Street Art in the NYTimes – "these works point beyond the self"

Seph Rodney, New York’s Sidewalk Prophets Are Heirs of the Lascaux Cave Artisans, NYTimes,Aug. 6, 2020.

Those early artisans [Lascaux, France] drew these creatures over and over, likely fascinated by their forms and their powers, but also intuiting that whatever happened to the animals would almost certainly be a harbinger of what would happen to humans. The presence of the bison and stags, their physical fitness and numbers, their mass migrations would have indicated the onset of plagues or cataclysmic weather systems. Containing some 15,000 paintings and engravings from the Upper Paleolithic era, the caves in Southwestern France were not simply an exhibition space for local talent. They essentially constituted a public square where a community shared critical knowledge.

These portraits and discrete stories are not very different from our contemporary forums: the street art adorning boarded-up storefronts in New York City. They tell us about our shared political realities, the people we coexist with in social space and the ways in which our stories and fates are tied together. If you walk the streets of SoHo, the alleys of the Lower East Side, and heavily trafficked avenues in Brooklyn, as I did over the last few weeks, you will see these symbols and signs and might wonder at their meanings. What became apparent to me is that in the intervening millenniums between those cave paintings and the killing of George Floyd, the messages we share, like the sociopolitical circumstance that impel them, have become more complex.

Now street artists take account of the qualified legal immunity protecting police officers, the Black Lives Matter movement and the ramifications of a dysfunctional democracy, among other realities, using a well-developed visual language of cultural memes that illustrate the ideological battles among regional, racial and cultural factions. When we see the image of thin, green-skinned, bipedal beings with teardrop-shaped black apertures for eyes, we typically read “alien.” But when I see the image of such a creature holding a sign that reads “I can’t breathe,” I grok an urgent message: Even aliens visiting from light years away understand the plight of Black people in the United States because this situation is so obviously dire.

Today’s street paintings contain dispatches that proliferate across the city sphere — lovely, challenging, angry, remonstrative and even desperate. There are two critical things to note about them. They are different from graffiti, which to my eyes is egocentric and monotone, mostly instantiating the will of the tagger over and over again. I am here and you must see me, is the message.

The street artists in these works point beyond the self, to larger, collective issues. The other pressing point is that these images in chalk, paint and oil stick are ephemeral. Between the time I walked these districts and alerted the photographer to document them, five images had already disappeared. One was a depiction of the transgender freedom fighter Marsha P. Johnson, whose image was marked in chalk on the sidewalk in the ad hoc tent city created near Chambers Street a few weeks ago. It’s since been cleared out by police officers.