We explain what street art is and how was the emergence of this artistic expression. Types of street art and their characteristics.
The symbolic phrase being covered by an employee of the globalized world.What is street art?
When we talk about street art, urban art or street art, we mean the techniques informal forms of artistic expression that take place on the street freely, sometimes even illegally, usually in large cities. It is a short-lived type of artistic intervention that does not appear in museums.
This type of artistic expression encompasses both the graffiti (famous as a form of anonymous protest), such as templates or stencil (stencil) and a varied number of techniques and resources used to illustrate on walls and other urban surfaces, such as trains, billboards, etc.
Street art is managed in a thin border between aesthetic, political or social expression, with vandalism and other forms of illegal intervention of the public façade of cities. This is due to the fact that often, in their eagerness to make their message visible, street artists climb to elevated surfaces, intervene signs of urban marking or government announcements, go beyond the limits of the city. private property and even, for some, they are responsible for a form of visual contamination. For that reason, street performers often hide their identity and use artistic pseudonyms.
Diatribes aside, this genre has been widely cultivated by numerous street artists in the main cities of the West, but even going so far as to intervene in famous locations around the world, such as a wall in Gaza, on the troubled Arab-Israeli border.
Some of the most famous artists of this trend are the American Shepard Fairey (with his well-known slogan of “obey”), Space Invaders (whose name comes from a famous video game from the 80s), Blek le rat, or the mythical Bansky, whose identity is unknown despite the world-famous of his interventions.
History of street art
The term street art arises in the mid-90s, also under the name of Post-graffiti, to identify a series of heterogeneous and usually anonymous artistic expressions that began to flood the great cities of the West.
These techniques already existed as forms of protest or popular denunciation, in fact in the mid-1960s templates were already used in Paris. But from then on it begins to become the expression of a subculture.
Eventually the popularization of Post-graffiti in different cities led to the emergence of local groups and artists from each city, recognizable by their messages or their recurring characters. At present, many artists such as the British Banksy have achieved such a degree of recognition that they have been addressed in books by art and some of his pieces were even exhibited clandestinely.
Types of street art
If we classify street art based on its techniques used, we will have the following categories:
- Graffiti. The graffiti is the traditional "graffiti", that is, the He drew or the clandestine writing on the walls of the city, only that in the case of urban art this graffiti is not simply a protest message, but acquires an aesthetic sense: drawings, shapes, encrypted messages, etc.
- Stencil. It works based on a template of plastic or paper on which the silhouette of what you want to paint is cut out, and then adhered to the wall before painting them with painting. In this way, elaborate shapes are achieved and the text with the image.
- Posters. Printed on paper or other materials and glued to the walls, they last a long time and allow you to combine several to form large figures.
- Sculptures and other interventions. There are other more daring forms of street art that involve objects from the public thoroughfare, telephone booths or even tickets, combining sculpture with other graphic arts.
Characteristics of street art
Street art, in general, is characterized by being:
- Ephemeral. In general, interventions of this type do not last long, as the walls are painted again and the surfaces cleaned by maintenance of the governments local. However, there are Photographs and filming of them.
- Clandestine. The appearance of artworks Street activities usually occur at night or in the early morning, so that people the next day stumble upon them, rather than see them happen. This gives them a factor of surprise, but it is also because artists sometimes expose themselves to danger (by climbing high surfaces, for example), or choose government property to intervene, which is not entirely legal.
- Almost anonymous. Although many of the interventions are signed with the artist's pseudonym, many others are not. You don't always know who this or that street artist is in real life.
- Extramural. As its name implies, street art is found in the street, in public transport, in everyday places, and not in museums or “controlled” places of artistic exhibition. There is something challenging about him street art.