Graffiti & Girls

Posts : 55 Join date : 2013-04-13 Location : exile

Graffiti & Girls

Banksy is maybe the only graffiti artist ever to achieve household name recognition. His anonymous anti-establishment B&W stencil pieces have been spotted around the World; he boasts legal exhibitions with his stuff going to peeps like Kate Moss and John Travolta for upwards of a quarter-million pounds; and, there's even a movie about him: Exit Through the Gift Shop, 2010.

Totally subalturn, it makes sense that one of Banksy's very most landmark pieces is of... a little girl: the very most hard-core rebellious tag that any subversive could identify with. So it was very apt, when on August 5th, 2005 the Global Community awoke to find a little girl had appeared, written by Banksy, on the 700 kilometer Security Barrier that is rapidly dividing the pariah Palestinians from Israel. Braided: maybe an allusion to Astrid Lindgren's little anarchist heroine Pippi Longstocking, the small girl holds to eight balloons that lift her off. She's an almost impossible lightness in what is known for being an often weighty place, in a sometimes very heavy world.

Another artist has also tweaked the graffiti art genre to achieve some legitimacy for the otherwise criminal art. Kevin Peterson, based in Houston, Texas transferred wild-style scripts, tags, and “bombed”-out urban spaces to canvas, and used it with corrugated metal as a background for the wickedest rebel icon: little girls... posing, strolling, smiling, or mostly just chillin'.

Kevin's style is photo-realistic, causing one critic, Arseny Vesnin, to compare his work to Jacques-Louis David. The exquisitely rendered cutest fresh vivacious little girls against a backdrop of rough and raged street art-urban decay and industrial metals sets up a big contrast between the purest innocence and the trashest breakdown. Kevin writes,

“It's about growing up and living in a world that is broken. These paintings are about trauma, fear and loneliness and the strength that it takes to survive and thrive. They each contain the contrast of the untainted, young and innocent against a backdrop of a worn, ragged, and defiled world.”Kevin describes himself in interview with Michelle Markelz as having a soft spot for kids and it shows. We can easily tune-in and empathize with the inner-worlds of the girls in his figurative foregrounds. Each girl is solo, alone on the canvas; sometimes melancholy, mostly sober if not grim; a few maybe hesitant smiles. Kevin says,

No mention of sexoageism exactly, but maybe it's in between the lines? Beautiful words from Kevin,

“Issues of race and the division of wealth have arisen in my recent work. This work deals with the idea of rigid boundaries, the hopeful breakdown of such restrictions, as well as questions about the forces that orchestrate our behavior.”(These quotes come from Kevin's standard artist statement to which he typically varies the final line to suit the show.)

Recognizing his precise vision of innocence juxtaposed against hardness, Kevin bites Banksy's iconic Security Barrier Pippi Longstocking-esque girl many times in his work.

...And sometimes that person who is willing to “break…social norms to express themselves” still really is a child! If the image of a small graffiti girl is rebellious, a lil' girl who writes graffiti must be revolutionary...

Called the “New” or “Female Banksy” by British media, school girl ten year-old Solveig Barlow writes legal on wastelands around her Brighton home. While supported by her (magazine) writer father Paul and mother Heidi, she isn't coached by them; speaking of her muse Solveig told The Sun,

“I’m not sure where I get my inspiration. I must just have a good imagination.”Solveig, which means “sun beam” in Norwegian, uses SOL as her tag.

After the spirit of Banksy a year-and-a-half earlier, SOL gets-up at the Berlin wall.

Graffiti is a subversive art: frequently anonymous, the expression of the alienated and disaffected, its messages tend to anti-establishment in form and content. But the most dissident piece or artist of all, shows up to be... the little girl.

Starfleet Commander Posts : 341 Join date : 2009-05-20

OMG!! That is really excellent artistry! cheers

Posts : 55 Join date : 2013-04-13 Location : exile

Graffiti & Girls: Appendix

The ultimate dissident philosophy is cute, fun, colorful, playful, and readily forgives; it's vulnerable, fragile, sincere, and cries easily. That is what is most threatening to the heaviness of the world. That is what is most defended against, poked fun of, and even criminalized.

Out-of-doors artist and social activist Kieth Haring's “radiant babies” are bit by Kevin in his “Into the Light”. Openly gay, Kieth was outspoken on gender and sexuality issues. He died of AIDS-related complications young, just 31.

The little girl in “Hope” is Ruby Bridges, bit from Norman Rockwell's integration painting: “The Problem We All Live With”; she is a symbol of overcoming, reminding us that the dreams of movement and acceptance from earlier periods of art history still have hope, and are found living today in that same mediums. While at the time, six year-old Ruby Bridges represented the breakdown of racist segregation; today, this little girl might mean the equally powerful and punitive ageosexist membranations that maintain the norms and taboos of contemporary capitalopatriarchy. Norman's painting was printed in 1964 Look, since he had ended his contract with The Saturday Evening Post the previous year due to their unwillingness to accommodate his political expressions.

Long ago hardened against the glyph of the adult face and figure, every form of psychological defense thrown up against it's affective expressions, the little girl still evokes for us our ultimate humanity, sensitivity, and impermanence in an infinitely tender Universe.

Egoic consciousness, meshed into the mechanation of the big world, hates and despises what is sweet and soft and warm-hearted. Kindness and caring melt the ego and it's defenses. That's why a harmless little girl is the most threatening to the System of any rebel insignia: she is trans-political, she dissolves the vast hard defenses of the statist war-machine and it's cogs. Unlike ordinary signs, little girls are not absurd and dead arbitrary signifiers readable only as code; she disarms everyone universally and immediately being a symbol of gentleness and goodhearted irreverence.

And Solveign Barlow is definitely one school-girl worth taking a looking at....

In and through Solveign Barlow there is a radical going over of traditional subject-object dichotomy in Western history of art. The little girl who had appeared as an image in the outsider art of graffiti writers, standing for the total subversion of all egoic and worldly hardened defenses, comes to life off the concrete walls and corrugated metal, and writes for herself the anti-establishment graffiti -- the word from beyond the System -- from whence she had come.

Starfleet Commander Posts : 341 Join date : 2009-05-20

Dissy is always welcome here. The world is too full of drab thinkers, so the new and the wild spirited free-thinkers have to increase their prowess incessantly.