Mission

The enthusiasm of illegality, the protection of anonymity and the challenge of celebrity

Among all the typologies of the urban popular culture, graffiti stands out as the most aggressive one - the most polemical against both the elitist and the mass culture, and, at the same time, as the most permeable one to the models, themes, and visual solutions offered and promoted by these opposite poles of the official culture. This type of art - which can be the expression of the tensions and conflicts generated by territorial disputes in the marginal areas of the city, in the ghettos and ethnic enclaves, and of the conflicts between the forever invasive suburbs and the elitist urban nuclei – can not become fixed in stereotypical formulas, but is a critic and creative visual comment, a constantly changing production of the popular collective imagery - dense with the pressures of the mythologies generated by the modern, postmodern and contemporary societies. These myths recycle the specificity (and the conglomeration) of the ethnic traditions, the violence as a dominant trait of social conditions, the eroticism and the consumerism delivered by the advertising imagery. The graffiti, initially a form of local guerilla, of protest, and thusly repressed as a form of visual vandalism, gradually became an imagistic discourse and an expressive appropriation of the city – the ground for fighting, for self-affirmation, or for the familiarization with the social environment and with the urban spaces which are, at the same time, a hostile universe to conquer and a territory to claim and defend. The argotic condition of graffiti generated hybrid group communication codes, which add further emphasis to the break with the conventions of common language. The hostile attitude of authorities and traditionalist citizens towards graffiti (even in the absence of any major social or political demands) has unavoidably caught the interest of art curators, gallery managers and art dealers – cultural institutions which were, at least initially, themselves perceived as opposed to this rhetorical form of freedom, and as targets of this polemic against the obsessions of celebrity, of commercial values, of success in all its aspects, of constraints and taboos. Under the pressure of the critic, polemic spirit, and under the protection of the assumed anonymity (the artists are defined solely by style and sign their works in code) street graffiti becomes increasingly interesting for the cultural institutions which validate the various artistic creations, including the museums – these traps for all avant-garde discourses which claim to be ephemeral and strictly actual. (Artists such as Bansky, the famous anonymous British artist, are present on both city walls and in the museums, in this ambiguous condition of the meeting point between fame and anonymity, and never giving up the mockery and critic or the polemical verve. The stencils of the “Bay sail” series are good examples of the defining constants of street art – the aggressive and at the same time playful spirit, exhibited in a museum.) This compromise between the manifest freedoms, which changes the face of the modern city, and this combination of historical and contemporary styles (from the severe modern functionalism and constructive ingeniousness to the formal and spatial imagistic of the postmodern neo-illusionism) express, organically, the popular spirit of the city. The option for the vivacity and promptness of the immediate street discourse, which belongs to the present (privileged time, connected with the past solely by the recycling of images from the vast patrimony of popular and elitist cultures, of the various styles and ideas – specific to any postproduction, and by the unpredictability of cultural or social references) meets with the avant-garde program of escaping from the museum (an avant-garde who has lost most of this deconstructive spirit).
The virtual space, initially a promised land of the freedom from any classifications, conservations and absorptions of a narrative duration (offered to the public through successive and recurrent aesthetical programs and unifying, leveling commercial strategies) has gradually gained itself the characteristics of the museum collection, a more accessible and interactive one, true, but still beyond the extensive area of the developing actuality, of the direct creativity. For the traditional or avant-garde, elitist or populist forms of art, created and delivered in the concrete reality, the virtual space remains just a container, a medium for the euphemized versions of presence, dialogue and conflict, obviously with its own specificities.
As the real or virtual museums present and certify (or deny) the cultural value of this form of art, the tensions generated by the invasive graffiti, manifested, accepted and persecuted as imagistic vandalism and hooliganism, are converted in a manifestation against the city or at least against the traditional appearance of the city. It is an aesthetic phenomenon which nevertheless reacts to the actual urban context, which bans, in its modern functionalism, the exterior ornaments (ornament and crime, wrote Adolf Loos at the debut of the architectonic integration of the industrial revolution), and considers the functional stereotype an aesthetical program.
The “Graffiti – Timisoara 2011” Festival aimed for a mediation between the authorities of this traditionally inter-cultural and innovatory city and this form of street art which answers the need for image, for ornament, even if it is deconstructive and aggressive.
The festival was, initially, a University project, elaborated by teachers and students from the Art and Design Faculty, together with several local cultural foundations. It has been initiated at the suggestion of few enthusiasts who were fascinated with the Romanian graffiti phenomenon, and with the way in which this type of art developed under the pressures of the western acculturation. It has temporary suspended any conflict between artists, anonymous polemists, town hall representatives, police and the recurrent bourgeois spirit.
We must of course recall the adventure of this type of gesture: illegal, defined by the risk implied by the political quality of the protest to such a degree that it could not become formulated as an artistic discourse and has, for a long time, remained in the realm of the written text. In the context of the last decades of last century, the censorship hardened and the social exasperation reached such a high level that it started to generate protests, rhetorical, but unsophisticated and free of clichés. It is not often, today, that the street graffiti in the Romanian cities is so deeply committed to the risky political protest. It usually remains playful, aesthetical, with a content referring to local competitions, to juvenile erotic reveries, or to polemics or imagistic disputes with the current cultural models. Unavoidably, the current argotic styles of cities which host major universities are defined by the aesthetic and artistic education, by the study of composition, and by the visual culture, with its local or exotic sources of inspiration.
The fact that it was an international festival allowed for the open communication between graffers, in a real, concrete competition and dialogue, more fruitful than the usual virtual contacts, on the one hand, and on the other it offered to the citizens of Timisoara a more solid argument in the favor of the legitimization of this form of ephemeral art which belongs, unquestionably, to the cultural patrimony, beyond its assumed temporal precariousness and the fact that, like any other performance, installation, event, etc, its preservation is dependent on traditional or digital recording technologies.
This festival is only one event, one aspect of this constant evolution of the urban environment, with its heteroclite tendencies which generate spectacularly different exigencies and solutions, towards a public expression, out of the museum and beyond the vandalism, on the one hand, and on the other hand towards a type of communication which transcends the cultural affinities and an aesthetical condition. These attempts to overrule the radicalisms of the oppositions between the cultural and sub-cultural extremes (as defined by Clement Greenberg in “Avant-garde or Kitsch”) demonstrate the tendencies to euphemize the dispersive tensions of the urban culture, triggered by the pressures for the leveling of all differences – ethnic, national, local, social, religious, aesthetical, etc, context in which the need for self-affirmation remains just one of the several morphological elements in the complex syntax of the actual universalism.

Alexandra Titu