A vital tour decipheres the signs and images of the boarded-up storefronts adorning public decor. What it teaches us about our common national experiences, and how it affects our tales.
Around 17,000 years ago, predecessors drew up on grotto walls in the caves of Lascaux, France, showing equines, stags, bison, aurochs and felines. We tried to communicate a cultural truth that was vital for their existence to all human beings: we shared their world with other people that dressed and acted differently than them.
Those early artisans regularly illustrated such characters, perhaps intrigued by their shapes and forces, but also intuiting that something that happened to the animals would almost definitely be a harbinger of what might happen to humans. The appearance of the bison and stags, their physical health and numbers, and their large migrations may suggest the beginning of plagues or cataclysmic weather systems. The caves in Southwest France were not merely an display area for local artists, holding some 15,000 drawings and engravings from the Upper Paleolithic period. They represented basically a public square where a group exchanged vital information.
Such images and distinct tales vary nothing from our current forums: New York City ‘s street decor adorning boarded-up storefronts. We teach us about our common cultural experiences, the individuals in collective space with whom we coexist and how our tales and fates are linked together. When you wander the streets of SoHo, the Lower East Side alleys, and Brooklyn’s densely trafficked roads, like I have done during the past few weeks, you’ll see these words and signs and you may think about their significance.
It was clear to me is that the words that we exchange, and the sociopolitical conditions that impel them, have grown more nuanced in the ensuing millenniums between those cave paintings and the killing of George Floyd.
Now street artists are taking into consideration, among other facts, the skilled legal privilege that safeguards police officers, the Black Lives Matter campaign and the repercussions of a broken society, use a well-developed conceptual vocabulary of digital memes that depicts political fights between national , ethnic, and sexual groups.
