immanence

BLDGBLOG‘s Geoff Manaugh raises challenging questions about Franco-Tunisian “undercover photographer” and graffiti/poster artist JR‘s exhibition of photos called The Hills Have Eyes. JR’s story is that he found a camera on a Paris subway station platform in the year 2000 and has since gone around photographing suburban ghetto rioters in Paris, impoverished and abused women in Africa, break-dancers, graffiti artists, snowboarders, and other outsiders, and pasting photo blow-ups of his work on city walls and in war zones around the world. He has taken close-ups of Israeli and Palestinian faces, then pasted these as huge posters on the Wall separating Israel from the West Bank. “The Hills Have Eyes” plasters the walls of favelas in Rio de Janeiro with the eyes of their dwellers.

In the tradition of artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, there’s an element of the ghetto speaking back in his work. There’s the raw energy and intensity, the racial otherness and sense of mystery about his own identity. And there’s also the whiff here of the art world canonizing an artist from the slums, so that one wonders who is patting themselves on the back for their liberal inclusiveness and who is selling himself with cheap labor from friends on the street. Manaugh asks:

“Are you visually transforming the ghetto so that those who live in the city below no longer have to look up and see themselves surrounded by blight? They will see, instead, a hot new contemporary artist on display? Or could you visually augment the favela in a way that positively impacts both the self-image of, and the quality of life for, the people living there while not erasing the presence of that ghetto from the visual awareness of the central city dwellers?”

And, I would add, isn’t Manaugh’s (and my) raising these questions unfair in relation to JR unless they are raised all the more in relation to other artists whose race or social class origins are more typical of the art world? Some of the comments on Manaugh’s blog suggest as much, i.e., that just because someone is good at what they do doesn’t mean they shouldn’t make a good living at it.

But there’s also something about the message here that undercuts the art world’s individualism and reaches to, and preaches for, a global level of common humanity.

One of the growing artistic trends of the last two decades is a globalism that ranges from films like Ron Fricke’s Baraka and Alejandro Iñárritu’s Babel to Matt Harding and Melissa Nixon’s viral YouTube video Dancing to the marketing campaigns of companies like Benetton (with its “United Colors” and Colors Magazine) and the imagery of Buddhist monks drinking Pepsi or chanting the benefits of an Apple computer. I want to be able to include the work of indigenous and Third World artists in that list, but for the most part those who deliver this globalist message are corporate globalizers, First World liberals, or upwardly-mobile ghetto artists like JR speaking to a global audience; actual grassroots artists generally speak out of their own experience and to their more immediate context. What I’d like to see is more of a filling in of the gaps between these poles, a breaking down of the “geometry of power” (in Doreen Massey’s words) that holds the pyramid in place whereby its base serves as fodder for the global-entrepreneurial creative class which in turn serves capital. Is JR’s work an indication of this happening?