It’s hard to shake the nagging paradox that seems to be spray-painted all over the upstairs gallery space at the Middlebury College Museum of Art’s Street Art Exhibit. Even if your experience with street art as a form of socio-political discourse is minimal, it is likely you have either heard of or come across the works of artists such as Banksy and Shepherd Faery, now more notorious for their merchandise than for their original urban artistic identities. Faery, who gained much of his fame from his iconic OBEY motif that you now see spattered across hats and t-shirts, held a retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston in 2009. Banksy, perhaps the most popular name in street art today, is an industry on his own. His net worth is in the millions, his prints sell within seconds online and he has even been nominated for an Oscar.
The basic question then begs: can street art ever really be street art if it fails to exist in the street? How can we step inside the often academic, systemic space of a museum and engage with work that is so grounded in its foundation of rebellion against the very same principles? To put art that has gained its popularity from the neighborhoods, walls, streets and masses that define it into a somewhat colorless space is to render it toothless. While Museum of Art Curator Emmie Donadio and Preparator Chris Murray provided a background of the history and techniques of street art in their opening lecture, which certainly prompts further discussion about artistic work not usually acknowledged by the establishment, what I felt was lacking was a discussion on how alienated these works seem in their decontextualized, poster-like display.
Take, for example, “The Conductor,” a collaborative piece by Retna and El Mac, which fuses calligraphy and brushwork with aerosol paint spray to create a dynamic, intricate effect of gradient and contours. The only real problem is that the original work is in fact a 40-foot mural, and not a meager framed print. This is the same difficulty that affects the work of Swoon, an artist who integrates contemporary consciousness with the visceral, physical presence of her pieces, using everything from pavements and fire escapes to rafts made out of New York City’s garbage as her medium. Even the attempt to furnish a rundown-looking wall in the corner of the gallery space with wheatpaste prints, to perhaps engender a sense of what they would really look like if you passed by them in a Brooklyn neighborhood, is an effort to provide context where it is severely lacking. The questions of the modern fetishization of art, commodity culture and gentrification that are so integral to street art culture all remain unanswered and avoided in this exhibition. The Warhol exhibit downstairs now seems to make a lot more sense.
While the reality of the urban sprawl is ultimately inseparable from the work of the art itself, the exhibition does nevertheless provide a platform for this important debate. It also perhaps opens a window into a world of some prominent names in street art for the previously unacquainted – a foothold into the overarching problem.
Judith Supine’s collages, bursting with brilliant fluorescent greens and pinks, are reminiscent of some hazy, seductive, pop-art acid trip; Muto, a stop-motion film of a graffiti project by enigmatic Italian artist Blu, is particularly remarkable in how grossly ambitious, irreverent and wildly fun it is. There is also a playful installation by French photographer JR composed of a series of enlarged black and white portrait pictures featuring Middlebury students that run along the floor and wall.
While it may be difficult to peer through the haze of commodification and the burgeoning celebrity business model that have come to define Banksy and Shepard Faery, their prints are still important for the waves they created, the impact they had on bringing street art to the masses (if it wasn’t already meant for that in the first place) and for the images they depict. Banksy’s “Girl With Balloon” is still inspiring in its simplicity of color and poignant illustration of a young girl watching her heart-shaped balloon slip away from her. Faery’s political posters, including the famous three-toned “Hope” (the face of Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign), are still important markers for the histories they were created to depict.
The street art exhibit does diversify the Museum collection, and many of the prints on display have been permanently acquired by the College thanks to the curators’ persistence with navigating the online market platform that most of these artists now work through. However, no matter how technically intriguing the art may be, it is ultimately difficult to reconcile crossing one’s arms to look at work that is native to the street while it is mounted, framed and hung up in a gallery space. Perhaps more visual and cultural information on the original presentation of the art would have been helpful in understanding the context in which it was conceived. It is intriguing to come away wondering whether an attempt to bring in the street at all is not simultaneously one that mutes it completely.
The “Outside In: Art of the Street” exhibition is open until April 19 at the Middlebury College Museum of Art. Entry is free. There is also a film screening of Style Wars, a documentary about the New York graffiti movement of the ‘70s and ‘80s, followed by a Q&A with director Henry Chalfant on March 5 in Dana Auditorium.
Street Art Exhibit Prompts Discussion
Comments
