Street Art and Space

Abstract

To say that art usually depends on its context would be a truism.Nowadays there are fewer and fewer theorists who defend its absolute autonomy as if a work of art was a stand-alone being, entirely independent of place, time and even its author.Even if we tried to claim that, in the words of Clement Greenberg, a work of art is "something given, increate, independent of meanings, similars or originals" (Greenberg 1971: 6), and even if it is fully abstract, at the moment when it appears in the public space, it falls within an entire network of relations with the surface, space, time, motion and above all with the recipient.Whether it is a simple tag or a mural, a monument or an installation, regardless of individual intentions, the trace left by the artist in the public space will be always received in a particular environment.Street art is a particularly contextual type of art as its very source derives from interacting with a city, a street, a wall or a passer-by 1 .Moreover, these contexts are always changing.Official art of a public nature -architecture, monumental sculpture, urban design -is supposed to intentionally build the public space in a certain manner and is usually created in the space provided.Street art -on the contrary -is created where it is not expected, it changes the existing space in an unpredictable way and surprises.This change, however, is usually not fundamental or permanent.For this reason, Alison Young uses the term "situational art" (Young 2014: 32-33) 2 .Street art introduces minor changes 1 For the purpose of this text, the term "street art" is widely understood as various forms of artistic activities, legal as well as illegal, in the public space, excluding architecture and traditional monumental sculpture.I am, however, fully aware of conflicting opinions and the difficulty in defining this type of art, especially if its boundaries are placed based on the sociological point of view, in which street art is derived from illegal activities aimed at reclaiming the public space (Compare: Gralińska-Toborek, Kazimierska-Jerzyk 2013: 19-20).2 Although I do not agree with the author that the main two reasons why street art "provokes affective intensities within the spectator herself " are: "the artist's desire to make unauthorised images in the face of their prohibition" and "the fact of trespass in the transgression of lines drawing distinctions between »your« property and »mine«" (Young 2014: 32).The knowledge of the illegality of an image need not affect

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