Articles + Reviews - AUSTIN GRAFFITI ART
Review: Austin Graffiti Art From Past to Present
Moore, Claire. "Review: Austin Graffiti Art from Past to Present" Cantanker. (September 2006)
As I approached the gallery I passed throngs of tattooed and pierced bodies spilling out into the parking lot and alongside the train tracks. After taking time to watch graffiti in the making (an artist was working on a temporary wall set up by the gallery,) I found my way inside. The densely filled space pulsed to music pumping out of a subwoofer as viewers explored works on canvas, board, and paper varying in size from eight by ten inches to five feet square. There was a broad scope of art presented—everything from elaborate text designs to modeled figurative works. The range of subject matter, media, and surprisingly small scale of the works combined with their context in a traditional gallery setting really got me thinking about the definition of graffiti art.
As an outsider I've always associated graffiti art with a certain defiant nature informed by the need of individuals to assert themselves within inner city communities—a sort of territorial mark-making by self taught artists whose real identity is only known by a select few. Even those of us who grew up far from the inner city can relate to the desire to make our mark. We've had the urge to express ourselves by writing on a bathroom door with a Sharpie or scratching our name onto a picnic table, but graffiti artists have taken that impulse to another level as they seek out commercial buildings, trains, and billboards to make their mark. Like the “Action” painters of the fifties and sixties the act itself is extremely important. I recall my awe a few years ago when a huge tag showed up on the side of the narrow railroad bridge that crosses Lake Austin. Thinking about how the artist climbed to the center of the bridge, most likely under the cover of night, with the prospect of a train coming at any moment, really captured my imagination.
Although there were some truly amazing artists represented I may not have otherwise seen, the fact that they were presented in a gallery and articulated through such mainstream materials in many cases (brushes, canvas, watercolors, etc,) was disconcerting. Graffiti on canvas seems like and oxymoron. When you commodify raw subversive expression and support it on an institutional level you anesthetize the act and dilute its power. Graffiti is site specific, and changing the site destroys the context. It is like taking Donald Judd's site-specific installation in Marfa, Texas of 100 reflective aluminum boxes designed to capture and reflect the shifting light of the West Texas plains, and moving it into a museum—it just isn't the same. Perhaps a better way to appreciate graffiti art would be to organize a bus tour so viewers have the opportunity to see the work in context.
That being said, among the group of artists represented there were a few standouts. Henry Warkentin's text-based piece Mutation took medieval interlacing to a new level as the text deftly transitioned from one letter to the next in highly complex organic designs, while Nathan Nordstrom's Austin AKA Changes explored depth and perception as transparent text, defined by a drop shadow and outline, engaged a diffused background of warm tones reminiscent of a sunset shining through frosted glass. Last but not least, Iron Pyrite a painting by Daniel Chairez, fused ornate three-dimensional text with a staccato of saturated hues just below the surface and delicate curvilinear motifs reminiscent of Art Nuevo.