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Vanguard or Vandal?

Published on Sep 30, 2016

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PRESENTATION OUTLINE

Vanguard or Vandal? Grafite and Pichação in Brazil

Word Association

Graffiti: refers to a range of practices from tagging to more elaborate “pieces” involving stylized signatures, usually of the writers' alias and their associated crew.

Street art: refers to a wider set of artistic practices in public space including murals, wheat-paste posters, stickers, stencils, yarn-bombing, etc.

Photo by duncan

Grafite
Graffiti
Pichação
Pixação

Photo by Felipe Fons

Pichação

refers to any form of prohibited and unsolicited writing or marking 
Photo by liquidslave

Pixação

Refers to a particular movement associated and specific style of writing 

Grafite

In mainstream usage, it has become synonymous with “street art” or “urban art”, which often includes murals.

How are these distinctions constructed and reproduced?

Photo by D.H. Parks

“It is the peculiar feature of political life that within it, behavior that could only otherwise be considered insane is perfectly effective. If you managed to convince everyone on earth that you can breathe underwater, it won’t make any difference: if you try it, you will still drown. On the other hand, if you could convince everyone in the entire world that you were the King of France, then you would actually be the king of France.” (Revolutions in Reverse, 94)

Photo by Mukumbura

“The entire apparatus of of the art world –critics, journals, curators, gallery owners, dealers, flashy magazines and the people who leaf through them and argue about them in factories-turned-chichi-cafes in gentrifying neighborhoods—could be said to exist to come up with the answer to one question: what is art? Or, to be more precise, to come up with some answer other than the obvious one, which is ‘whatever we can convince very rich people to buy.’” (Revolutions in Reverse, 93)

Says who?

Brief History

  • Grafite and pixação were both illegal according to the law of environmental crime established in the Constitution of 1988
  • In 2011, the term ‘grafitar’ (to make graffiti) was removed from the original environmental crime law, and the government made a public statement legitimizing grafite as art while still adamantly criminalizing pichação.
Photo by Renan Araujo

If the act itself is not the crime, where is deviance being located (by the state and by “law-abiding citizens”)? Is criminality inscribed in the content of these unsolicited markings or is it mapped onto particular acting bodies? What are the implications of this struggle for legitimacy, this contestation of signs, on the lived realities of these artists, particularly those working at the cusp of art and crime? When the images and text they produce are relegated to either category, what is the effect on their identities, their citizenship, and their encounters with establishment? This project investigates the way shifting symbolic boundaries of graffiti may reinforce or influence structural inequalities in the lived realities of both graffiti writers and other urban citizens, particularly within the context of a nation that has recently legitimated one form of graffiti over another.

Untitled Slide

Some Recent Events

  • 2016 -- Cidade Linda campaign
  • Jan. 2017 --Doria paints Ave 23 de Maio
  • March 2017 --announced Projeto MAR (Museu de Arte de Rua)
  • March 2017 --vertical garden planted along Avenida 23 de Maio
  • 2019 - judicial case ruled Doria’s actions inappropriate and officially recognized grafite as historical patrimony
Photo by de Paula FJ

Transgression of normative codes reveals, and sometimes redefines, their boundaries

Grafite and Pixo in the Public Imaginary

  • Rhetoric of pixação and pixadores as "dirty" and "criminals"
  • Celebration of grafite and grafiteiros as art and artists
Photo by I Bird 2

Grafite and Pixo Lives

  • Grafiteiros and pixadores are both conscious of the way their craft and their bodies are coded
  • Grafiteiros have to defend against being classified as a pixador even while they disagree with mainstream categories of grafite as art and pixo as crime
  • Pixadores similarly leverage the more positive reputations of grafiteiros to their own benefit

These redrawn boundaries between art and crime have manifested as another justification for crafting marginal bodies as criminal and that the language of aesthetics has become embedded in the reinforcement of existing inequalities.

Photo by jbushnell

However, the semiotic processes involved in creating these distinctions are ambiguous, that repulsion often accompanies attraction, and the resulting tensions are multiple and complex. The illicitness of pichação is necessary to the elevation of grafite and instrumental in constructing an alternative experience of the city.

Photo by Paul Ebbo