Over the last decade, Denver’s RiNo neighborhood has been transformed by street art: impeccably painted, forcefully colorful, with content bordering on the political but kept well within the boundaries of the widely acceptable. There’s the locally cherished Larimer Boy/Larimer Girl diptych, an optical illusion on a pleated wall that reveals a morose girl from one direction and a delighted boy from the other. Shepard Fairey, the artist who famously designed Barack Obama’s Hope posters, installed a mural of Angela Davis, whose afro dons the statement “Power & Equality.” With its empowering yet apolitical message, the mural tepidly dips its toes into activism without stirring controversy. Perhaps the most Instagrammable painting in a neighborhood full of picture-perfect art is the iconic “Love this City” mural, a lively geometric work which essentially serves as 20-foot-wide Denver postcard. These murals are fun—they let you know that you’re in a neighborhood that’s artsy, perhaps even edgy, and certainly not unsafe, since, after all, the paintings are just so pretty.
The vast majority of RiNo’s street art is painted during the Crush Walls festival, an annual street art event sponsored by the city government and over 50 local and national companies. The content of the murals needs to be approved by these authorities before being painted. Since it’s legal, artists are able to work openly during the day and thus put more time and precision into their work than they could put into most illegal street art. But legality also subjects artists to censorship. Though Crush Walls claims it doesn’t censor work, it also explicitly forbids overt political statements—one artist was denied entrance into the festival because their proposed mural condemned Brett Kavanaugh around the time of his hearing. The artist proceeded to complete the mural illegally on a wall across the street from the festival, and the work has since been painted over.
These murals are, of course, not graffiti. As I’ll use it in this article, the word “graffiti” refers to any street art done illegally and without commission—picture loopy-lettered tags, small stencils, quick drawings.
Graffiti is ubiquitous, popping up in pretty much any place inhabited by humans. It’s spontaneous and aggressively uncensored. Often, graffiti is intended as a form of communication within a very specific community of people who also make illegal street art. If you’ve ever seen a tag and found yourself unable to read it, it’s probably because the message just wasn’t meant for you. Legal murals, on the other hand, are aesthetic objects meant to be understood by anyone.
Graffiti can function as a political weapon in ways that legal murals cannot—the work condemning Kavanaugh is a great example of political graffiti that couldn’t materialize through the bureaucracy of the legal art scene. The artist’s message would be prone to censorship even within the traditional art gallery circuit, making graffiti their only definite option. Crush Walls censors political messages in the works it exhibits because it doesn’t want to risk controversy; the festival is funded largely by the city of Denver, so curators avoid promoting work that could be disruptive to governmental power.
When neighborhoods like RiNo are filled with art that supports the agenda of those in power, those groups continue to maintain control over the visual landscape. When an individual can express their own ideas or images within the public sphere through graffiti, they subvert this power and gain influence over the visual landscape.
The “visual landscape” is the amalgamation of everything we experience visually and how that affects our understanding of our social and political surroundings—it shapes pretty much everything about how we perceive the world around us. The term “visual landscape” originally comes from urban planning and landscape architecture, but it can be thought of in a sociological way too. Every billboard, every subtlety of the buildings you pass by, the appearance of every person you see—all of these things comprise the visual landscape, coming together to produce your interpretation of the area you’re in. Every place is a palimpsest of everything that has happened within it, which people read constantly with or without their awareness.
Graffiti can function as anything from a political weapon to a method of communication—it serves as a tool that anyone, regardless of status, can use to gain power within the visual landscape.
Large-scale murals like those in RiNo function in the opposite way. Because of the size of the projects, large-scale murals must almost always be done with the consent or commission of the person who owns the walls that the works are on. Because of this, these pieces are stripped of their political and social value and become purely aesthetic objects that function only as a fun foray for the upper classes into what they perceive as “edgy.” Their function in the visual landscape is like the function of a billboard, only more insidious; it’s there to trick you into believing the place you’re walking through is cool and artsy, a break from the rest of the yuppie realm. The murals exist for the sake of pandering to an audience gullible enough to think that this kind of street art delivers a genuine message.
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Keith Haring: When street art costs money
Long before his paintings became ubiquitous in the form of t-shirts and tattoos, Keith Haring was a street artist. In the early 1980s, his distinctive bold-lined, energetic works filled every corner of the New York City subway, earning him fame (or notoriety) throughout the city. Haring saw the subway as a laboratory of sorts, a place where he could experiment with content and easily engage with a wide range of people. He was motivated by the breadth and diversity of his audience and thought that his work’s connection to daily life was vital to its meaning. He believed that the public had a right to be in contact with art. The fact that his work made such frequent contact with such a huge number of people allowed it to convey political messages efficiently, and Haring took advantage of that. As a gay man and a victim of the AIDS epidemic, he produced many works criticizing the public’s ignorance about the disease bearing statements like “Ignorance = Fear / Silence = Death / Fight AIDS, act up.” Unlike Shepard Fairey’s tepid attempt to use his art for activism, Keith Haring was direct and forceful in his condemnation of the U.S. government’s failure to intervene in the AIDS crisis.
Though he didn’t identify as a graffiti artist, Haring was arrested numerous times for vandalism—unsurprising, since he allegedly created up to 40 works a day, all of which were very public.
After initially developing his recognizable style through graffitiing New York subways, Keith Haring took to painting on canvas and heightened the cheerfulness of his style even more through the use of vibrant colors. In 1981, not long after his transition to painting, Haring had his first solo show. Throughout the ‘80s, his work was exhibited widely throughout the world.
The figures in Keith Haring’s work are oddly joyful in contrast with his powerful political messages. Radiant babies (as Haring referred to them), barking dogs, hovering angels, and flying saucers are frequent characters enacting his often bleak and urgent stories. They’re pared down, bold, a little surreal, and always pleasantly entertaining. Maybe that’s why he was able to traverse the gap between his early work and high art, finding a good deal of commercial success even within his short life: his art is fun.
Keith Haring was likely the first person to monetize work that originated as street art. His ability to be successful both in the gallery and on the subway marked the beginning of a vital shift in which street art became something desirable to the upper classes. The exuberance of Haring’s work and the appealing hint of edgy transgressiveness present in its graffiti roots, in conjunction with his associations with other New York artists of his era, made Haring’s paintings desirable to a high-paying audience. This was the first time that anything with such a strong connection to street art was worth a high art amount of money.
Despite his success within the wealthy world of museums and galleries, Haring continued to produce illegal street art. From his first piece of graffiti until his death, Haring’s work on the subway was the crux of his artistic practice.
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The loop effect
By the early to mid-2000s, it was well established that graffiti could be worth money. People who would have fled any neighborhood contaminated with illegal street art 10 years earlier now stopped to pause and ask whether that stencil on the wall could be a Banksy. What before would have been a sure sign of seediness began to have potential as a harbinger of culture. This transition from graffiti signaling destitution to graffiti signaling artiness is called the loop effect.
The loop effect goes a bit like this: first, you have crowds of artists living and working in the neighborhoods they can afford, which are generally somewhat impoverished and thus dense with graffiti. Sometimes, the artists living in these neighborhoods achieve financial success by entering the artistic mainstream. Now that their work is monetarily valuable, they’re seen as valid by the upper classes; no longer grimy bohemians, they’re considered real, cultured artists. These neighborhoods are no longer perceived to be criminal, but rather sophisticated and artistic, and so they increase in value. Expensive businesses and wealthy homeowners fill the area. In many ways, this process is very similar to that of gentrification. The upper classes decide a neighborhood is cool because of its creative underbelly, so developers take advantage of the change in opinion and sterilize the area to sell it at a higher price, forcing the original, rightful residents out.
Ironically, since around 2010, there’s been a trend of developers and city governments forcing the loop effect in order to increase neighborhoods’ monetary value. In these cases, the city hires artists to install murals on public walls. Though the artwork’s public placement refers to graffiti in all the fun ways, the city ensures that all of the art is immaculate in both content and execution, disassociating itself from graffiti’s sleaze and insurgence. Skipping over the “grimy bohemian,” low-property value phase entirely, cities can artificially raise property values.
It’s clear that Denver has pulled this trick with its revitalization of RiNo. By subsidizing the Crush Walls festival, the city artificially injects the neighborhood with fiscally lucrative artiness.
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Ahol Sniffs Glue: Coming full circle
David Anasagasti, better known by his tag name Ahol Sniffs Glue, is a contemporary Miami-based graffiti artist. One of his unmistakable murals can be found in RiNo somewhere between Shepard Fairey’s “Power & Equality” woman and the oversized postcard.
Almost all of Anasagasti’s murals, which are spread throughout the country, share the same motif: tired, half-closed, heavy lidded eyes painted over and over in a repeating pattern covering a large area. The works are deceptively simple—the tired eyes are intended as a salute to the working class and a condemnation of the inhumane working conditions that these people are often subjected to. The eyes are hypnotic in their repetition.
Anasagasti’s murals are decidedly anti-corporate. That’s why he found it especially insulting when American Eagle used Anasagasti’s works as the background for an international advertising campaign without the artist’s permission. Angered at the brand’s intellectual property infringement and concerned that his anti-corporate message would be compromised, Anasagasti sued American Eagle. The lawsuit was settled amicably out of court (which implies that the artist thankfully got some sort of sizable compensation).
American Eagle’s use of Anasagasti’s graffiti sends a clear message: graffiti has become so far removed from its original political function that it can be used in the exact opposite way, becoming a billboard advertising exactly that which it denounces. Anasagasti has come into the same problems that Keith Haring did more than 30 years ago. Like Haring, Anasagasti’s work is colorful, recognizable, and aesthetically appealing regardless of how much thought the viewer puts into interpreting its message.
Anasagasti’s attempt to gain control over the visual landscape and advocate for marginalized people clearly backfired due to American Eagle’s unethical use of his artwork. But the ensuing lawsuit brought attention to the issue and made street artists’ position clear: despite the ever-increasing commercialization of street art, they will continue to take control over the visual landscape and force people to hear their messages—Anasagasti’s mural in RiNo takes up as much room as the Denver postcard does, and they’re only a few blocks away from each other. His work speaking out for marginalized people does exactly what the best of graffiti does: it takes up space and makes its point.
Mediocre Issue | October 2019