Street Art is exhibited, and not just in the street

About the numerous exhibitions devoted to Street Art this summer throughout France.

“When we say that urban art must stay in the streets, it reminds me of when we were young and we were told “rap is not music”. We have the impression that the quarrel between the classics and the moderns is being replayed. » Dixit Sowat, the Franco-American artist who covered the railway tracks of Marseille with graffiti. I think it’s so well done…

Can street art enter the museum? Can works of art exhibited in urban spaces become works of art for sale in contemporary art galleries? In short, does Street Art have the right to panic the art market? Should we write “visual artist from urban art” to designate a street artist who sells his works of art to buyers hanging them in their living room? This is the question that Connaissance des arts magazine is asking itself this summer, given the multitude of exhibitions currently offered on the subject. “The question of whether we can exhibit graffiti outside the street is a chestnut in the art world,” rightly note Lek & Sowat, the famous French contemporary art duo to whom a retrospective is devoted so far. until July 27 at the Domaine Départemental Pierresvives in Montpellier. “Yet urban art is not only created in the street and requires a lot of preparation work, sketches, but also photo or video capture,” they add. It is precisely from this angle, that of the documentary approach, that the Rennes Museum of Fine Arts has chosen to construct the exhibition “Aerosol, a history of graffiti”, on view until September 22 to delve into the world of graffiti, from the 1960s to the present day, through the prism of the use of the aerosol can for artistic purposes.

“It’s difficult to talk about the street without showing it,” explains Patrice Poch, artist and co-curator of the exhibition with Claire Lignereux and Nicolas Gzeley. “We made the choice to present as few studio works as possible. There are around twenty in all, which is very unusual in a fine arts museum. »

Whether it is freehand spraying, stenciling or graffiti writing, aerosol has established itself as a form of plural artistic expression, rich in more than half a century of practice. Sometimes illegal, sometimes tolerated, creation can develop on fences, metro trains or in workshops. Born in the street, it is an art by nature ephemeral: dedicating an exhibition to it in a museum is a challenge. This project is based on the observation that the practice of graffiti is both very popular and nevertheless largely unknown: in the first part of the exhibition, visitors can therefore precisely retrace the emergence of graffiti in France, from the 1960s to 1986, with rare and unpublished works of art (Blek le rat, Jef Aérosol, Marie Rouffet, Miss.Tic, Bando, Futura2000, Blitz, Dee Nasty, Loly Pop…) as well as numerous documents, photographs and testimonies.

In order to extend this historical approach and demonstrate the exponential vitality of graffiti from the end of the 1980s, the museum patio space offers a focus on the theme of the train and the metro, a favored medium for writers, from the collections of Mucem, the first European museum to have established a fund dedicated to this movement at the very beginning of the 2000s. The exhibition in the patio presents works of art, objects and photographs retracing the activity of European “trainists” . These artists having finally tamed a tool, the aerosol can, which was initially designed for painting bodywork…

“Whoever says urban art market says Banksy,” notes the journalist from Connaissance des arts. However, “like a tree hiding the forest, “Banksymania” hides a much more contrasting market, with for example aluminum plates from Jef Aérosol starting at €3,500. After a decade of boom, the popularity of urban art is narrowing around “sure” values, like Invader, Shepard Fairey and more recently Gérard Zlotykamien. »

The fact remains that “urban art even makes its way to the Petit Palais, where Mehdi Ben Cheikh, founder of the Itinerrance gallery, joins forces with journalist Annick Cojean to bring together most of the artists who made the success of his Street Art course in the 13th arrondissement of Paris. Not bad, for an artistic phenomenon acclaimed by the public but long shunned by institutions..." notes Camille Deschamps in her article for Connaissance des arts. Yes, urban art is popular with the public. Its immediately accessible side, no doubt. I don't know about you, but I personally am bombarded all year round with photos of urban art taken by my friends during their wanderings, accompanied by the little ritual comment: "You see, we don't go to all the museums but we also see lots of works of art – wink smiley.”

Having the regular opportunity to park my trailer in Nancy, I of course took the opportunity to discover the work of Aletaïa, a visual artist with a background in Street Art. She had been invited thanks to the director of the Nancy Museum of Fine Arts to participate in the round table entitled “Urban art to make cities”, during the edition of the Nancy Urban Meetings 2022. Then discovering this city , and driven by her curiosity, she got involved in an exhibition project: Egotarium. “Before Susana Gallego Cuesta invited me to Nancy, I was not looking to exhibit my work in galleries and institutions,” the artist confided to the journalist from Connaissance des arts. “I wasn’t fond of that, I had a desire for the exterior, for monumentality. I found that my work made sense in the street, but no longer worked in the studio. But what do you do when you're 45 and you no longer want to be kneeling on the ground in the street? »

With Egotarium at the Nancy Museum of Fine Arts, Aleteïa therefore launches an attack on the museum form and attempts a general catasterization of its relationship to the world. Which allowed me to discover in passing the word “catasterization”, and I love that: “transformation of a being into a constellation or star, or transfer of its soul into the sky”. In short, it is a question here of the artistic ego, treated with distance and irony, but above all of its difficult construction when one is a woman: how, against all odds, in the midst of patriarchy, do we become Aleteïa? It being understood that the exhibition also questions at the same time the ego of humans in the 21st century, their relationship to nature and their contemporary history. Needless to say, there is plenty to do.

Article written by Valibri in Roulotte

Illustration: © Nicolas Gzeley