We recently read the article Essay: Willem de Kooning and Wildstyle by Daniel Feral on 12ozprophet.com. We wanted to share some quotes from the essay and hope you head over and read the complete essay here. It will be articles like this that will further, and help with the dialogue of our culture. We also hope to contribute more in depth articles and essays throughout the year. They can help educate as well bring new perspectives to look at graffiti. Daniel Feral does an excellent job articulating and referencing some key concepts about graffiti and art history. We are a big proponent of the idea that there are clear similarities to what is happening now and past art history. Its great to see another writer take the time to bring these thoughts to paper in a clear essay. Daniel Feral recently co-curated PANTHEON: A history of art from the streets of NYC Exhibition and continues to write about street art and graffiti as a contributor for 120zprophet.
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“Even if the early graffiti writers and street artists did not know who Willem de Kooning was, he and the other Action Painters can still be considered their theoretical and cultural heritage. If nothing else the tendency for any movement to develop from a primitive style to a highly complex expression of the original form is fully evident in the development of Wildstyle in the late seventies from the primitive scrawl of early taggers in the late sixties. Wildstyle, in the late part of the seventies and early eighties, was an apotheosis of style equivalent to the development of Cubism from Fauvism via Symbolism and Impressionism, and also similar to the way AbEx developed from a simpler form geometric abstraction.”
“The Feral Diagram illustrates these connections with a 2-D info-graphic, charting the revolutionary change in Fine Art History as Graffiti and Street Art became the most relevant movement(s) throughout the world, as evidenced by their popularity and influence. As time has passed, because of the successes of the Pop Art movement as well which allowed for the acceptance of the movement into the art world in the first place, Graffiti and Street Art have continued to grow in acceptance and popularity, becoming the most relevant movement of the late twentieth century and at the start of the new millennium.”
