Emerging Out of Graffiti Into the Gallery

Abstract

This exegesis develops and applies strategies for how my practice emerging out of the tradition of graffiti in contemporary Australia can maintain its criticality in a gallery context crossing over from the street to mainstream Visual Art practice. This exegesis gives an account of graffiti as a criminal act deliberating the implications of the aesthetics and the intrinsic principal of graffiti being corrupted by the mainstream. The exegesis gives an analysis of graffiti as a skill different to art making, and looks at the cultural background of the marginal graffiti practitioner. In this investigation, the aim is to assess the corrupters of graffiti that are embedded in laneways, media, industrialization and the gallery. In this exegesis, I attempt to defend transgressing from graffiti into the gallery as a better option of losing criticality, to gain indiscretion in my practice. This study considers the effect of laneways, describing how they exclude graffiti by usurping public space from the marginal, and how media reproductive capabilities can be deceptive in the commodification of graffiti aesthetics through industrialized art and design. The purpose of research into forms of corruption in graffiti is to create a range of counter strategies that utilize a historical resistance and subvert the supposed rules and terms of graffiti. Using the proposition of Australian Bushmen artists of the Heidelberg School ‘9 by 5’ impressionist exhibition format informs my practice of making work that is cheaper, quicker and less elitist. Utilizing techniques associated with the critical reception of the ‘9 by 5’ exhibition such as the loose unfinished look of their paintings, provides a method of how to examine ways to connect Visual Art and graffiti that maintain an authentic, less incriminating perception of graffiti to be displayed. The proposed new methodology uses graffiti’s form in context of it’s aesthetics with those of outmoded visual art practices such as, ceramics and watercolours, combined with contemporary forms of graffiti subjects in the landscape.