Ornament and Order: Graffiti, Street Art, and the Parergon
2014 Routledge (Ashgate) Hardback & Paperback • 312 pages • Size: 270 × 249 mm Includes 218 colour illustrations ISBN 1472409981 / 1317085000 / 9781472409980 Available from Lund Humphries here and Amazon here.
Over the last forty years, graffiti and street-art have become a global phenomenon within the visual arts. Whilst they have increasingly been taken seriously by the art establishment (or perhaps the art market), their academic and popular examination still remains within old debates which argue over whether these acts are vandalism or art, and which examine the role of graffiti in gang culture and in terms of visual pollution.
Based on an in-depth ethnographic study working with some of the world’s most influential Independent Public Artists, this book takes a completely new approach. Placing these illicit aesthetic practices within a broader historical, political, and aesthetic context, it argues that they are in fact both intrinsically ornamental (working within a classic architectonic framework), as well as innately ordered (within a highly ritualized, performative structure). Rather than disharmonic, destructive forms, rather than ones solely working within the dynamics of the market, these insurgent images are seen to reface rather than deface the city, operating within a modality of contemporary civic ritual.
The book is divided into two main sections, Ornament and Order. Ornament focuses upon the physical artifacts themselves, the various meanings these public artists ascribe to their images as well as the tensions and communicative schemata emerging out of their material form. Using two very different understandings of political action, it places these illicit icons within the wider theoretical debate over the public sphere that they materially re-present. Order is focused more closely on the ephemeral trace of these spatial acts, the explicitly performative, practice-based elements of their aesthetic production. Exploring thematics such as carnival and play, risk and creativity, it tracks how the very residue of this cultural production structures and shapes the socio-ethico guidelines of these artists’ lifeworlds.
Please find the foreword, preface, and introduction of the book HERE.
Ornament and Order: Graffiti, Street Art and the Parergon
Rafael Schacter, Ornament and Order: Graffiti, Street Art and the ParergonAshgate, Farnham, 2014, £70 hbk (ISBN: 9781409980), 278 pp.
In Ornament and Order, Schacter makes an interesting and important contribution to the growing academic literature on graffiti. Whilst this book is based on and uses participant observational methods, field notes, photographic evidence and material from interviews with a graffiti ‘collective’ or ‘crew’ based and operative in Madrid and elsewhere, its scope is international and does not follow a standard ethnographic or subcultural analysis of graffiti (see Ferrell, 1996; MacDonald, 2001). Schacter approaches and defines what he calls ‘Independent Public Art’ instead of graffiti (see also McAuliffe, 2012 on graffiti or street art, and Young’s, 2014discussion of ‘situational street art’) with a clearly argued and theoretically sophisticated and grounded analysis of the types, practices, motivations, locations and intellectual and political understandings of street artists’ intimate knowledge of and commitment to the contemporary urban experience.
The book itself is organised into two main sections in which the author uses a range of examples, illustrated by field notes and photographs to present an authoritative and critical argument concerning the complex of values, meanings, intentions and understandings of street art as a productive activity that challenges not only our perception of the practices involved but the urban realm in which it is predominately found.
The first part, Ornament, introduces and discusses how graffiti and street art can be understood and analysed as cultural products that are adjunctive additions, embellishing and decorating the material cityscape. Using case studies, illustrated by the work of the artists from within his ethnographic study, Schacter produces a dualistic typology based on motivations, intentionality and form. Consensual ornamentation is discussed using Habermas’s work on the public sphere and rational communication to argue that some graffiti artists can be understood as involved in sympathetic communicative ‘communal transactions’ of integration in which through participation, location and aesthetic practice, public space is humanised. The second form Schacter identifies, using the works of Lyotard and Mouffe, is that of Agonistic Ornamentation. This form challenges ‘the deadening vacuity of the ostensibly “public” sphere’ (p. 103) by the use of predominantly calligraphic inscription intended to contest and engage with the dominant discourses of the delimited and delineated urban landscape. It thus contests not only the form and organisation of architecture and public space but also the dominance of an accepted and acceptable aesthetics.
The Second part, Order, takes perhaps a more clearly anthropological approach in which the practices and activities of graffiti and street artists are explored and illustrated by selected use of field notes and photographs, and discussed as secular, sacred, and ritual practices. There is a clarity and power in the descriptions of the intimate knowledge of the urban landscape in which the street artists’ creative productions are understood as interventions that have the potential to invert, subvert and pervert the dominant discourses and organised structure of the city. Through the application of a carnivalesque sense of play (using Bakthin, Turner and Derrida) Schacter presents a convincing case for street art as ludic, transgressional, picaresque practices that not only challenge the accepted ‘order’ of the city but that propose a different and particular sense of architectural order, urban knowledge and aesthetic sensitivity.
This is an interesting and insightful book, based on the author’s intimate and sensitive knowledge of graffiti and street art and those who make it. It is much more than an ethnography. It is a critical and sophisticated attempt to situate graffiti and street art as coherent, rational and creative interventions by interlinked and committed people who care about the cities that they inhabit and want to demonstrate it by adorning and ornamenting, challenging and embellishing the material infrastructure that, whilst taken for granted by most, dominates and structures our everyday urban lives. However, this commitment to very public and independent art forms is understood as ritual performances which, like their artefacts, have the potential to challenge and reorder the urban realm at the margins, blurring the boundaries of art and crime, being, identity and community. For anyone interested in understanding not only graffiti and street art but the complexity of the city as an embodied and practiced experience as well as a material and social environment, this book offers an insightful inside tour for understanding not only the practices and products of street artists but also of being in the city in which the possibility of an alternate aesthetics of urban place and space is, at times literally, writ large.
References
Ferrell, J (1996) Crimes of Style. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press. McAuliffe, C (2012) Graffiti or street art? Negotiating the moral geographies of the creative city. Journal of Urban Affairs 34(2): 189–206. MacDonald, N (2001) The Graffiti Sub-culture: Youth, Masculinity and Identity in London and New York. London: Palgrave MacMillan. Young, A (2014) Street Art, Public City. London: Routledge.
Ornament and Order offers a valuable and insightful view into an underexplored area of street art, writes Kate Bailey. The majority of examples draw on Rafael Schacter’s two-year period of fieldwork based in Madrid, where he was embedded within an artistic collective. Rather than just being applicable to Madrid, the book’s variety of examples, case studies and theoretical discussions ensures this text would be useful for scholars looking at street art in numerous spaces and places.
Ornament and Order: Graffiti, Street Art and the Parergon. Rafael Schacter. Ashgate Publishing. 2014.
With Rafael Schacter’s book, Ornament and Ordercomes a new and interesting lens through which to explore street art. Graffiti, or as Schacter terms it, ‘Independent Public Art’ has been examined from a number of different angles within the academic field: the relationship between graffiti and criminality; its place within youth and gang culture; and the history of New York spray can art, to name but a few. As the foreword of the book notes, Ornament and Orderdoes not provide a ‘definitive approach’ for studying graffiti (one could even question whether this is possible considering the multiplicity and diversity of characteristics that street art is endued with); what it does offer however, is a new perspective. Schacter’s aim with Ornament and Order was to place Independent Public Art in a broader forum that allowed it to be examined as a form of ornamentation, as a ‘ritualistic’ performance, and as an art form not solely reliant on capital for its existence; and it is clear upon reading that he has achieved this. Ornament and Order‘deconstruct[s] more conventional dogma’ that surrounds street art and opens up the conversation surrounding this controversial art form.
The book is divided into two sections: ‘Ornament’ and ‘Order’. Schacter starts the book by examining the products of graffiti: the ‘Ornament’. By defining Independent Public Art as a form of ornamentation, Schacter carves out a place for street art “within the wider debate…over ornament in the architectural cannon as a whole”, placing it in a position where it may be examined as something “addictive rather than reductive”; the negative connotations usually associated with graffiti are replaced by an acknowledgement of the power such ornamentation can and does hold, both over the space it is placed in and the lives of those creating it. The majority of examples he uses of this ornamentation draw on his two-year period of fieldwork based in Madrid, where he was embedded within an artistic collective. Yet Schacter also refers to worldwide collectives and the work of artists based in a host of different cities, preventing the book from becoming a study of simply one situation. By including a range of case studies from various locations, Schacter’s theories and ideas concerning graffiti are demonstrated as being more widely relevant; rather than being applicable to the one physical location of Madrid, the variety of examples allows Ornament and Order to be used by scholars looking at street art in numerous spaces and places.
Within this discussion of Independent Public Art as a form of ‘Ornament’, Schacter presents us with two subdivisions: ornament that is ‘Consensual’ and ‘Agonistic’. ‘Consensual’ ornament is defined as a form of Independent Public Art designed to work within a community and within the sense of communal opinion and agreement: it is a practice “based upon the intentions of private individuals to rally together”. ‘Agonistic’ ornament is the opposite of this: it seeks to highlight contrast and to create friction; “it is difference, fracture they [the artists] seek to display”. This distinction is used to an effective end, and permits the conversation within the book to naturally move into more theoretical discussions regarding the creation of Independent Public Art and the reasoning and intention behind it. The presence of these theoretical discussions, as with the myriad of case studies used in examples, permits the book to offer a broader scope of thought on the topic of street art and present concepts that can be applied across the academic field, since it draws on highly pertinent ideas such as the role of the spectator, legitimacy of democracy and governance, and the unity of form and function.
As Schacter rigorously explored the two definitions of ‘Consensual’ and ‘Agonistic’ ornament, the continuation of the discussion when it is being applied to the idea of ‘Order’ within street art is easy to follow and understand. This section of the book focuses on the processes of artists through which works of Independent Public Art are created. It discusses the performance that goes into creating pieces, offering insights into why the pieces are created and why, despite the dangers and lack of financial gain, artists continue to engage with it. Schacter also introduces the idea of ‘ritual’ within street art, a term that he takes time to examine and apply clearly. The earlier identification of the distinction between the two types of ornament lends itself to the introduction of this idea, as Schacter recognizes that despite the opposing views and intentions, communities of artists continue to live harmoniously beside one another. It is the ‘ritual’, a ‘sacred, yet not religious’ process, of creating street art that holds the groups together. Schacter notes himself within the text that rather than observe one physical space, he instead studied the spaces that were defined and created by the communities themselves: there were no physical boundaries as such to Schacter’s study; he worked instead within the areas defined by practice or ‘ritual’. This multi-sited aspect of Schacter’s research works in the overall favour of the book, as it highlights the importance of Schacter’s observations concerning the centrality of the ‘ritual’ of creation to the presence of artistic communities and Independent Public Art.
Despite the introduction of new terminology and definitions, Ornament and Order is a book that would be suitable for those familiar with research conducted on graffiti or for researchers beginning their explorations. Throughout the text Schacter neatly intertwines the ideas of ‘Ornament’ and ‘Order’, identifying their differences but also their co-existence and importance. He provides relevant histories concerning street art, extracts from his field notes and interviews, and an extensive bibliography. The book also contains a number of photographs in both black and white, and colour. The presence of these pictures aids Schacter’s discussion, as the reader is able to see for themselves the placement and form of the Independent Public Art, although at times, Schacter could integrate these images more into the discussion taking place in the body of the text. Schacter is thorough in his academic discussions, and what is evident throughout the book is the respect that the author has for both the artistic communities he worked with and the Independent Public Art itself. Ornament and Order offers a valuable and insightful view into an underexplored area of street art, and successfully presents it as a practice based on something more than crime or disputed aesthetic tastes.
Kate Bailey is a PhD student in the History Department at Lancaster University, UK. Her research is currently examining the memorialization of the ‘disappeared’ in Guatemala, looking at the use of street art, art exhibitions, museums, and public events as forms of alternative memorial. Follow her on Twitter here: @KH_Bailey.
