The relationship between politics and art continues to be one of the central strands of the Crick Centre’s work. In this blog, our new Post Doctoral Researcher, Dr Holly Eva Ryan, recounts an interview she conducted with the Brazilian street artist Paulo Ito, and reflects on the importance of street art as a method of political engagement.
In 2014, The Conversation Australia asked me to produce a short opinion piece on political street art and the World Cup in Brazil. Taking the opportunity to explore a cross-section of Sao Paulo’s street artists and their responses to the sports mega-event, I set out to demonstrate the power of street art as a communicative and expressive medium that can cut both ways – it might work with the prevailing political system or against it. However, street art rarely fits into such a neat dichotomy of ‘for’ or ‘against’.
This is one of the points underlined by street artist Paulo Ito, whose painting of a boy served up a football instead of his dinner sparked worldwide interest in anti-FIFA activism during the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. As global audiences disengaged from World Cup fever, I caught up with Paulo and asked him some questions about his art and his politics.
HR: Paulo, when did you begin to paint on the street?
PI: I started painting in 2000. But 3 years before that I used to just paint with friends in the campus of Unicamp where I graduated in the fine arts.
HR: Does your ‘boy with football’ have a name? Why did you paint him?
PI: No, he doesn’t have a specific name but I personally like to call the character Meme. Normally my paintings have some critical message and with the Meme it was the same. I had the idea after seeing the French street artist Goin’s painting in Athens. His painting was of a starving boy with a ball at the bottom and there is the sentence ‘need food, not football’.
[Goin is a stencil artist whose work is known for its political undertones. His large scale intervention ‘need food, not football’ was painted in 2013 and shows a malnourished black child, on the streets of Athens. His painting can be viewed here]
HR: What do you want viewers to understand from Meme? How does he relate to the street art you have done in the past?
PI: I don’t want my works to have a single understanding. To me a good painting will propagate different interpretations and the image itself sometimes is more about feelings and therefore it should not be turned into words.
HR: How do you feel about the World Cup, and about the course of Brazilian politics more generally?
PI: I feel FIFA is very powerful and authorities obey them too much. The government [in Brazil] nowadays works much more against poverty when compared with the PSDB government which came before. But, in the coalition nowadays [there is an interest in working with] the rich, corporations, banking and financial systems and [there is an interest in] holding on to power itself.
HR: Across the world, your image inspired critique of FIFA and the PT. How was your painting received in Brazil?
PI: People used to say that everything is Dilma’s fault, and it is not true. The government itself has lot of problems, but in my opinion changing government will not fix anything. From my point of view Brazil needs to change its entire political system. [In contrast to the attention that I have received from journalists and media sources abroad] in Brazil itself, my painting had no answer from authorities and the media didn’t seem to care too much.
HR: It is notable that many of other street artists accepted corporate sponsorship to advertise for the World Cup. Do you feel that the World Cup divided street artists into two camps?
PI: No. I think individually each artist has his point of view but sometimes, as in this case, working pro World Cup could be a nice opportunity to gain employment. Probably, if it happened 10 years ago I couldn’t pass over this opportunity myself. Nowadays, being financially more stable, it is possible for me to do things differently. And at same time, in all of the history of art, artists have lived with this kind of contradiction of patronage, and we will keep living in this way.
Paulo’s comments reveal that making and engaging with street art is a complex political process, irreducible to ready-made categories and dichotomies. Building on his insights, I’d like to outline six key points that I think are crucial for understanding street art as an instrument and expression of politics today:
- The first thing to note is that street art, even when produced for specific political purposes is neither purely instrumental, nor can we attribute a single meaning to it. The way we interpret the images and text that we encounter on the street may depend very much upon how they line up against our own prior experiences, ideologies and pre-formed aesthetic preferences. For some, street art can be seen as a symbolic re-appropriation or ‘taking back’ of the public space, whilst for others it remains an act of vandalism.
- Authors including Lyman Chaffee describe street art as a medium of mass communication, with properties akin to other mass media like television, radio and the internet. To the extent that street art can be thought of as a mass medium, it is subject to processes of active interpretation and even resistance on the part of audiences. Arguably, it is here, in the gap between the production and reception of a work of art, that the real politics occurs – through the interlinked processes of seeing, feeling, negotiating and making sense of an image or intervention on the street.
- Moreover, street art encounters can have extended and cumulative impacts on audiences, inspiring reflection and evoking feeling, months, or even years on. Therefore, when thinking about the power of street art, it is important to note that the political beliefs and worldviews of audiences and the artists themselves may be usurped, transformed or solidified in gradual and non-explicit ways.
- An often under-acknowledged aspect of street art’s political power is its extra-discursive nature. By this, I mean that art connects with our senses and with our emotions in ways that words and text cannot. Moreover, whilst some street art interventions are carefully composed, others appear as spontaneous outpourings of sentiment. Here, we should be particularly attentive to the cathartic, even therapeutic effects of street art production; that it can provide a way of ‘working through’ negative national events and experiences. Some street art ‘outpourings’ carry across nations, cultures and borders. This was most explicit in the wave of uprisings in the Middle East and North African countries from 2011.
- The sharing of images through digital networks and social media platforms since the 1990’s has made street art increasingly visible across the world. Its popularity has not gone unnoticed by governments, some of whom have decriminalised graffiti or created free painting zones in urban centres. The political power that street art has long wielded as a type of ‘disturbance’ may be undermined by these shifts. It is true that artists have long grappled with the challenge of being beholden to patrons, including the state. Yet, in an age of increasing surveillance through an ‘internet of things’, street artists may find themselves increasingly compelled to work with the state rather than in its shadow.
- Online sharing of street art across the globe has given birth to an almost paradoxical set of processes, whereby street art styles and motifs have tended to converge, whilst simultaneously being (re)interpreted by more and more diverse audiences, each of which brings its own culture, experiences and machinations to the decoding process.
Bio
Dr Holly Eva Ryan is Post Doctoral Researcher in Politics, Art and Expression at the Crick Centre at the University of Sheffield. She can be found tweeting at @HollyERyan
Note: this article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Crick Centre, or the Understanding Politics blog series. To write for the Understanding Politics blog, email our editor Nicholas Try at [email protected]
