Culture: November 2007 Archives
Nowhere else in the world will you find such a burgeoning street art scene than you do in Buenos Aires. Why though? Perhaps it’s to do with a politically involved population. BA is the social and political centre of Argentina so it’s inevitable that political commentaries be played out on the walls of its many streets; in Buenos Aires, there is much to say. Take the Dirty War of 1977, six years of military dictatorship and state-sponsored violence against activists, radicals, students and anyone with remotely left wing views. In 1976, a year before the violence began in earnest, one general made a sinister prediction: “We’re going to have to kill 50,000 people: 25,000 subversives, 20,000 sympathisers, and we will make 5,000 mistakes.” In reality, the number of deaths was nearer 30,000. They were known then, and still are, as ‘The Disappeared’, taken from their homes, their bodies thrown like lifeless sacks into the Rio de la Plata. Their families (mostly the mothers) met every Thursday at the Plaza de Mayo; they became known as Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo, and many still meet today in the hope of being reunited with their children. Around the square itself, images of their white scarves (symbols of their plight) have been painted on the tiles (see above). It’s disturbing stories such as these that inform much of the art you see around you when walking the streets of Buenos Aires.
But not all the street art there is overtly political. DOMA, an Argentine collective of artists who emerged during the now defining year for Argentinean street art, 1998, are not so interested in a turbulent political past as they are in the present, the here and now. Since ‘98, they’ve set out to interfere in all the information channels available to us in today’s media saturated environment (Argentina is widely considered to be the most European city in South America), specialising in motion graphics, animation, filming, VJing and toy design. They move all over the world, intent on studying people’s reactions to their works. After all, what is the point of art if there’s no reaction, no interaction? “We could write a book about reactions,” they say. It’s what interests them most. They put their Giant Dummy (pictured) downtown in Buenos Aires and the way most people reacted to it was, I believe, a little sad, if not entirely predictable. On their way to work, briefcase in one hand, papers in the other, people walked by as if it wasn’t even there. Most didn’t even look at it. Some people, or rather most people, just aren’t interested in anything remotely creative, imaginative or just plain fun. They haven’t the time; there are serious matters to attend to. I often think that about people in this country. People walk the streets with eyes trained on the ground in front of them. They notice nothing, stopping only when pedestrian lights tell them to, on a one man mission to nowhere. Of course, it was the younger generations that fell in love with the Giant Dummy, perhaps the ones who haven’t yet surrendered to the pressure to conform.
I know people living in Buenos Aires at the moment. All I hear is good things, snapshots in my inbox of a place where anything goes, a city regalvanised by its thriving culture, whose city walls are but great canvases to the imagination.
Read about DOMA’s views on corporate sponsorship of street artists and graffiti, their love of Nintendo, their analog appreciation of the world, and recent collaborations with Kidrobot in a great little interview here; and be sure to check their own website here.
And for "trends, innovations and inspirations about Buenos Aires - a true map of the city", this will do the trick.
“Even graffiti, if you see it in a different way, can be celebratory. I don’t think it and these buildings always need to be associated with violence. They are quite grand structuresin their own way.” DAVID HEPHER
Or, at least, they were once grand. They were once modernist symbols of regeneration and great concrete odes to Le Corbusier’s infatuation with “breton brut”. In the UKin particular, this strain of modernism, the one that spawned structures such as The British Film Institute and The National Theatre on the Southbank, became known as Brutalism, and it accounted for many concrete high rise housing blocks like those we encounter in Hepher’s pictures. Structures like Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower in West London once represented modernism’s last stand. Goldfinger himself lived on the top floor of a similar building to try and demonstrate the benefits of high rise living to a cynical public; tall buildings served a worthy function at a time when local councils were still reeling from war damage. But then came tales of women raped in the elevators and children robbed by heroin addicts, and so the buildings earned a reputation. Today, these tall, dank buildings, once upon a time built for the good of society, are seen as towering symbols of inner city angst.
Hepher, it seems, wants to remind us of a more illustrious past. His pictures are not intended, as I presumed, as social commentary or doom-laden depictions of degeneration. They aren’t as predictable as that, and that’s why I like them. Painted on canvases of concrete, making them both of the city and about it, Hepher combines graffiti and photographs of these buildings to try and shift people’s opinions about objects they uniformly condemn as ugly or dangerous. He sees beauty where others don’t.
The conservative view puts both graffiti and tower block living in the same hat as gun crime and gang culture, but Hepher, a man of 72 years no less, uses his creativity to show us that this isn’t necessarily the case.
Peter Schneider’s superb novel, The Wall Jumper, reminds us that, even in difficult times - in this case a city gripped by the effects of the Berlin Wall - there’s plenty room for a little imagination, creativity and determination. This excerpt makes the point, albeit with a decent helping of irony...
“In the early sixties a circus acrobat had used a high-tension wire as a tightrope to walk into the West. And hadn’t a pole-vaulting champion used the Wall as a bar and cleared it with room to spare? There was no end to the list, and on the basis of sheer imagination, it would be difficult to select candidates for a hall of fame (of wall jumping).
The suppression in the DDR of sports that might lead to border crossing - ballooning and scuba-diving, for instance - had loosed a tide of fantasy and produced a generation of inventors. Snorkels, diving masks, and oxygen tanks had hardly disappeared from the stores before hobbyists of all kinds began fashioning replacements out of bicycle inner tubes, home heating gas containers, and rubber aprons. Where in a hall of fame would one place the auto mechanic who developed a miniature motor to pull him across the Baltic under water? And how would one rank the engineer who, after searching the specialty bookstores in vain for textbooks on aerodynamics, rediscovered the principal of the hot air balloon?
The one sure thing - and here the dialogue on the Wall could take a philosophical turn - was that every improvement in the border system had spurred the creative drive to find a new loophole. The urge to master the Wall didn’t differ in substance, perhaps, from the impulse to climb K2: the Wall, like the mountain, was there; and the challenge would persist as long as the Wall remained standing.”
“In the early sixties a circus acrobat had used a high-tension wire as a tightrope to walk into the West. And hadn’t a pole-vaulting champion used the Wall as a bar and cleared it with room to spare? There was no end to the list, and on the basis of sheer imagination, it would be difficult to select candidates for a hall of fame (of wall jumping).
The suppression in the DDR of sports that might lead to border crossing - ballooning and scuba-diving, for instance - had loosed a tide of fantasy and produced a generation of inventors. Snorkels, diving masks, and oxygen tanks had hardly disappeared from the stores before hobbyists of all kinds began fashioning replacements out of bicycle inner tubes, home heating gas containers, and rubber aprons. Where in a hall of fame would one place the auto mechanic who developed a miniature motor to pull him across the Baltic under water? And how would one rank the engineer who, after searching the specialty bookstores in vain for textbooks on aerodynamics, rediscovered the principal of the hot air balloon?
The one sure thing - and here the dialogue on the Wall could take a philosophical turn - was that every improvement in the border system had spurred the creative drive to find a new loophole. The urge to master the Wall didn’t differ in substance, perhaps, from the impulse to climb K2: the Wall, like the mountain, was there; and the challenge would persist as long as the Wall remained standing.”
Lego. Oh how I used to love it. If you’re a guy, you probably did too. And if you’re a girl, then you’ll remember swallowing a few of your brother’s bricks.
Darren Neave and John Cake, AKA The Little Artists, still do love Lego, and they use it rather mischievously to question what it means to be an artist in today’s commodity-driven and throwaway culture by recreating famous artworks (particularly those of the YBA artists of the early 90s) with Lego bricks and people. No glue, no painting on the figures. Pure Lego. In themselves, the works are imaginative, creative and, more than anything, amusing.
But I think there’s more to them than that. Lego has always placed great emphasis on encouraging creativity in young children by getting them to dream something up in their minds before making those dreams happen with the tools (the little bricks) they supply. Neave and Cake’s works are, in effect, a silent homage to that Lego aesthetic: little bricks that, with a little imagination and creativity, as well as a great deal of determination, eventually became art.
We’re not sure if they did this, but it’s worth a look anyway.
Darren Neave and John Cake, AKA The Little Artists, still do love Lego, and they use it rather mischievously to question what it means to be an artist in today’s commodity-driven and throwaway culture by recreating famous artworks (particularly those of the YBA artists of the early 90s) with Lego bricks and people. No glue, no painting on the figures. Pure Lego. In themselves, the works are imaginative, creative and, more than anything, amusing.
But I think there’s more to them than that. Lego has always placed great emphasis on encouraging creativity in young children by getting them to dream something up in their minds before making those dreams happen with the tools (the little bricks) they supply. Neave and Cake’s works are, in effect, a silent homage to that Lego aesthetic: little bricks that, with a little imagination and creativity, as well as a great deal of determination, eventually became art.We’re not sure if they did this, but it’s worth a look anyway.
