Graffiti & street art as subculture and its communication with dominant culture: The case of Athens

Culture, in anthropological sense, is the totality of values, norms and daily life activities organized in certain forms of life: foundations, tools of life, thoughts, images, texts and all practices related to human. On the other hand, culture as the entirety of daily life activities changing peculiar to each period and society, is not comprised of set of values and connections of homogenous, similar characters. As accepted, established and prevalent cultural structure form dominant culture, on the other side, subcultures arise manifesting its distinctness from average cultural structure through its specific "styles". Subcultures, which try to exhibit their presence through styles and rituals around a specific collective identity, have position out of dominant cultural system and oppose. As a result of this attitude, they are reinterpreted with the intention of harmonization. The reinterpretation occurs by way of making subcultural products into meta form and / or labelling them ideologically. Hence, the presence of cultural differentiation and subcultures can hardly be recognized on condition that these social groups accept dominant values. Those who were deprived of opportunities in cities in 1960s discovered graffiti and street art as a way of coping with disappointment and declaring their presence in cities. Graffiti and street art, as commonly known, began its journey in the ghettos and trains of New York City, moved on becoming visible in many cities of the world in 1980s and reached the present day getting into partnerships with dominant cultural structures. As placed within the limits of dominant meanings while increasingly recognized, graffiti and street concordantly moved away from its subcultural nature and turned into a new hybrid form. The purpose of this thesis is to understand how the current transformation of graffiti and street art is experienced by artists in Athens, the capital of Greece, where the use of public space is relatively free and find out the artists' relation with dominant cultural system. Within this framework, data was collected by reaching 14 street art and graffiti artists who live in Athens through the method of snowball sampling in accordance with the necessities of qualitative research. In the first chapter, in which culture is defined as a struggle area, dominant culture is first of all clarified as a complex whole composed of relations of domination and resistance. Thereafter, with reference to the inclusion of dominant culture many cultural places of articulation depending on change of social conditions; popular culture, mass culture and culture industry, folk culture and high culture are elaborated. Thereafter, because the thesis subject is based on a subcultural formation, the phenomenon subculture is examined and the ways used to domesticate it in structure of dominant culture are revealed. The character of the process of domestication varies depending on formation ways and styles to be chosen by social structure and each subculture. Based on the question of where subcultural formations, in other words zones of micro resistance, which can be defined as "crack" in dominant culture are established, city and place are brought forward and it is explained that city is surrounded by potential creativity practices of ordinary people or "tactics" in De Certeau's conception. In the second chapter, historical process of graffiti and street art, motivations led to researches on these two subjects, study methods and how and why they are diverged are investigated. Although both types appear to be public art forms which erode the distance between art and spectators, it is found out that graffiti and street art diverge with respect to technic, intent and function. Besides, it is argued that the setting of graffiti and street art, which arose in and nourished from streets, is today not limited to streets where they are generated. Also, the reflections of change experienced by means of new media are shortly evaluated through examples. In the third chapter of the thesis, the experience of field study which includes the research method, process of data collection and self-reflective notes is shared and findings of field work are interpreted around themes. Field research analyzes that graffiti and street art in Athens keep being the zone of micro resistance, however at the same time, the ways they are included in the frame of dominant meanings are also investigated through in-depth interviews with 15 street art and graffiti artists.