The culture jamming qualities of urban art
2024-08-18 15:56:00 +07:00 by Mark Smith
I had totally forgotten about how much I like street art until I read this article about UK street artists earlier today. It’s funny how seing pictures of some of these murals brings back all sorts of memories of places I’ve lived in, or visited or just past by often. All those pieces of art are ever present but they sort of disapear into the scenery, into the background. They become part of the city, part of your everyday life, like an old friend you bump into every now and then.
What I love about street art is how it channels culture jaming in really positive ways. In that for a moment as you go about your daily routines, it pierces through the invisible bariers that innevitably rise in between us and wakes you up out of the automatisms of life. For a small moment you pause and appreciate life in it’s purest form, and then life goes on. It’s some sort of combination of magic and love encoded directly into the environment.
And people take photos, and send them to their friends, the love and ambience spreads. Yes I guess it’s strickly speaking illegal but it can have such a net benefit, when done right and used sparingly, for the ambience of a place. It breathes life right into the often cold and mundane realities of urban life. There are lots of examples all over the world, but my favorite, and I am of course very biased, is the street art in the UK.
There is something so personal and unique about UK street art, the artists must spend so much time thinking about their projects because I find that more often than in other places they seem to seemlessly blend in to the location almost as if they had somehow grown out of the walls, bridges and nooks and crannies where they appear. Getting this type of art right I imagine is very difficult, a sort of synthesis of a melange of cultures and vibes and historical events, boiling it all down to an essence, but it’s also a sort of curration, one that breaks right out of the frame and into the place where it resides.
Also I think one of the unique aspects of this art form is that it references the culture, becomes the culture and shapes the direction of the culture. And as an observer of it, you somehow feel part of it, like you are participating, because it’s about your city, and you are living inside that city, and when you look at the art there’s a part of you - the part that in some way contributed to that city by being there everyday just doing normal everyday things - that is inside the art itself. I’m not sure if others feel that way, but that’s how I feel about it.