Author: Stevan Vuković
“City surfaces are multi-layered,” claim urban geographers. In their interpretation, the city is shown to be a “palimpsest of past and present stories, cultures and economies that have been imprinted over time” [1]. Each wall carries a multitude of stories that have been put on it by “a long history of planners, architects, activists, commentators and ordinary residents”, and therefore acts like a “multiple filled canvas”.[2]Street art takes exactly such surfaces as places where it intervenes and from which it broadcasts messages to the wider public. Street art, as architectural theorist Jonathan Hill claims, acts as “a process of addition, not reduction”[3], in the sense that it does not aim to visually cancel the wall on which a work is performed, nor to isolate the work on it from environment. On the contrary, with it, an additional layer is applied to the wall, treated as a canvas, through which the personal attitude of the author and the message he wants to share in the form of text, image or some combination of them are introduced into the already present meaning structure. If street art critically examines a found meaning structure, it is done from the inside, “from a place within the structure”.[4]
The experience of such art at one time had a formative effect on all the authors who, as part of the “Balkan live – Live Painting Session” event, performed at the Balkan Cinema on August 29 and 30, 2020, from 12:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m., performing their works on pre-prepared or in-person places on selected surfaces in the interior of the building. Today, they are mostly trained architects, designers and illustrators of the middle generation, who in some aspect of their work have remained true to their initial fascination with free artistic expression in the codes of street art and have continued to test and question those codes. They, whether inside or outside the barriers of their current professional commitments, continue to test their skills acquired through the practice of street art, and some of them apply them not only by making graffiti, murals, stencils or paste apps, but also comics and other types of works on paper, and even tattoos. In addition to their independent interventions on the street, with which they mostly started once, they also perform at festivals and jams, but also develop other types of public placement of street art. For this purpose, they hold workshops, street art tours, exhibitions in a gallery format, and some of them also build various types of digital platforms that serve to increase the visibility of this type of art, and often for the sale of works or various products of applied art to which they apply their works. . They perform under the following names and titles: Sobekcis, Junk, Hesoyam, TKV, Dulait, Marz, Das Drogen, Nikola, Rage, Sensi, Wuper and Super Timor.
The form in which their activities took place at the Balkan Cinema was a painting session, which was successfully completed over just two days, with the musical support of DJ UVEQ, and the partial presence of the audience. It was based on joint work in a stimulating environment. It involved a spontaneous but very intense intellectual and creative exchange between the participants during the process, which influenced all decisions about the ways in which the painted scenes were constructed. Those decisions, in the adaptation of pre-conceived sketches to the given environment, were necessarily made on the spot.
With the part in which it was open to the public, this project demonstrated the ways in which through specific forms of temporary creative communities, i.e. the synergies they enable, a very complex exhibition can be created very easily and quickly. On it, in a well-measured way, very different individual expressions are confronted with each other, primarily because the setting developed organically, through the mutual interaction of authors who have already collaborated on this type of event several times. In this way, a fairly representative cross-section of current trends on the street art scene was achieved, without insisting on demarcating the thematic and stylistic determinants of the works, but with respect for the heterogeneity of styles, which is noticeable not only in the comparison of individual author’s manuscripts, but also within the collectives that are there performed, such as Hesoyam.
Certain works formed their own microambients, some entered into a dialogue with the spatial elements of the building, and one of them humorously reflected the context of the former cinema. Through the depiction of the character Đenka from Slobodan Šijan’s 1982 film Marathoners run the lap of honor, and the title (Cinema Works Again), which is related to one of the sequences from that film, that work very successfully played with the general place of local cinema culture. Many of the involved authors understood this opportunity, as well as the spatial environment, as a challenge, and the works that were created there were mostly not replicas of some previous ones, nor just enlarged, previously elaborated sketches. Even those works that were not designed or realized in a spatially or contextually specific way, carry at least an implicit trace of the place and situation in which they were created. On the other hand, as far as the program matrix of the Balkan Cinema is concerned, this event introduced a new component into it, which can be further elaborated on some subsequent occasions. At the same time, he introduced a new audience to the space, and to the standard audience he presented the works exhibited there as a specific combination of contemporary and street art.
This type of art, by the way, has a recognized tradition of half a century. It also has a recognizable form of visual appearance, because it includes traces of several countercultures, spontaneous vernacular forms of visual expression in public space, urban folklore, as well as adopted and reworked elements of mass culture and mainstream currents of contemporary visual art.
Unfortunately, any attempt to determine the exact time in history when some initial examples of street art appeared for the first time is doomed to prove to be completely provisional, because so far every building of walls in any environment has always simultaneously provoked different types of practices. leaving drawn and written traces on them[5], so that in a broader sense, street art can always be considered a “parallel text within a specific culture”[6]. In the narrower sense of the term, which is the most widely used today, street art refers to those types of urban activities that arise as “successors of graffiti”[7], and the mythical beginning of this type of art was the illegal graffiti on trains and subways in the sixties of the last century. , to then move on to walls and other surfaces in the open city space, as well as to various substrates common to gallery art.
As Gregory Snyder argued in his analysis of the legal graffiti movement in New York, the advantages of working on a wall with the owner’s approval were that the authors could “work slowly and in peace, which resulted in really good art”[8]. The further shift towards painting on canvas or other surfaces within gallery or museum spaces has brought such practice an even greater degree of acceptance within mainstream culture and the field of contemporary art, and at the same time representation in private and public collections. In order to achieve this, Hugo Martinez in 1972, while still a sociology student at New York University, formed an association called “United Graffiti Artists”, and as a curator organized their gallery exhibition, which opened December 7 of that year. Ronald Kramer, another historian of the legal graffiti movement in New York, states that Martinez believed that “the people who paint the subways produce some form of art, but that this energy must be translated to the canvas in order for it to receive the social recognition it deserves” [9 ]. This recognition followed very quickly, and today it is almost unimaginable that a more representative museum that has collections of art from the last and this century does not have at least one work in it that in some way builds on the traditions of street art.
Some artists whose works were realized within the framework of this jam at the Balkan Cinema distribute their works through galleries and exhibit by invitation at gallery and sometimes museum exhibitions, and almost all of them made murals for which they were hired from the private and corporate sector, such as and from local self-governments, as well as within projects initiated by domestic or foreign cultural centers. If there is still an important specific difference in the placement of their works in relation to the placement of other works in the field of contemporary art, it consists in the fact that these artists have an additional very loyal audience in younger street painters who follow them in order to improve their personal authorial practice. , and that is because they enter it mostly without having an academic art education and without the mediation of institutions of culture and art. They learn to make works and to profile their expression from more experienced authors, and jams of this kind are very useful for improving such practice. At such events, it is not only possible to see completed works, representative of a given moment, but also to observe the processes that lead to them, and even make direct contact with the authors and talk with them about these processes while they are still going on. Of course, this is all interesting for a wider audience, which has no authorial ambitions.
If, on the other hand, one compares the painting that arises from the experience of street art with other types of work in the field of contemporary art, it is easy to see characteristics such as adaptability to different types of contexts and applicability to different substrates, speed of execution, if already has a limited amount of time, and pre-calculated compatibility with other works of a completely different style, which is the result of experiences of joint painting or painting on surfaces where there are already some works that the author does not want to ‘tread over’ (that is, to paint over them). In a thematic sense, samples of different and even completely unrelated narratives with street culture fit into such painting very easily, while still preserving the organic whole of the individual work. Such paintings often contain comments on some other works and meta-comments regarding the context of creation and the position the author wants to take with that work.
Although they mainly strive for the development of very individual styles, recognizable and with a clear personal stamp of the author, painting practices with the experience of street art always contain a kind of eclecticism and adaptability to the context, and precisely as such, they enter the field of contemporary visual art. Into that field they bring various new sets of references and a collective spirit in which these references are incorporated into concrete works, but also agonistic tendencies, since in every form of temporary creative communities that such painters often form there is a healthy dose of mutual challenge, questioning of positions which the authors occupied with their work, as well as the concepts and the way in which they are realized. In this sense, every new collective exhibition, session, festival or other form of confronting the productions of different authors contains something more than just one-way communication of works with the audience and adding another line in the biography of each of the participants. They are always opportunities to see who is in which positions and who has come so far both in terms of technique and in terms of thinking about the position of such painting in the society in which it is created.
[1] Mould, Oli: Urban Subversion and the Creative City, London: Routledge, 2015, p. 92.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Hill, Jonathan: Immaterial Architecture, London: Routledge, 2006, p. 176.
[4] Harvey, David: Spaces of Hope, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000, p. 52
[5] A good example of this is the graffiti that has been completely preserved in Pompeii, due to the influence of the lava that preserved the entire city in the state it was in at the time of the eruption of the Vesuvius volcano on August 24, 79 AD. The amount of graffiti that was done there is best described by one of these graffiti, registered under the number CIL 4.1904, which says the following: “I am amazed, O wall, that you have not yet disintegrated, you who are the basis for the boring messages of so many number of authors”. More on this in the collection called Ancient Graffiti in Context, edited by J.A. Baird and Claire Taylor, published by Routledge in 2011.
[6] Olton, Elizabeth, and Lovata, Troy: “Introduction”, in Understanding Graffiti – Multidisciplinary Studies From Prehistory to the Present, edited by Troy Lovata and Elizabeth Olton, London and New York: Routledge, p. 14.
[7] Crommelin, Claude: New Street Art, Woodbridge: Antique Collectors Club Dist 2016, p. 4. Cultural studies lecturer Mitja Velikonja also wrote that in the context of our region, “street art is often referred to as post-graffiti art”, in Mitja Velikonja: Post-Socialist Political Graffiti in the Balkans and Central Europe , Oxon and New York, 2020, p. 27.
[8] Snyder, Gregory J: Graffiti Lives: Beyond the Tag in New York’s Urban Underground, New York: New York University Press, 2009, p.97.
[9] Ronald Kramer: The Rise of Legal Graffiti Writing in New York and Beyond London: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 29
