Graffiti can be many things
the ephemeral
last
That's just side down cute. Isn't it?
From the Scambler scrolling z' of Roman citizens to the radical graffiti of revolutionary Parisians
It can be scratched
written
Even painted, but what does it mean?
For tens of thousands of years humans have been leaving their marks on wards
From caves to city streets
Graffiti something that seems to bubble up wherever humans go. It's an explosion
of creativity
Graffiti surrounds us but is it a blessing or is it a curse when does?
Vandalism become graffiti when does graffiti become Street mob and when the street art just become well
art
In this film I'll show how the best graffiti is shaping the world of art with its sheer vitality
Fede is a state of mind it's now a thing
It's not a flower and the graffiti can be political and even help us to come to terms with the past
It is really genuinely. I'm dr. Richard clay, and this is my brief history of graffiti
So in the ground out history
Is graffiti the artless scratching scribbling and spraying of vandals
Or is it something much more interesting for me graffiti is almost always for latter
This is Berlin's Reichstag, it's the seat of the German parliament, but it's also a symbol
It stands for one of the most important events of the 20th century the defeat of Nazism
After a devastating street battle in Berlin the young men and women of the Red Army took the Reichstag
As the dust settled they laid down their arms and some began writing on the walls of the ruined building
I've been looking at marks left on walls all over the world
And these are probably the most moving of the marks that I've seen
marks left by
Soviet soldiers who survived the battle for the Reichstag
This graffiti is deeply moving a list of friends calling themselves the Brandenburg boys
The towns and cities they fought in on their grueling march to victory on the 2nd of May 1945
And a vengeful comment this is for Leningrad
I just can't get over the fact that it's all painted with charcoal
from a burned-out building
It's painted with crayons
Used to mark maps is painted with chalk. It's painted with the tools that soldiers to happen can't
Believe it survived
It is genuinely
Moving to be in this space with these marks left by these men and these women who fought
for
What turned out later to be freedoms in Europe and in Russia?
It is really genuinely moving
This compulsion
This urge to leave a mark that says you need to know that I was here
Seems to be at the heart of this graffiti
Why?
The clues might lie deep in our past
I've traveled to burgundy France to look for some of the earliest examples of graffiti
The cave system of Hoth Darcy was first occupied well over 30,000 years ago
The generations of families who lived here also used these walls in the darkness of the cave system
in ways that celebrate their humanity a
Handprint
It's not a print it's a stencil. It's a child's hand
This floor would have been 40 centimeters lower
This have been a child reaching up and
Then having paint blown onto their hands and leave their own personal mark
In this age before writing the mark of the hand reveals an urge to put a lasting message on the wall saying
Remember I was here
But deeper into the cave the walls also provide further clues as to the origins of graffiti
The people who lived here so long ago decided to paint even more thought-provoking symbols on the walls
There's a massive mammoth
It's incredible warning odor and then another in a different medium entirely in black
It's extraordinary
In it the real economy of mine
Really carefully considered
So much Picasso
This is art and its high quality
The painter has chosen the location of each of the paintings carefully
The line drawings use bulges in the rock surface to create an impression of volume
They've elevated the rock itself
you say that it's absolutely incredible I
Do love, art, that's best seen on your hands and neat I
Can't believe I'm about to say this, but it's almost like
Re/max, art you see it so close soft. It's so in-your-face
If you're down on your knees the mammoth starts to tower over
It makes you feel
Small
These paintings
Beautiful records of people's engagement with the world around them remind us of how much we hold in common with our ancestors
to create art on walls and leave the mark of our brief existence seems to be at the heart of this urge to
make graffiti
But how did they create a haunting image of the hand?
Street artists savvier proof lives a short distance from the cave system
I've dropped by a studio to delve deeper into the technique used to create the ham stencil
Today we've been to there's some caves
amazing absolutely amazing
300 meters into the mountainside
but there's a couple of spots whether it be like an animal and
then a hand
who's put their hand against the wall and
somehow
They've sprayed around it and
Take their hand away and more than thirty thousand years later
the mark returns
So how
The mist piles of spray cans Salvy a digs out the raw materials for Stone Age art scallop shells and red ochre
He wants to try using the Stone Age version of the spray can
Blowing hard across a tube immersed in the ochre paint. He can create a fine spray of color
That's amazing that's that's it you've got a stone age and
We reproduce what people while doing before
We refined it. Yeah, the spray can it's portable. It's quick its precise
Yeah, it opens up a whole new world of opportunities. Yeah, but fundamentally
It's a it's absolutely the same
Whether using a spray can or a scallop shell
This urge to mark the walls around this seems to be part of what makes us human
As more sophisticated
Civilizations like the Roman Empire appeared our lives became more complicated and so too
Did our graffiti our?
Ancient cities really all that different to modern cities thousands of voices clamoring for attention
But the spoken word it comes it goes the written word that lasts longer
write those words on walls and walls become
arenas of conflict
In the Roman world
Graffiti wasn't just about I was here. It would also be used to let the world know whose side you were on
Researchers like George Cardozo a
Revealing the images and the messages scratched into the walls of the old Roman city of Leon
so George
What is it?
image is very
Very simple you can see it here. It's the helmet of a gladiator
and
He's Eldin a sword a glad use
ok
If you get back here, you can see
His shield this gladiator was found scratched into the walls of a large third-century townhouse
Why this gladiator was such a big deal that somebody would want to scratch this into a ward
I think he was he was a kind of supporter
Famous is this guy particularly special worth supporting. There's a clue here. You can see it
There's a double X with a line for one
The Roman numerals XXI
21 almost certainly represent the gladiators number of kills
It appears to be the work of a superfan in their own home
But people who are prepared to scratch into their own walls
Images of the gladiator because he's killed 21 people
There must be other fans. I mean at the arena. I'm getting a sense of a kind of football hooliganism
Nature well well it shows that people were really interested in games and supported
gladiators
Roman graffiti wasn't always about showing your allegiances in relation to the arena's dark world
It can also give us a tantalizing glimpse of the conflicts within ancient society
This wall painting from 59 ad in Pompeii
Memorialized as a deadly street battle between locals and visitors from the nearby cities of kapwa and new cheerier
Leon university professor Pascal Arno is using graffiti to reveal a deep conflict in Roman society
That gave rise to shocking event like this. This is Pompey's amphitheater. These are not the a toes
These are people from the audience
Who are started fighting each other?
Instead of just watching the violent spectacle in the arena the Pompeians launched a savage attack on the visiting team and its fans
And people have tried to escape and the companions are now killing them in the street
using
Any kind of weapon they could find?
But it's the written graffiti from elsewhere in Pompeii that lays bare the raw hatred between rival cities like Pompeii
Kapwa and new cheerier in the graffito. We can see that
Some among the Pompeian say that one victory
Allowed people from Capra to perish altogether with the people of nuke area
People from Pompeii will not ashamed at all
This was a day of glory
To have killed the hated labors
other graffiti from Pompeii tells us the opposing side of the story a
Sympathizer with the victims from new cheerier hopes the Pompeians will get speared on a meat hook for their crimes
The graffiti reveals in gory detail the vicious rivalries between Roman communities
This is a
very frightening kind of graffiti war
That was the actual life and relationship between neighboring cities these struggles in the arena
That's an afternoon's entertainment right yeah, whereas the writing on the wall
outlasts the entertainment and
memorializes
identity and violence and struggle in between matches and trouble lately
Thanks to vesuvius only we have preserved. That's
aspects municipal pride
The Roman world shows that graffiti can be political as well as personal
Writing on walls is clearly not always a meaningless act of vandalism and
Here in present-day Leone 2,000 years later wars on walls are still raging
If there's one thing that I've learned in Leone it's that graffiti is open to interpretation
But then I kind of always knew that this kind of thing that's more unusual
Graffiti that is entirely unambiguous. God is love or
Christ the redemptor if an july's in christian graffiti isn't something you see every day in britain nowadays. That's for sure
But it seems to me that in Leon a struggle is still continuing between different groups of society
different communities of belief
Here, we've got a stencil artist
He's gone to the trouble of
creating this piece that seems to be so Pro Catholic and
Somebody's actually bothered to chip out the face
This is an ongoing war of the walls. It's a war of words
Graffiti can reveal power struggles between communities
walls often become site of conflict an
18th centuries after the height of the Roman Empire graffiti would ultimately become a revolutionary weapon
Paris France
from the 1790s onwards this was a city awash with radical political ideas and haunted by the specter of
revolutionary violence
But even from such a turbulent period graffiti still survives in dark secret places
This place
Has millions
Millions of people in it
This is where the dead of the city's graveyards were moved
This is indeed the Empire of death
In the late 18th and 19th centuries overflowing Parisian cemeteries were emptied into this tunnel network
Originally a quarry for the limestone that built Paris it soon became an enormous -
Now that is astonishing
Now we really get a sense of how far underground. We are there are shafts like these
Sunk across Paris in the nineteenth century when the graveyards were cleared
above-ground the bones were
decanted down here
Least have ropes down these shafts to pull them around
So that the bones wouldn't get jammed in here
While above-ground 18th and 19th century graffitis been lost down here. It should have survived the centuries
The question is can I find some in the 230 kilometers of tunnels
it's Underground out history I
Found the underground
I'm just looking for the are
First I find a name Pierre and crave this in 1779
Could he possibly have imagined that?
More than 200 years later people would be standing here reading it. It's as if
he wanted to be remembered a kind of stab at
immortality
It's amazing the power
14 years after Pierre had left his name on the wall the French King lost his head
Decades of revolution were underway
1881
1841
carved into the stone
There a trace is being left
You know this graffiti that survives down here these signatures these in a boat who knows when that was put there
this stuff
Would have been happening upstairs too, but we lose all of that. We lose all of that the modern city becomes clean
We lose all of that and it's preserved downstairs. I don't know caves
Catacombs they're like
museums of the ephemeral the stuff that we would otherwise have lost buried
In 1871 France was still in turmoil having just lost a war a new moderate Republic took shape
But radical Parisian workers rebelled forming a commune that took control of the city
soon
Revolution gave way to deeper violent conflict
If we go deeper into these
Tunnels this vast network of tunnels we find graffiti
left by
revolutionaries of the commune of the 1870s
Who made their last stand?
against their enemies
underground
The graffiti left by the commune are revolutionaries adorns the deepest recesses of the catacombs
statements like the Republic or death inspired generations of revolutionaries, but
While they were scrolling political slogans on walls underground the Communist were exploiting new technologies upstairs
They would take the idea of writing on walls and industrialize it
Invented in the
1790s
lithography allowed revolutionaries to create one political message on stone and then print thousands of copies
These could then be stuck up on the walls overnight
It was an incredibly powerful new tool
Stephane Gribble the foremost lithographer in Paris has agreed to show me the secrets of this
Revolutionary process in the early 19th century it completely changed, not just visual culture
But the culture of our streets
Suddenly it was possible to produce images of the highest quality and produce thousands and thousands of them
But they're so cheap you can stick them on the walls of the city
You can have a political point of view and plaster the city with these images
Imagine how shockingly new it must have been
Inspired by that solitary thirty thousand year old hand
I'm going to create a political poster that resonates in today's climate a
Call fell Liberty express your
freedom of speech ah
Thank you. That's very considerate. I've almost there. I'm almost a little graphic
Um you can I be your apprentice sure you have money?
Money
So this is Arabic gun you're easy to put your hand in
the Arabic gun and then
print
Your hand under stone right two seconds in there
two seconds on there
Lithography is the creation of an image on stone by etching the surface with acid
This h stone is then inked up and pressed onto paper
First my handprint in Arabic gum creates the centerpiece of the poster
Then the word liveth day is drawn using a greasy black ink
As an art historian I'm usually called upon to look and not participate
But a Stephan's temporary apprentice. I've been put to work
We build up the image using wax pencils and ink
Next Stefan adds a wash of acid over our picture
You see white things you see the reaction absolutely immediate
The gum greasy ink and wax pencils protect our picture from the acid
It's this protected area our image that will carry the ink onto the paper in the press
know
the stone is prepared you have to
Removed having to remove the acid from the stone
Then we will leave the stone or two hours, and we will start printing processing so it's the waiting game yeah
As we wait for the chemical changes to take effect
It's time to choose the colors, so we're all use this. This is a primary rule
almost
Called our beautiful blue
That's that's deep sleep that is it's good blue efq line eat your heart out. It's Stefan blue
Sabo Cunha
Revolutionary red
There couldn't be any other choice for a poster to celebrate Liberty
The Swiss visitor to Paris in 1817
Said that the walls were screaming
Because of all of the leather graphs that were all over the walls
In 1871 the common arts witty and teracle messages flooded the streets
Grabbing the attention of the public
In one afternoon a printer on a press like Stephan's could produce well over a thousand posters
Stephan's lithographic press he's over a century old
But in his expert hands it can still apply a pressure of 2,000 pounds per square inch to create each copy
It's like the the twirl or years the three glorious days of revolution in 1830
beautiful days
beautiful blue skies
And the a flag of the alarm. I love it absolutely love it
texture and you know the sprays
really rich textures
The revolution didn't end well for the Communists
They failed to dislodge the government and they were butchered in their thousands
Since the arrival of lithography posters created such controversy that successive governments turned to censorship
Those ubiquitous defense the fishy or post no bills signs
Still visible on so many walls in France have their origins back in 1881
mass-produced posters and graffiti had become very dangerous indeed
As the 19th century progressed
Increasingly powerful print technologies started to be put to work serving a very modern master
Advertising
Cities like, New York
Probably the most image stuffed place on earth saw the madmen of advertising plastic commercial imagery across
every available blank space
Lithography in the early 19th century
changes everything suddenly
imagery becomes part of the vocabulary of commercial advertising
Images layered over images land over images on the street in the 20th century we end up with posters and at the size
of buildings multi-story images and in the late 20th century
This kind of circles this
Republic of commercial signs it's all-encompassing and yet still
Graffiti finds its place in the nooks and the crannies in this forest the symbols
Cities changed walls became covered in advertising as
a 20th century rolled on an urban area sprawled some inhabitants of the city
Made their mark in the gaps between the outs
This new graffiti that hit the urban sprawl of 60s and 70s America created a moral panic
So those in power it was symbolic of decay for them it was barbaric it was vandalism and
It harnessed a new technology the paint spray camp invented in 1949
This new kind of graffiti would eventually spread across the globe and energized the world of art
You know what we're kidding ourselves if we don't think that graffiti is implicitly if not explicitly political
Every blank wall tells us that this space is under control
This is why the authorities in New York City were so obsessed with the explosion of throw-ups and of tags
That emerged in the 70s and in the 80s
With the birth of stencil art
It is political but on the other hand if somebody decides to tag the side of my house
I'm going to want to break their legs
Born in Philadelphia in the 1960s modern graffiti rapidly spread through the boroughs of New York City
The Big Apple of the 70s was near bankrupt crime rates soared and garbage filled the streets
In this brutal environment a young Brooklynite called lee made a name for himself as a graffiti King
In his Brooklyn studio he's still painting to great acclaim
This is the great day in Harlem from that famous photograph, but this is a great rush hour in the Bronx
And that's why it's called benchmark
Because it's taken at the bench on June 49th Street
Grand Concourse which was one of the main stables where we would come to talk about our works?
and you know work out our quirks and all kinds of stuff you know and
collaborations
The young Lee was surrounded by a like-minded pair group they provided support
And they were a sounding board to the new radical ideas that defined New York graffiti
You know it was a very innocent honest
Movement, and you know we never thought that it was gonna last for so long
And that's what's represented in the bubbles the very subtle nosov bubbles. You know you see them you watch them, and then you just go
and go on
We made a name for himself creating increasingly audacious pieces on the subway trains of New York
You're famous for having painted a whole trade
Hmm, that's a totally different league of painting the 1975 one was ready thinking of the concept of creating
Something so grand and out of scale that
It would be talked about for you know decades later
Lee and his crew treated the painting of subway cars like a quasi-military
operation
Doing those cars in the yards there was no room for error there was no no time
There was a very small window of time to create something and you had pretty much. We pretty much had it all pre-planned
Beforehand so that you could at least have them a striking chance to create finished and
successfully launched your piece
Needless to say with work like this Lee and others got noticed by the gatekeepers of the mainstream art world
The man who helped lead into the gallery was jeffrey Deitch until recently director of the Los Angeles
Museum of Contemporary Art
Lee was in good company dykes was also instrumental in the careers of pop art
giants like John Michell bass crea and Keith Haring
back in the sort of the late seventies
You were part of the art world and you you saw this stuff, and thought it's this isn't just vandalism
This is our you descend it into the subway, and it was this astonishing world for some people it was like descending into hell
It was like an artistic heaven
you know the
conventional sense of order in New York City had just dissipated and
The way the the subway belonged to the kids
And so the trains were covered with
Amazing wild style Afeni on the exterior the interior
was
this maze of tags all kinds I
found it remarkable I
sew my circle of friends we would go down into the subway just to see this just to experience it and
Just take a ride it
Wasn't important where we went. We just wanted to see what was on the trains
For dodge the best subway art was truly exciting and needed to be taken seriously
But not everybody was convinced there was some criticism
People said street art belongs on the street. You know and aren't you
Distorting what this art is about by putting it in museum and my responses every serious artist I know with a few exceptions
They want their work ultimately to be in a museum
You know they believe in what they're doing they want to be part of the history of visual culture. There's not a
Subcategory of art called street art and then there's real art
the best the art that emerges on the streets is
Absolutely real art and the best of it is as good as
the contemporary art that
begins in the galleries
these graffiti crew were among dyche's first protegees from the world of street art I
Wanted to understand what drove a man like lee from the thrill and the notoriety of the street into the relative quiet of the gallery
Was part of the move into the galleries to find displays where your work would survive
Out here everything changes architecture changes over time
Attitudes change over time on the work on canvas is done and is preserved
It is that moment a rested moment in that time and it's there forever
These paintings are sought after recently eric clapton paid a hundred and twenty thousand dollars for some of his work
The league continues to draw inspiration from his roots in this image
He constructs wild style graffiti
Felt that while style lettering
The way they were configured and sculpted and a two-dimensional way to painting were actually in real life
three-dimensional
Windows into our lives
The fact that it was unlovable to the average person didn't mean that we didn't know exactly
The dance that those letters will have so I wanted to revisit that in a fun way
It's more inviting for me as a challenge to take two E's and interlock them into each other
It's like two twins almost phasing each other out
But they have to call inside because if not it'll just self-destruct and the name would just be you know a lily
Leaf painting is infused with the energy of its best work from the 70s and 80s
But given time and money you've moved on yes
It is art. But it hasn't turned its back on the street
More than 40 years after li painted his whole train refugee artists flight Brooklands Rusk is still at it
Rusk isn't after gallery space in fact. I think he might have more in common with the Parisian revolutionaries
He's fighting a war on the walls
with words
In a world where there's imagery everywhere, right?
And there's advertising
Everywhere and blank walls are still a statement somebody owns it and do you see what you're doing is being
wrestling with advertising and all that kind of thing this is part of my visual landscape there's
an endless amount of advertising inundating
biplane of vision and I want to add my contribution
I want to see people reacting to the world around them and just become part of the
Unconscious environment that you walk by every day, you know this like even like final lettering is like objectionable to me. I see I
See hand-painted signs and think they're beautiful. You know the touch of the human hand
Really like in live is an environment and so when you can see
some kind of stale wall enriched by
By someone who who cared enough to put something there. It's just
It's an element of the city now graffiti is you know it's spinning around
free
But really as long as time. It's just a really innate human human impulse
They say I think you might have slightly changed the way even I think about grafica sir
I've always felt if somebody painted on my house wall
I probably want to do them a damage so now I'm starting to think maybe I should give them a break
Of course Rusk is well aware that there's a power struggle afoot the
Walls of our city streets are covered with images trying to sell us products or tell us what to do?
Today's graffiti artists are working in the gaps
subverting these messages with their spray cans
The most exciting street art has an element of surprise it leaps from the war when you least expect it and
It can change the way you see the world around you
Former architect and Godfather of stencil art
Parisians a VA crew better known as black the rat is a leader of the scene
We are living a revolution in art really
So we are the consequences of of pop art movement of
serologic movement - but, but we are live really living a
Revolution
Legs witty and smart art on our city streets is made in famous as
A trained architect. He knows that it's not just about what he paints, but where he paints it I?
realized
Not with my first answer
But after a while you know after maybe one or two years that the place was very very important. You know and the
Environment around is the the place where I put my stand it was very very important also
if you put your images
in a very posh
Area, it would be completely
see and understand understood completely differently than if you leave the same image at
You know in the worker
area
of the city, this is the the most interesting thing in graffiti in my
Opinion, you know is there something about
Leaving about the out out lives ee
Ya when when I when I painting in the streets you know?
When I finished my work every
Really the feeling that I leave my trace somewhere
it's very deep with this feeling you know, but I'll leave my trace and for the future generation and
people will see it after my death and
It's very important for me, and that was I think it was very important for the people who?
make it the
The hand on the case you know also they were thinking about that you leave a trace so there I was here even
Though blacks work is politically engaged
At its core it echoes. The simple impulse behind that hand in the cave I was here
Don't forget me
Flex art and the work of those who inspired like the ever-popular Banksy is in vogue
Like the seventies the art world is again turning to the street for inspiration
In the palais de tokyo a major parisian gallery a pair of graffiti
Artists have fused the art world and the street with striking results
What a project
14 artists a work signed by all of them and all their visitors a
Little taste of the work of
Some what and lack?
He's gonna. Tell me that graffiti is an art. Look at the sophistication of this stuff
Three artists perhaps
Looking close
then it collapses and
It finds form again. It's just exquisite
So what and lack two eminent Parisian graffiti artists were commissioned to lead a fourteen strong crew?
To cover the interior of this space with art
And then just the whole space the ceilings the walls painted
Got the movement
All over painting Jackson Pollock eat your heart out
This is all over painting painting all over a camp. This is one thing
Treating a whole building as your canvas is quite another
It's staggering
and an explosion of creativity
The shrapnel hanging from the ceiling I love it. It's photocopies
It's peeling off. It's like the lithographs the posters
Peeling off over the course of time. It's almost like they're saying yeah, we know where our
R6 we get where it relates to the poster culture
How many different hands
With 14 artists involved the work ranges from a kind of futurism
through nightmarish shapes to parodies of popular culture
Yeah the problem with your graffiti artists is they will tank your doors
You gotta love it graffito coming from the Italian to scratch this is scratching
Chipping out in incredible detail
Stand back and stand back you stand back. It's
Amazing it's like quantal ism but with a hard point
pointillism
And I love this the thirty thousand year old hand spray painted onto a cave wall I
was here
This one's left by an alien
With so many unique artists to conduct how deadly cancer what bring this ambitious work together?
pursue consider from the structure
Mm kiss, Munna and Cass
Nanhua party holding the Jagannath didn't defrost a screw Chappell
Everybody Trust is like so much that they will let them they will let him and them some CAD far enough that also helped us
create this
Arrays some parts of the paintings
and then
We would
intervene on top of those parts keep what we like the artists were free to come back and do the same with us and
And this is how you it's like a layer
Kind of work the murals in the palais are fantastic, but they have a limited lifespan
another exhibition will eventually take place in the same space
This work like most graffiti will be painted over and lost forever
In response like and so what did something that in my opinion?
Fuses the world of gallery and street art together in an entirely original way we arrived to the politico
We understood that just like any other shows there what we did was supposed to be temporary and from day one
We figured it would be interesting to have us artists that come from
the ephemeral world of art and
We figured we want to find the time capsule inside the but it took you to do something. That would be
vainly eternal something that
That is so out of reach and so complicated to see and to do and that is so far away from
Normal showing spaces that no one would ever find the interest of raising it
Lek and so walk found the space an air duct inside the gallery
In total secrecy they began to cover the walls of this out-of-the-way place in a manner that takes me back to the caves
Joining them were a small number of other artists including the graffiti superstar and friend of Lee future or 2000
This is gonna get heavy this desire to preserve stuff. I know you understand that the art is ephemeral, but is there also a
realization and that
You're a founder off there both of you are ephemeral, too
If you leave something in this inaccessible space it does every possibility
It's actually going to outlive you we hope so we don't intellectualize things like you just did our only intuition
Is that it would be damn cool to do something in a dark?
Inside Europe's biggest Contemporary Art. Center, we really like the idea of doing something forbidden
hidden and out of reach to the public
The culture we'll work with now is so
Accessible with the internet that part of the mystery is gone
Part of what is making this a bit magical is gone. Everything is disposable
You can do a wall at the other side of the world. I'll see it an hour after you finish it on Instagram and
We wanted to respond to that
Do you see your practice your experiences artist is having
parallels with earlier pop artists
It's a cycle so for a long time it felt like you had
The art world had accepted and embraced and loved Basquiat and Keith Haring then for 30 years
They stopped looking at what was happening in the streets
So you have this street art craze right now, and it feels like those the cycles
Go is a lack of memory. It feels like each generation thinks. It's inventing something
When truth is we're just doing the exact same thing maybe the ingredients change
Maybe the colors the aesthetics the places, but the raw energy is the same
the only time I felt connected with a
basket is the
Pictures of him tracing letters on derelict buildings because it's something that I've also done
but the aesthetic is very very different, and we haven't banged, Madonna, so
Yes
Lekha so what have pulled off an NBA bull feet to bring Street graffiti into the art gallery
For me. There's no argument the best graffiti is art
challenging art
Graffiti on the walls of our streets today like those moving mottos from the Parisian revolutions still speaks truth to
power
The lithographic revolution of the 19th century
changed our streets
Advertising in our face everywhere street artists are challenging that taking the language of advertising just do
Art and using it against commercial culture
Taking the brands of global capitalism and saying we're not all about money
Asking us to rise up saying shoot the bank
Saying isn't all about cash
saying to vanquish without peril is to triumph without glory and
all of this
grows out of a tradition from the
1970s the aerosol tradition this
Revolution this tool that allows artists to paint
Rapidly and to throw their markup onto the wall with great precision
But we can also paint
Extraordinary works almost like a Sheila the beauty the sketch the aerosol
Evolves the blank wall is a provocation to so many
Individuals, whether they consider themselves graph'it ist's or street artists or just vandals
They're angry and sometimes their anger is directly specifically stated
impossible to misunderstand
18 million eight hundred
Thousand dead in the Congo, and you don't have a word in the media
These are voices that are all screaming clamoring for attention
because they are part of a revolution that wants to challenge the dominance of
Commercial culture in public space do I approve does it matter they disapprove?
And today some modern democracies have learned to live with the many and varied
voices speaking through graffiti
At the Reichstag in Berlin the graffiti scrawled by the Red Army could be harshly critical
But the Parliament of a reunified Germany decided to preserve large parts of it for posterity
Could the Soviet soldiers possibly have imagined that when they took temporary materials and wrote on a wall in the Reichstag
That you sow the wind and you reap the whirlwind that what would be reaped in due course
Would be a whirlwind of liberties that Alright?
means that governments remain anxious about writings on walls, but allow and
celebrate multiple voices multiple
Voices
The fact that these marks survived is
testament to
the strength and the resilience of democracy
These marks have been deliberately preserved by members of the German parliament
because they believe in the freedom of speech they believe in the right of people to
utter
Uncomfortable truths on walls
Greetings Moscow Berlin is kaput on the walls of the Reichstag
Graffiti scratching painting or writing on walls is something profoundly human
Should we always succumb to the knee-jerk reaction of painting over it or scrubbing it off
Sometimes we need to use our eyes to look in order to hear what people are trying to say
Sieges royal affairs and the intoxicating tale of King Arthur next as BBC four explores the fortified history of Britain's castles
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