War Bugs: Street Art as Performed Discourse in Bogotá

The Arts: 2nd Place (The Ohio State University Edward F. Hayes Graduate Research Forum)Historically, the embodied practice of making stencil or graffiti art has been uniquely heightened because of the fact that the artist is in danger of arrest during the creation of the work. This has led to anti-authoritarian posturing and interpretation by the artists and spectators. However, new commercial opportunities for urban artists and increasing acceptance of their art as art has led to the establishment of legal spaces for street art in some cities, including Bogotá. Theorists such as Jean Boudrillard, Dwight Conquergood, and others who have contributed to the theorization of graffiti have generally conceived of graffiti as textual, that is, they discuss graffiti in terms employed for the analysis of stable texts or artifacts. Graffiti artists acknowledge that their work is not stable; rather it is subject to amendment or deletion by other artists, by property owners, or by the authorities. For this reason, my analysis follows Diana Taylor’s distinction between the archive, or forms of documentation which are usually stable such as books, recordings, etc., and the repertoire, or systems of memory making which are temporal, embodied, and fluid. My project is to shift the theoretical perspective on graffiti away from the text/statement frame toward a performance/discourse frame. The visual landscape in public urban spaces is predominantly controlled by government or religious interests and corporate branding. Street art repertoires seek to interrupt this visual field, contesting the narratives of powerful interests and re-writing, or rather, over-writing the urban geography. If graffiti and stencil art implicitly critique the dominance of the visual landscape by corporate and government interests, is this criticism undermined when urban artists become commercially successful? How does that affect the political efficacy of the art? These are a few of the questions I begin to address in my ongoing research. In a country whose government is, even as I write, attempting to negotiate a peaceful resolution to decades-long conflict in which tens of thousands of lives have been lost, it is critical to examine the politically engaged cultural production of artists like Dj Lu, whose work contests dominant narratives and underscores links between corporate consumerism, the weapons which are supplied and disseminated in the support of neoliberal ideology, and the traumatized Earth violated by pollution and exploitation.A five-year embargo was granted for this item