User:Katpepper13/Urban Surrealism

Overview
Urban Surrealism is an art scene prominent in architecture, drawing and painting, literature, music and drama, where emphasizing the unorthodox, bizarre and novelty parts of an artistic piece, while retaining simplicity, is key. It is inspired by comedy and satire, and has an amusing personality as a genre. An important element of urban surrealism is a rather comical approach to the high class, or the ruling class, which means that urban surreal art, with its high quality, may attract the aristocracy, while still being casually produced regarding its structure. Urban surrealism, since its early integration to its prominence today, is commonly and effectively applied to its city environment often to function as contrast to the infrastructure it imposes on, with ulterior motives and meanings inapplicable to the livelihoods of upper class private spheres.

Postmodernism
The practice of curating art on, and around urban settings became a recognized art form during the Postmodernism era, in which authoritarian and private spheres began prioritizing creative components in their city frameworks. Postmodern developments allotted more resources and spatial volumes for art to be situated in the city. The collapse of the Modern era commenced during the late 1960’s and the postmodern era was marked by the models in which Western culture continued to progress. Traits of postmodernism are insistent on deserting the traditional conventions unkempt throughout modernism; conventions and traditions made known through their philosophical and literary presences in media. The postmodernist value for change from the established societal ‘norms’ generated a higher social and political desire for Contemporary art within the realm of society and its functionality.

Street Art
Street art takes form in visual art methodology like painting, sculptural instalments or interactive pieces, and specifically in the form of Graffiti. The act of graffiti entails vandalism on city infrastructures, typically with spray paint, and it has developed consistent traits within the practice making it a reputable art form. Its artists gain notoriety through the use of tags and repeated symbols. The illegal and unauthorised nature of most graffiti and street art executions insinuate the simultaneous notion of protesting the city it vandalises, more specifically the private spheres within the city which hold the highest levels of political power. Street arts act as communicative tools instigated by the public and operate throughout the disrupting of existing urban structures and application of new contexts. Street art is not always unsanctioned, and public artworks are often commissioned by the city leaders in attempts to distinguish the city and its identity.

National Endowments for the Arts
Further evincing the newfound desirability for profound creative genres, as well as their integration into the Western hemisphere’s frameworks, would be the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), officiated as a congressional establishment in the United States in 1965. The organisation remained funded by the American Congress, and served the intent to encourage and prolong artistic production through fundings, sponsorships, and publicity. The NEA contributed to the initiation of urban surrealism as a foundational creative practice of the postmodern period with the first Public art piece the organization sponsored being Alexander Calder’s ultramodern public instalment La Grande Vitesse. The piece continued urban inspirations for a more decorated and appealing visual structure.

The Significance of the City
The use of the city as both medium and context to Visual arts is a uniquely effective manner of asserting oneself within urban foundations to engage with the power spheres as well as the marginalized spheres. The specificity of urban settings over alternatively rural or suburban areas is the opportunity for  engaging with such distinguished populations which is prominent in larger capital cities over smaller, less populated and non-authoritarian dwellings. The city is a primitive site of political actions and establishments, and it is fast paced, busy, and exceedingly diverse, similar to art that emerges within and over it.

Architecture as Surreal Media
The visual role of Architecture is to constitute the identity of its surroundings and account for various aesthetics eminent in urban culture. These aesthetics, as of recent decades, are heavily interconnected with surrealist arts, in the newly emerged mass appreciation of the unorthodox. Exclusively visual functions of urban infrastructure materialise less conventionally, and rather aim to stand out as a subject of admiration, regardless of the building's internal motives.

City Spaces
Dividend areas within urban geographies timelessly expose the imperial and capitalist values rendered in current society and perennial corruptions within Western culture and Capitalism are still majorly enforced. This depicts the city as a certain breeding ground for division. The frameworks of many cities stimulate division, through the existence of marginalized spaces, and representational spaces. Marginalised city spaces are areas which receive little government funding, and are considerably less developed than representational city spaces which include communal areas like town squares and parks, which contribute to the city’s identity, hence quality and success. Marginalised city spaces are typically rendered as so due to conservative perspectives of the communities within them, oftentimes based on racial differences and class statuses. Due to authoritarian neglect, these are areas subject to heightened crime, poverty, and drug/substance abuse. Urban art that situates itself in marginalized spaces is frequently in reference to its underdeveloped nature, and artists attempt to represent the life within the neighbourhoods as unjust, and as equally deserving of opportunity and successes as their representational counterparts. Marginalized urban art conforms to surrealist tropes as surrealist art itself is existent on the basis of unconventional and underrepresented creative subjects.

Art Imitates Life
Surreal art is in part defined by the threats its existence makes to traditionally conservative values. Urban surrealism is the practice of unorthodox art by the unorthodox artist. The art of such a classification portrays the disproportionate struggles of socially excluded identities, and it imitates the difficult, mundane, or indifferent life experiences of minorities, just as representational art in representational spaces imitate the assets and advantages of imperial, western conforming.

Popularity
Apart from the presence of street arts in public settings and often accessed public locations, their fame is limited to the area in which they manifest. Recent technological and communicative developments throughout the past decades of postmodernism have as of late, allocated abstract environments where street arts and artists may be recognized for their pieces, as well as to expand the reach of the morals their works speak to. Almost ten years after the placement of Calder’s La Grande Vitesse, urban surrealism was additionally determined as an integral cultural value in the publishing of magazine Architectural Design’s  1978 issue on Architecture and Surrealism. The widespread acknowledgment of the surrealist art movement holding immense urban cultural significance further officiated the cohesive relation between architecture and the avant-garde.

Zines
Accessibility to site specific works has been enhanced through assimilated street cultures and livelihoods. The early productions of Zines contained records of relevant cultural events and happenings on small and inconspicuous scales within the underbelly of the city. In relation to the social spread of street artists and their collections throughout the city, zines throughout the 70’s and 80’s compiled imagery, texts, and advertisements for events or organisations that aim to exploit capital corruption and the western authorities that street arts tend to argue in the first place. Zines helped to establish a concrete and vast community of artists and underrepresented individuals alike.

The Internet
Throughout the early to late 90’s as zines were still effective and accessible means of community building, the internet invention was developed to serve extensive public purposes, including the introduction of cyber social spaces. Like zines, the communicative technology functioned as an interactional media to spread information and ideas past the limits of demographics. The use of early social media formations like blogs and online community bulletin boards required less physical resources and labour than that of zines, and was relatively limitless in the scale of populations that could be reached.