Sunday, September 4, 2011

anima man


And the big question is ... is this, indeed, "anima", as in "mind" - as in a thinking version of this guy, or is the artwork even more curtailed than this suggests: is it Animal Man, devil's horn and all?   He's just appeared on a wall at Sunset Junction, a particularly good area for street art big and small.   I've been using my Victorian pavement artists research as an excuse to start reading myself into the realm of urban street art in a more general way - what distinguishes permission-less posters on walls, and graffiti, and stickers on lampposts, and surprising murals, of course, is its counter-cultural style, in opposition to the mimic-ing of high art at its most cliched that formed the norm for Victorian pavement artists.   Los Angeles is endlessly full of the surprising and the inventive when it comes to street art (some of it political, some of it subversive, some of it just fun) and I completely delight in it.   At the same time, I'm getting fascinated by the transnationalism of street art, but nothing that I've read so far has satisfactorily explained quite how it spreads, and I think that I'll need to explore all kinds of alternative web sites and Flickr postings and other web-based records of people's unsanctioned decoration of public space.

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