You don’t know what art is?
Swinging through the city like a winged shadow, the Phantom Street Artist wants to burst the South Sea Bubbles that hold contemporary society and the contemporary art world in thrall.
Once upon a time the Phantom sprayed the streets of Los Angeles with human silhouettes, and gained international recognition on the cover of an equally burst-intending, mega-selling album by Rage Against the Machine. But graffiti, which the Phantom describes as “an indigenous voice to challenge oppressive social and cultural notions of conformity,” became “a gimmick, marketed by elite private interest groups whose underhand designs result in the gentrifying of our communities.”[1]
Rejecting the recuperation, the Phantom expanded his practice. “The new school graffiti artist,” he explains, “expresses themselves through protest with a hybrid of multi-disciplinary, comprehensive, expressive forms. Referencing semiotics, post structuralism, neo-murals, media-staged performance, tagged barrio design, and transcendental throw-ups, they practice a new language that is beyond hermeneutics.”
Dancing with the ghost of Expressionist Emile Nolde, the Phantom’s hybridity aims to make images “so sharp and genuine that they never could be hung in scented drawing rooms.” [2] They include an equalizing conflation of fascist, patriotic, and commercial insignias; Abraham Lincoln as drunken sot; red carpet performances with an unhappy dwarf; and a long-standing cage-fight challenge to art world insiders Shepherd Fairey and Jeffrey Deitch, the former director of LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art.
Using aggressively gestural brushwork, a garish palette, and distorted figures, Nolde violated the bourgeois sensibilities of early 20th-century Europe, which sought to overlay swamps of inequality with a lace-trimmed doily. Using parody and self-parody in ways that only someone with a decades-long history of street activity and Rage Against the Machine-levels of street-credibility could pull off, the Phantom similarly contravenes the bourgeois liberal sensitivities of our age. He does it with tastelessness and uncool; with a Kaleidoscope of unKool that sends squirms of embarrassment down the liberal spine.
The Phantom checks the right boxes in the art world’s unwritten codes of correctness: working-class Chicano street artist, check; détournement of popular tropes and commercial culture that turns “the expressions of the capitalist system against itself,”[3] check; an extensive art-theory vocabulary, check. But then, Diogenes-like, he makes a dwarf cry and pisses all over the agora.
As the Tate Gallery defines it, deconstruction “involves discovering, recognizing and understanding the underlying and unspoken and implicit assumptions, ideas and frameworks of cultural forms.”[4] “But what’s the point of institutional critique,” says the Phantom, “if the institution refuses to apply it to the inside”?
It’s in the squirm that rupture happens. Was it inevitable that the scented “assumptions, ideas and frameworks” of early 20th century Europe led to the First World War? To what inevitabilities will today’s perfumed but unspoken frameworks lead? I may not know what art is, but I know what I want it to do. “Art Saves Lives?” – yes, but only when it kicks against “radical chic” and the liberal pricks.
Janet Owen Driggs
Published by California State University Stanislaus, 2017
For “The Phantom Street Artist – MAKE AMERIKA JACK’D AGAIN”
NOTES
[1] Quotations from the Phantom Street Artist derive from conversations between the artist and the author, 2010-2017
[2] Emile Nolde, reported in Richard L. Lewis, Susan Ingalls Lewis: The Power of Art, Wadsworth Publishing 2013, p.397
[3] Douglas B. Holt: Cultural Strategy Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands, Oxford University Press 2010, p.252
[4] Tate Online Glossary: www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/d/deconstruction, accessed 11/22/2017