AWH Research

Teaching urban intervention: learning to see the city anew

Javier Abarca, Universidad Complutense de Madrid | 2011

Review by Lily Linton, MA Urban Design Candidate, University of Auckland

In this article Javier Abarca talks about the value of street art in art education and its role in generating awareness of the urban environment as a context for art and life – Javier teaches workshops on urban intervention at the University Complutense in Madrid.

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Javier breaks street art into three types: graffiti, post-graffiti and urban interventions. Each type has successive growth in interacting with urban context, beginning with graffiti which he states as having a clearly defined methodology and a fixed visual vocabulary.

For an audience outside the particular culture (originally urban hip hop in New York) that uses this visual language, the work is as cryptic as, say, abstract sculpture to a ‘non-art audience’. Global culture spread both these art forms around the world, but only one presumes the general public will take it upon themselves to learn to read the more obscure text. Graffiti art is made for the approval of peers, fellow ‘writers’, while also being visually arresting, colourful and energetic sites of specific cultural expression for passers-by.

One might say similarly about the goals of ‘plonk’ art, expensive objects imposed on public space for the approval of those schooled in elite art institutions. Both these kinds of art assume their public-ness though placement in public space. Graffiti writers are perhaps more honest in that they do not claim to speak to the public as a whole; they work specifically with the idea of difference or being outside of the mainstream. In a city that claims tolerance of diverse cultures graffiti should be expected and managed as a legitimate part of that cultural mix.

Contemporary public art practice (sometimes) aims to move beyond the distaste for incomprehensible elitist art by examining the meaning of ‘public’ in public art, shifting towards site specificity [1], and then towards direct interaction with the public or using public issues as context [2].

Javier encourages a similar shift in process for street art, through his workshops with art students.

His term post-graffiti refers to the street art inspired by the “energy and immediacy” of graffiti, but containing a wide range of styles, methods, or visual art language, with the “aim to communicate to the general public”.

An urban intervention is more complicated as a site specific work, created for a particular context, as a specific ‘conversation’ with some part of the city. We have seen a few examples of this in Auckland city’s Living Room programme, temporary works as part of a public event, but such installations are not confined to bureaucratic approval. As Javier states, any artist wanting to engage with street-life and the urban environment can do so providing they work within the limitations of public space – that is the ethical (more so than legal) consideration that “public space is everyone’s personal space and to act in it is to interfere with peoples personal spaces, without them having asked for it”.

Public art is not just about permission in terms of ownership. It is a negotiation with all other users of a particular space, for the right to be heard, and the responsibility of being an active participant in society. The lesson from street art is that we can influence the world we inhabit in striking ways. The lesson that Javier teaches his students is that intimate dialogue with a public space is a form of social awareness, it reveals once again that the personal is political and vice versa.

While the argument for ART WAS HERE originates as a response to the over-zealous removal of street art in Auckland recently, it is certainly not true that all art removed was placed without permission. Indeed, the impetus seems to come from a conservative view of public art and graffiti as a communication model only available to the heads of state, as part of a sudden desire to display an unusually homogenous rugby culture in an otherwise diverse, multicultural New Zealand city.

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All references to Javier Abarca from the essay ‘Teaching urban intervention, learning to see the city anew’, May 2011.
Available at link below.

http://www.eksperimenta.net/ohjur/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/1101-Teaching-urban-intervention-IDEAlab-Javier-Abarca.pdf

http://urbanario.es/clase
http://urbanario.es/dialogos

Other references:
[1] Miwon Kwon in One Place and Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity, 2002.

[2] Such as Patricia Phillips discussion of public art as the new ‘commons’ in Out of Order: the Public Art Machine, 1988, Art Forum, and particularly in the more recent temporary or impermanent works named New Genre Public Art in 1995, Susan Steinman, Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art.