A MAJOR MINORITY, curated by POESIA, the editor of GRAFFUTURISM.COM opens this friday at 1AM GALLERY in SAN FRANCISCO. This is a link to an essay written by Art Poesia and i for the Graffuturism website to accompany the announcement of the opening. the breadth of the exhibition and intellectual nature of much of the art inspired much more than we anticipated as we wrote the essay. we got VERY far away from just discussing the art in the exhibition and went back to the roots of graff and the culture it grew from to try to explain where and why graffiti/street art arose as the dominant aesthetic expression over the past fifty years. i am very proud of this surprising detour we made. i think we discovered some unique theoretical, cultural and historical connections, which get at the genesis of graffiti, its current state of progressive hybridization fifty years later, and its place in relation to Contemporary Art, art history and fine art culture. Poesia wrote the first draft, and i was just going to copy edit it, but the first exciting realization that gave me shivers was that Marshall Mcluhans Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (which poesia hadnt read) and Arthur Dantos The End of Art (which i hadnt read) were both published in 1964, the same decade that saw the manifestation of graffiti as a unique aesthetic cultural force. the connection between the ideas of these two visionary texts, which defined a new world and graffiti as the expression of it, set the tone for me for the rest of the writing. From there, we went back and forth, involved others who gave feedback (listed at end of essay), and i continued to write and get shivers and write and get shivers. it grew from a thousand words to three thousand and five hundred words, and i stand behind all of them as important to the document. it could not have happened without everyones input and communal effort. poesia as always was the ignition. he came up with the title and wrote the basis for everything i added. if this inspires ideas in anyone else who then has more feedback, suggestions for other texts to read, or connections/ideas to make, please comment below or email me at ekglabs@ymail Ive pasted in the second and third paragraphs here as a teaser or just click the link below: A Major Minority: An Intercontinental Survey of Othercontemporary Urban Art Exhibition Statement written by Poesia and Ekg. ... By amassing this huge survey, Poesia presents the current Post-historical aesthetic moment of our Global Village as the natural evolution from the original form of Graffiti which manifested in the late Sixties. Both the above terms were created and defined fifty years ago in 1964 when they were developed independently by Arthur Danto and Marshall McLuhan in their works The End of Art and Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man respectively. Coincidentally, these two visionary texts articulated our new world during the same decade that Graffiti appeared within the urban environments of Philadelphia and New York City. At first Graffiti was simply known as Writing by the progenitors of the movement, but then the term Graffiti began to be used in the mass media, and it stuck in the consciousness of the populace and the next generation of writers as well. Since that time, this singular art form has gone through many more progressive mutations as it developed. Even within the last fifteen years, since the turn of the new millennium, Graffiti has found itself once again rejuvenated by the re-emergence of Street Art, which became a powerful cultural, aesthetic, and marketplace force this time around. As traditional Graffiti merges with Street Art and becomes what we have come to call Urban Art, A Major Minority illustrates this current maturity and intellectual self-awareness of itself in all it’s iterations and as the major global art form, expressing and engaging our post-historical, global village culture and psyche at the turn of the new millennium. Despite this maturity, Urban Art has always remained on the edges of the art world and has never been bestowed true institutional recognition. At this point, Urban Art is a highly-developed movement with a rich fifty-year history, consisting of a wide-ranging community of practitioners, fans, merchants, and some institutional supporters. The use of the term Othercontemporary Art, coined by Stefano Antonelli, was settled upon during the discourse generated by the process of writing this exhibition statement, and encapsulates the concept that this is an art form which has always existed alongside but outside of what has become known as Contemporary Art by the critical, intellectual and institutional fine art communities. The term incorporates, but is not exclusive to, the ideals of The Other, Outsider Art and the recognition of an alternative version of art history of which Graffiti and its iterations are at the center of. The use of Othercontemporary is an attempt to create a specific and meaningful adjective for our proper nouns — Graffiti, Street Art and Urban Art — but it can also be used as an umbrella for those three terms, especially when used in opposition to the term Contemporary Art.
Posted on: Mon, 10 Mar 2014 07:41:01 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015