Graffiti

Before history was written, when people didn't know how grow food or build shelters, they painted. Cave dwellers covered their rock-lined rooms with the days of their lives. You might say that graffiti artists carry on the Paleolithic tradition.

While teaching art in a New York high school some years ago, I had a student given to marking up subway cars. But he was no "Kilroy Was Here" disciple of America’s pop culture efforts of the ‘40s and ‘50s.

An aerosol paint can in his hand was like a chisel in Michelangelo's. I'm not kidding. This kid could make a trail of subway of cars sing like a chorus in a Broadway musical, down to the applause he prompted from strap-hangers.

This was before graffiti rose up from the street to exhibit halls. This boy’s underground picture-making seemed less an act of vandalism and more a demonstration of urban folk art. And even though the Whitney Museum of American Art mounted a retrospective of the most infamous graffiti artist in subway lore, Keith Haring, a court sentenced him to cleaning the subway cars he had ``marred.''

Clearly, the subway artist in my classroom was on the right track. Haring's subway art, down to its homoerotic hardcore porn, is deemed public art now.

The Whitney exhibit traced Haring's development from his chalk and felt-tip pen days to his ornate field painting. I'm partial to his outlaw variety, the jostling figures art and their chaotic, cartoon-y quality. They reminded me of my student’s subway art, minus the homoeroticism.

Primitive to the core, Haring's subway work was a kind of latter-day cave art. His exhibit at the Whitney was just the beginning of connoisseurship for graffiti. Claudia Barbieri, writing for the New York Times out of Paris, has chronicled the bounty of graffiti exhibits on both sides of the Atlanti, complete with adoring exhibit goers. “People have been lining up round the block to get in,” she said.

Shades of the strap hangers in the ‘70s who swooned over a boy’s subway car art.
Daily lines around the Grand Palais, a leading picture palace, reportedly stretched further than those for the Warhol exhibition next door. The attraction? A collectionof graffit paintings from street artists ranging from New York’s subway art of the ‘70s to contemporary urban art in Europe and South America.
My student’s work didn’t show up in this collection, but that of other New Yorkers like him did, including examples by a former delivery boy and son of a well-known banking family credited for bringing the New York style of graffit to France in the ‘80.
How respectable has graffiti art become? The Grand Palais puts on display work by Nunca, the Brazilian street-artist famed for being invited to spray paint murals on the river facade of the Tate Modern, in London.
And in Manhattan, a couple of galleries – the Helenbeck and Gismondi – debuted a graffiti show along with 17th- and 18th-century furnishings.
Pre-opening jitters centered on the worry that gallery goers in New York may not take to graffiti in galleries. But the stuff of subway scrawlers wowed the crowd. Barbieri said that opening night drew hundreds that lined up around the block – in the rain, no less.
Wait, there’s more: a show at the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris with a retrospective of urban street art. To hear Barbieri tell it, you can’t get more of a “sacramental consecration” than a graffiti show at the Cartier foundation.
Transitioning from marking up walls to doing it on canvas has changed the tools from your basic aerosol cans to something quite elaborate: spray cans that can produce thick and thin line and blend-able colors that mimic painting with a brush.
If you ask me, such sophisticated tools are coloring the new graffiti inauthentic. Why go to the trouble of spray-painting an image that looks as if it were? Isn't that like a photo-real painting trying to look like a color slide? Why should something look like something else when the real thing is do-able?
Mind you, all artists should be able to make art out of anything they want and that ought to include blendable spray paints. But to make art out of a spray can that looks like art made with a brush is making art under false colors, not to mention pointless.
The digital photography of Florida artist Nancy Hellebrand – look-a-likes for painting - raises questions that go unasked in a digital art exhibit. The following exchange between Hellebrand and me may hold some answers.
ALTABE: You go to the trouble of electronically generating an image that looks as if it were painted by hand. Why? I grant you that artists have always taken lifeless matter, like clay, and transformed it into living form, and it may be said that circuitry is another form of clay. I also acknowledge that electronic technologies gets art out of its traditional spaces. It can likewise be argued that it doesn't matter if art comes in cyber form, as long as it's good art.
But I don’t kid myself. I like the way your pictures look because of their beguiling resemblance to painting. When I remember that the images are not painted, but push-buttoned, the light of the cathode ray comes on in my head and in a click, I become un-beguiled.
HELLEBRAND: I actually didn’t choose to work with a computer, but technology made darkroom work and conventional photographic printing obsolete. Hours and hours in the darkroom (with no sunlight and intense noxious smells) made no sense when it became possible to accomplish the same thing in a minute fraction of the time on the computer.
I feel that the means an artist uses are of no great significance. It's what the finished product is that matters.
ALTABE: OK. Take us through your thinking about your exhibit example it and what you think matters about it.
HELLEBRAND: It is a picture of familiar trees and shrubs of our region. These trees and shrubs are very beautiful without my intervention. However, I'm a photographer and this is grist for my mill. I liked the single photographs that were combined for this image, but they didn't really get my juices flowing. When I combined the files and worked with them in Photoshop it became a new thing - different, not what we know. To me the final picture has an interest apart from what I see and know from my daily life here.
Myy artistic struggle is to invoke the infinite in the finite. It is the unseen aspect of my subject matter which I am constantly trying to discover. By "unseen" I mean something beyond vision and speech, something which cannot really be articulated in pictures or words, but which is even more essential than that which is describable.
ALTABE: You talk of a desire to photograph the underside of what you see, Isn’t that what art is about? Thomas Messer said it in a Guggenheim exhibit note about modern painting more than 40 years ago. He said that art of the time was not necessarily concerned with the re presentation of visible things, but often reflected that part of existence that lies behind and beneath observable appearances.
Given that you've taught art history and must surely know of the driving force behind modernism, why do you consider your wanting to photograph the unseen a discovery?
HELLEBRAND: What I am doing may not seem so unique, but because it is me who makes the photograph and because it is happening at this time in history, in this place, there is the possibility of something new, hopefully an Ah Ha!! experience. To elegantly and juicily capture a subject in a photograph is thrilling to me, but less thrilling than taking that as my starting point and then making it more revealing, way beyond subject matter.
My pictures happen to reflect concerns one usually associates more with painting than photography. All the same to me - it matters not. I'd say the proof is in the work. Good work coming from a computer or camera makes it because it speaks to us. You can't argue truth and beauty!
ALTABE: Arguing that would be like sparring with Keats’s view that truth and beauty are all we need to know.