A spotlight on graffiti as an art form

Graffiti as an art form is in spotlight courtesy a new art project, entitled ‘I think therefore graffiti’ at the Guild Art Gallery. It has artists from across the country to locate the socially relevant thoughts that revisit the spirit of Graffiti. Rakhi Peswani in her introductory note mentions: “Perhaps, as a project that is sprouting from the mainstream, the aim is to break the glass as well as hold a mirror...for it is through these domains of the public that a private life is shaped, which in turn produces the public sphere ahead...

“The domains of exclusion, of a constructed ‘mainstream’, the domain of anti aesthetic, the domain of fast, transient, street culture, of politics of private property, of art and its objectification, of homelessness, art and site specificity, the spoken and the visual, the spontaneous expression, the strengths of the vulnerable, reactionary visual activism on the urban streets, mobility of the ‘common man’, deprivation, isolation, commercialization are some of the tropes that seemed to be opened through this project.”

Here are few interesting sidelights on the art form:

1. Graffiti evolved in the west, from the grassroots; voicing these differences. The voices were from those that felt excluded or from those who felt a need for something that the mainstream was unable to address.

2. It became synonymous with the voices that quietly, sometimes anonymously, vehemently roared against private property, homogeneity, and many other forms of exclusions that individuals experienced in the marginalized neighborhoods of developed nations.

3. Ironically, once it started getting institutionalized, like many other forms of art, the art of graffiti also, came to be ‘recognized’ by the system of capitalist art market, and thus got usurped into another paradigm of style, that could be borrowed to replicate radical, reactionary behavior.

4. So, in its formal behavior, if graffiti is a form of painting on the wall, one can immediately hold a strong denial, since there are many more possibilities of wall painting that cannot be termed as graffiti... in its spirit, and formal tones, the art form demands total unification to be termed thus.