Karen Jones's The Urban Event: Spectacle, Resistance, and Hegemony and Lydia Yee's Two-Way Street discuss public art movements and how photography fits into ideas, events, and art in the streets.
Karen Jones explores the different aspects of public, city art in her The Urban Event: Spectacle, Resistance, and Hegemony. She uses the phrase "unitary urbanism", meaning "a theory of the combined use of arts and techniques for the integral construction of a milieu [a person's social environment] in dynamic relation with experiments in behavior." This idea allows theories and rebellions to happen through experiments of transformation of the city (such as performance art and graffiti) in relation to the government, oppression, and political and economic systems. David Wojnarowicz photographed Arthur Rimbaud in New York, where he wore a Rimbaud mask and stood in places that he had inhabited as a homeless teen. In doing so, he does the same thing that Buckingham does: draw out a past in something that cannot be immediately seen at surface level, but demands that the viewer understand the images (or story) at a different level. Lydia Yee and Frazer Ward speak quickly of this in their writings as well, but more-so dealing with a racial aspect of it. When Ward mentioned Adrian Piper and how she visually changed her identity as a racial commentary, I immediately thought of Nikki S. Lee, whom Yee mentions. Lee, a Korean-American woman, studies different subcultures within the American environment and then "becomes" one of the group. She then has herself photographed in this scene, blending into a hispanic neighborhood, a skatepark teenage scene, a yuppie shopper, and a cubicle businesswoman. Lee makes quite a clear racial statement that even on the streets, things taken at surface level are skewed and incorrect, and that not everything is as it immediately seems.
Nikki S. Lee, #4 from the Yuppie Project
Nikki S. Lee, #7 from the Skateboarders Project
Nikki S. Lee, #6 from the Hip Hop Project
Another form of art that Jones mentions is the graffiti art that exploded in New York from 1971-1982. During this time, graffiti artists gained "recognition" for "taking back" public space from a controlled power and producing street art that was name-making and free. It was seen, but not through anybody's (the public's) intentions; this is not art in a gallery or museum. It is public and it is unavoidably viewed. The rebellion of taking back what some would deem public space, is exactly what spurred on the Tompkins Square Park riots in 1988, when many of the students, artists, and homeless that had been removed or relocated because of gentrification in the area attempted to take back their public space in the park after they had been getting kicked out at 1am.
As Yee breaks down, Public events such as these were usually documented photographically under the category of documentary photography or photojournalism. Allan Sekula, however, states that there can also be an anti-photojournalism style within the same documented event. According to Sekula, this anti-photojournalism is "not in the headlines of the mainstream media, but 'the lulls, the waiting and the margin of events.'" Though I understand where he is coming from, I do not agree with his statement as it seems he is afraid to fall into the photojournalistic category and therefore made up his own "type" of photography. Photojournalism, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is simply "the use of photographs in journalism; journalism consisting primarily of photographs." So although Sekula may photograph "in between" major events happening, the fact that he is still documenting the people that were involved in the event when they are at the event, qualifies his images as photojournalistic. Interestingly enough, Sekula was not the only photographer to fear being lumped into a distinguishable photographic category: Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, and Diane Arbus attempted to "distinguish their work from previous documentarians by privileging individual style rather than a social message." Ultimately, they wanted to know life through their images, not reform it.
Following this section of photographers not wanting to really be categorized, Yee categorizes some other photographers into archives, portrait, or performance. For the archive category, photographers such as Eugene Atget, Sze Tsung Leong, Zoe Leonard, Nils Norman, and Francis Alys were mentioned. These photographers created documentation of the cities they were in at the time, some making political or economic points, such as Leong's History Images, and some, such as Alys's Instantaneas simply capturing the essence of the street.
For portrait, Yee brought up August Sander, Amy Arbus, and Jamel Shabazz. Though not always in the street, and some photographs obviously posed and set up in a more traditional "studio style", Sander created a sort of portrait archive of people in Germany in the 20th Century (Menschen des 20 Jahrhunderts). Amy Arbus, in similar style to her mother's subject matter, photographed people on the streets that had unique style or personality. Shabazz made more of a political statement by documenting the Lation and African American youth in NYC at the time.
August Sander
Amy Arbus
Jamal Shabazz
The performance category is slightly different as it relies less on still images and more heavily on video. Kimsooja made a film entitled A Needle Woman, "following" a woman around different capital cities. Robin Rhode made animations and graffiti with simple drawings and interactive stop motion. Daniel Guzman created a music video of one of Kiss's songs, filming in the streets of Mexico City.
Though categories help to organize and break down elements of art and the street, they seem irrelevant in the long run. What is most interesting is not which art is under which category, but how all of these types of photography and street art came together to create representations and ideas of the street that we can still see and relate to today.
No comments:
Post a Comment