Conform
Macmillan Art Publishing RRP: PB $39.95
Conform is a glossy record of and tribute to recent Australian graffiti practices. The book contains images of poster art, stencils, guerrilla slogans, tags and murals gathered by photographer, Saskia Folk, from various urban sites. While there is documentary sense to these images, they are framed and selected by the photographer, and given a sense of equivalence through the format of the book. The book contains no commentary or captions. Folk offers some explanation in quotes from International Stencil artist Banksy who has a utopian vision of the city.
The urban imagination has been shaped by photography, a visual practice which emerged with the growth of the modern city. In this sense the photographer is participating in a kind of dialectical urbanism characterized by the mobile gaze, fleeting relations between subjects and the world, negativity and alienation. Folk documents a series of empty abandoned spaces (a city abandoned by its citizens) in which a series of occurrences have taken place. It is as though the images are photographic evidence of a crime. We do not see graffiti being enacted: we do not see the graffitist at work. This focus is potentially mystifying of a practice which is often time consuming and considered. Folk seems to stick to the streets rather than traveling the urban trainlines covered in tags and murals.
The book contains examples of work by emerging artists such as James Dodd (whose practice also includes gallery exhibitions), images of cultural icons, political incitement, expressions of unspeakable sadness, and allusions to war and cyberculture. Public sites are a place of externalising and making visible the personal, the political and the consumer ethic of advertising and promotion. These messages collide