‘Street Art San Francisco’ review
Political artist Josh MacPhee takes a critical look at the San Francisco art scene, and the book that's trying to capture it.
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I gotta say, from the minute I cracked open the spine of this book I was immediately nostalgic for San Francisco - a city that, strangely enough, I've never even lived in! 
But there was something extremely powerful about the streets of SF between 1997-2004, even for a visitor and outsider like myself.
Coming to the city, and the Mission District in particular, was like walking into a giant, explosive, exciting car crash of ideas, experiences, ideologies and people. The walls literally dripped with the shrapnel, covered with the remnants of 1970s and '80s murals, anti-gentrification screenprinted posters, art student graffiti, Latino gang markings, weirdo street artists, anarchist slogans, and billboards triumphantly announcing the dot-com and real estate booms. And for the most part this book does a great job of capturing that energy and feeling, carrying us through the blur.
Although Street Art SF is broken into sections, they are fairly hard to distinguish, which in many ways is a good thing, allowing the reader to flow from one style to another, fade between histories, jump between artists, just like a pedestrian on Valencia, Bryant or Mission streets would. Don't let the title fool you: this isn't just another edition pulled of the seemingly endless conveyor belt of dull "Street Art" book cash-ins. Though it was probably a smart marketing move to put street art first in the title, this is really a mural book that understands and values the contributions that street art and graffiti have added to the brew of public expression.
From an outsider's perspective the book is quite exhaustive, from the origins of the SF mural scene - thanks in no small part to Diego Rivera's 1930s/40s trips to the Bay Area - to the Billboard Liberation Front and everything in between. So many of the diverse artists that have added to the walls of SF are in here that it makes the head spin (including Rivera, Robert Crumb, Spain Rodriguez, Juana Alicia, Susan Kelk Cervantes, TWIST/Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen, Susan Greene, Ester Hernandez, Michael Roman, ESPO, Mona Caron, Scott Williams, SF Print Collective, Chris Ware, Rigo, Swoon, Cuba, Andrew Schoultz, Ray Patlan, Aaron Noble, Ivy Jeanne, Heart 101, Aaron Noble, and hundreds of others).
By carrying us back and forth through all these artists and history, the book helps express the larger bird's eye view of the Mission scene, something that is different and more than just a sum of its parts. But don't worry, most of those parts are here, too, and many of them not just captured in images, but also in the words and ideas of the artists. The pictures tell a million stories, but thankfully we're given some written history and stories too. Each page answers questions I've always had, including the origin of the thumb-sucking Wolverine painting in Clarion Alley; how the Balmy Alley murals came to be; and the names and pieces of stories of dozens of artists whose work I've admired on the street for years but knew little or nothing about.
Although I first started visiting SF in the mid-90s, it wasn't until 2001-2003 that I started spending significant time in the city and adding to the messages on the walls (full disclosure: one of the quick and dirty murals I designed with friends is featured in the book). It's this period (more broadly 1997-2004) that is the most heavily featured in Street Art SF, and for good reason. San Francisco was caught up in the dot.com boom, which was extremely destructive to the existing Latino, artist, punk and activist communities (none of which were mutually exclusive, of course).
The gentrification caused by the capital influx and frenzy of internet start-ups pushed hundreds of people out of their homes, and quickly replaced long-time community commercial institutions with businesses more "appropriate" for the new wealthy, largely white, population flooding the neighborhood (read: expensive restaurants, $5 lattes, fancy boutiques). The San Francisco Print Collective (SFPC), in association with the Mission Anti-Development Coalition (MAC), started covering the streets with posters about gentrification, often raising direct issues around the actions of specific politicians, the eviction of specific families, and the pros and cons of specific laws and referendums. The walls spoke to the specifics of people's lives, so people spoke back to the walls, adding to them on a daily, if not hourly basis. Some of this political energy is captured in the book, but it gets relatively short shrift.
A similar flood of expression happened in 2003 as the US was gearing up to invade Iraq. I was living in Chicago at the time, a city known for its "clean" streets and lack of public expression, and landing in SF was a revelation. The walls (and windows, sidewalks, roll-downs, billboards, fire-hydrants, newspaper boxes, phone booths, etc.) were absolutely blanketed with anti-war art and messages. It was inescapable, and gave one the sense that the whole world was against this war (which was largely true), and that resistance was in the air we breathed (which was maybe true in SF, but not in other parts of the country). Unlike the usual corporate messaging reigning down on my head, trying to beat me into submission so I'd buy so many things I neither wanted nor needed, the streets supported me, bolstering my opposition to the war and larger political outlook. Although an extreme example, I think this helps explain the powerful dialectic on the streets of SF, where political and social beliefs and actions encourage public art expression, and that expression in turn encourages deeper beliefs and actions.
And this is Street Art SF's weakest point: it largely steers clear of all politics not rooted in traditional "community" concerns, i.e. the Latino heritage of the neighborhood, the role of women in the mural movement, etc. These are definitely important issues, but it is a mistake to not see gentrification and war as community issues as well. Not that these are absent from the book, but they get little direct attention. The outpouring of opposition to the war is barely her, but without it, it seems extremely difficult to fully understand the streets of SF.
One of the real mysteries of the book, and its subject, is the collapse of the energy of the late 90s/early 00s scene. There is almost no images here from post-2005, and strangely enough, most of those included are wheat pastes by Swoon, a New Yorker. Why, when almost the entire book is dedicated to the cauldron of culture generated in SF, does Swoon become a place holder for all things post 2005? How does an explosive and vibrant community, making creative innovations in the realms of murals, graffiti, street installations, etc. get collapsed into the aesthetic of one non-SF artist? Murals are still being painted, graffiti is still going up, the community is still attempting to represent itself, yet the editors decided that little of this work from the past 4 years was worth including.
And I tend to agree with them, in my visits, most of the new work is good, but it's treading the same water as the great work of 1999 or 2003, and adding little new. The aesthetics are still there, but the active, moving, tumultuous social bodies that organised, marched, picketed, fought, and generally gave weight to the images and words on the walls are gone. At least for now.
Street Art San Francisco: Mission Muralismo is published by Abrams, 2009, and edited by Annice Jacoby for Precita Eyes Muralists.
Josh MacPhee is a political artist and founder of Justseeds/Visual Resistance Artists' Cooperative.
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‘Street Art San Francisco’ review (text) by Josh MacPhee is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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