, The Work on the Street

Irvine, The Work on the Street

space, a psychogeography of spaces. Street artists have a well-developed practice

Irvine, The Work on the Street

Irvine, The Work on the Street

Brassas graffiti photographs in 1956 and the Bibliothque Nationale organized a

Rauschenbergs deconstructed image- and sign-bearing

Irvine, The Work on the Street

smuggling in non-art acts on walls as a disruptive move within the grand

Irvine, The Work on the Street

Irvine, The Work on the Street

Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger, important wall-breakers in other

Irvine, The Work on the Street

The cultural wall system is capable of many reversals and inversions

appropriations, and tactics described in Michel de Certeaus, The Practice of

Irvine, The Work on the Street

Irvine, The Work on the Street

Irvine, The Work on the Street

Irvine, The Work on the Street

with a fantasy of a consumerist community. The code of advertizing is

Irvine, The Work on the Street

Irvine, The Work on the Street

Irvine, The Work on the Street

Conclusions and Consequences:

Irvine, The Work on the Street

Irvine, The Work on the Street

Irvine, The Work on the Street

Irvine, The Work on the Street

subculture, or whether the artist takes an adversarial, affirmative, or conflicted

Irvine, The Work on the Street

Irvine, The Work on the Street

CA: University of California Press, 1984).

Irvine, The Work on the Street

This is a central question approached in various ways in Marquard Smith, Visual

Fairey, OBEY, 94.

de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life.

See Marc Auge, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity,

trans. John Howe, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2009).

Irvine, The Work on the Street

MIT Press, 1984).

documents in Nguyen and Mackenzie, Beyond the Street.