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Graffiti

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Jinalyn Garcia
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122 views3 pages

Graffiti

reading passage

Uploaded by

Jinalyn Garcia
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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READING PASSAGE 3 You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 28-40, wrich are based on Reading Passage 3 below, Graffiti The role of graffiti in the city is exemplified by Zevs' Dirty City Wall in Copenhagen ‘We are accustomed to the idea of authorised art, commissioned and sanctioned by religious institutions, the state or that private individual with the deep pocket. ‘Such art is entirely under the command of the poker- faced man with the serious purse. This is the story behind the marvels of the Renaissance and the years thereafter. In his oil sketches, you can see how Rubens danced to the not-so-delicate tunes of his patrons, agerandising a donor here, bringing down others at times. ‘Street art, on the other hand, is paid for by no one, and it is not for re-sale in the marketplace. It often comes into being thanks to some nocturnal daredevil with a taste for what is often regarded as criminal behaviout This is art made on the run, The studio is the actit’s pocket. The canvas on which they work is entirely. unprimed and unready for theie assault. The fact that it isat odds with the authorities means that artof this kind often feels hectic in mood, hasty in execution, urgenily political in its impulses, and prepared for the fact that it ‘may disappear again just as rapidly as it has appeared because those who see it may regard it as an offence to the eye. ‘Such art has an air of wild chancing about it. It hits out at consumerism, greed, hypocrisy and the money- fvclled chattering of the art establishment. In a world at the visual mercy of corporate branding, street artists such as Ron English, for example, re-make brand images. His is an art of disruption and violation, an art which exists to do harm to the seductive global culture of corporate advertising. ‘The best of graffiti art, such as that of the French grafiiti artist and ‘urban guerilla’ Zevs, often plays with ideas of danger and prohibition. It seems to laugh at what gives offence to those who dislike it so much. Zevs Produces some of his work with the aid of a high- pressure jet. Recently, he applied this technique to clean a stretch of unlovely, unacknowledged urban brick wall in Copenhagen, Denmark in such a way that what emerges from a century's accretion of grime and pollution was an image of wave upon wave of destructively engulfing flames, of which just fragments are shown in photographs. (This can be one of the problems with capturing street art with the camera: itis often difficult to contain on the page of a newspaper.) No one was ever burnt by a photo of a fire. Can you deface a building by cleaning it? Surely not. And yet some sort of violence has surely been done to its surface. ‘Zovs worked with the grain of what existed, the uneven surface of a sed brick wall, and what such a material seemed to evoke ~ the wall of a factory building: or terraced housing in a poor district. The modulation of tones ~ black, ochre, red, yellow and many points in between — was replicated in the flames themselves, which seemed to emerge from the wall es if they were some spiritual embodiment of its essential nature. This ghostly lashing of flames suggests the vanished power of industry. This unexpected depiction of flames on the side of the building also felt like a heartfelt expression of the fundamental energies of art beyond the tamed space of the gallery, art which had the freedom to be and 10 do whatever it wished st a moment of its own choosing. What is more, it tad no definable, containable

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