Pictoral Discourse
The Quest for the QS: Between Pictorial Narrative and Social Discourse
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Evelina Deyneka
Our paper is dedicated to the research we are carrying out on an artistic and social project named QS. It represents a network of graffiti, created by a group of anonymous semiprofessional artists (Cyop&Kaf), disseminated within Quartieri Spagnoli, a historical center of Naples. These quarters (San Ferdinando, Avvocata and Montecalvario) were built in the XVIth century to house the Spanish garrisons and, nowadays, are known for their poverty and criminality, as well as for their historical value. The street art project called “Quore Spinato” (phonetic equivalent of Cuore Spinato, literally “Thorny Heart,” image evoking the “Sacred Heart” of Jesus Christ), thus, has a double reference: the name of the city district (Quartieri Spagnoli) and the metaphor of mercifulness in relation to the “persecuted persecutors.” Mural paintings which constitute this project are of great interest from cultural, artistic and social viewpoints. Their symbolic pictorial narratives are full of everyday life references and represent an implicit codified discussion of pressing problems within the local community. At the same time, they are real little masterpieces of the contemporary art, woven from artistic, literary, cultural, historical hypertexts and personal psychological obsessions of their authors. Previously, we have already studied different aspects of this remarkable “social art” phenomenon. In particular, we have analyzed a “nomadic” nature of these paintings. Another research project allowed to reveal an interesting color symbolism (a kind of “motivated suprematism”) in their representational system. The present study concerns the relation between pictorial narrativity and social discoursiveness of these paintings.
Sanctioning Art, or a Taming of the Shrew: The Graffiti to Gallery Dis-Continuum
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Thomas Houser
Since making their first cave wall paintings, our ancestors have expressed personal, societal, and political agendas with graffiti. Archeologists have uncovered examples from ancient cultures around the world. In the 1960s, a universal explosion of graffiti ignited within the hip-hop counter-culture in New York. It spread rapidly across the United States, Europe, and Asia. To this day public attitudes and legal sanctions towards graffiti vary dramatically from country to country, even city to city. Punishments for illicitly painting graffiti on vehicles and buildings range from fines and imprisonment to caning. Harsh punishments still prevail in some repressive regimes. However, over the past two decades attitudes towards graffiti and street murals have arisen that embrace, or at least acknowledge street artworks as meaningful and relevant forms of expression. Some community art programs provide opportunities for street artists with no gang affiliations to express themselves constructively. Cities from Moscow, to New York, Los Angeles, and Singapore provide sanctioned walls for graffiti artists and muralists to create and display work temporarily. To the chagrin of many street artists, galleries have mounted exhibits of transplanted street art. Diverse museums dedicated to graffiti have opened in cities scattered around the world, including Berlin, St. Petersburg, Amsterdam, and New York. This paper places special emphasis on sanctioned and unsanctioned graffiti and public murals documented by the author, in countries including (from East to West) Russia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece, Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, and the United States. An ultimate question remains: if it’s institutionalized, is it graffiti?
Lysistrata in Cairo: Maintaining Values While Extending the Limit
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jillian Campana
This paper details a 2017 American University in Cairo production of Ellen McLaughlin’s adaptation of Lysistrata. It discusses the challenges and highlights of producing a play in Egypt that advances female sex positivism, advocates strongly for the influence of women’s voices in politics and promotes gender equality. Though AUC students, who tend to be from the educated and privileged class, are possibly less exposed to the inequality most of the country’s females experience, the traditional Egyptian social order is affected by pervasive gender discrimination and female sexual oppression. Examples of such oppression are everywhere, in the street, home and the workplace and while the American University in Cairo strives to mitigate such injustice, it does seep onto campus. Producing Lysistrata as part of our campus season was an overt effort to educate the student body (both audience members and those involved in the play). We wanted to offer young women a voice and agency in their intellectual and sexual expressions (albeit, through performing characters separate from themselves) and to open up for discussion the power dynamic in male-female relationships.
