I was admittedly not overly excited about this weeks readings. If you remember my blog a few weeks back I tried to take the position that graffiti owed its place to in the hip hop nation to its influence in the early period, rather than any overwhelming connection. This is not to say I don’t think graffiti is interesting, or that it was not tied to the hip hop movement in general. Its tie just hasn’t been argued in a compelling way in the modern period. However, I feel I boxed myself in a bit.
I did enjoy a number of things from this weeks readings. First, when I was in D.C. for a summer internship in 2008, my office was two blocks from the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. That gallery contained a collection at that point entitled “Recognize: Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture.” That collection contained works from Kehinde Wiley that were discussed in Dr. Schur’s piece. It is from this experience, and this argument that I can see a more compelling argument attaching visual art to the hip hop movement. However, arguments like the one made in “Shaping the New Language of Visual Culture” that see graffiti as hip hop’s Black Arts Movement (BAM), are less persuasive in my mind. Graffiti, at least in my own personal conception fits into hip hop because it is also composed of the same aesthetic elements like irony/parody, call and response, and sampling. Rather than an argument that simply says well when Kool DJ Herc and Flash were starting the deejay and party scene, Lee Quiones was writing on train cars, this perspective says that they are tied because they have similar qualities and background, and fit into a somewhat shared experience.
A few more thoughts just to throw out there.
- I really liked reading about the differing approaches to graffiti around the globe. I especially like the English approach to allowing graffiti to flourish, and the argument that graffiti writers are often the most assertive/healthy in most neighborhoods.
-Is graffiti, like we discussed last week in regards to language, a “limitless” art form?
- Really liked Bando’s quote from “Spraycan Art” p. 25, sums up my thoughts on Graffiti, “You don’t have to understand something for it to be beautiful.”
Here is a link to the National Portrait Gallery's exibition: Recognize.
http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/recognize/
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I feel what you are saying here, Tom. I'm not sure today where graf artists are at, to be honest. And the ones that are publishing in galleries, I'm not sure how much hip hop is really in those pieces. I think a lot of where graffiti connects up well with hip hop (in addition to some of the aesthetic traits you mentioned) is its use of the public space and the question of society's norms on building aesthetics and ownership. It seemed in the Spraycan Art book, a lot of what made graffiti what it was, was the experience of tagging or the dialectic between the authorities and the "bombers". Maybe tomorrow we can chat about the modern graf artists, and where they are doing there thing at... anyway, good stuff and looking forward to Monday!
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