Arte, pixo e política: dissenso, dissemelhança e desentendimento

Abstract

In spite of the uniformity, repetition and pattern shaping their architectural landscapes, almost every metropolis of the 21st century has been intensely bombarded, marked, drawn and sketched as if they formed a large and plural urban canvas. The boundaries of what is known as public sphere, in opposition to the private sphere, the ties between actions classified as legal and illegal, the permeability that surrounds urban art and interventions designated as vandal have frequently confused and shuffled discussions carried out by the media, public policies and even by agents who intervene in the city. Based on a kind of anthropology that operates to merge the use of images and the webs of narrative, this paper aims to approach the emergence in Fortaleza of a form of tagging that narrows the connections between politics and art, and tears up each one of these signifiers. In the duration of this research, we came to understand that it does not seem relevant whether tagging is art or not, nor if it will sensitize curators, critics and gallery owners, considering that it “breaks” in some sort with the “taste” for pieces created to embellish, represent and render meaning. In one way or another, tags point out to other aesthetic references, to plural forms of appreciation and circulation of images in the city. The tag seems to escape therefore from the representational, iconic regime, and alludes to singular forms of appreciation and perception of a kind of art marked by a mantle of the indiscernible, of difficult categorization, of what produces noise and disagreements.