"Darling look! It's a Banksy!" Viewers’ material engagement with street art and graffiti

Hansen, Susan and Flynn, Danny (2016) "Darling look! It's a Banksy!" Viewers’ material engagement with street art and graffiti. In: Aesthetics of the City. Łódź University Press, Łódź, Poland, pp. 103-115. ISBN 9788380881518

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Abstract / Description

This chapter examines viewers’ affective encounters with street art and graffiti, with attention to the critical framework provided by Rancière (2004), whose work suggests a method for investigating our aesthetic practices of participation (or exclusion) and looking (or not looking). Viewers’ material engagements with street art and graffiti represent a disruption of the expectable order that demonstrates that what we see, according to our usual division of the sensible, could be otherwise – thus revealing the contingency of our perceptual and conceptual order. Our examination of the visual dialogue on just one city wall highlights the temporal, site-specific and participatory elements of graffiti and street art as a form of communication, or visual dialogue. We demonstrate that viewers are not passive recipients of the artist’s intentions, but are instead competent social actors capable of understanding, appreciating, and actively and materially engaging with street art and graffiti.

Item Type:	Book Section
Uncontrolled Keywords:	street art, graffiti, site-specific art, cities, urban environments, viewers' engagement
Subjects:	700 The arts; fine & decorative arts > 710 Civic & landscape art
Department:	The School of Art, Architecture and Design
Depositing User:	Danny Flynn
Date Deposited:	11 Apr 2016 10:30
Last Modified:	10 Sep 2020 15:52
URI:	https://repository.londonmet.ac.uk/id/eprint/972

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