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Kent Jockington does not think much of graffiti. He said as much to me in passing. Like all imaginary boyfriends, he is an orthodontist, and, like all orthodontists, he is too busy looking at everyone's teeth to have a opinion on public art. But he does like to watch trains go by, and he gets mesmerized by an El car swathed in a Target ad, when he's supposed to be driving me to get Chinese.
“Watch the road!” I tell him.
“Now that's really clever,” he says. “That's marketing!”
“I hope you know,” I say, “That these Target bastards have appropriated the space historically reserved for graffiti and traditional urban decay.”
“So?” says Kent Jockington.
“So, what kind of space does this leave for spontaneous and original militant usurpation of space by this country's youth,” I say. “What about anarchy?”
Then he says, “What is up with anarchy? Wasn't that so 1995?”
I take out my notebook out of the glovebox and make a quick list of five other imaginary orthodontists I could be sleeping with.
I went to Chicago's first graffiti gallery, the appropriately named Defiance Gallery & Design, located in Pilsen, and spoke to two Chicago writers who would like to see graffiti engage its anarchical orgin to stake a claim in contemporary art. Chicago graffiti writers Kane and Skew claim that, at its worst, graffiti writing concerns itself with power and becomes a selfish act, though it has the tools to challenge existing modes of urban living and accepted ways of using city space. Nearly a decade ago, William Upski wrote “Bomb the Suburbs” on Chicago graffiti, with a title that referred to a challenge to graffiti writers to take the mindless surges of aggression of some graffiti writing to the suburbs, while using the better impulses of graffiti as a tool to beautify Chicago, a call to unite writers to engage every city rooftop.
I ask what Chicago graffiti is like now, and Skew launches into a laundry list of traits.
“ It's grit, it's Detroit. It's underground, it's dark, it's dead, it's mean. It's aggressive, it's not friendly at all..it's a little touch skinned... The beginning of graffiti is sort of an evolution but even the way that some graffiti writers think, is nothing in the way that you would think evolution would come out of. Not progressive.”
Kane opened Defiance this November with aspirations to provide some middle ground. In observing the space and the people in it, the gallery creates a space to facilitate collaboration between artists, and awareness for the city at large. Kane explains, “ Defiance is exclusively a graffiti gallery, or caters to art that is influenced by graffiti or artists that have used graffiti as a jumping point. There's a whole culture of street art that's making its own wedge in history. With the gallery we are trying to educate though exposure.”
So the roles of art and ads in public space can be reversed. Graffiti uses the closed gallery space as a culturally recognizable means of promoting itself, while advertisers use the language of graffiti to lend their product an urban aesthetic. Apple paid graffiti writers to tag their iPod advertisements on city walls with criticism of the iPod's memory, just before releasing a newer, more expensive iPod with more storage space. Calvin Klein has plans to pay KAWS, a New York City graffiti writer to improve upon their existing ads by adding an element of spray paint to them. But it's not just via imitating an urban aesthetic that advertisements function. They aren't all upfront in their motives. Commercials can be mini narratives. Print advertisements in the public space can be increasingly so far removed from the direct approach of “Drink Coca-Cola”, that at first glance you may not get what is being sold. They're all trying to catch you off guard, disrupt your commute, your walk, your regularly scheduled program, with a little artful image or clever turn of phrase that has little to do with their product, aside from the fact that you, the consumer, will now associate the two.
This intersection provides license for the manipulation of public space to serve either end. In the same way that ads can employ narrative to catch consumers off guard, so too can art use the stereotypical dry command of advertisement to startle an audience. The Chicago-based project “You Are Beautiful” calls on the stark lettering of advertisement to blend in with the solicitous urban landscape, to a degree. The artists associated with the project place installations throughout the city, in spaces typically devoted to advertisements, posting instead, the statement “You Are Beautiful”. The message's appearances have included city billboards and water towers, EL cars and storefront windows. When I ask this group of artists to comment on the relationship of their work with advertisements in the public space, they claim, “This project is meant to be quietly lurking, and in the midst of your daily life, grab your arm, and just tug on it a little.”
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