LECTURE NOTES:GRAFFITI/STREET ART//OUGD401

ORIGINATES:Caves at Lascaux, France

•Drawings and paintings on cave walls from the Paleolithic period (17, 300 years old)
•Discovered in 1940 by four teenagers •Depicting scenes of everyday life, hunting etc.
•scratched with animal bones, natural pigments 

Ancient Roman Graffiti-

•From Pompeii (Italy)– graffiti on wall
•Pompeii was destroyed and completely buried during a long catastrophic eruption of the volcano Mount Vesuvius spanning two days in the year AD 79.

URBAN GRAFFITI: 1970's NEW YORK, spray can graffiti, evolves alongside hip-hop culture, making language of the streets visible, announcing a presence.  WE WILL NOT BE IGNORED.


JON NAAR graffiti photographer 1973:

From on Becoming a Graffiti photographer, John Naar

• “you will see that the vast majority of these writers came from the most run-down and neglected sections of New York....predominantly Hispanic and African American. The graffiti they sprayed on the fronts of their homes and on the trains... were a cry for change from the ghetto to clean up the filthy streets, to improve the quality of the schools, and to reduce he glaring inequality between rich and poor.” p20 

Basquiat and Diaz started as students, created the character Samo:

1979: death of Samo, moved onto Neo Expressionist paintings

Basquiat worked with Warhol.

Keith Haring paints murals all over the world, Rio, Berlin etc.

VIDEO GAME CULTURE: Stencil from the Berlin Wall of a console controller commenting on lack of brands and technology on the Eastern block-political side to street art.  PS2, XBOX games incorporating street art culture into video games: -Grand Theft Auto-tagging, 

Re emergence of street art- Banksy

Photographer JR: Favela Morro Da Providencia- Rio (2008)

drawing attention to women as a sub group that are unrepresented:

John Fekner- Broken Promises 1980

Referring to shortage of houses and waste of building space

Faith 71 (Amsterdam) Sticker art- bridges the gap between hyperrealist and hyper-abstract art.

Sam 3 (Spain)-Turns city into a stage

VHIKS aka Alexandre Farto (Portugal)

Graffiti- to interact, to add to

Female Graffiti Artists:

DIVA (Brooklyn)

Fafi (France)

Miss Van

These days artists that have been to art college use and incorporate street art into their work, whereas before it was more about making a voice for the streets and getting noticed.

WARHOL AND BASQUIAT:

•General Electric with waiter, 1984
•One of Americas largest corporations
•Collaborated towards the end of his life, Basquiat died of a heroin overdose 18 months after Warhol

In 1981 he sketched his first chalk drawings on black paper and painted plastic, metal and found objects.

•In 1984, Haring visited Australia and painted wall murals in Melbourne

•Other commissions- Rio, Paris, Berlin 

Graffiti in video games    

Invader
•French artist, born 1969
•First mosaic in mid 1990’s Paris
•Mosaic tile which has permanency as it is weatherproof and more difficult to remove than paper/paint
•Tiles are pixel like
•The ‘invasion’ spreads first across French cities and then 22 countries worldwide 

BANKSY

Banksy, 2005
• “The Israeli government is building a wall surrounding the occupied Palestinian territories. It stands three times the height of the Berlin Wall and will eventually run for over 700km- the distance from London to Zurich. The wall is illegal under international law and essentially turns Palestine into the worlds largest open prison. It also makes it the ultimate activity holiday destination for graffiti writers.” 

Graffiti in film  

80 Blocks from Tiffany's (1979)

Style Wars (1983)

"Exit Through The Gift Shop" (2010)