Art in post- modernity - Essay Example

? How does fashion and/or artistic practice illustrate the condition of post- modernity? Choose a relevant case study and explore the appropriate theory. Name: Instructor: Street art is an example of hybridity in the world of visual culture, a postmodern genre, whose definition is in real-time practice than in a unified movement, theory or message. These artists utilize cities as their working environment, and do not consider themselves as “graffiti” or “street” artists. Street art started as an underground, rebellious, in-your-face exploitation of public visual surfaces. Currently, it is has become a key element of visual space in various cities and an acknowledged art movement, which is crossing over into the gallery and museum system. Street art creates and circulates a visual vocabulary and collection of stylistic registers, which have become instantaneously recognizable throughout mass culture (Irvine 2012, 235). Street art, a form of contemporary visual culture, is a key connection linking multiple institutional and disciplinary domains that rarely connect with this finely tuned state of visibility (Irvine 2012, 236). The conflict between intersecting forces, which surround street art exposes concealed questions regarding: regimes of public space and visibility; the role of cultural institutions and communities of practice; the constitutive spaces and locations of art; the generative judgment of appropriation and remix culture; and rivaling arguments concerning the type of art and its relation to a public. The practice is founded on urban “operational space,” as depicted in “practice of place” as illustrated by Certeau and not the abstract space of urban planning, geometry, or the virtual space of the screen. This is a space produced by a lived experience, characterized by individuals mapping their personal movements and every day relationships to seeming centers of power through the neighborhoods, the streets and transit networks of the city. Street art offers an instinctive break from the hastened “aesthetics of disappearance”. Hence, it is an indicator cut off in an exceedingly mass-arbitrated environment, which is dominated by a regime of screen visibility that always has absence of material objects. The placement of works requires a place, demarcating locations with awareness, which is against the increasing urban “non-places” of anonymous commerce and transit. Street artists use walls as mural space, which is their useful differentiator (Irvine 2012, 240). In the early 1990s, the street arts had effectively used walls in Los Angeles and New York, which boasted of different graffiti styles. The Berlin Wall had miles of mural art and graffiti, which created visually striking images during the fall of wall in 1989. As a city mural art, street art spread across Europe and to South America, throughout the 1990s. There has been a gradual evolution from simple graffiti as slogan writing or name to a focused practice entailing many types of graphic and image techniques. These techniques involve hybrid genres and mixed methods, which are produced and executed both on and off the street. Figure 1 Pop, as anticipated by Dada and Duchamp, launched a new conceptual space, which introduced new arguments regarding on what art could be. Street art acquired these arguments; thus, becoming a transformative logic of Pop. Consequently, it became a redirected work of transubstantiation, which changed the unrefined and non-art-differentiated space of public streets into novel territories of visual engagement. This anti-art performative works eventually resulted in a new art category. Street art deaestheticizes “high art” as one of the various forms of source material; and on the other hand, aestheticizing sectors, which were formerly outside culturally acknowledged art space. The “extramural” sectors of non-art space and the judgment of the art container are currently turned inside out. The walls of the city reflect what was banned on the walls of art institutions, such as, galleries, schools and museums. This means that Street art is outside the institutional walls; hence, mural art of the extramuros. Street art expands various significant post-pop and postmodernist methods, which are currently the common language of contemporary art: repetition, photo-reproduction, the grid, appropriation, serial imaging and inversions of high and reduced cultural ciphers. Street artists take the reasoning of hybridity, appropriation, and remix in every direction: contentions; actions; ideas; interventions; performances; inversions and subversions, which are always expanded into new spaces, and remixed for forms and contexts never foreseen in earlier postmodernist arguments. Street art additionally assumes a foundational dialogism in which every new act of constructing a piece and inserting it into a street context maybe: a response; an answer; an associate engagement with previous works; and a continuing debate concerning the public visual exterior of a city. In contemporary urban communities without the disguised history of medieval and traditional guarding walls, the structure of highways, buildings and streets and train yards produce marked boundaries, zones, territories and separation of hierarchical space, a psychogeography of spaces. Street artists have an overall improved practice for setting works in this organized space, where the well-picked situation of a work regularly builds more credit than the work itself. Surfaces that structure the visible city are vertical: visibility turns into a challenge for utilizing and controlling vertical space. Walls are allegories for verticality, that is, street layout, buildings and boundary walls create the topography of publically viewable space. Vertical space is very valuable in contemporary cities, the driving worth of “air rights” on top of vertical surfaces and property, which can be chartered for advertising. When amassed in spaces like Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo, Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, and Times Square in New York, advertising surfaces attain the status of totalizing displays, walled enclaves of manufactured and managed visuality. Figure 2 One of the real fixations of modern art theory has been the cultural wall: the issue of institutional walls, the over-resolved pioneer “white cube” of four exhibition walls, and the middle class commoditization of wall-mountable arts epitomizing the symbolic capital in a domestic area. Additionally, there is the abstract use of art establishment walls as a theoretical surface for transient works, which does not require lasting or strong material structures; walls as limits, boundaries, zones, territories, enclosures and thoughts of art on, off, or outside the walls. For abstract art, it was the inquiry of the objecthood of the work, its autonomy from wall space, other than the verticalness of the structure to be utilized, or not, within the installation of a piece Street art consistently uncovers that no urban is neutral, that is, street topography and walls are boundaries for socially built domains and zones, and vertical space controlled by administrations of visibility. Leaving a visible mark in publicly urban space is actually illegal and frequently executed as a demonstration of non-fierce common noncompliance. These artists comprehend that public visible space, commonly controlled by property and business administrations for regulating visibility, could be appropriated for free, uncontained, antagonist acts. All art movements have progressed in cities; nevertheless, street art is unique in having emerged as an immediate engagement with the postmodern city. This is for the reason that the works and the artists presume a dialogic relationship, an essential entailment, with the fabric and symbolic world of the city (Irvine 2012, 241). Street artists usually remark that their art is a response to the command of urban visual space by publicizing in a shut property administration. Street art is a reaction to experiencing public spaces as being unreservedly, structurally, manifestations of advertising, encapsulating the codes for socialization in the political economy (Irvine 2012, 256). In endeavors to boost the business appeal of downtown areas, numerous urban areas have government supported urban ventures, which transform urban zones into amusement parks with deliberately regulated visual data important for supporting a tourist simulacrum. Not only messages for products and services; on the other hand, a social informing framework, "ambiguously enticing, dubiously consensual," that supplants existed social experience. Street art attempts to mix up this script, jam the report, or expose its dishonestly clear operation, permitting viewers to embrace diverse positions, no more basically subjects of a mess. Street art may be an upfront engagement with a city’s messaging system, an immediate hit on the unconscious, accepted, on the face of natural areas within which visual messages will seem. Street artists mediate with counter-imagery, acts of displacement in associate generative “semeiocracy,” the politics of meaning-creation through pictures and writing in perspectives, which bring the competition over visibility into the open. Walls and structures may be repurposed, de-purposed, refaced, de-faced, remade, or de-made. Shepard Fairey, Ron English, Banksy and many other artists have created express subversion of advertising space, which is one in all their chief tactics. Ron English, with his Pop “subvertisements,” has high-jacked over one thousand billboards along, turning out to be the example of the culture jamming latent of street art (Irvine 2012, 257). This tactic has been the key motivator for Shepard Fairey’s long-running “Obey” campaign: pictures and slogans, which incite awareness concerning public advertising and messages. Figure 3 In street art, remix of designs, appropriation and representational process extend the previous practices of Pop and abstract Art genres (Irvine 2012, 262). Conversely, street artists take for granted the conditions of postmodernity, as one thing already within the past, and accounted for and within the mix. The state of art-making nowadays is not any longer laden with the program of postmodernism—lamenting over the museum’s ruins; the de-historicized crush-ups of in style culture, classifying the collapse of high and low culture boundaries, and discovering uses for worries relating to post-colonial identity politics and international hybridizing. Remix is currently coming into the picture as one of core engines of culture, though long silent and concealed in a black box of ideologies. Behind so much innovative work in art, music, writing, and plan today is the feeling of society as being dependably recently crossover, a mix of "tainted," indiscriminate, and frequently unacknowledged or smothered sources, nearby and worldwide, and kept alive in a progressing dialogic call and response. Nicolas Bourriaud has contended that the bunch of plans connected with appropriation and remixes and may be outlined as postproduction: current art practices function as a substitute editing table for remixing the mosaic people tend to call actuality into the cultural fictions. The mixing board or editing table (terms from varying media postproduction) are appropriate for a period where most new cultural processing is communicated as post-production, accepted cultural materials are picked, cited, collaged, remixed, altered, and positioned in new unique or material settings. By making visible the reutilization of materials, which are already available for use inside the common culture, a great deal of street art has affinities with endlessly advancing global crossover music societies. Street works may seem anarchic or utopian, derivative or original, juvenile or stunningly well-executed, aggressive or sympathetic; however, it is a genre that began due to the artists’ deep empathy and identification with the city. As a result, they were obliged to shape something in and with the city, whether in forms of irony, protest, humor, critique, clever prank, beauty or subversion. A well-placed street piece will show the meaning of its material background, which makes a city, re-imaged and re-imagined, the invisible visible. Whatsoever the motives and medium of the work, the city is the presumed framework, interlocutor and necessary prerequisite for making the artwork work (Irvine 2012, 238). According to the art theory of the institutional art world, street art and artists appear tailor-made for a time when there is no recognized “period” identity for contemporary art. Consequently, there is no agreement on the probable role of an avant-garde. Nevertheless, the reception of the institutional artworld towards street art remains difficult and stuck in a generational shift. This is because the street art movement encompasses majority of the anti-institutional arguments, which have been detailed over the past fifty years in the artworld. Furthermore, it has not been fully adopted as a category for furthering art-institutional replication, which is the main objective of the art profession. Bibliography Irvine, M 2012. “The Work on the Street: Street Art and Visual Culture. “ The Handbook of Visual Culture, ed. Sandywell, B & Heywood, I. Berg, London & New York, pp 235-278. Image List Figure 1: Jones, J. (2011). In praise of the Berlin Wall Murals. Short Cuts Blog. Figure 2: Charlote, L. (2009). 38 Marvelous Graffiti and Street Art That Will Blow You Away. One Extra Pixel Figure 3: Crave. (2011). Culture Jamming, Ron English in Los Angeles. Read More