by Mike Haldeman, Cheyenne Peerson, Sonya Rauschenbach, and Jessica Salomon
Introduction to Brooklyn:
Brooklyn’s public spaces, among the most dynamic urban settings ever present in the United States, are inscribed with an intertwining and often competing set of forces that construct the city’s realms of imaginary and lived narrative and experience. The area as been marked by immense historical shifts in its infrastructural, social, and political composition, generating a dynamism which illuminates “the city as simultaneously a place to inhabit and a place to be imagined,” in Néstor García Canclini’s wording (Canclini 2009: 43). Brooklyn is populated by both an imagined effervescence of images and mediating matrix of physical and pragmatic infrastructures in addition to those individuals whose subjectivity and collectivity animate this urban pastiche. Together, these actors and forces produce the tension alluded to in Canclini’s dualistic conception of the interplay of the private realm of the imaginary and the public realm of order and structuralism.
The city, under this perspective, has always been in some state of flux as such—however most recently the forces of gentrification, manifested in rapid demographic, cultural, and economic change, have profoundly operated on and re-animated the neighborhoods of Williamsburg, Bushwick, and East New York. In these spaces, we have observed the emergence of four characteristics of public artworks that align with and contextualize the changes most central to the recent development and dynamism of the three portions of our Beat. Derelict space has been largely repurposed or re-imagined by artists and real estate developers alike. Artists have taken to the facades of abandoned spaces in order to beautify their surroundings or alternatively to comment on the social and economic shifts ushered in with gentrification. Real estate developers have taken to these spaces with a different set of aims: to refurbish and redevelop decrepit spaces so that a profit may be turned from the gentrifying populations of transplant residents. The influx of the new into these urban landscapes incites the emergence of spontaneous and novel forms of individual and collective expression in public art. Emergent styles erupt from these shifting settings, visible in novel dynamics of graffiti tagging hotspots, and shifts in the aesthetics of public artworks that do not align with the conventional appearance of works belonging to an older community paradigm. These emergent styles are typically a product of the propagation of Transplant Artists and Collectives drawn to neighborhoods at the forefront of the trends of gentrification. In dialogue with these stylistic and social shifts surrounding the evolving public understanding of what exactly the communities’ native public art consists in, there has been a significant and critical series of Responses from Native Artists produced. Regularly, these responses from Natives appear directly on top of or are immediately juxtaposed with those pieces by those Transplant Artists and Collectives whose work the Natives aim to criticize and deconstruct.
These Brooklyn neighborhoods’ status as liminal, interstitial, and transitory, and the consequential character of the public art they play host to, together illuminate the “paradox of opposition” that Mary Schwartz understands in all public art: these expressions are situated “between the freedom of aesthetic expression and the institutional and financial apparatuses of urban planning” (Schwartz 2009: 141).
Today, Brooklyn finds itself as the most populous neighborhood in all of the Greater New York metropolitan area. In the original Dutch, it is referred to as “Breuckelen” and was largely undeveloped farmland. Thanks to the ferry system, it became an important go-between across into the land past the East River. Originally, the industrial revolution brought an influx of German, Irish and English immigrants. Within the larger conglomerate of Brooklyn, a interesting investigation can be taken into the various neighborhoods. It wasn’t utnil 1827 that both Williamsburg and Bushwick were recognized as proper villages and granted a charter. The industrial revolution brought developers in pharmaceuticals, sugar and glass to Williamsburg, and German-led businesses to the two areas. Today, both the consumer-minded landscape and the general demographics have made a much broader shift to the diverse community that makes up Brooklyn today.
Introduction to Colegiales:
According to the city’s public database, Colegiales has one of the highest population densities in Buenos Aires, but walking around, you’d never know it. The streets are so quiet that you can hear your footsteps. The apartments are compact and the buildings scrape the sky, but the orderly trees and frequent small parks make it easy to forget that Colegiales is not in fact a small suburb and indeed part of a large and thriving city. There is the occasional café or kiosco, but mainly there are quaint apartment buildings and houses. Colegiales is the dormant sleeping place of the wealthy in Buenos Aires, who have chosen to live in a quiet and tranquil neighborhood that steps out of the fast-paced flow of normal city life. Colegiales’ residents have on average high levels of reported income and the neighborhood itself has the highest employment rate in all of Buenos Aires. There are many schools, private and public, primary, secondary, and university, that are located in the neighborhood. It seems to be an area focused on family, a place to settle down after getting married, a place to raise a family and a place to play with children in the parts.
However, the neighborhood is not only known for its wealth and serenity, but also for its abounding street art. Agrotóxico stickers with a skull and cross-bones are posted on a street sign, asserting that the agricultural policies of Argentina, a country whose wealth comes from food production, are deadly. Bright, colorful murals with creatures friendly-looking creatures float in a made-up land. Images of unfamiliar faces cover the walls. Rows of and murals from famous world-renowned street artists line the streets, a by-product of global street-art convention that the neighborhood played host to. And the streets of Colegiales have room for the smaller things, too. Tags of a loving father line buildings, telling Tomás and Catalina just how much he loves them. A school kid writes in pencil, marking back and forth many times to create a dark line, the name of her crush with a heart around it. And tags of numerous writers as well as the graffiti of numerous artists fill any open space imaginable. This street art is both in and of Colegiales, as well as creates a tension with it. The murals showcase the neighborhood’s wealth, while the tags and the graffiti show the talents and the use of space of local artists. As in Brooklyn, Colegiales can make the same claims about Derelict Space, Emergent Styles, Transplant Artist Collectives, and of the Native Artists’ Response to the Transplant Collective. These themes thread together this claim in Colegiales about space, whether publically owned, like in the many parks, or privately maintained, like on the walls of the electricity plant in Colegiales, that there is a question of who has a right to mark space. It is an on-going conversation, the answer of this question of who’s job it is to mark these walls. Beautiful patterns emerge when people create in the same space, and ultimately, the streets of Colegiales are home to a dialogue of layers, artists adding to the work of someone they will never meet.
Derelict Spaces: Brooklyn
For our Beat in Brooklyn, each section along the L Train Line exhibits different dynamics surrounding the public use and treatment of derelict space, particularly as related to the appearance of public artworks. The Williamsburg portion of our beat shows the most far-along examples of derelict space repurposing and redevelopment, since the forces of gentrification had first taken root there more than twenty years ago. The East Williamsburg Industrial Park (or EWIP for short) is situated in a median stage, wherein the processes of gentrification have begun to set down root, however the area has not come to the more matured level of economic and social shifts seen just miles west nearer to the Williamsburg waterfront. East New York is the most embryonic of the three, slated for very significant redevelopment projects in the near future, presently sporting an enormous amount of abandoned or nearly uninhabited space.
Williamsburg’s mature state of gentrification has a significant effect on the treatment of abandoned or derelict space nearby. Nearly all of the warehouse space in the area has been repurposed for sprawling office spaces, commercial outlets, and swanky loft-style apartments, among many other luxuries. The area is brimming with incoming investments in business and real estate, since the neighborhood’s immense popularity has drawn so much attention to it as of late. Abandoned storefronts, particularly on Bedford Avenue, are a particularly frequented space for tagging hotspots, where numerous artists and taggers will throw up their small-to-medium sized pieces atop one another in what seems like a mad dash for recognition. Larger abandoned sites, however, like warehouses and single-family homes, are quizzically less popular locations for tagging. I hypothesize that this trend exists because these larger, more lucrative real estate sites like these are generally under construction, so the daily presence of crews, construction materials, accessibility measures like walls and metal gates, and so on provide for sufficiently precarious circumstances for tagging so as to deter the behavior. Further, since these types of more lucrative real-estate sites are being presently developed, they get a steady stream of attention from workers and laborers on site, who may have orders to clean up graffiti or other artworks on the buildings.
The East Williamsburg Industrial Park area, on the border between Williamsburg and Bushwick, went through a floundering process of redevelopment efforts over thirty years ago, beginning in the early 1980’s. Many of the industrial spaces therein saw various stages of repurposing and redevelopment that has yet to reach the level of maturity seen in Williamsburg’s waterfront area. In this portion of our Beat, public artworks are largely extremely colorful and efflorescent, comprised of images that conjure associations with living systems, hope, humanity, and progress. Many of these larger, more colorful works do not appear on the derelict spaces that comprise the “bones” of the former community redevelopment efforts’ paradigm. However some murals do appear on these abandoned spaces upon occasion, however these works were observed to be darker in tone and subject matter, often conveying images of death and decay (see appendix: image 1). The area of the EWIP evokes more of the fluid and transitory dynamism of gentrification in Neil Smith’s categorization of the process, rather than Loretta Lees’ teleological view which terminates with the super-gentrification of Williamsburg proper.
East New York makes for an interesting comparison case. Whereas the gentrification of Williamsburg and Bushwick is already set in steady motion, in East New York it still sits upon the precipice, in between falling towards a similar fate or staying true to the diverse neighborhood state. Mayor Bill de Blasio has proposed that the Affordable Housing plan has been created with the low-income and racially diverse population in mind, but the plan must be taken with a grain of salt. While the average median income in East New York is $34,000, the low-income housing de Blasio is pushing starts for family incomes over $42,000. Even more interesting is the controversial matter of population count. In 2010, the Census Bureau wrongfully miscalculated the populations of Brooklyn and Queens, possibly leaving them with less support in the way of publicly-funded programs.
Walking around the neighborhood of East New York, it admittedly is easy enough to see where the miscalculations could have occurred to an extent. Most spaces are industrial in nature – large garages or warehouses, with entrances pulled down and no lights on. The yards and windows of the few apartment duplexes are in an extremely sorry state, and a walk on the sidewalk area doesn’t leave one engaging with many locals. However, this apparently derelict space is actually a prime spot for street art, although most of the content is simply tags, instead of anything more engaging or political.
Derelict Space: Colegiales
While Colegiales does not have a lot of vacancies (even though there is a stark lack of foot traffic), there is an area that is vacant during the night. This space holds a factory, next to a park and two blocks of land owned by the College of agrarian sciences. This area is awash with graffiti and murals, but one stands out more than the rest From the wall of the factory, a life-like painting of a gigantic pair of green eyes stare at the viewer. They are in beautiful color and delicately painted, however they are not happy or bright. These eyes scream confrontation, with their squint and their size. They are constantly looking, during the day and during the night. During the day, the eyes look down at a somewhat busy street, because people work at the electricity plant and school children gather around the park. However, at night this area is deserted. The presence of these eyes almost acts as a surveillance of the area, watching what happens when the area is full and when it becomes abandoned.
Specifically, in regards to the mural’s location in Colegiales and in Buenos Aires, these eyes take on a more sinister meaning, considering Argentina’s history of state terrorism and oppression. The presence of something that is always watching, panoptic, especially painted on a building that at the time of the dictatorship was owned by the state, resonates strongly with state surveillance. They could be a reminder of a time when the state was watching everything and perhaps a warning that even when there is no one around, people should never consider themselves completely hidden from the eyes of the state.
Emergent Stylistic / Convention Shifts: Brooklyn
The processes of demographic, economic, and cultural shifts in an urban environment have effects on the public expressions of the area’s residents, particularly visible in the manifestation of public art. A set of emergent properties, unique to the area hosting the shifting population, begins to unravel as the public expressions of newcomers and transplants mix with those belonging to the community’s former paradigm. What grows from this is a re-establishment or re-orientation of certain conventions for the modes of public expression, which has particular influence on the appearance and stylistic nuance of street art. In Williamsburg, for example, a graffiti wall (see appendix: image 2) shows a cooperative paradigm wherein artists share a walls space equally as opposed to writing over one another’s tags, as observed almost ubiquitously nearby. This fixing of a grid, and of a type of logical order and systematicity, upon the walls that typically housed the living expressions of the public, constitutes the assertion of a sanitizing and organizing principle which in many ways bleaches essential qualities of the community’s expressions from the very embodiment of those expressions themselves. This evokes a similar feeling as what Gorelik Describes in A Metropolis in the Pampas: where the assertion of an urban order in the layout of the city itself (the grid) was an essential tool for establishing a forceful dichotomy between the native, primitive, illogical model of community in Buenos Aires and the modern, Eurocentric, and logically effective model being implemented.
Emergent Stylistic / Convention Shifts: Colegiales
In Colegiales there is also a brick wall where people have added their names, one next to another and some on top of each other (see appendix: image 8). It isn’t clear if this was started by one person or if a group of people wrote their names together, and then other taggers added to it. Nonetheless, what is interesting is how people used the lines of the brick to organize their collective tagging. Each person took a brick, sometimes two, to write their name and/or the name of the person they love. The names are written in white, except for two in black, which are the only stylized names that follow the pattern of containing their name to one brick. These bricks mirror nicely the apartment buildings in Colegiales; each person has their own square, their own space. On top of this sprawl of names are various colorful, stylized tags that seem to mock the tacit rules of the previous name writers. With large, swooping, graceful lines these taggers let the world know that they have been here and are not following the rules.
The contrast between ordered blocks and the flowing lines that challenge them resonates strongly with city planning. As highlighted by Gorelik in his essay, “A Metropolis in the Pampas”, Buenos Aires has been designed to implement order and European civility within the vast and uncontained pampas, or the flatlands, that make up most of central Argentina. This grid was also used to define what was the city and what was the wild. This definition was important to the identity of the Argentines. As Gorelik writes, quoting Massimo Bontempelli, “Buenoes Aires is a piece of the Pampas translated into a city. This explains the construction blocks… A city is shaped repeating blocks to the infinite, with non needed boundaries… The principle of repetition to the infinite, showed by nature with the Pampas, was scrupulously respected by men when they had to build the human world in from the the natural world..”[1] This need to define the city strikes interesting parallels with the social function of a name. A name doesn’t mirror the uniqueness of each human, because people can have the same name, however the name is seen as a symbol of the identity of the person. The placement of these names, either following the collective pattern of placing the name in a block, or the more artistic names that flow on the wall, create a parallel city of names.
Unsurprisingly, the city planners chose a grid as the organization of Buenos Aires. This idea of a grid was so prevalent that to this day, the city of Buenos Aires has a database that marks which blocks are ‘atypical’ (see appendix: image 10). Interestingly, heavy clusters of street art are concentrated around street blocks that are classified as atypical. Atypical blocks tend to have more surface area on the buildings. However, it’s curious if the high concentration is due to artists choosing, whether they consciously or subconsciously choose to walk down streets that are out of the ordinary. If so, it is an interesting connection with the writing and the murals on the walls of the neighborhood. As mentioned before, the names on the bricks are all stylized similarly, with two exceptions, the ones that flow out of the grid of bricks. This finding goes along with the common conception of creativity—that creativity is constantly seeking to break out of lines that previously were considered boundaries.
Transplant Artists/Collectives: Brooklyn
It seems that the future of street art may very well lay in the form of collectives. From New York, to Buenos Aires, even Australia and Hawaii – this is the form production that seems to get the most financial and critical recognition. In Brooklyn, the neighborhood of Bushwick has become the most prominent spot for street art tours, centering around the neighborhood of Bushwick. Both the work itself and the artists behind it deserve critique however – most are not even from the neighborhood, and the founder of the prominent “Bushwick Collective” has banned public art that it too closely tied with political or community agenda, instead opting to bring in various international artists to produce works that are little more than aesthetically pleasing. Alternatively, other models, such as that in Austin and Honolulu, strive to engage the community with the art at a deeper level, whether that entails free talks between producers and consumers, or educational classes in the methodology and concepts behind street art.
Transplant Artists/Collectives: Colegiales
In November of 2011, a global street art event literally changed the face of a little residential neighborhood in Buenos Aires. The event, called the Meeting of Styles, made it possible for dozens of street artists to paint legally and freely on the walls of Colegiales. And yet, though the works produced are beautiful, they were painted in overwhelming numbers by foreign artists, artists not of Colegiales, Buenos Aires, Argentina, and in some instances, not even from South America. This makes Colegiales home to the footprint of a giant transplant artist community, and there is a possible tension between the physical image of Colegiales, as in, how it may appear to a person walking through the neighborhood, and the people for which this neighborhood represents a home.
The Meeting of Styles (MOS) began in 2002, in Wiesbaden, Germany. It grew from a local event, also the brain-child of MOS creator Manuel Gerullis, titled the Wall Street Meeting. Beginning in 1995, Gerullis organized a group of international street artists to come and paint the abandoned slaughterhouses in Wiesbaden, in order to delay the city’s plan to demolish the buildings. It was a huge success; the event grew organically and the slaughterhouses became somewhat of a graffiti mecca. By 2000, the Wall Street Meeting had gained a huge following, with over 10,000 people—a mix of artists, spectators, and performers, in attendance.[1] At that fateful Wall Street Meeting in 2000, spectators started a riot, and in response, the government of Wiesbaden finally demolished the Hall of Fame. In order to keep the spirit of the Wall Street Meeting alive, Gerullis then established the Meeting of Styles, an event that operates in the style of a world tour. Gerullis coordinated with the city and with private investors to gain space and funding, and the MOS was born. The mission was to “[bring] people together, [create] publicity, and [enable] intercultural cross-border-cooperation as an example for a better world of tomorrow,” and this was accomplished by teaming up with city governments, artists, and communities in order to spread that message.[2]
It’s unknown exactly why the MOS used Colegiales as the location for their 2011 in Buenos Aires, but there is a hypothesis that makes sense. For an event with such a large scale, there obviously needs to be coordination with the city, with the government officials, and with the neighborhood association. There are permits that need to be obtained and dates that need to be set. As such, the city of Buenos Aires most likely chose Colegiales for the MOS. While Colegiales is a quiet, mostly residential neighborhood, it is also located in what is designated by the city as an economic center (see appendix: image 7). This economic center is particular is designated as one of film and TV production, mostly due to its inclusion of Colegiales’ much larger, much more developed and commercial neighbor Palermo Hollywood. As such, when coordinating with the MOS, the city of Buenos Aires could have presented Colegiales as a sort of blank canvas, in the hopes that the beautification would attract businesses and tourists into this quieter area designated as an economic center.
The murals themselves are quite lovely; while they perhaps haven’t made as large of an impact on businesses within the last seven years, they have served to make the neighborhood a much more vibrant place. There are countless murals on the walls of the Mercado de las Pulgas as well as the green spaces along Concepción Arenal. Each is quite distinct. For example, there’s a mural of Mapuche symbols placed to form the face of a cougar, painted by Colombian artist Seta Fuerte. There’s a mural of communist cows fighting for the cities of Berlin and Buenos Aires. There’s a man with spray paint cans for eyes. There’s a mural of a woman holding a child by Entes of Peru, and a mural of two bulls fighting painted by Buenos Aires local, Jaz (see appendix: images 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12 respectively). While each is vibrantly different from its neighbor, they all take on the same theme. That year, the theme of the MOS world tour was that of “One World, One People.” In some way or another, each individual image presented images of unity, of peace, of a different worldview, or of a collective. And in doing so, it created a unified image of Colegiales: a sort of down-to-earth, relaxed, peaceful neighborhood full of street art.
Still, this theme of a unified world and the compromise between the MOS and the city of Buenos Aires is problematic. Most of the murals seen in Colegiales were painted not by locals, but by this foreign collective. Basically, there’s this dialogue that happens and it is much larger than Colegiales. The neighborhood is reduced to only a host, and is somehow lost in this much larger discussion of the world and of city politics. It poses an interesting question: who can claim “ownership” of this space? Alison Young wrote in her book Street Art, Public City about property ownership, that, “the idea of property ownership is tied to the idea of restraining others…individuals who do not own a particular property are inhibited from writing or painting on that property.”[3] The works during the MOS are considered licit, but the artists who painted there are so overwhelmingly “other” that their murals can seem parasitic, a sort of take-over of the space from the native writers. The walls become essentially property of the MOS, which in turn is a reflection of the ownership of the streets by the government of Buenos Aires, and takes away from the ownership of the individuals in the community. Basically, the artistic representation of Colegiales by Colegiales is excluded or dwarfed. And while there is some effort on the parts of the native writers to reclaim the space, the streets of Colegiales remain overwhelmingly the property of the government and of the MOS.
[1] “Interview with Manuel Gerullis, the MOS Mastermind.” Innercity Graffiti Magazine, 2008. Accessed May 11, 2015. http://sunsite.icm.edu.pl/graffiti/mos/mos_english.html.
This article is an English translation of an article originally published in French by Innercity, a magazine which is no longer in publication. The original interviewer and the translator’s names are unavailable.
[2] “FAQs-Meeting Of Styles.” Meeting Of Styles. Accessed May 14, 2015. http://www.meetingofstyles.com/faqs/.
[3] Young, Alison. Street Art, Public City: Law, Crime and the Urban Imagination. New York: Routledge, 2014.
Native Artists’ Responses to Transplants: Brooklyn
Native artists in Brooklyn have not taken well at all to the propagation of new transplant artists and collectives such as The Bushwick Collective. Zexor, a Bushwick native and traditionalist graffiti artist, has taken it upon himself to effectively declare war against the monoculture of enormous, extremely colorful and intricate murals quickly populating the prime wallspace of Bushwick and East Williamsburg. In a significant expression of the tension between locals and transplants, Zexor and Bushwick-Collective-associated artist Lmnopi shared a very public dialogue on the face of one of Lmnopi’s works (see appendix, images 3-6). Zexor’s frustrations are aimed towards the assertion, by the Bushwick Collective, of a new mode of public art, which sports a boisterous and flamboyant array of color and detail which is very far removed from the public art stylings in graffiti art endemic to the neighborhood. Zexor has tagged on top of many of the Bushwick Collective’s largest and most ornate works, re-asserting the rebellious ethos of Bushwick’s native tagging culture, against the expressions and appearances of the artistically-embodied forms of the displacing and denaturalizing forces of gentrification.
Native Artists’ Responses to Transplants: Colegiales
As previously stated in the section about the transplant collective in Colegiales, the native graffiti writers and taggers are finding ways to reclaim the local space in their neighborhood, on their streets. This is mostly done by tagging or writing over other artists’ works, therefore denying the original image any sort of respect. There are a few examples of this in particular, one that lies on a warehouse on Capitán General Ramón Fiere, and the other being a mural painted during the Meeting of Styles located on Cramer.
The first example of native artists reclaiming the space in Colegiales comes from the warehouse on Fiere. Along the wall of the warehouse, there’s a series of arched indentations in the brick, and each twenty-foot tall indentation is home to a mural of its’ own. There’s not much information on the origin of these murals, but each section of four is painted thematically, in regards to color or subject matter (see appendix: images 17 and 18). Clearly, they were planned, and they were licit, if not commissioned. They haven’t been incredibly well maintained (the paint is faded slightly) but it is still possible to see that an artist put a lot of effort into the work.
However, graffiti artists have tagged over these murals. Every single indentation is tagged, covering the bottom ten feet of each mural. Various graffiti writers in writing in various colors have claimed them. But why would graffiti writers tag over another artist’s work to begin with? In her book Street Art, Public City, Alison Young explains patterns of art placement in the street. She directly acknowledges the existence of a hierarchy, explaining, “Artists…make decisions about placement according to the norms of the street…in the customary sense that less experienced artists should not ‘go over’ or ‘slash’ works by artists with more experience and recognition…”[1] If this hierarchy of artists exists, then by tagging over these murals, the native artists of Colegiales are saying that they are the ones who have the right to the space and not the muralists. They have the experience, they have the recognition; they deserve these things and they deserve the space.
There is another example of this that is perhaps even more poignant. There are multiple images available of an image painted by the Peruvian artist Entes during the 2011 Meeting of Styles (see appendix: image 15). The original image, a photograph of Entes with his work in 2011 features a woman holding a child, and together with a bird and a cat, they seem to form a globe against a dark black background.
There is another image of Entes’ mural, taken in April of 2015 (see appendix: image 19). The negative space around the image had been tagged around, encroaching on the space around the globe. In April, though the image itself was still clear, it no longer existed in a vacuum. Tags dotted the black negative space, surrounding the globe, surrounding the mother and child. Slowly, the native artists of Colegiales were claiming their space.
Shortly after, by May of 2015, the bottom half of the image had been tagged over. Unfortunately, an image is unavailable, but suddenly, giant red and silver letters now covered half the globe, covering the sleeping cat and the bird. Now, only the child and the mother stare out onto the streets of Colegiales, seeming forlorn and uncertain against a gray, cloudy sky.
What is perhaps most interesting here is that this image was painted during the MOS, and that it has been tagged over. Not very many of the high-caliber murals in Colegiales have been subject to repainting by the local artists, and it is hard to tell what exactly triggered this response. Still, it raises questions about space. Alison Young writes of the government policing of space, and how “Such resseniment constructs the illicit artist as a figure who must be excluded from the community.”[2] Perhaps the native artists, both in the instances of the warehouse and of Entes’ mural, felt excluded by the presence of these murals and by the presence, ultimately, of a foreign artist collective. As such, their response was to literally to take back the space, to paint on the wall over the mural and claim the space as theirs. This taking back of space contributes to the layers of dialogue here in Colegiales, and re-enforces the notion of the struggle for artistic space in an otherwise unproblematic neighborhood.
[1] Young, Alison. Street Art, Public City: Law, Crime and the Urban Imagination. New York: Routledge, 2014.
[2] Young, Alison. Street Art, Public City: Law, Crime and the Urban Imagination. New York: Routledge, 2014.
Conclusions:
As demonstrated by these examples, the neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Colegiales have a lot in common. It doesn’t seem like it at first. Brooklyn is rapidly gentrifying, and although its income levels vary from region to region, it is often poor, while Colegiales lives in comfortable, stable wealth thanks to its designation as a Film and TV economic zone. Brooklyn is seems hip and vibrant and trendy, while Colegiales seems to be the place to raise a family. And yet, through their art, through the murals, tags, and graffiti that lines their streets, there are commonalities that are able to span both hemispheres. We can see a serendipitous connection between brick walls in different cities, a connection between Emergent Styles. Though a difference lies between the income levels and the population of both areas, we can see that each neighborhood makes use of its’ own version of Derelict, Abandoned Space, with Brooklyn artists painting animal skulls on the facade of a building, a reminder of decay, and with the giant eyes of Colegiales always watching the abandoned streets below. There is an especially strong connection between who chooses to decorate each space, with each beat being home to Transplant Artist Collectives, with the Bushwick Collective in Brooklyn and the Meeting of Styles in Buenos Aires. Each neighborhood also houses a Native Response to that collective. Through different languages, hemispheres, city scapes, and more, Brooklyn and Colegiales actually have much in common. In the future, it will be interesting to see where each goes. In Colegiales, the neighborhood is so stable that any shift will be immediately discernible. In Brooklyn, the three stops along the “L” train line that have served as beats also serve as a sort of archeological layering of gentrification, with greatest to least going from Williamsburg to East New York. When it comes down to the skeletal structure of the Brooklyn neighborhoods, all are consistent in their mix of industrial warehouse space and interspersed residential neighborhoods. What will be most interesting is if the community of East New York fights against the gentrification and works along with de Blasio’s affordable housing act, in order to stay present with the order.
In both beats, space is contested, and creates for a vibrant dialogue between artists and between ways of life. This dialogue is ongoing, and is reminiscent of Julio Cortazar’s “Graffiti.” In the short story, though the artists never meet, they wonder about each other, and they respond to both the pressures of their environment and to the works of one another. Both Brooklyn and Colegiales operate in this layered discourse, and through the unity of a cross-cultural dissection, they ultimately and indirectly come into conversation with each other.♦