Vitoria, summer 2012
URBANARIO
URBANARIO
Some time has already passed since street art ceased to be a fringe activity, one that yields personal fulfilment but is guaranteed to be rejected by society, particularly by those most socially adjusted. Quite the contrary, it has been marketed for a while as something cool. And it is obvious that, far from being an emblem of divergence, cool is the spearhead of adjustment, the emblem of those sheep at the front of the herd. The street art scene is every day more commercial, more superficial, more upper class. And it is patently disappearing, along with the media hype that blew it up like a balloon during the last few years. Thus far into the story, what abounds in the scene are fanfares, devised to scrape up some attention in time to cash in on the street art brand before the last traces of its appeal finally turn into just the opposite, and the time comes for it to follow the fate of everything cool: to be unfashionable. It is no surprise that the hype of these past years has had a distortional effect. The inevitably superficial approaches of commercial media have but spurred the attitudes of mutual glorification, lacking any critical stance, already characteristic of the scene. On the other hand, the premise that ‘if it appears in the street, then it must be interesting’ has flooded the media with mediocre and downright bad artworks. This weakness of content has not prevented, however, the development of an audience around the practice, an audience not very demanding of artistic discourses, which loves the kind of immediate gratification characteristic of our spectacularized contemporary reality. This audience is as numerous and enthusiastic as it is unfaithful: its attention span will only last as long as the time it takes for the industry to find the next commercial pitch.
For those with a true interest in these artistic practices, the end of the hype is largely good news. It means there will at last be a possibility of analysis beyond the surface, without the echoes of the media distorting the conversation – even if this conversation has to take place in smaller circles. And, more importantly, it means there will finally exist again a workspace that is not perverted by money, a space that gives sincere projects the opportunity to develop naturally, once the possibility of immediate social or professional projection through this kind of art has disappeared. In any case, what we are dealing with in this text is also a sign of the times: the first solo exhibition in a national museum by an artist whose career originated in this scene, a noteworthy event in the institutional assimilation of the current. Deambular is also Eltono’s most mature project, and the one that, for good, makes him significant beyond the echoes of the media hype. In this exhibition Eltono is just an artist who uses the street in his work. His connection with street art can almost be irrelevant for understanding and enjoying Deambular. • The idea of working with the street, as opposed to working in the street, is key. During these years we have heard many times about the use of the street as a canvas, but anyone who pays enough attention will realize the expression is not accurate. When it comes to taking in a work of art, the street is probably one of the things furthest from a canvas one could conceive. The white canvas is the inert support that, according to the modernist paradigm, an artwork needs in order to display its meaning, free from any connotation foreign to its own self. This pretended semantic blankness is of course an overwhelming message in itself: it means we have passed the hierarchic treshold separating real life from this other world, the one in which art can and must take place. The world of the expensive commodity, of the politically deactivated. But if we ignore the monolithic message of the white cube, and we enter its game, we can consider it a semantically inert space, a blank canvas. The street is, as we have said, far from being that: it is more of a jungle of meanings, which will take part in the final message as much as anything the artist could put forward. For a lucid artist, the street is a toolbox, a palette of elements to be rearranged and interpreted. 6
On the other hand, it is also untrue that the essential activity of the graffiti writer, like that of the really involved street artist, is painting. The graphic aspect is only one part of their work. Most of the energy is invested in the exploration and reinterpretation of the surroundings, therefore the activity as a whole is much closer to urbex, street skate or parkour than it is of easel painting, or even traditional muralism. This multidimensionality is essential for the viewer of this type of art as well, as the aesthetic experience takes form through the way the works become interspersed in the personal context, and by the accumulation of encounters with them through space and time. The most important consequence of all this, for both the creator and the audience, is a widened perspective, the configuring of a subjective environment different from the one imposed by the capital. • All this being so, it comes as a surprise that only a small number of artists educated in these kinds of methods and circumstances make use of them as working material when given the opportunity to formulate a project for an exhibition space. The usual shows present no more than a series of collectables on which the imagery originally used in the street is reproduced, now detached from the spatial and experiential context that gave meaning to it, and therefore completely void. The case of Eltono is an example of congruity in taking this step. Every time he accepts a commission from an exhibition space he approaches it as an opportunity for further experimentation with his usual working medium, the street, although with more possibilities than the illegal methodology would usually allow: optimal materials, an ample workspace with good ubication, professionals who document and install the pieces, a watched space where displayed pieces can stay untouched indefinitely, visibility in the media, and the possibility of working in different countries. Born in Paris in 1975 and educated in the New York graffiti tradition, in 2000 Eltono started to produce the small, contextual paintings he is renowned for, works that were among the handful of seminal contributions that began to shape the then emerging street art scene. These paintings take from graffiti the ability to instantly build from a given context, and take from official art training, which the artist was then undergoing in Madrid, the interrogative approach 7
of dialogue with the environment and the palette: plastic paint, applied with a brush and masked with adhesive paper tape. In parallel with this series, Eltono has used his stints into art spaces to test formulas that play with the essential differences that separate the street and the exhibition space as workspaces for art. One of those differences has to do with the life of the pieces. While indoor pieces are preserved so their form is always the one the artist gave them, the opposite happens with a street piece: once the artist abandons it to its fate, it starts to develop a life of its own. Its shape changes in a more or less gradual process, until it eventually disappears, through a sum of more or less accidental factors over which the artist has no control whatsoever. This process is lived by the viewer as part of his own experience, and is among the core values to be found in this kind of artwork. Its absence is one of the keys to understanding the ineffectuality of street images when they are simply transferred to a canvas. This has been a basic concern for Eltono, as well as his main source of inspiration, when conceiving projects for art spaces. It forms the base of Chinchetas, as well as of Pubblico (2009) or Branco de España (2010), two of his best projects. All these series are games that let the artist exploit the mentioned form-generating factors in a controlled way, with two goals: on one hand, to observe mutations of his graphic vocabulary he would never have conceived, on the other – more significant for the present discussion – to generate indoor pieces that somehow encapsulate part of the organic force of the street. Chinchetas is only one of the tasks undertaken by Eltono as part of Deambular. The work schedule, started days before the exhibition space was opened – totally empty at first – to the public, and which continued until two weeks into the exhibition, also included several contextual paintings, produced at night without permission on neglected doors in the old city, and a series of murals painted on the walls of the exhibition space based on data generated by the whole of the activities. • The main tool available in the exhibition space for working with pieces produced in the street is of course documentation, photography in particular. The problem arises when pieces such as Eltono’s contextual paintings, characterized by their austerity regarding materials, are reproduced with the standards of the art 8
market, that is, large and expensive photographic prints. Something is not quite right when inherently free and inclusive artworks are artificially turned into limited copies, are privatized and reserved for a small audience. When pieces that only make sense as part of our subjective experience of the city, pieces that are born, mutate and die along with us, are turned into eternal, alien objects. Two of the street paintings made by Eltono in Vitoria have been photographed together with their context, and are presented in the exhibition space as mural reproductions in which the piece appears in a 1:1 scale. The use of this proportion aims to make the most of the limited ability of photography to evoke the multidimensional experience of the encounter with a piece in the street. As an alternative to large-scale printouts, the exhibition team has installed two mural mosaics made up of A3 sheets, printed on the desktop machines in the museum’s offices, and attached to the walls with pins. The goal is to circumvent some of the problems described in the preceding paragraph, replacing budgets with close techniques and materials, and with a physical involvement in the production process that the viewer can read in the outcome. As opposed to the product of a large-scale industrial printer, which is, for the common viewer, something closer to the world of magic than to the world of the intelligible, these mosaics let the viewer guess the way they have been born and have lived, and envision what can happen to them in the future. This same motivation is behind the method followed by the artist in producing the murals in the museum, transferring the trajectories to the wall through holes in an unwieldy handmade map, instead of going for the easy solution an image projector would have provided. The mural series is a generative experiment akin to the ones produced by Eltono in recent years, although its formgenerating agent is not, in this case, the action of the pedestrian, but the wanderings of the artist through his work day. The streets appear more or less wide on the mural routes according not to their physical dimension, as a utilitarian reading of the terrain would dictate, but according to the breadth of the relation the artist has had with them through time. A form of subjective cartography close to that of lettrist psychogeography. The interventions with small coloured stickers constitute the most stimulating part of the show, and the one that affects the environment in a more effectual and constructive way. When the 9
artist proposed the project, it immediately brought to mind the small stickers – simple and discreet but of multiple colours and motifs – which the workers who deliver leaflets used in Madrid to mark the gates they had already delivered to. Both are tactics that aim to go unnoticed by the average pedestrian, but are full of meaning for those eyes that know what to look for. This model of encrypted communication in public space has been used historically by all kinds of minorities, from early Christians, gipsies and hobos, to – in a legal context in this case – masonic lodges. Not forgetting, in an obviously visible strata but with a comparably cryptic stance, the contemporary culture of graffiti. The stickers are a game built on this fundamental key of human sensibility. They give the viewer the opportunity to feel part of something that happens before everyone’s eyes, but that only a few other people understand, or even perceive. These stickers are part of an already long list of devices conceived by Eltono to induce a two-way flow between the street and the exhibition space, one of the earliest and most recurrent goals in the artist’s career. They operate as the link that lets the viewer project his aesthetic experience beyond the exhibition space, and make it part of his daily involvement with the city. From a technical point of view, the stickers are an ingenious solution, noticeable enough to be visible to those who look, but discreet enough to allow for their accumulation over days without causing a reaction from the City’s street-cleaning crews. All of it while shaping a densely populated network of generative murals as minimal in their scale – a quality that will probably grant them longevity beyond what is usual in this kind of intervention – as they are surprising in the cryptic solidity of their forms, and in the way they magnetize the landscape from a disarmingly unpretentious position. Observing the small coloured dots on the pipes, one is not tempted to suspect them of being just another commercial decoy. Trivial as this may sound, it actually is a feat in the stuffy atmosphere that both outdoor advertising – particularly illegal – and some kinds of street art have contributed to build. In these times of the terminal spectacularization of the current, what is natural is to aim for modest solutions, in whose humility rests the ability to make the city speak, to make the city spin around them.
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To start the series Chinchetas, the artist strolls through Vitoria in search for disused premises with wooden doors or windows. He then uses drawing pins to position on the wood some simple compositions made of coloured card he has previously cut in the gallery space. After this, random pedestrians progressively change the compositions by moving the drawing pins and removing – in some cases also repositioning – the pieces of card. Eltono and a photographer make rounds to observe and record these changes. In a workshop space set up in the gallery – and later left there as part of the exhibition – the artist progressively produces a series of paintings on paper. These are life-size reproductions of the different phases that have been recorded, including the last phase, in which all the cards have already disappeared.
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Each drawing in this mural series records the journeys made by Eltono during the various tasks of a working day for the project Deambular. From tasks relating to the exhibited works – the paintings he made in the street at night and the Chinchetas series – including the search for locations, the carrying out of interventions and the documentation of results, to his comings and goings from the Museum, as well as secondary tasks such as the purchase of materials or a visit to a radio station for an interview. Journeys unrelated to the work also appear, such as the route he took to a restaurant where he dined, the bars where he relaxed, or the hotel where he slept every night. Using as a template a big map of Vitoria, later left on the floor of the gallery as part of the installation, Eltono begins each working day by drawing on the wall the route he had taken on the previous day. Each colour corresponds to a day of the week. The streets appear as fine lines if the artist walked through them only once, and become thicker depending on the number of times he walked through them on that day.
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Eltono has used small coloured stickers to mark on the street the places he has passed by. Each colour corresponds to a day, in the same manner as on the mural maps. By following the stickers, viewers can reproduce the maps at their own pace as they walk through the streets of Vitoria.
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INDEX 5 Essay 14 Chinchetas 20 Paintings 24 Mural enlargements 26 Maps 3 4 Stickers
Deambular took place between 6 July and 2 September 2012 at Artium, Museum-Center of Contemporary Art, Vitoria-Gasteiz. Curated by Javier Abarca and Sergio GarcĂa. Eltono: Deambular is the first publication in the series Urbanario Monographs. Published by Urbanario in Villaverde, Madrid, October 2012. Edition and texts: Javier Abarca Photography: Irene Moratinos Graphic design: Urbanario Images appear by courtesy of the artist urbanario.es /en /monographs /deambular ISSN 2255-131X urbanario.es /en
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