The Art of Street Culture

By: JohnPaul "JC1"Calandra

The etymological root of the words “image” and “imagination” is the same as that of “magic” and magician.” One can infer from this that there is a profound relationship between images and human aspirations, that curiosity that people try to satisfy through underground movements, and pop-culture. 

Modern psychoanalysis has concerned itself with images in dreams and wishes.  Jung, in particular, has seen the primordial religious urges latent in the “controlling images” of the collective unconscious. 

As a “compost of heaven and mire,” man needs to represent in human, palpable ways the numinous, the transcendental, and the holy,  The danger arises, of course, in the human proclivity to mistake the image for the reality it represents.  The very first commandment on the Tablets of the Law given to Moses on Mount Sinai proscribed the worship of graven images, whether of clay, wood, stone, ivory, silver, or gold.

Today the images that influence man’s memory, imagination, mind, and will are more subtle. 

Now in the Hip-Hop age, we are prone to worship lamp-posts and mailboxes covered with sticker art, wheat pasted screen-prints and designer stencils.  Nevertheless, the temptation is still with us to idolize, to believe that one is in touch with the art of street culture through some visible or audible link with earth. 

Contemporary urban man is literally barraged with “images.”  It has been estimated that the average New York commuter receives some 5,000 audiovisual impressions during a weekday:  subway and billboard advertisements, tabloids, pictorial journals, magazines, radio, television, and cinema.  Some believe we live in a new “photocivilization” where more and more the image, either still or in motion, is the passport to belief and acceptability.

In fact, the saturation of visual communications may not be an insignificant reason for the emergence of a “Pork 4 Paradise”, "I'm your GOD", movement and the popularity of rites such as Dondi, Keith Haring, Cost and Revs,Etc...

While recognizing this danger, this primer on street culture has sought to establish the positive value of the “image.”  The image reflects a world dynamic that, if ambivalent in terms of the clash of good and evil, testifies to the goodness of creation, the abiding presence of Providence, and the ultimate triumph of the God-intoxicated person in sacrifice and martyrdom.  If the temptation to idolatry has not been diminished by the advent of the spray can,  sculpting knife and the silk-screen, there is still in these products of man’s technical genius a yearning to give witness to the deepest aspirations of the human spirit and the larger scheme of truth after which it thirsts. 

The Bible teaches that Christ is the Image par excellence, reflecting the substance of the Divine Father who sent Him ( Epistle to the Hebrews:1-3).  All images, therefore, have some necessary relation to this Proto-Image, the matrix of the Eternal Plan of Providence.  It may be a relation of conscious affirmation of this image: it may be an anonymous allegiance through an honest, if stumbling, search: it may be a rejection through indifference or indolence: or it may be an overt rejection of this image in unconcealed hostility. 

If the art world is theological in essence, then the new world art form of street culture remains a mystery play with many theological clues. .....ExperiBreed

copyright   2005-12

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Graffiti Mouth & The Gutter GRIT.

By: JConer