Urban Art

1

Review

CHADORS AND GRAFFITI, EU FLAGS AND ICONIC

BODIES: FOUR CONTEMPORARY VISUAL ARTISTS

By Maria Petrides

Ð''Work grounded in protest - against fascism, moral hypocrisy, the

Vietnam War, and so on - is the closest thing we have to an art that

zeroes in on a crisis of public conscience and attempts to provoke

viewers to think about their own relationship to a social upheaval

close at hand.'1

Contemporary art stretches beyond the boundaries of an

individual medium and of a single national border. With

this encouragement of diversity, fluidity and mobility, art

becomes a form of social empowerment by the very

surrender of singularity. Reviewing the work of four

artists - the Turkish-Cypriot fashion designer and

installation/video artist Hussein Chalayan; the British

graffiti artist known as Banksy; the New York installation

artist Spencer Tunick; and the New York-based multi-

media artist Anna Lascari - this piece of commentary

aims to show how, in the late twentieth and early twenty-

first century, certain art expresses its resistance through

various media: whether it be social or political resistance,

or resistance to any type of Ð''conformity' which may

restrict the potential found in mobility and hybridity.

Hussein Chalayan's oeuvre crosses the boundaries of

fashion into sculpture, furniture objects into architecture.

If one of the literary concerns of the nineteenth century2

was the Ð''form' and Ð''content' divide in literature,

complicating the process of Ð''content' as it develops into

Ð''form', and locating how Ð''form' becomes an expression

of emerging Ð''contents' and ideas, we may find that our

century is not necessarily free of this separation.

In 1891, Oscar Wilde writes in Ð''The Soul of Man

Under Socialism',

Form and substance cannot be separated in a work of

art; they are always one [Ð'...]. Style recognizes the beauty

of the material it employs, be that material one of

words or of bronze, of colour or of ivory, and uses that

beauty as a factor in producing the aesthetic effect [Ð'...].

1

Dan Cameron, 'Inconsolable' in Doris Salcedo, p.9 (Dan

Cameron is senior curator of the New Museum of

Contemporary Art, and contributor to the magazine Art

Forum).

2

Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and Gustave Flaubert are examples

of several writers of aestheticism who began to emphasize the

importance of style and aesthetics in literature, complicating

notions about finding Ð''meaning' merely in the subject of a text.

For more on this see Pater's Appreciations, Wilde's The Soul of

Man Under Socialism and Flaubert's work Ð''On Realism' in Oeuvres

ComplÐ"Ёtes, Correspondance, p.90-95.

The subject is conditioned by the temperament of the

artist, and comes directly out of it.3

The materials of the creator, whether it be paint, objects,

words or ideas, are, innately, forms that the artist chooses

because of the potential s/he attributes to them. In this

way, content and form are indissoluble. On the

inseparability of form and idea, Gustave Flaubert writes,

It is impossible to extract from a physical body the

qualities which really constitute it colour, extension, and

the like Ð'- without reducing it to a hollow abstraction, in

a word, without destroying it; just so it is impossible to

detach the form from the idea, for the idea only exists

by virtue of the form.4

If Flaubert makes a distinction between the two, it is to

esteem form over content since, for Flaubert, content,

the idea, needs to be exhibited in a given form.

Nonetheless, these terms return to remind us that,

perhaps, we aren't always ready to think that they are one

and the same in different ways. The