64 pages 23 x 23 cm Language: English Paperback Publisher: Unruly Publishing Edition of 600 copies 2015
"It's my uneducated guess that half of all emerging visual artists have — at some point — used the street as a medium."
Published on the occasion of the group exhibition Abstract Vandalism at Galerie Gabriel Rolt, featuring new works by Egs, Nug and Shoe, this manifesto by graffiti pioneer Niels Shoe Meulman stakes out a new direction beyond the increasingly fractured field of graffiti and street art.
Taking Joseph Beuys' claim that every person is an artist as a starting point, Meulman argues that all creation is also destruction — every mark, every monument, every tag is both an act of making and an act of vandalism. From cave paintings to subway cars, from Norman Mailer's 1974 The Faith of Graffiti to New York's Teflon-coated tunnel walls, the text traces a long lineage of art treated as crime, and crime treated as art.
Equal parts manifesto, art history, and provocation, Abstract Vandalism makes the case for a movement defined not by urban attitude, but by ideas — and asks where the line between art and vandalism really sits.
