TRAFFIC congestion torments us on most days, but sometimes it also gives us the time and opportunity to get a good look at the art that’s surfacing on some of our cities’ walls. A couple of years ago, while I waited for the cars ahead to inch forward, my gaze accidentally fell on a poster that showed Jesus Christ crucified on the lower-case blue “f” that has become Facebook’s emblem.
Who was the artist and what did he or she intend to say? Someone had taken pains to glue that poster on an anti-jaywalking sign planted in one of Mandaue city’s center islands, had left a message that was too important not to say. That image has stayed with me, although the poster itself has long been scrubbed away. That’s one of the most moving things about street art. An artist makes a mark but knows that the elements will claim it soon. Or else, someone with spray paint and different notions of public art might paint over it with an obscenity. Or the name of some gang that hasn’t learned yet how to spell.
Three years ago, a non-profit in New York City decided to work with artists and merchants to paint murals on the metal gates that are pulled over storefronts at night. That’s one of street art’s twists. It’s a message meant to draw you in, painted on a surface built to keep you out. In Subangdaku, Mandaue City, murals of whales, corals, and various fishes in fabulous colors still cover some walls and large parts of a flyover: in-our-face comments on our environment, which have become part of the environment itself.
Since 2014, the Lower East Side Partnership has, with its community of artists, painted over the gates of at least 100 shops in New York City. The project’s participants (www.100gates.nyc and @100gatesproject on Instagram) describe their work as a “graffiti deterrent.” So a debate that’s nearly four decades old still continues, apparently. Graffiti is defacement, while street art is what, exactly? Embellishment? Visual commentary?
I don’t have a trained artist’s eye nor an education in art criticism, so I’ll leave that debate to the communities behind these practices. I find some street art in Cebu beautiful and moving, and others, less so. I am happy it’s so accessible, though I’m sure some owners of the properties where street art gets done will disagree. These are works that our artists offer to anyone with the time and patience to look. Few people will see the art that’s tethered to the walls of galleries or museums. But for street artists, attention is the only price of admission.
Or at least it used to be. Eleven years ago, the British street artist Banksy organized an exhibit in Los Angeles that, in his own words, succeeded because it combined “controversy, celebrity, and a painted elephant.” (The elephant was supposed to drive home a point about how widespread poverty had become and yet people had refused to talk about it and try to fix it consistently. It was, literally, the elephant in the room.) That show started what’s now called the “Banksy effect,” the drift toward the mainstream of a form of art that lived outside and was created by outsiders.
Today, tours and festivals are organized around street art in some cities, like Buenos Aires, London, New York, and Paris. Banksy continues to be unrepresented by any gallery. A group called Pest Control can confirm whether or not something attributed to him is, indeed, by Banksy. Few street artists will find the kind of success Banksy has gained, but that doesn’t make their work any less compelling. “Maybe art is a bit of a joke,” Banksy says in his 2010 documentary “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” which is, in part, about someone who’s more of a con artist than a street artist. In any case, I love how some street artists can make us rethink what we find beautiful or important; how they compel us to pay attention, how they keep us from looking away.