What Is Street Art? All You Need To Know About The Artform…
Street art is officially in the mainstream. Young people peek around laneways for it, retirees travel the country hunting it, and almost every business is looking to get their hands on a mural to boost their image. But what exactly is street art?
Of the three examples just now, only one really lives on the streets. Silo art is on silos in the middle of nowhere, murals in businesses are technically interior decoration, and much of the street art that is commissioned in our cities is the creative vision of a non-creative who just commissioned an artist to paint it. So, we could call that a mural, but does it technically fit the definition of “street art”?
WTF is street art?
To understand what street art is today, we need to take a look back at what it was, or where it came from. And that, folks, is graffiti.
Graffiti Roots
As soon as you begin to scratch the surface on the street art movement, you will learn pretty quick that it began with graffiti. And you can’t really grasp the graffiti movement, without acknowledging its place in the hip hop movement.
If I may be brave enough to try and describe it, Hip hop culture was born out of the under-representation of people who didn’t fit in certain boxes and wanted their voices to be heard. The elements of hip hop: emceeing, breakdancing, graffiti, deejaying and beatboxing, were all ways for people to express themselves. Shouting out and saying “we are here”.
With this in mind, graffiti writers were inspired to make their mark around the cities — originally just using permanent markers.
Naturally, as the movement grew so did their desire to do bigger and better pieces. Because of the hip hop influence, artists would often paint Bboys and other characters or symbols related to the movement alongside their throw-ups (graffiti lingo for the big graffiti pieces you see that are detailed and artistic). With the introduction of these characters or accompanying drawings, doors were opened within the graffiti movement for other art forms to creep in, which is the beginning of what we would call street art today.
What’s critical to consider at this point is that NO ONE was paying people to do these artworks. Street art was not curated. It was not dictated. It was pure expression from people who felt they had something to share, whether it was beautiful or excruciatingly painful.
While some artists may have been requested to paint in particular places — when appreciation started to grow for this artform — it was not something that artists or writers made money from when the movement began.
Turning Mainstream
Street art has really been turning mainstream for a few decades now. We may consider it to be relatively new. It’s not that long since festivals started all over the place, murals were commissioned in every cool area, and artists could actually make a living by doing art on the street. But it took time to get to this point.
Long before artists were getting paid, or even getting credit, advertising companies saw the power to profit from urban art. With a growing consumer-base living in urban areas (the ones that were ignored before hip hop), advertising companies began to use murals in the background for filming and photography — relating to the demographic growing up around these walls.
With that, murals began appearing in magazines, and on TV and it was thus imprinted on our minds that this was a cool aesthetic–which, we obviously agree with.
Naturally, as companies recognised this as profitable, they began commissioning work, and an industry was born.
So, Again, What is Street Art?
To be honest, there is no real way to answer this clearly. If you want to be a purist, you could say that street art is exclusively the art put on the street — this would include stickers, stencils, installations, murals, graffiti, the lot — and is not dictated by anyone but the artist. Plus, it would be only art On The Street.
To us, street art is a philosophy. Those who do street art could come from graffiti backgrounds, fine art backgrounds, whatever other backgrounds, and put art on streets, in stores, on silos, water tanks, wherever the F they want to essentially. There is just one key commonality: the belief in public art’s power to impact people, impress upon them new ideas and push the boundaries to inspire and encourage creative expression. And a motivation to do just that. Simple…
That description could fit every artist who has ever existed, which is kind of the point. To honour its roots, street art is all about using public art to share something with the public. That could be a smile, a painful reality, a confusing look at different styles you may not understand, or pushing the agenda that creative expression in all of its forms is important — graffiti included.
Street Art Under Threat
If we can agree that street art is really only street art when it honours its rebellious roots to push the boundaries and share creative expression that is not censored or curated, then we have to accept that street art needs to retain its freedom.
Talking with countless artists on the Street Art Unearthed podcast, the most common topic that is discussed is the tendency for those commissioning artworks to want to censor artists, box them in, get them to paint or create according to what they want, not what the artist recommends. This is not street art. And it is wildly limiting the potential of the art form.
Artists see the world in a different way. They can communicate and express themselves and their ideas in new and innovative ways that can profoundly impact the world around them. Non-creatives dictating creative direction leaves pretty pictures with no soul and no power.
The easiest way to describe it? Street art is public art that is directed by the artists.
If you want powerful street art, you need to trust your artist. Listen to Jack Fran’s take on street art vs contemporary mural art for more insight from the artist perspective.
Header image is an installation art piece by Humble.
