"Meeting of Styles" -- Fights Over city Space Played out in Paint: Buffing, Dissing, and Placas

I went back to 30th and Kedzie to look at the finished walls this Tuesday, and after a thoroughly Chicago bus ride, jam packed at noon, with tons of strollers, preaching elderly women, folks just trying to get by, I staggered off and ran to see the walls. On the Wall of Style, the kind of central wall for the festival, an billboard company had drilled giant metal posts into the wall, going over STEF's and two other pieces, slashing through them. For advertising. I was reminded by the statement of purpose on the MOS website which says that "Since 1997 We are keeping it real, instead of faking the fun focusing on culture instead of commerce," and saddened that physically "commerce" had violently damaged days' worth of work by talented artists.



I continued walking west on 30th, rounded the corner, and saw what used to be a Red Rum piece buffed out, with a gold lion, and a Latin Kings tag over it. I had seen a few pieces vandalized that weekend: three by 36th and Albany with lines of red paint over them, but this seemed different. I had noticed the Latin Kings throwup across the street. I mentioned this to PATH ONE who I interviewed later that afternoon 9transcript to follwo when I learn how to embed onto this site), and he suggested that because it was an Old School spot maybe someone had reserved it for them, and said that it was uncharacteristic of gangs and more characteristic of writers to go through the trouble of buffing the wall-- you only buff something if you want to paint it yourself.

But what the paint tells us is a complex story about different visuals vying for a place on a corner, in a space that is clearly vulnerable to multiple kinds of forces of destruction (weather, advertisements, etcetera). Even though it is frankly a bummer to see hours of work buffed out, it is a healthy reminder of the fragility of this space, and how the most durable product seems to be the social connections people make, not the art work.

"Meeting of Styles" Chicago: We Are All Energy

So I have a lot, a lot, more to write about this festival but I wanted to say something briefly about what I took to be the ethos, the sense, of Meeting of the Styles this year, which was a kind of improvisation and generosity. Watching various artists paint (forgive my imperfect recollection of names) AIR crew, CBS Crew, NERD and PATH, STEF and DEMON, SUPHER, FLASH and CHUMBLY among many many others, and hanging out with a writer on hiatus, the kind OUTLET, I witnessed a kind of organic collaboration, communication through the vocabulary of color, and a shared sense of excitement and intense dedication. Starting around noon yesterday, facing large swathes of yet-to-be-primed walls artists had to take sketches on 8 by 11 inches of paper and transfer them to a scale of ten by eight feet, at minimum. They had to deal with random plant growth, a tree that stubbornly grew right up to a wall, uneven brick, confining alleys, and produce something fantastic.

Observing artists do an activity that is frequently understood as ego driven, but do so in a collaborative, generous way (sharing gloves, paint, ideas, smokes, beers) is a powerful reminder that art can startle us, change us, and open us up to different ways of thinking.

At 27th and Kedzie after interviewing Caesar (transcript to follow) I stood in silence watching, listening to the guys work. "I hate how these fucking white lines got fucked up!" a writer lamented-- "Fucking cans. But yo, just make your letters and I'll make it work " he suggested. The alley hosted the rhythms of gentle exhales, kind of a hissing and kind of a whisper, of spray cans, hinting at the life walls have and the imaginative resources they can offer to us.

This event is not without politics or controversy. Nothing is. But I felt lucky to be able to see artists from Texas, the Bay Area, Chicago, LA, New Mexico, Detroit sharing spaces, and sharing ideas. At the opening party on Friday night Illuminati Congo rhymed about how "we are all energy" and listening, smelling and seeing the outpouring of expression via aerosol cans across four different sets of walls in South West Chicago, there is visual evidence to prove his point.

The Shape of Things

Its all about geometry. The Eucledian stuff you learn in high school. All visual art, whether its public art, or gallery work, requires that you take a drawing that fills a sheet of paper, and expand it to fill a wall, while keeping it exactly the same. Rahmaan Statik Barnes told me and another gallery visitor this while explaining the origin of the name Polytechnic at his design group’s gallery show closing. Polytechnic, coming from West African drumming, requires that you think about things in terms a rhythm where it is full of different sounds, but it blends to create music, without losing its distinctiveness. Academics have framed this problem in terms of politics of singularity, or how to think of things in terms of pluralism, or multiplicity. Wall art, monumental art, is fundamentally a problem of geometry. It visually constructs modes to think about the ongoing problem of representation.



However, wall art is not an unproblematic solution. Talking to REIS, a young graffiti artist, and Jon Laidacker, a lead muralist, both explained to me the way that constructing objects of scale involves difficult issues of geometry. REIS explained that its easy having a sketch, but when you try to put if on a wall a figure can have one arm half the length of the other. Laidacker, in showing me a mock up of the “How Philly Moves” mural articulated how one set of figures had to be three stories tall, while others had to be six stories tall to conform to the shape of the Airport Parking Lot. JJ Tiziou in discussing the compositional challenges of “How Philly Moves” pointed out that every organizational move, shifting a figure to the left or right, or scaling one figure up or down twenty-percent transformed the entire tableau, and risked making another figure’s face “fall into a hole.”

In a sense, the spatial translation issues that public artists face is similar to the challenges we encounter as political theorists or simply political dreamers—how to transform concerns that seem aesthetically and conceptually sounds into a public space that is beyond our control, often unwieldly, requiring shape shifting and alterations that force intentional acts of imagination. The discipline practiced by artists like REIS, Statik, Laidacker, and Tiziou in mentally shifting frames, materially going through processes of trial and error to find something that makes sense to public eyes, are technés that could be applied to good use in political invention proper.