TABLE OF CONTENTS
There is a restless energy to street life in New York City — a continuous flow of people and cars on the move, seemingly hell-bent on reaching some predetermined destination, or momentarily at rest, yet resolutely immersed in the urban experience.
Chapter 2. Fleeting Connections
Like a backdrop to a shadow play, images on a wall connect and merge with the animated yet transitory flow of street life. In the integrated images, captured by the camera, one finds a whole that is larger than the sum of its parts — a serendipitous relationship that serves as a commentary on the passing scene.
Chapter 3. Trenchant Observers
City walls present a large number of separate and self-contained portraits of men and women, not unlike many who inhabit the streets below. They appear as keen observers of the passing scene, though concealing their judgments, as if proclaiming it’s for us to know and for you to find out.
Eyes punctuate and enliven many of the faces found on walls. Like magnets they draw and center one’s attention to the image, and their presence continues to haunt city streets long after the images may have lost their luster.
Chapter 5. Coming of Age in the City
Children are frequently portrayed on city walls in a somewhat idealized fashion, emphasizing their open-eyed innocence, exuberance and vulnerability in the midst of bustling streets filled with strangers. Many of these images are found in schoolyards, playgrounds and day care centers, where children can be protected from the unforeseen risks of the street. These portrayals promote and emphasize healthy and productive habits, as well as solitude and a sense of wonderment within the confines of the congested city.
Murals scattered through several neighborhoods – fewer than might be expected in a city of such ethnic and cultural diversity — focus on the origin, history and legacy of communities as a whole, rather than individuals per se. The emphasis on group identity, and economic diversity, is at the heart of these images: the struggle to acculturate and belong, the effort to erase injustice, and the need to maintain and improve one’s daily life, while holding on to what makes one different.
City walls provide an “open mike” or a soapbox of sorts for anyone with a cause. Street artists and others can protest, advocate, proselytize, or seek recognition for any belief or issue close to their heart. Images on walls run the gamut, veering between the solely personal validations of self in graffiti on the one hand, and the declaratory pronouncements in the service of communal or political issues on the other. Whether the specific subject of the protest is articulated or not, the image itself is always assertive, and at times menacing or even violent.
The communal nature of the public space is most pronounced in memento mori for people who died — young men who died prematurely, community activists, and occasionally public figures. The memorials and commemorations on city walls express sorrow for the loss of kindred spirits, but also celebrate their lives. Perhaps most importantly the memorials enhance and maintain a continuity of sorts between the living and the dead, as if the unwritten code of street art assures the dead a place within the community.
Chapter 9. Dreams, Nightmares and Apparitions
The most private images found in the public space often contemplate and reflect dreams, hallucinations and nightmares — when one loses hold on reality, when faces are masked, distorted, and/or obliterated altogether, and when the comfort zones of everyday life disappear. Frequently evocative of the occult on the one hand and Ovid’s Metamorphoses on the other, faces are caught in the twilight zone, which brings in its wake an unsettling sense of the loss of identity, or a plunge into the abyss.
Chapter 10. The Lure of Distant Landscapes
As if recognizing the need to come up for air in a congested city, street art provides small doses of antidote to city living and urban malaise — images depicting the sea, desert, mountains or forests. Such images often draw inspiration from well-known works of art, popular stereotypes of wilderness, or made-up concoctions of landscapes of the mind.
Images of beasts, birds and fowl present another visual antidote to the multitude of human faces in the city. Many of these creatures are easily recognizable. Some reflect a commentary of sorts on the human condition or the passing scene, while others stand alone, as transplants from other habitats. Yet all possess strong and transfixing eyes. And like their human counterparts, they stand as inscrutable observers of urban life.
Hands. Why hands? Not too many, and yet, so pronounced and evocative of differing artistic temperaments. Some are wholly functional, but others are purely whimsical, an arresting presence in the landscape.
In the age of Twitter, city walls provide an easy outlet for aphorisms of all sorts, and image-makers broadcast their manifestos and define their goals in short verbal statements (e.g. “all art is theft”; “make art”; “individual activist”; and “in pursuit”) which are very general, assertive, and straightforward. These missives can be viewed as explanations, and perhaps justifications for the handiwork found on city walls.