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| La Wife & friends. Near the Mercado de las Pulgas in Colegiales |
Kaitlin arrived in Buenos Aires the other day, where summer is in full-swing. It's almost 100 degrees!
Even though it was sizzling outside, I braved the elements and took a really interesting tour with Graffiti Mundo, where we walked around the neighborhoods of Buenos Aires and learned about the street art & graffiti movement that's so hot right now (forgive the play on words). Here are some pictures from the tour (the full story to come later!)
If you want to expand your street art knowledge beyond Bansky and Keith Haring, take this tour. What I appreciated most about this tour was that I was able to learn some
of the language for interpreting, understanding, and appreciating street
art. Once I
learned there was a difference between tagging and street art, for example, I saw less tagging and more street art. And even tagging is not such a crime against aesthetics or public property as it is in the United States. Tagging, according to my
porteña guide Anna, is just the first step in becoming a street artist.
I thought that sentiment was a little too generous. Tagging, the rudimentary act of writing your initials on public spaces, is merely an artist taking baby steps towards some much more eye-pleasing calling? Hmm, if only all taggers would mature so rapidly as they do in Buenos Aires.
But, I understand her sentiment is meant to change foreigner's perspectives, which sometimes need a lot of shoving if they're ever going to budge. My perspective, without every being cognizant of it, was that grafitti, tagging, stencils - the whole lot - is a tool used by gangs to provoke one another, stake out territory, and generally lead society towards violence and destruction. I never knew that I thought this; I just thought grafitti was ugly. But my
porteña guide helped me see just how wrong I was.
While abroad, graffiti has its roots in the mafia and gangs movements of the 20th century, Buenos Aires was under the terrible
junta, when tagging could lead to death. It wasn't until democracy began in 1983, when the middle-class kids and teens started traveling abroad with their parents to the United States and Europe, that they brought back graffiti techniques and ideas. So in Buenos Aires, graffiti is associated with healthy self-expression, the flowering of democracy, and the rise of the middle class.
That said, many of the street art murals we saw in Buenos Aires are in residential neighborhoods, where middle-class artists see blank walls in their neighborhoods and couldn't resist. Many of the artists are professionals, who hone their craft in class and then take it to the streets. And, they often obtain permission to paint a wall beforehand. So graffiti isn't just tolerated around here; artists are sometimes commissioned to paint houses and buildings.
Take a look at the photos below. Would you call the cops on these folks?
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| The start of our tour: this house was painted by the previous owner, along with some of his friends: Tec, Chu, P3DRO, Defi, Parbo, Rundontwalk, whose caricatures include the friendly green cactus on the right. |
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| The "Nestornaut" is a stencil of the former President Nestor Krishner as the Astronaut, a popular comic hero figure in Argentina. Krishner used this symbol as propoganda to pose himself as a popular hero. Nestornauta, annonymous artist. |
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| A mural done by Goliche |
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| The Meeting of Styles. The piece to the right was done by Jaz, a famous artist in the area, who wanted to tell a story of two neighborhood boys who were killed by the police. The left mural was painted by Jim Vision from England. |
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| A portrait of a Peruvian woman and babe by Entes y Pésimo. Note the website in top left - no need for anonymity here in Buenos Aires. |
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| Fragment of collective piece for Meeting of Styles, 2011. |
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| Chu & Sixe (from Spain) |
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| This piece represents the animal instinct in the Argentine football "hooligans." Fragment of piece, only Jaz's creatures are shown. |
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| Incomplete piece by Evoke |
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| This one is really remarkable because it was completely free-hand spraypaint. No rulers, no tape, nothing was used to help create the lines for the 3D effect. By Nerf. |
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Other from Canadá
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And here's a cool video, stop motion
animation made entirely from graffiti:
For more information and to purchase art work by the street artists featured here, visit
http://www.graffitimundo.com/artists
