Article
Anna Waclawek. Graffiti and Street Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 2011
Anna Waclawek's book is an example of the new perspective on graffiti and street art. It focuses on the role or the graffiti and street art in urban visual environment and the role of urban space and urban visuality in production and perseption of these phenomena. The book introduces the system of codes and convention attached to street art and graffiti to the wide audience.
A particular case which has been chosen for this paper deals with a unique personal project by Hamburg graffiti writer Oz, one of the oldest and prolific participants of Hamburg graffiti and street art scene. His personal project, successful in terms of public recognition (and public hate), includes 30 years of painting simple but incalculable symbols on nearly every surface in Hamburg. Oz presents a viewer with a different image of the city, creating an open and fluid urban “community of vision” as well as the conditions for “street art” to develop itself in the city in a very innovative way. The paper brings together several methodological fields: visual studies, which are comparatively less presented in the existing field of debates on street art, with more traditional sociology and social anthropology
This article consists of a publication of one of the most important graffiti-inscriptions on fragments of fresco plaster found in the course of excavations in 2014 in St. George’s Cathedral in Novgorod’s Yuriev Monastery. The graffito was a note recording the death of Prince Yaroslav Vladimirovich’s sons, Izyaslav and Rostislav, who according to evidence in the chronicle died in the early summer of 1198 and were buried in the monastery’s cathedral. The precise dates included in the text (the burial of Izyaslav on June 15th and the death of Rostislav on June 20th) shed light on the circumstances, in which on June 8, 1198 the foundations were laid for the Church of the Transfiguration on Nereditsa Hill, which is thought to have been founded in connection with the death of the Prince’s sons.
The article analyzes the evolution and forms of political graffiti in Russia 1990. First, the author problematizes the methods of analysis of political graffiti and graffiti function in a situation of civil activity. Secondly, the author shows that political graffiti of the 1990s. reflect a serious transformation of public opinion and civil society in Russia this period. Thirdly, the author concludes that the political graffiti became an illustration of the cultural reaction to trauma.