My creativity advent calendar 2024: Day 13.
Guerrilla Art
According to Wikipedia, guerrilla art is a street art movement that first emerged in the UK, but has since spread around the world and is now established in most countries that already had developed graffiti scenes.
One of the definitions I like best is that because guerrilla art is environmental, the surface to which it is applied being fundamental to the piece’s meaning, the art is defined by what it does as opposed to what it is.
From Banksy’s stencilled work on urban walls to craft groups’ yarn bombing there is a huge range of guerrilla art, most designed to be fleeting and create a range of reactions and emotions in passers by.
Last night (12th Dec) I attended a meeting of the creative collective Neotists to hear members share ideas on Christmas Guerrilla Art — all designed to bring moments of unexpected delight to people in the town.
Iris Murdoch observed that “tyrants always fear art because tyrants want to mystify while art tends to clarify” and Auden insisted that “the mere making of a work of art is itself a political act.”
Art critic, novelist, painter and poet John Berger adds:
“I can’t tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. I know too that the powerful fear art, whatever its form, when it does this, and that amongst the people such art sometimes runs like a rumour and a legend because it makes sense of what life’s brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us, for it is inseparable from a justice at last.”
The term guerrilla art is fairly recent but it seems that the idea of it is as old as time.
