Art New England - October/November 2004

BOOKS

Street Logos

By Tristan Manco
London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 2004.
128 pages, 485 illustrations, 463 in color. $19.95

For millennia human beings have vied with one another for control of urban public space through the display and dissemination of signs. From prehistoric cave paintings to the symbols painted on houses and storefronts in medieval Italian towns by “secret” societies to contemporary graffiti art, individuals and groups alike have sought to lay claim to, reclaim, and dominate public space. Often this has been in response to or in protest against a dominating factor; today, the reclaiming of air space devoted increasingly to advertising and mass-marketing tactics is the goal of interventionist individuals and collectives around the world, such as La Mano in Barcelona or Boston’s own Sonik.
     In Street Logos, Tristan Manco has attempted to dip into the “gene pool” of contemporary graffiti art and artists, though he notes in the introduction that “an encyclopaedic undertaking would be out of date before the ink was dry.’’ The book is divided into several categories: Signs, Iconographics, Logos, Urban Characters, and Free-Forms, with a representative sampling of artists’ work in each. The approach is international and inclusive. In the 1980s graffiti writers primarily asserted their individual identities on public space by tagging their street names on the sides of buildings and especially on subway trains, but today’s artists have shifted from a typographic approach to an iconographic one, in which symbols have replaced words and individual monikers. Artist Above is quoted in the book as saying, “An image speaks a universal language, to any person of any age or ethnicity.” And the range of influences and styles incorporated into the work of these artists attests to the pluralist nature of the enterprise—typography, pop culture, the Internet, video games, as well as old-school standards such as the simplified, faux-naïve style of Keith Haring and other innovators from the 1980s. For the most part, the book aims to simply present the art and to give a few details about the backgrounds and intentions of the artists; although Manco touches on the divisiveness created by the increasing prevalence of plagiarism and disputes over labels of movements and styles as growing interest from the traditional contemporary art world pushes artists to define themselves and what they do, in general he does not take a straight critical approach.
     The objective of many of these artists is to respond to the congestion of advertising in cities around the world by creating their own “brands” or logos—some designate themselves as “brandalists”—that compete in size, scale, and occasionally proliferation with mass-media advertising. On one night in May 2002, the Paris-based collective La Nuit covered the billboards of the 11th arrondissement with sixty-three panels they had prepared in their squat over the course of three months. While some artists, such as L’Atlas, also of Paris, are more interested in lettering (he studied Arabic calligraphy, which he incorporates into the billboardsize posters he pastes over actual billboards on Paris streets), others create political or socially critical interventions, such as Swedish artist Peter Baronowski, who attached cloth skirts to the male “walk” figures on street signs in Stockholm. Some works are painstakingly planned and executed—the French street artist Invader has situated mosaics of his Space Invader in Paris, London, Tokyo, New York, and Melbourne—while others are drawn in a more offhand, spontaneous style.
     Street Logos presents contemporary graffiti essentially as a protest art that consciously and consistently (and often successfully) resists commodification and commercialization. Unlike most contemporary art, it cannot be bought or sold and has only recently been archived or documented in a cohesive manner. Being ephemeral in nature, it is always fresh, always turning over the past with a response from the present. Like a visual slang, it constantly updates itself.

Portia Belz