Mart. One of my personal favorites. Mart is a completely self-taught street artists in Buenos Aires. His current neighborhood, Palermo, is full of his colorful work.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Mart/147575948663638?ref=ts&fref=ts
Mart. One of my personal favorites. Mart is a completely self-taught street artists in Buenos Aires. His current neighborhood, Palermo, is full of his colorful work.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Mart/147575948663638?ref=ts&fref=ts
Excerpts from Howard S Becker’s book, “Art Worlds”:
“All artistic work, like all human activity, involves the joint activity of a number, often a large number, of people. Through their cooperation the art work we eventually see or hear comes to be and continues to be. The work always shows signs of that cooperation. The forms of cooperation may be ephemeral, but often become more or less routine, producing patterns of collective activity we can all call an art world. ”
“Art worlds typically devote considerable attention to trying to decide what is and isn’t art, what is and isn’t their kind of art, and who is and isn’t an artist; by observing how an art world makes those distinctions rather than trying to make them ourselves we can understand much of what does on in that world.”
Some things that occupy public space in Buenos Aires. Ahi se encuentra todo.
Despite having a female president and some remarkably liberal legislature regarding gender and sexuality (same sex marriage is legal for instance), “machismo” still manifests itself through both formal and informal social relationships in Argentina. Perhaps unsurprisingly, male street artists far outnumber the women that are active in this art world. However, more and more women have been taking their work to the street, and some Argentine women like Hyuro, Pum Pum, and Georgina Ciotti have attracted international attention. There are also many active female graffiti writers like Shine and Mickey despite the male-dominated image of graffiti (generated through the risk, illegality, physicality, and brave recklessness associated with graff). Street art is undeniably labor intensive, and a large piece might require days of work and hours of painting, climbing up and down ladders, etc. Even the use of aerosol requires physical work and maneuvering.
In an interview with Carolina Cuore, she expressed her frustration with the projection of gender expectations even in the supposedly free world of street art. She has heard other female artists express fear of vertigo, and aversion to the general intensive nature of the work. In her interest of breaking these stereotypes, Cuore plans on starting a regimen of physical training to prepare her body for a long future of street work. Women seem to be more cautious in approaching street art and are more likely to take the workshops on urban art or stencil making (Indeed I noticed the “Aerosol Urbano” workshop was at least 80% composed of women). All of the female street artists I had interviewed in Buenos Aires also had a background in fine art—none of them were self-trained or taught themselves through the practice of graffiti.
All of that being said, women have had an undeniable (and underrated) presence in the movements of street art, graffiti, and activist art in Buenos Aires. It was first of all the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo that truly started to reclaim public space during the end of the last brutal dictatorship in the early 1980s. Then the Grupo de Art Callejero (GAC), as an all female group of young art students, helped pioneer the explosion of activist art in the late 1990s. Pum Pum is another female street artist/graphic designer that has been around since the first explosion of aesthetic street art post 2001. As street art continues to be normalized in Buenos Aires, I have a feeling that the number of female artists will continue to increase—and it will be a refreshing voice for the city.
“El barrio es mi galeria.”/ “The neighborhood is my gallery.” — Ice
Indeed, the barrio Caballito in Buenos Aires is a gallery of street art. The artist Ice even has a fan club of elderly women who support him and shower him with praise every time he paints in the neighborhood.
Check him out here: http://www.facebook.com/icearte?fref=ts
Buenos Aires provides the unique opportunity to view decaying street art and graffiti. The unusual duration of street art can be explained by a combination of conditions: a culturally ingrained value of public expression, ample wall space, and respect among artists and inhabitants. Some pieces can last for up to 5 or 10 years—and these are not pieces secluded in a hard to reach space.
“The evolution of street art is tried to the development of Argentina as a nation.” —Lymann G. Chaffee, from “Political Protest and Street Art” (1993; 101)
“For politics, like art, is about perturbing stable regimes of perceptibility, making visible bodies which, though always there, went somehow unnoticed, making audible and legible as music what was previously written off as mere noise. Reality, in other words, doesn’t just show up on our radar screens because it is there; like desire, it has to be composed. And that composition is a political act.” —Stephen Wright, from “Behind Police Lines: Art Visible and Invisible” (pg. 3)
On their first act of militancy using street art in 1997: “Por que no tomar la calle y ver que pasa?”
On the politics of public space in the context of Buenos Aires: “Acá hay mucha cultura del uso de espacio publico, hacer graffiti no es revolucionario…acá el espacio ya es ganado”
—Interview with members of el GAC (Grupo de Arte Callejero) in June 2012
On Buenos Aires: “Nosotros aprovechamos el caos que es Buenos Aires. Somos parte del caos.”
On traveling and painting: “Más allá que te llenan artísticamente, te llenan de experiencias, y de puntos de vista de ciudades, paises, y gente que de otra manera no la tendrías.”
On the process of street art: “It’s fundamental to be conscious of the fact that what we paint must die with time.”
—Jaz (Franco Fasoli)
All quotes taken from an interview with Jaz in July, 2012 [Villa Crespo, Buenos Aires]
In 2011 there was only one Panda in Villa Crespo. And some cows/graffiti. Then 6 months later I come back and there are 3 more pandas!! (all painted by Zumi)
An international collaboration in Caballito. La Robot de Madera and Charquipunk are two Chilean artists from Valparaíso—another Latin American hub for street art (the last two photos were taken while I was in Valpo last winter). This mural also features work by the Argentine artists Ice and Pelos De Plumas. It is no longer a secret that Buenos Aires is a city that embraces street art; artists around the world come to paint here, sometimes with astounding frequency (Blu is one of the most regular visitors—he painted his famous stop-motion film, Muto, in Buenos Aires). In Buenos Aires there is plenty of wall space and an accompanying porteño attitude that welcomes street art. When foreign artists visit the city, the local community of artists can help them find walls to paint, and they will often work on pieces together. However, as Mart told me in his interview, there have been foreigners that take advantage of the situation and paint/tag/cover the city wherever they like without any respect for the local artists and the inhabitants of the neighborhoods. The street artists here have built a community founded on a code of respect for one another and the city that they live in. There are esoteric rules that guide the selection of walls they paint and the content of their murals. Both Poeta and Mart have mentioned a sense of responsibility—an acute awareness about how their paintings can affect people.
