Crew 22
3ttman
JR
Nunca
Sixeart
'Street art' is a sub-genre of graffiti writing and owes much to its predecessor. Though there is a good deal of crossover between the genres, they are distinct and separate in their own right. The difference between graffiti writing and street art is as great as that between, for example, jazz and techno music. Just as techno could arguably never have come into existence without predecessors such as jazz and blues, street art derives from graffiti writing. There are, of course jazz musicians today who work with techno and there's jazzy techno if you want it. No genre is ever pure. Similarly, many street artists will have come to their work through an interest in graffiti writing and may even do a bit of graffiti on the side. Many hardcore graffiti writers don't like street art, just as some purist jazz musicians don't have much time for techno.
If all this compartmentalising weren't complicated enough, we also need to take into account the fact that many of the artists we might consider street artists wouldn't necessarily accept this term themselves. Some prefer just to be known as 'artists'. The problems with the term 'street art' lie in its broadness. It seeks to cover a vast group of artists working all over the world in many different ways. Artists, as a rule, don't welcome external categorisation; they prefer to be looked at as individuals. Street artists are by definition rule-breakers, so if you attempt to categorise them, they'll simply go and break the rules that have been set to define them. It's their nature and it's the nature of the genre. Once these rules have been broken, the parameters of the art form will also have been stretched, but the work may well still qualify under the original definition. Despite all of this, it's useful to have some workable term for this art form, and 'street art' is the best we've got. The benefit of the term is that it's wide enough not to strangle any one individual, but precise enough to eliminate other works that don't fall into the category. The etymological origins of the term are difficult to pin-point. The phrase was certainly in common usage throughout the late 1970s.
In 1978, the artist John Fekner curated Detective Show in an outdoor park in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York, which included the words 'street museum' on the invitation card. He recalls, 'We laughed at the term "street art" when it started to get around a few years later. If you had a degree, you did "street art" as opposed to graffiti.' An early use of the term in print came with Allan Schwartzman's excellent book of that name in 1985. Since then, many artists have been happy to be known as 'street artists' and actively encourage the use of this term over, for example, 'graffiti artist', 'graffiti writer', 'urban artist' or the numerous other names that are associated with the art form. This is an indication that both genre and title have some validity.
One of the principle reasons for making a distinction between street art and graffiti writing is that graffiti has such a bad public reputation. Graffiti writers as a general rule couldn't care less about this; street artists are often more concerned with external perceptions. Here we see the start of a separation process. This separation has evolved to include several defining factors, including differences in technique, differences in motivation and audience, and major differences in the way the separate genres actually look.
Street art and graffiti writing may be very similar pastimes, both stemming from a similar place with some congruous ideas and cross pollination, but they are different in terms of form, function and most importantly, intention.
Cedar Lewisohn
Cedar Lewisohn is an artist and curator based in London. He is the curator of 'Street Art', which features work by Blu from Bologna, Italy; the artist collective Faile from New York, USA; JR from Paris, France; Nunca and Os Gêmeos, both from São Paulo, Brazil and Sixeart from Barcelona, Spain (on at Tate Modern until 25 August). A fully illustrated book on Street Art by Cedar Lewisohn is published by Tate.
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