Whatever happened to street art?

Back in the early 2000s, a conversation could go like this: “Have you seen that new ‘street art’ around the city?” “What do you mean ‘street art’?” “You know, that new stuff that is like graffiti but is actually stuff you can understand.” “Oh yeah I’ve seen that, it’s quite cool.” It was not a very scientific description, but for the moment it worked. Everybody knew what they were talking about.

When the mural festival frenzy took over the street art scene in the 2010s, the term ‘street art’ became more slippery. The usual small-scale, ephemeral works furtively scattered around back alleys were replaced by huge and permanent paintings which, confusingly, were also referred-to as ‘street art’. Soon after, ‘street art’ gallery shows also became prevalent, adding to the confusion and rendering the term unusable for good.

Fast forward ten years and things have developed further. Big murals are now commonplace and have become an industry. Most artists in that circuit have no past in furtive street art, and traditional painting styles are favoured over street-related aesthetics. The art gallery market that grew out of street art exploded, and is becoming too large for the ‘street art’ label to be as profitable anymore. A few years ago, a successful Spanish street art fair dropped the term ‘urban’ from its name.

This erratic evolution has baffled outside observers and has prevented them from understanding what street art was actually about. Now that the hype-borne dust seems to be starting to settle, it is the time to look back on the decades-long history of street art — in particular on the 2000s, the years when furtive creativity in the streets was at its highest.

Why is this needed? Because, as the focus shifted towards murals and exhibitions, the most interesting art slipped through, leaving a whole wealth of art production that has yet to be properly studied and understood by both the art world and society at large.

What was street art about, then?

When talking about the original, furtive street art, the word ‘street’ is particularly misleading. It refers to the typical setting of the practice, but gives no idea about the practice itself. What is the practice about, then? That is the question I tried to answer ten years ago, after being commissioned to curate a mural festival.

My proposal was to do away with the murals and have artists in residency for a few weeks so they could soak themselves in the environment, and let them paint small-scale around the city improvising verbal permissions with neighbours. I needed to convince the organisers that this was more interesting than flashy facades, so I broke my arguments down in writing. That became my 2016 text “From street art to murals, what have we lost?”

In that text I made use of the contrast against large-scale murals to pinpoint the mechanisms that make furtive street art unique and interesting. These have to do with how the artwork relates to its context, how it reflects the human scale, and how it multiplies across space and time, accumulating into a network of pieces that leads the viewer along peculiar paths through the city and its features.

Looking at good examples of this kind of art, such as the long-running series “Furtive paintings” by French artist Eltono, it is apparent that the city does not serve as just the backdrop — instead, it is actually the working material. Choosing the location is half of the work. Eltono may select discreet corners laden with texture and history that yield fewer but more intimate encounters with the viewer, while others favour loud and clear locations. Artists need to carefully balance the risks involved, the visibility of the resulting artwork, and how long it can be expected to remain in place.

Working subtly with each context is therefore paramount in good furtive street art. Sensitive artists can incorporate the social connotations of a particular space into their work, and will take advantage of the architecture by climbing up a ledge or finding their way up a rooftop. Adapting to contexts can involve devising new tools and techniques, and the resulting array of approaches is as wide as it is fascinating. The bike-mounted toolset created by North American artist MOMO for pasting up screenprints at first-floor height around New York City is an inspiring example of how far ingenuity can get in the methodologies of furtive street art.

Context, human scale, network and time

Scale is key when working in public settings, and furtive artists effectively modulate size and distance in their practice. A big work can tower upon the viewer, or it can gaze from afar and remain readable, while a small piece can hide in the crevices of the landscape and hit closer.

A crucial idea here is that all this playing with size takes place, necessarily, within the scale of the human body. The art will be as big and reach as far as the body allows. While artists can go beyond that using portable ladders or poles, those function only as extensions of the body, and the resulting scale remains visibly human. The art is always the trace of a physical relation between body and architecture.

Furtive street art typically takes the form of a series of related artworks scattered through space, and also through time. Eltono’s furtive paintings would be a perfect example. This ongoing exercise provides the artist with frequent opportunities to shape his view of the landscape —in both the micro-scale of a particular corner and the geographic scale of a whole city— and allows viewers to accumulate encounters with the art, thus getting a fuller grasp on the artist’s approach. The resulting network of pieces forms an imaginary drawing on the map of the city that tells a particular strategy.

Working with time is a last key aspect in furtive street art. A piece left to its fate in the street is not a static object, it may disappear suddenly or it may degrade over time and intertwine organically with its surroundings. It can resurface after months or years under plaster, it can even travel and change locations when placed on a train or a building container. Most furtive artists enjoy these variables they cannot control, and many devise ways to modulate time in their favour. The constant search for surfaces where the art will stay longer is already an effective use of this dimension.

When considering the qualities of the authorised mural format, my analysis found it to be lacking deeply in all of the potentials described above. Murals are usually painted in record time, leaving scarce opportunities for the artist to engage with the place. There is no need to come up with solutions in order to adapt to contexts, and playing with scale is reduced to one extreme of the spectrum. While artists like Escif or Ampparito have found ways around these constraints, the vast majority conform.

Furtive street art necessarily relates to its setting. A mural does not, and this translates into vast differences in the result. If the human scale of furtive art engages viewers one-to-one and calls them to action, murals are an architecture-level monologue that forces passive consumption. If following furtive art can take you to the backstages of the city, murals appear in predictable areas and are best experienced with a printed map or a guided tour. A paste-up will degrade beautifully over time, a mural sits permanently frozen and removed from the real life around it.

At the time when my text was published back in 2016, most street art aficionados were excited about the development towards murals, yet many wondered why the art felt so different. Bringing up all these points was needed, and they made an impact. Echoes of the concept of ‘human scale’ are still felt in academia. However, as the mural and exhibition hype escalated and detached audiences further from the original practice, the whole idea of furtive street art became secondary at best. The discussion about it was largely forgotten, along with the artworks themselves.

The Goldsworthy paradox

Twenty years ago, street art aficionados were happy to share our interest with an increasingly larger audience. Many of us were educated in contemporary art as well, and were huge fans of land artist Andy Goldsworthy. As conversations about street art proliferated, some of us were left to wonder why Goldsworthy’s interventions seemed to exist in a different plane, a world apart from the new art. In our eyes, the values found in his work were close to the ones addressed above.

At a first glance, the problem had to do with the word ‘street’ and its misleading focus on the typical setting, instead of on the actual practice. The underlying problem was larger and more difficult to solve though, as became apparent when artists like Brad Downey stood out in the scene. Downey spearheaded the tiny but visible minority of street artists who did away with personal imagery to work solely with the features of each context.

While Eltono’s paintings were arguably too close to graffiti to expect immediate links to the work of Goldsworthy, Downey’s approach greatly overlapped that of the English sculptor, just in a different setting and with a different attitude. The confusion only worsened when looking at contemporary artists like Francis Alÿs and his very urban and barebones street actions from the turn of the century. What created the divide between the works of Downey and Alÿs? It was merely a matter of audiences.

Downey was part of the street art scene of the 2000s from its inception, his work circulated through street art media and was known about and valued within that social and professional circle. For Alÿs that was not the case, which rendered him invisible to street art aficionados — even if his work was close to Downey’s. And the fact is, there is no shortage of contemporary artists like Alÿs, who have worked in the street doing uncommissioned interventions and actions. One can find them in every decade.

Bridging the gap between street and contemporary

Throughout the 2000s we rediscovered contemporary artists like Daniel Buren or Ernest Pignon-Ernest, whose visionary work from the 1960s and ’70s was as close to the street art of the day as it could get. Buren’s aggressive postering of a meaningless motif surprisingly mirrors Shepard Fairey’s original empty advertising campaign, and diverges from it only in aesthetics and audiences. Meanwhile, Pignon-Ernest’s sentimental cut-out paste-ups could have passed as the work of one of the artists inspired by Swoon.

In 2008 I published a series of texts on my website Urbanario presenting for the first time to the street art public the work of Buren, Pignon-Ernest and other related artists from past decades. In a scene driven by novelty and flashy aesthetics, though, these unearthed treasures gained little traction. They were found to be dwelling at the opposite side a large wall, a clear gap separating the sphere of street art from that of contemporary art. They were, along with the work of Goldsworthy and Alÿs, simply part of a different conversation.

This situation changed over time, but only slowly and partially. Some papers and books have drawn links between the street art of this century and its ignored precursors. The art world has showed some interest in parts of this history. What is still lacking, though, is a conceptual framework that would allow for a comprehensive and substantiated approach to these practices.

Doing without the term ‘street art’ is a long-overdue must. If we want to understand furtive art in public space, we need a standpoint that lays the focus not on the setting, but on the practice itself. We need an argumentation founded upon those unique inner workings that make the art interesting. And this new framework inevitably calls for a newly coined term that would sustain it.

Art & Place, from graffiti to land art

The lack of permission of furtive art is relevant to this analysis, but only because it translates into a particular set of working parameters for artists — one that forces intimate attention to each public context. And it is precisely that context-based work what needs to be framed. This focus is not only accurate, it can also allow to link these practices with other forms of public art.

Talking about ‘contextual art’ could be tempting, if the term was not already in use in the art world — to refer to a very different thing. ‘Site-specific’ is also in use and often refers to indoor settings. Buren’s ‘in situ’ implies similar problems. ‘Space’ would be a candidate word, then again it is vague and carries unfitting connotations. ‘Spot’ is too subcultural and slangish. Thinking further I found a word that ticked all the boxes, and a phrasing of the new term that would work for this need.

‘Art & Place’ is a transversal field of art practices whose core value is the work with particular public contexts. It serves as a framework for the study of street art, while accommodating at the same time all other forms of art in public space — from graffiti, to authorised public art, to land art. Art & Place provides with a common theoretical thread and brings them all together in a conversation around their shared cornerstone, a sensible and effective engagement with the place.

The figure below represents the field in a diagram. To the left side of the vertical line are the practices related to street art. First is the contemporary culture of graffiti, referred-to using Staffan Jacobson’s term ‘TTP graffiti’ (as in Tags, Throw-ups and Pieces). Second is ‘identity-driven street art’, which would describe works such as Eltono’s furtive paintings. The third bubble represents ‘context-driven street art’ as in the work that made Brad Downey famous.

To the right side are practices related to contemporary art. The first element would include Alÿs, Buren, Pignon-Ernest and the many contemporary artists involved in lightweight forms of public art that are ephemeral, small scale, site specific, performative and often furtive. This is the mirrored twin of ‘context-driven street art’ —laying right at the opposite side of the wall separating street from contemporary— and the artworks in both bubbles are largely interchangeable.

Next is official ‘public art’ such as large sculptures and sanctioned murals. The last bubble represents all forms of land art, from Goldsworthy’s tiny gestures to the monumental works of Robert Smithson. Some practices less relevant to this general analysis are left out of the diagram’s focus, among them artivism, various forms of graffiti, and outsider public art such as the work of the King of Kowloon.

Working with places

Art & Place is not limited to public art, though. Working with a particular place is also at the core of practices such as landscape painting and photography, in both urban and rural settings. Although they are not shown in this diagram, any practice based on the study of a public space can be fruitfully added to the discussion, in particular walk- and survey-based art such as the work of Mathieu Tremblin. A conversation can be imagined between a hyperrealistic painter and a graffiti writer about the particularities of certain rooftops.

The term ‘place’ is useful here for different reasons. It conveys a literary quality, which provides enough depth and breadth to work comfortably with the diverse practices in the field. It is flexible enough to describe settings in a wide range of scales —a place can be a corner, a square, a neighbourhood or a whole city— which accommodates the geographically strategic work of furtive artists.

Place can be understood as a particular space within a particular timeframe, which accommodates the crucial modulation of time found in furtive art. By virtue of this nature, a space will become a different place over time, which explains why a furtive piece preserved in situ can feel out of place after some decades of changes around it — the place that inspired the art is not there anymore. Place is also understood as the shared social experience around a particular space, again a recurring working material for sensitive artists.

The scope of Art & Place results in a highly transversal topography encompassing different artworlds and art audiences. The group of practices represented is heterogeneous, and can be perceived as inconsistent when examined through an established view that groups artworks based on artworld conventions and social spheres. From Downey to Alÿs, from Eltono to Goldsworthy and Smithson, from graffiti to city landscape painting, all these different forms of art share a single core working material: a particular place.

Graffiti and Richard Serra: what is good Art & Place