Art is everywhere. You just have to open your eyes and/or decide that something is art. This is what Ernest Pignon-Ernest showed when he glued frames on the walls of Nice, France, from 2004 to 2013. Known for the celebration of the chosen place as a place of poetry and history, the artist used the frame as a sign to reveal the artistic potential of the walls, ie a tool of “artification” (Heinich et Shapiro 2012). The frame refers to the museum piece, which it encircles, protects and highlights. By definition, street artworks don’t have a physical frame, if by Street Art we mean a self-authorized art (Blanché 2015) situated in the public place or in abandoned places, or any form of site-specific art. Nevertheless, the frame is an essential and problematic question in many regards.
First of all, the frame is a recurring element in Street Art imagery, whether it is a physical frame encircling the artwork or the natural boundaries wherein it is inscribed. Artists who encircle their works mean that it is as worthy as a museum piece. They also mean that the place where the artwork is located (outdoor, public, free) is on par with usual venues of art exhibition (indoor, private, not free). The frame encompasses the issue of the location of Street Art, which is considered as a site-specific art as well as a white cube art, since a market of contemporary urban art has been increasing for a few years. An urban artwork by Pøbel & Atle Østrem shows two men trying in vain to bring into a golden frame the throw-up STREETCRED. The street gives to the artwork its legitimacy, but the institution (embodied in the two suited men) wants to lock it up in a box (a frame seen as a set of established rules), which entails amputating it, damaging it. Urban contemporary art is not Street Art: the first one respects the institutional rules, and is fixed and kitsh (Génin 2015) whereas the latter is free and alive. Urban art might rather be a cousin of Street Art.
Moreover, the frame, not as an object anymore but as a space delimiting the photographed artwork, is a necessary and crucial choice for both the viewer and the artist. They often take a photo of the piece and sometimes put it on the Internet. This choice means not only that the piece is two-dimensional, but also that it is possible to decide of its physical limits, and additionally, that it is possible to fix it forever. But, on one hand, a piece of Street Art is site-specific and, on the other hand, it is participative, it is an open “conversation” (Hansen and Flynn 2016), “shared” (Bertini 2015), often transitory, in progress: “term Street Art cannot be defined conclusively since what it encompasses is constantly being negotiated” (Bengtsen 2014). Can we consider that the picture of the piece, which only embraces one shape of it in its natural evolving process, is the piece of art in itself or a part of it, as artists taking photos of their in-situ pieces let us think? Has Street Art become an “Internet Art” (Glaser 2015)?
Finally, many artists – writers and street artists – don’t like the recent academic interest in their works, because taking Street Art as an object of research means trying to frame it, potentially enclosing it or locking it up. The frame here has a figurative meaning : « nonphysical boundaries as the institutional frame, the perceptual frame, the semiotic frame, or the gendered frame » (Duro 1996). To frame also means to conspire to incriminate (someone) on a false charge, or to contrive the dishonest outcome (of something). Street Art is polemic indeed. Polemic within the academic research, because of the controversial interpretation of the umbrella-term and between those who consider only self-authorized practices and those who also include compromises in their definition, like commissioned works. Polemic also within the people and political authorities, because of the illegal status of most pieces, and because of the question of the occupation of the visual space in the public arena, filled with signs of injunction and information and adverts of any kind. The conference is up to take into consideration this other aspect of the title Framing Street Art, including criticism
and self-criticism, in a constructive and dialogic set of mind.
