Street Optics

거리의 시각

Street art operates within an already given visual order: the visuality of the modern city in which the regimentation of the image has become fully adaptive to-what Fredric Jameson termed-the logic of late capitalism. What is the relationship between street art and the hegemonic forms of the image dictated by the "city's rulers"? Does street art evoke an alternative kind of spectatorship? Can the unsolicited visual intervention in the life of the city open up an "optics" that resists the reifying patterns of the contemporary gaze? This paper follows Baudrillard's pioneering analysis of graffiti, arguing that the visuality of a certain kind of street images carries an important potential of challenging the hegemonic manner in which the contemporary image has come to dominate the field of vision.