{"id":856,"date":"2015-09-21T06:08:13","date_gmt":"2015-09-21T11:08:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.meredithwwatts.com\/MWBrazilBlog\/?p=856"},"modified":"2019-07-29T16:24:46","modified_gmt":"2019-07-29T21:24:46","slug":"what-to-look-at-when-you-are-stuck-in-traffic-sao-paulo-street-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.meredithwwatts.com\/MWBrazilBlog\/?p=856","title":{"rendered":"What To Look at When You are stuck in Traffic: Sao Paulo Street Art"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\u00a0<\/em>\n

Wall art<\/em> and tagging in Sao Paulo<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"IMG_0508_DxO\" — A kiosk near downtown Sao Paulo. \u201cBanca\u201d here means a newsstand and \u201cCaras\u201d is a popular magazine that fawns on celebrities and royalty. It appears that you can buy it 24 hours a day.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Sao Paulo has remarkable tagger art. Two men \u2013 internationally known as Os Gemeos<\/em> (The twins) \u2013 led the revolution in the city\u2019s tagger tradition and made it into a unique art form.\u00a0 They even entered the contemporary modern art world. Not long ago *Os Gemeos<\/em> had a special showing at the Tate Modern art museum in London.\u00a0 The legacy is not theirs alone in the city, and there are many styles to be seen.<\/p>\n*
Here every available underpass wall and many buildings are beautifully \u2014 or at least elaborately \u2014 decorated.\u00a0 Much of the mural art is along the highways and freeway underpasses.\u00a0 This mural art is hard to see, though, unless you are In a car or bus driven by someone else. Traffic is too intense to gaze about, and the walls and underpasses are not pedestrian-friendly.\u00a0\u00a0 Who knows how the artists got there, but the average citizen must have divided attention to enjoy the freeway art.\u00a0 To photograph it is even harder \u2014 most of these photos were taken from a car driven by someone else.\u00a0 Many interesting murals could not be photographed because of traffic.\u00a0 My favorite one is a long mural that appears to be a photo of historical scenes of city life.\u00a0 It goes on for many yards, but I couldn\u2019t get a decent picture of this soccer-field sized photorealist mural because of traffic.\u00a0 This give me a reason \u2014 almost \u2014 to brave the traffic again to take another look.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n
*\u00a0<\/p>\n*
*\u00a0<\/p>\n*
$\"Pre-emptive$ <\/a>
A fairly conventional example of \u201cpreemptive\u201d wall art.\u00a0 This one decorates one of the many children\u2019s party centers to be found in middle-class neighborhoods. This painting probably preempted getting tagged with erotic pictures of aliens, or other popular themes.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Examples of the older, pre-Twins, wall art are still everywhere, but they tend to remain because they are not on prime viewing spaces.<\/p>\n
$\"Old$ <\/a>
Old fashioned tagging, before the art veered from cheerful vandalism to high culture<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Wall art is so pervasive that many commercial buildings have special murals in the tagger form. People and businesses who don\u2019t want their walls decorated late at night with science fiction, fantasy, revolutionary, or sexual art have found a solution \u2013 they hire a painter to decorate their wall with a theme of their choice (whales, ethereal little girls, pets, parrots and flowers have a following). Out of apparent artistic solidarity the street taggers normally leave such walls alone, even at the aesthetic cost of having wall after wall of butterflies and flowers on all the children\u2019s party centers.\u00a0 The surfer shops and sports stores are also stylized with characters straight out of Japanese manga art \u2014 huge macho characters surfing in cosmic freefall or flexing cartoonishly powerful bodies (to alert you to what is avaiLable inside).<\/p>\n
The most ingenuous, though, are the prime spaces on the endless walls that section off the many commuter thoroughfares.\u00a0 All the pictures below are from these astonishing drive-time art shows that commuters see everyday.\u00a0 I suppose they need to see them every day because each piece of art is in focus for only a few seconds, unless you are fortunate\/unfortunate enough to be gridlocked in front of an interesting one.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
$\"Sao$ <\/a>
Sao Paulo freeway art<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
$\"Sao$ <\/a>
A commuter\u2019s view when traffic is not moving, which is much of the time)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
$\"A$ <\/a>
A Sao Paulo bridge support along the freeway<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
$\"A$ <\/a>
A wall along the commuter highway.\u00a0 This might serve as well on a suburban party center<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
$\"Freeway$ <\/a>
Cubist deconstruction is not part of the artistic vocabulary but the wall artist but the spatial volumes and colors have a fascinating diversity and originality<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
$\"The$ <\/a>
The sign in the lower may be the name of the artist.\u00a0 Now that this is a recognized are form the artists sign their work (and also hope for a Tate Modern exhibit like Os Gemeos<\/em>).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
$\"Sao$ <\/a>
Something to think about during drive time<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
$\"A$ <\/a>
In this wider perspective you can see how the art is concentrated on highway retaining walls.\u00a0 Sometimes the space above is also used for installation art.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
$\"Sao$ <\/a>
Sao Paulo expressway\/bridge underpass \u2014 a field of dusty and smogged flowers<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
$This Sao Paulo building has \"pre-emptive\" art that inhibits old-fashioned tagging and vandalism$ <\/a><\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
$\"Bridge$ <\/a>
Bridge underpass in Sao Paulo. The fish-eating monkey is something to think about during drive-time \u2014 if your life is not actually in danger at the moment.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 Wall art and tagging in Sao Paulo \u00a0 \u00a0 Sao Paulo has remarkable tagger art. Two men \u2013 internationally known as Os Gemeos (The twins) \u2013 led the revolution in the city\u2019s tagger tradition and made it into a unique art form.\u00a0 They even entered the contemporary modern art world. Not long ago Os … Continue reading What To Look at When You are stuck in Traffic: Sao Paulo Street Art<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sao-paulo-brazil-images"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meredithwwatts.com\/MWBrazilBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meredithwwatts.com\/MWBrazilBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meredithwwatts.com\/MWBrazilBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meredithwwatts.com\/MWBrazilBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meredithwwatts.com\/MWBrazilBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=856"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.meredithwwatts.com\/MWBrazilBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":977,"href":"https:\/\/www.meredithwwatts.com\/MWBrazilBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856\/revisions\/977"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meredithwwatts.com\/MWBrazilBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meredithwwatts.com\/MWBrazilBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meredithwwatts.com\/MWBrazilBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}