UDC

7.011.3

Authors

Artem Yu. Tylik
Faculty of Philosophy, Saint Petersburg State University
5 Mendeleevskaya liniya, St. Petersburg, 199034, Russian Federation;
e-mail: tylik-fh@yandex.ru

Abstract

This paper considers dialogic strategies in modern street art illustrated by works of I. Ponosov, Candy Chang, a blogger nicknamed “Monster” and a number of anonymous artists. Dialogism is described here as one of the commonly employed strategies of street art, which is sometimes also called “post-graffiti”. An analysis and a theoretical interpretation of such phenomena are presented. Creating dialogical games of various scope and content in the urban space, street artists, whose works formally resemble artistic actions of the situationists of the 1950–60s, break the monologism of dominant discourses (advertising and political) in the city environment, thus re-establishing free, unrestricted, active semiosis. The desire to recreate free semiosis based on deliberate violation of “speech norms” (Bakhtin) creates an affinity between modern street art and vulgar culture of the Middle Ages, in particular, the carnival. Further, the article identifies the critical potential of modern street art, which violates the symbolic order established in public spaces and sponsored by the authorities. In addition, the relationship between the unrestricted, spontaneous, active semiosis reproduced by modern street art and the functioning of public spaces of Classical Antiquity is defined. The evolution of the phenomenon of graffiti from Antiquity to the Modern Era is examined. The author observed a substantial transformation of the status of wall inscriptions and drawings (graffiti) in Western culture: from everyday communication to а crime. Such major changes in the status of graffiti are first of all due to the changes in the mode of functioning of public spaces: from free semiosis (Antiquity) to strict regulations (Modern Era). This process, in its turn, is caused by the form taken on by power in the post-industrial era: to rule means to control neither regiments nor platoons, nor means of production, but discourses, symbolic practices, as well as those spaces in which these discourses and practices take place.

Keywords

street art, graffiti, post-graffiti, carnival, mass media

References

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