Subcultures and street art

Street art reorganizes the public spaces and through installations, converts them into media that convey messages to the spectators. The aim is to reclaim the public space from the corporations that utilize the space for advertising purposes via visual works that change the dynamics of the space. Street artists regard their expressions as a means of empowerment against the world of advertising. To sum up, it is possible to argue that street art is an anonymous provocation carried out in public spaces.To appreciate street art, it is necessary to relate it to the ghettos surrounding metropolises and to the subcultures deriving from these ghettos.In the early 80?s, even before street artists caught the attention of the New York art scene, many other art ?traditions? had produced art works on the streets. Avant-garde trends such as Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus, and Situationism carried their works through happenings. A path that leads to Walter Benjamin; to the surrealists, who sought the surreal in everyday life; to the Situatinists who called for a re-discovery of the city through psycho-geographic research and even to the punk subculture?Their repercussions can still be traced in the contemporary street art. Hence, the gap between art and life is being overcome by street artists.The effort to open up to social space, which is a given of the 20th Century modern art and its predecessors, still continues today. In contemporary art, streets are being preferred to galleries by many artists as they offer a larger platform and a stronger link between life and art or the artist and the spectator. However, placing the products of street art in art galleries entails displacing them out of their street context. Street art possesses a reality that is based on communicating the message directly to the spectator. By virtue of participating in city life, the artists claim the city life their own. In the contemporary artistic practice of the 2000?s connection with life and concrete efforts in search of ways of rebellion against forms of social exclusion are being shaped in this fashion. Persistence of alternative searches for introducing your work and word into circulation against dominant high artistic norms; against sexual, racial, class based segregation and the artist?s preference of streets over the galleries within the context of these alternative searches leads to creating a strong bond between life and art.