street art - book - 2008 - Street Art: The Graffiti Revolution

Street Art: The Graffiti Revolution
Cedar Lewisohn
Tate Publishing
2008
160 pages
 

Cedar Lewisohn, a curator at Tate Modern gallery in London, U.K. has written an insightful study of the international phenomena known as graffiti and street art.  Street Art is, by my estimation, far more substantive than such publications as the already profiled Stencil Graffiti or Graffiti NYC.  Lewisohn’s book attempts to theorize the differences between graffiti and the new, emerging forms it inspires, which he refers to as ‘street art’ proper.  Furthermore, Lewisohn’s text comprises an attempt, which has already been seen in Tristan Manco’s Stencil Graffiti, to formulate a canon of street artists.  

This book was released to coincide with a Lewisohn-curated Street Art exhibition held at the Tate Modern from 23 May – 25 August 2008.  I am often skeptical of the relevance of graffiti or street art gallery exhibitions because I believe the loss of the ‘street’ setting empties such works of much of their essence.   Lewisohn’s show was accompanied by a walking tour lead by a number of practicing street artists, thus returning the street to the academic discourse on the cultural form.  In Street Art, the author makes calls for academic and high-art institutions to recognize street art and in particular he requests that museums begin including such works in their collections.  While Lewisohn’s arguments are more nuanced and articulate than the simplistic griping about lack of recognition done by Hugo Martinez in Graffiti NYC, the call for graffiti to appear museums still sounds problematic to me.  The transposition from street to gallery for a work of art creates for it a radical change of status, because graffiti/street art is not simply imagery and its street setting is of critical importance to its value.  

Graffiti and Street art (its questionable whether or not people who are not hip to the scene differentiate between the two the way Lewisohn does) normally exist in a tension between the street artists and the city officials who believe that nothing can improve upon the appearance of an unadorned concrete wall.  Spectators play in the balance, choosing their level of engagement with the art as they move through the city, and making evaluations as they proceed.  Combining a gallery exhibition of street art with a walking tour is perhaps a strategy for attempting to reconcile the transposition of street art into the gallery, with the original experience of viewing such art in the street.

As has already been stated, Lewisohn’s book operates in a manner different from many other street art texts, and this is first evidenced in the images he uses.  While Stencil Graffiti and Graffiti NYC often displayed closely cropped images (with some exceptions) of street art, Street Art often displays a work of graffiti surrounded by a number of other markings, tags, stickers, etc.  The images in the book display the hypergraphic reality that works of street art exist in.  They are seldom discreet graphic objects and are almost always on a surface with a myriad of other ‘works’ of similar art.  

Another aspect to Lewisohn’s text that makes it an interesting book in the graffiti art literature is its construction of a history for the craft.  Lewisohn operates along two lines of history, the first is with regards to the art, which he grounds in NYC graffiti of the 1970s and 1980s as well as practices by the “high-art” artists who used the street as a showplace, including Jenny Holzer, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, John Fekner, and some others.  Lewisohn reaches as far back as Brassai, a photographer of mid-20th-century streetlife and his photos of children’s scratchings on the sides of Parisian buildings.  Lewisohn’s history of the art draws on both folk and fine art traditions, radical politics, and desires for illegal thrills, which lead into his descriptions of the most reputable contemporary practitioners of street art.  Street Art, for Lewisohn, is the culmination of the convergence of all of these traditions.  The canon of contemporary street artists includes Blek Le Rat, Banksy, Judith Supine, Lady Pink, Shepard Fairey, and Miss Van.  The author's prehistory of street is varied and comprehensive and it is fitting that Lewisohn's list of currently relevant artists is also varied in terms of location, style, motivations, and materials.  

The other history Lewisohn presents is that of the documentation and theory about graffiti and street art.  Lewisohn includes discussions with Henry Chalfant (author of early books about graffiti and director of the 1984 graffiti documentary film, Style Wars).  He also includes photographs and discussions with Martha Cooper who produced the 1988 book Subway Art a seminal photobook of the era of NYC subway graffiti.  Numerous references are made throughout the book to seminal writings on the art form, including Norman Mailer’s text The Faith of Graffiti, and French postmodernist Jean Baudrillard’s discussion of NYC tagging in Symbolic Exchange and Death.  Interspersed with Lewisohn’s profiles of the most reputable members of the international street artist scene are some notes considering specific cultural influences such as punk culture or the formative art-school environment.  Lewisohn’s text and innovative 2008 exhibition has placed himself as a recent figure in the field of graffiti research, and his book is as much about the history of graffiti history as it is about the emerging street art scene.  It should also go without saying but this Tate publication is filled with full colour images of examples of the art Lewisohn finds to be such a vital form of modern expression.

 

guy debord, situationist international - book - 1985/2001 - Considerations on the Assassination of Gerard Lebovici

Considerations on the Assassination of Gerard Lebovici
Guy Debord
1985/2001
Tam Tam books
Translated and Introduced by Robert Green
81 pages


Gerard Lebovici was a French film producer, book publisher, and a personal friend to Situationist International figurehead, Guy Debord.  Lebovici managed a publishing company called Editions Champs Libre (renamed Editions Gerard Lebovici after the publisher’s death) which published many works of leftist literature, among them Debord’s revolutionary The Society of the Spectacle.  Debord was a film maker known for creating completely abstract films,and also a cultural theorist.  Lebovici financed three of the radical thinker’s later (that is, post 1968) films.  Guy Debord and the other members of the Situationist International are considered critically influential figures in the erruption of the May 68’ Paris Uprisings.  

On March 7, 1984, Lebovici was murdered in a parking garage in Paris.  The crime was never solved.  A number of French newspapers contained commentary upon the murder often involving wild speculation upon the relationship between the ill fated film producer and Guy Debord.  Numerous newspapers considered the meaning of their friendship, the dangerous social connections a man like Debord could provide, Debord's refusal to be a public figure, his manner of living, etc.  All of the speculations regarding Debord’s character and lifestyle were the grounds upon which newspaper personnel built their case that the former Situationist was responsible in some way for Lebovici’s death.  Considerations on the Assassination of Gerard Lebovici was Debord's response to these accusations and his treatment by agents of media following the death of his friend.  At the time of publication for Considerations, Debord had not published any written work (aside from the scripts for his experimental films) since 1972.  

Considerations on the Assassination of Gerard Lebovici is a survey of the misinformation and invective spread by French newspapers about Debord after Lebovici's murder.  Debord felt compelled to respond to the speculations, if only to ridicule them and demonstrate how the cultural conditions identified in The Society of the Spectacle have accelerated since 1967.  Debord notes, for example, that many of the editorials condemn his ‘silence’ as a point of suspicion.  Some considered it a strategy by which the radical theorist could maintain or expand his notoriety while others simply considered it a reason to believe he is involved in underworld activities.  Debord notes that this focus on his absence from the spotlight indicates a widespread attitude that it is not permitted for an individual to disengage from the ‘spectacle’, that one ‘appears’ if one is a part of society.  (note: see Jean Baudrillard’s essay: The Ecstasy of Communication for a similar discussion of appearance in media as social participation).  

Debord’s ‘silence’ was used as an empty space into which journalists could project all of their assumptions about him.  The Situationist International disbanded in 1972, but many of the journalists did not know that, and wondered what the group is up to now, in secret.  One journalist presumed that the Situationists are now involved in international terrorism, and they maintain connections with other terror groups, including the Red Brigades and the Red Army Faction.  The journalists described chains of imaginary social connections, developed out of the grounds of Debord’s ‘silence’ and his former activities.  Their inventions lead many of the journalists to wonder who, exactly, in this web of terrorist and criminal networks that Debord was speculated to have introduced Lebovici to, was slighted in some way by the film producer that a murderous ambush was an appropriate response?  Many journalists considered the slighted party to be Debord himself, who was often speculated as the man who pulled the strings.  Debord noted at one point in his text that he successfully sued a number of newspapers in a libel suit, and felt compelled to do so because he had never before been accused of killing a friend.

The text is a criticism of the practice of journalism and the power journalists hold to make the unreal appear real.  Many journalists seemed to have taken this murder case as an opportunity to attack an individual, as Debord’s films, writings, and former glories were all subjects for editorial slander, regardless of whether or not a connection to the murder was alleged in a particular piece.  Many of the editorialists attempted to attack the Situationist from all angles, simultaneously characterizing him as an irrelevant egomaniac and also as a puppet-master of the contemporary (extremist) left.   Editorialists deployed slanted language to give the most banal aspects of Debord’s life a sinister edge, making the fact that he enjoys good food, for example, sound like he was hypocritical or incorrigibly decadent. Debord’s short book launches a caustic critique of journalists as frontline agents to the Society of the Spectacle from the vista of his own experience.  Considerations is fundamentally media criticism, and while it emanates from a radical-left point of view, and focuses on the personal issues of its author, it is much more nuanced than much of the existing radical-left media criticism which tends to simply charge such media with brainwashing.

anarchism, anti-globalization - book - 2000 - Days of War, Nights of Love

Days of War, Nights of Love
Crimethinc Ex-Workers Collective
2000
CrimethInc

Available in PDF format from http://www.daysofwarnightsoflove.com/

This book, the first full book published by the CrimethInc Ex-Workers collective, can be read as a poorly developed collection of ideas about capitalism, the media, work, and everyday life.  The collective is described, on their website, as a “decentralized anarchist collective composed of many cells which act independently in pursuit of a freer and more joyous world.”  I take that statement to mean that there is a small group of actual members directly involved in the work of writing and publishing the books and pamphlets they release... and that’s it.  The independent cells referred to are likely any show of activism that occurs   Days of War is useful to researchers in the sense that it is a quintessential manifestation of a radicalism that admires historical radical leftism yet lacks the will to develop a coherent philosophy of its own.  The book reads as a tribute to personal zines of the 1990s, hardcore punk, and the underground radical press of the 1960s. Futhermore in its graphic array much inspiration has been drawn from Situationism, albeit CrimethInc's text is lacking in the intellectual rigor the French neo-Marxists once displayed.  


This book is a series of rants, driven by a collection of angry attitudes directed towards ‘capitalism’ and anything hegemonic.  I characterize the philosophical program of the text to be incoherent because its authors do not establish any kind of analytic framework.  The attitudes represented by this book are quite commonly expressed in zines, on the Internet, and less intellectually focused journals of radical ideas, like Adbusters (although Adbusters tends to accompany their luke-warm critiques with interesting images).  Days of War, Nights of Love emerges from a strained point of view where its writers have chosen to articulate, over three hundred pages, that action is more important than developing theory.  So while in its presentation, the book appears to benefit from a history of radical slogans and images, it appears to disavow that history while simultaneously ignoring the base of ideas and radical thought those slogans and images emerge from.  Ultimately, what this book conveys most strongly is a desperation by its authors to speak out against the things they hate, without considering the form of their statements or whether or not their utterances have previously been uttered.

Days of War also plays with history in strange ways that I suspect pertain to little more than the prejudices of the authors.  One particular example is a description of the prank pulled by Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and friends in 1967 when they threw several hundred dollars in cash onto the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange.  While the CrimethInc Collective lauded the action, they simply described its actors as friends of Black Panther leader, Eldridge Cleaver.  Not only were the fellows in question NOT friends with Cleaver, they were famous sixties radicals in their own right.  So why erase their names?  Is there some vestigial hatred of Hoffman of the Yippies!?  Are they not to be named, even if their actions are to be admired?  Is there a vestigial admiration of Cleaver and the Black Panthers as the exemplars of American radicalism?  If that is the case then that is the exact same attitude many late-sixties American radicals held towards the Panthers.... during the late-sixties.

This book strives to be a forceful message of radical urgency.  It does not contain a single unique idea.  In fact, in its incoherence Days of War, Nights of Love manages to convey an implicit support for consumerism, embedded near to the surface of its passages calling for perpetual pleasure.  What is interesting about Days of War, Nights of Love is its appearance as a pastiche or an agglomeration of a number of distinct strains of twentieth century radicalism.  Furthermore, it is interesting because it valorizes anti-intellectualism, another theme of the 1960s (see Counterrevolution and Revolt by Herbert Marcuse for a critique of anti-intellectual tendencies among 1960s radicals), and it strives to make a virtue of its own incoherence.