As I maneuvered down M St. Saturday night towards the Wall Snatchers exhibit at the Washington Project for the Arts’ gallery, dodging oblivious yuppies, club-goers and light poles, it struck me—not just in Georgetown, but everywhere I’ve been thus far in the D of C, that there’s a shortage of street culture. The District seems to be missing hoodie-clad vandals with backpacks full of spray paint.
Wall Snatchers provides us with an odd substitute: it cages a medium that is, at its core, public. It locks behind plate glass windows a mode of expression that needs street air to breathe. Wall Snatchers is very obviously a constructed exhibit that lacks the spontaneous exclamation of color that can be found on the cold cement of a Brooklyn street.
I steered myself into the gallery, blinded for a second by the bright fluorescent light pouring out of the glass façade and found myself standing in a grimy, white-walled, tiled warehouse. In the center sat an installation of surfaces on which the featured artists had reproduced various street murals that adorn dingy brick walls and buildings in Boston, Florida, New York and the District itself.
This art bears no relation to the street art with which we are familiar. Street art is divorced from other genres by the constraints that guerilla artists face in decorating somber city blocks. With finite time and a fairly limited set of materials, artists are often unable to use the techniques used on the walls shown in the gallery. Many of the pieces looked more like the handiwork of a print shop, covered in perfectly cut font-like character stencils. It left me wondering whether its artists are infused with the renegade, bedraggled spirit of their progenitors. Is it really street art if they’re not scanning over their shoulders for cop cars, ready to run at any second?
There is interesting, young art to be seen here and some fun to be had with markers and paints in the do-it-yourself section at the back of the warehouse. But without the danger, the spontaneity of creation and the public nature of street art, one can no longer call it such.
