Nuart Journal – #2 Eloquent Vandals
“The theme of Issue II – ELOQUENT VANDALS – is a provocative link to street art and urban culture’s delinquent roots and the ‘creative joy of destruction’ – evidenced most recently in Banksy and Blu’s high profile acts of auto- iconoclasm, but also present in a multitude of everyday, human scale, unsanctioned urban interventions. The rise of festival-sponsored neoliberal muralism sits uneasily with these ungovernable forms of urban creativity. Nuart Journal Issue II contains contributions that celebrate the work of street art’s eloquent vandals, and papers that critically examine attempts to cultivate, instrumentalise, commodify, and ‘protect’ the art of the streets.”
Only half a year after the birth of the Nuart Journal the second issue was released in April 2019. Following the editors intentions the No.2 “marks another step towards realising a more ‘critical street art.’” As the whole concept of the journal is opened to submissions, whether full-length papers or shorter experimental essays, the recent version includes again a broad variety of peer-reviewed contributions from the Netherlands, Australia, Russia, U.S.A., UK Sweden, etc..
Although most of the texts do not particularly feature topics of classic graffiti in the tradition of name-writing, the articles are never the less interesting and relevant due to an overlap of similarities in between street art, graffiti and other sub genres of urban art. On 112 pages Eloquent Vandals is again divided into three main chapters:
I. Original articles • Alison Young: Art and Belongig: On Place, Displacement, and Placelessness • Reuben Woods: Secondary Vandals: The Performances of Uncommissioned Urban Art in Post-Earthquake Christchurch • Lindsey Mancini: Graffiti as Gift: Street Art’s Conceptual Emergence • Enrico Bonadio: Does Preserving Street Art Destroy its ‘Authenticity’?
II. Visual/Experimental • Jeff Ferrell: Sometimes the City • Oskolki (Осколки): Black Bombing • Jens Besser: PADiGLiONE iN MOViMENTO. A Vandals’ Pavilion during the 2017 Venice Biennale • Georgis Stampolidis: Urban Creativity in Abandoned Places • Daniël de Jongh: 5 Days of Work for 1 Night of Glamour • Jaime Rojo: Words Matter • Vlady: Art Underground
III. Interviews/Talks/Books • Christian Omodeo: Vandal Curator? • Vittorio Parisi: Book Review: Urban Art: Creating the Urban with Art • Faith XLVII: Ex Animo: A Chapter in Time • Milu Correch: Decolonising Artivism
Now available at Hitzerot.