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New Cultural Capitals
 Critical Issues

Series Editors
Dr Robert Fisher Lisa Howard
Dr Ken Monteith Dr Daniel Riha

Advisory Board

James Arvanitakis Simon Bacon

Katarzyna Bronk Stephen Morris
Jo Chipperfield John Parry
Ann-Marie Cook Karl Spracklen
Peter Mario Kreuter Peter Twohig
S Ram Vemuri Kenneth Wilson

A Critical Issues research and publications project.

http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/critical-issues/

The Cyber Hub

‘Urban Popcultures’

2013
 New Cultural Capitals:

Urban Pop Cultures in Focus

Edited by

Leonard R. Koos

Inter-Disciplinary Press
Oxford, United Kingdom
© Inter-Disciplinary Press 2013
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/id-press/

The Inter-Disciplinary Press is part of Inter-Disciplinary.Net – a global network

for research and publishing. The Inter-Disciplinary Press aims to promote and
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ISBN: 978-1-84888-177-8
First published in the United Kingdom in eBook format in 2013. First Edition.
 Table of Contents

Introduction vii
Leonard R. Koos

Part 1 Visible Cities

Graffiti, Street Art, Urban Art: Terminological Problems

and Generic Properties 3
Ljiljana Radosevic

Visual Kei: Practices of Gender and Body in a Translocal

Subculture 15
Nadine Heymann

Crossing the ‘I Love You Bridge’: Gentrification and the

Contemporary Picturesque 23
Samantha Bernstein

Part 2 Recreations

Speaking of the Suburbs: Verlan and the Culture of the

French Banlieue 37
Leonard R. Koos

Sexual Autonomy and Non-Monogamy in the Boston

Anarchist Community 49
Sarah Bradley

Basque Radical Rock: The Rock of Stateless People 57

David de la Fuente García

The Real Czech Emcees Please Stand Up! Construction

of Authenticity in Czech Rap Music 65
Anna Oravcová

Part 3 Urban Planning

Berlin: A Hacker City? 79

Noel David Nicolaus
Evidence, Evocation, and Public Memory in Rockstar
Games´ Virtual Cityscapes 89
Jon Leon Torn

‘Do-It-Yourself’: Grassroots Music-Making and the D.I.Y.

Music Community in Glasgow, Scotland 97
Evangelos Chrysagis
 Introduction

Leonard R. Koos
The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the
individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his
existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical
heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life. 1

In his seminal 1979 work Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of

Taste, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu developed the theoretical construct of
cultural capital as a way of charting and understanding the complex forces
involved in the interactions and differentiations of groups and ultimately classes in
larger social structures. For Bourdieu, culture, like the economic field, is a
contested one in which participants vie for resources that they subsequently
accumulate in the form of capital. Cultural capital combines with other related but
different types of capital (economic capital, symbolic capital, intellectual capital,
educational capital, and so forth) in a multi-dimensionally interactive social field in
order to establish distinctions and confer status upon its agents, in the end
reflecting class hierarchies, but also providing opportunities for social mobility. As
Bourdieu suggestively summarised his intellectual project in a later interview:

My central thesis is that this space of symbolic distinctions

expresses and reproduces the space of material differences. The
latter as soon as they are perceived, classed, and appreciated,
function like distinctive traits, stylistic deviations in the system
of differences, becoming thereby symbolic. We are condemned
to signify by the play of difference. 2

Bourdieu’s top-down conceptualisation of social structure in the form of

cultural capital provides a compelling theoretical model for examining and
understanding the dynamics of elite and dominant cultural forces in relating actions
to social structure, what the sociologist himself called the ‘aristocracy of culture.’ 3
However, Bourdieu’s theorisations do not necessarily address in sufficient detail
the ways by which individuals and groups produce and consume mainstream and
specialised popular culture, particularly when it involves those marginalised by the
economic field. 4 While the constitution of distinction with the appropriation of
cultural capital in terms of modernist art, a speaker’s accent, classical music, the
education system, and so forth, can perhaps more evidently convey the subsequent
conferring of social status, the production and consumption of certain types of
popular cultural forms like video games, punk music, slang, and graffiti as acts of a
valorised social positioning is not quite as obvious. This is particularly the case
when considering the expressive forms of certain groups that come together,
viii Introduction
__________________________________________________________________
operate, and develop on or in the margins of established economies and cultures,
namely subcultures. Sociological studies of specific subcultures, from the Chicago
school’s early case studies in urban ethnology to the more recent Birmingham
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies’s examinations of, among others, youth
cultures, have ultimately synthesised from their research useful theoretical
approaches and thereby refined our critical understanding of how these smaller,
minority, and frequently marginalised groups emerge, develop, and persist in the
interstices of culture and society.
Following these important critical precedents, the dynamics of how these sorts
of groups function with regards to larger social structures as well as internally can
been examined more extensively in the context of the great variety of subcultures
that exist. In this respect, the work of Sarah Thornton on British youth taste
cultures in music and her proposition of the concept of subcultural capital is
instructive. For Thornton, while relying on the basic premises and structures of
distinction and cultural capital theorized by Bourdieu but then applying them to
these smaller, marginalised cultural formations in the realm of popular culture,
subcultural capital is equally objectified or embodied in external forms and
behaviour that is perceived of as being ‘in the know’ and ’second nature’ as a
system of knowledge. 5 Subcultural capital, as Thornton conceives it, however,
distinguishes itself by resisting a conversion into economic capital and thereby
being less tied to class (even entertaining the fantasy of classlessness), as well as
by developing far more through a dissemination in the media (radio, television,
magazines, fanzines, and so forth). 6 The notion of media consumption, of course,
particularly as it relates to subcultural youth groups and their taste cultures, now
necessarily involves what one generically calls social media, those internet-based
platforms that facilitate and support subcultural practices and cohesion.
A significant value in the realm of the subcultural as considered by Thornton
and other researchers who have observed and examined these groups is the concept
of authenticity. When rappers evoke as a central dictum the notion of ‘keepin’ it
real,’ they are specifically referring to this distinction, often mediated by the
additional dichotomisation of a mainstream orientation as opposed to an overt
refusal of commercialisation and commodification. In this respect, the perceived
inauthenticity of selling out or posing is the diametrical opposite of accumulated
subcultural capital based on the authentic. Moreover, authenticity as a value of
subcultural capital tends to be rendered, particularly in the city and now in online
environments, as a category of performativity and even exhibitionism in the public
realm, its ‘politics of gestures, symbol, and metaphor’ paradoxically constituting a
‘play for attention but also a refusal, once attention has been granted, to be read
according to the Book.’ 7 Particularly in the modern and contemporary city where
‘all sorts of people meet and mingle together who never fully comprehend one
another,’ 8 the performance of the gesture of authenticity stands as an organising
construct and signifying marker of recognition and identity that individuals,
 Leonard R. Koos ix
__________________________________________________________________
smaller groups, and communities assert beneath and beside the networks of signs
of established culture and institutions of power.
The politics and poetics of identity that emerge from subcultural groupings and
subsequent taste cultures invariably assert a dimension of difference (ethnic,
generational, gendered, sexual, linguistic, and so forth) in their signifying practices
and representational strategies. The resulting constructions of alterity, however, in
contradistinction to those articulated by the panoptic gaze of dominant, elite, and
often even mass culture in which otherness is discursively inscribed as secondary,
peripheral, and ultimately inferior, constitute the assumption of a resistance, an
oppositionality, and potentially a subversion as they demarcate their specifications
of difference. In this vein, Dick Hebdige, following the authors of the influential
essay collection, Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War
Britain (edited by fellow Birmingham CCCS researchers Stuart Hall and Tony
Jefferson), suggestively characterised subcultural production as a noise (as opposed
to simply a sound), a dissonance and an interference in the representational process
on the cultural landscape. 9 In a similar fashion, Paul Willis, who employed the
concept of homology to explain the cohesion and representational solidarity of
subcultural style, not only underscored the resistive nature of this type of activity in
the face of a post-Gramscian notion of hegemony on the part of dominant and elite
culture, but also added the dimension of appropriation as a strategy for these
groups as they attempt to counter an incorporation of their identity formations. 10
This strategy of appropriation, additionally, recalls the work of Michel de Certeau
on the everyday in which he observed how agents creatively poach from received
and established culture in activities whose oppositionality ultimately comprises a
subversion:

Yet it is precisely the effective order of things which is subverted

by just such “popular” tactics for their own ends, without any
illusions as to their ultimate practical effects. Where dominating
powers exploit the order of things, where ideological discourse
represses or ignores it, these tactics fool this order and make it
the field of their art… 11

While these theories are hesitant to ascribe an overtly political agenda to the sort of
activity that Willis has dubbed ‘informal culture’ that comes ‘from below,’ 12 the
very presence of these forms coveys an obstruction, however ephemeral, of the
rules of a greater social order.
This brief survey of some of the related concepts and organising principles that
come into play in the inception, articulation, and reception of the cultural
production of those groups and subgroups that emerge and evolve in the modern
and contemporary city offers a suggestive theoretical and practical framework for
the chapters contained in this volume which were initially presented as part of the
x Introduction
__________________________________________________________________
programme of the second Urban Popcultures conference held in Prague, Czech
Republic March 9-11, 2012. In Part 1, entitled ‘Visible Cities,’ the essays analyse
visual phenomena in the modern and contemporary city that attest to the
complicating presence of otherwise marginalised groups and spaces. Part 2,
‘Recreations,’ considers those ostensibly leisure-time practices in which
individuals and groups engage that nonetheless demarcate the parameters of
identity and resistance for their participants. Finally, Part 3, ‘Urban Planning,’
examines the ways cities are evoked, used, and reconceptualised by the pop
cultural imagination. Whether verbal or written, physical or virtual, produced or
received by individuals or groups, the representations and practices examined in
the chapters in each of these sections attest to the dynamic nature of urban popular
cultures, a presence that has ultimately transformed the ways by which we
understand and appreciate urban existence.

Notes
1
Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, in The Sociology of Georg
Simmel, trans. Kurt Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1950), 409.
2
Pierre Bourdieu and Claud DuVerlie, ‘Esquisse d’un Projet Intellectuelle: Un
Entretien avec Pierre Bourdieu’, French Review 61, No. 2 (December, 1987): 202,
my translation. For a useful summary of Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital and
its applications to different cultural contexts, see Michele Lamont and Annette
Lareau, ‘Cultural Capital: Allusions, Gaps, and Glissandos in Recent Theoretical
Developments’, Sociological Theory 6, No. 2 (Autumn, 1985): 153-168.
3
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans.
Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 11-17.
4
For an interesting examination of the limits of the applicability of Bourdieu’s
concepts in the context of two case studies in American popular culture on
automobile tail fins and modernist architecture, see David Gartman, ‘Bourdieu’s
Theory of Cultural Change: Explication, Application, Critique’, Sociological
Theory 20, No. 2 (July, 2002): 255-277.
5
Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital
(Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 11.
6
Ibid., 12-14.
7
Dick Hebdige, ‘Posing… Threats, Striking… Poses; Youth, Surveillance, and
Display’, in The Subcultures Reader, ed. Ken Gelder (London: Routledge, 2005),
297.
8
Robert E. Park, ‘The City’, in The Subcultures Reader, ed. Ken Gelder (London:
Routledge, 2005), 29.
 Leonard R. Koos xi
__________________________________________________________________

9
See both Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, eds., Resistance through Rituals: Youth
Subcultures in Post-War Britain (London: Unwin Hyman, 1976) and Dick
Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979).
10
In particular, see Paul Willis, Profane Culture (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 2005).
11
Michel de Certeau, ‘On the Oppositional Practices of Everyday Life’, trans.
Fredreric Jameson and Carl Lovitt, Social Text 3 (1980): 4.
12
Roberta Sassatelli, Marco Santoro and Paul Willis, ‘An Interview with Paul
Willis: Commodification, Resistance, and Reproduction’, European Journal of
Social Theory 12, No. 2 (1990): 265.

Bibliography
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.
Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984.

Bourdieu, Pierre, and Claude DuVerlie. ‘Esquisse d’un Projet Intellectuel: Un

Entretien avec Bourdieu’. French Review 61, No. 3 (December, 1987): 194–205.

De Certeau, Michel. ‘On the Oppositional Practices of Everyday Life’. Translated

by Fredreric Jameson, and Carl Lovitt. Social Text 3 (1980): 3–43.

Gartman, David. ‘Bourdieu’s Theory of Cultural Change: Explication, Application,

Critique’. Sociological Theory 20, No. 2 (July, 2002): 255–277.

Hall, Stuart, and Tony Jefferson, eds. Resistance through Rituals: Youth
Subcultures in Post-War Britain. London: Unwin Hyman, 1976.

Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen, 1979.

—––. ‘Posing… Threats, Striking… Poses: Youth, Surveillance, and Display’. In

The Subcultures Reader, edited by Ken Gelder, 288–298. London: Routledge,
2005.

Lamont, Michele, and Annette Lareau. ‘Cultural Capital: Allusions, Gaps,

Glissandos in Recent Theoretical Developments’. Sociological Theory 6, No. 2
(Autumn, 1988): 153–168.
xii Introduction
__________________________________________________________________

Park, Robert E. ‘The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in
Urban Environments’. In The Subcultures Reader, edited by Ken Gelder, 25–34.
London: Routledge, 2005.

Simmel, Georg. ‘The Metropolis and Modern Life’. In The Sociology of Georg
Simmel. Translated by Kurt Wolff, 409–424. New York: Free Press, 1950.

Sassatelli, Roberta, Marco Santoro, and Paul Willis. ‘An Interview with Paul
Willis: Commodification, Resistance, and Reproduction’. European Journal of
Social Theory 12, No. 2 (1990): 265–289.

Thornton, Sarah. Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Hanover:
Wesleyan University Press, 1996.

Willis, Paul. Profane Culture. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978.
 Part 1

Visible Cities
 Graffiti, Street Art, Urban Art: Terminological Problems and
Generic Properties

Ljiljana Radosevic
Abstract
In the last ten years, street art has become a very important factor in the
international art scene. It has become a precious object to buy and preserve, and yet
there is considerable confusion about the generic properties and definition of street
art in academic research. As a rightful part of popular culture and urban culture,
street art is not pure and independent. It intertwines with different art forms and
urban subcultures, and nurtures spin-off production. Therefore, it is quite hard to
trace its borders. Street art is not graffiti. They are different visual expressions and
even though they might share the same space, artists, and techniques. They still
produce visually and conceptually different art works. This confusion produces
many layers of problematic issues which put the street artists both on the police
wanted lists and in the most important galleries and museums such as the Tate
Modern in London, the Grand Palais in Paris, and MOCA in Los Angeles to name
the few. In addition, in some official documents and in auction houses, graffiti and
street art are referred to as urban art, a term not used or understood by the members
of the subculture. It is not clear what graffiti, street art, and urban art are and how
they are positioned within contemporary culture. Therefore, it is necessary to deal
with the generic terms first and only after this issue has been addressed, one can
look at all these terms from different perspectives. This chapter aims at resolving
these problems without offering new definitions, but by explaining the terms used
both in subcultures and in academic research.

Key Words: Graffiti, street art, urban art, terminology, discourse.

*****

During the last decade, there has been a significant increase in the academic
research on graffiti and street art production. Yet terminological confusion still
exists because there is no consensus among the academic and non-academic
authors on what these terms include. Most of the authors clearly state how they use
these terms but different authors use them in different manners. However, in
academic articles and in books published on this subject, authors usually explain
the term graffiti and all of them, to my knowledge, use the same definition. For
example, the definition from the most influential book about graffiti from the
1970s, The Handwriting on the Wall, says ‘graffiti (“little scratchings,” from the
Italian graffiare, “to scratch”; the singular graffito) are a form of communication
that is both personal and free of the everyday social restraints…’ 1 Some of them
further elaborate the history of graffiti and find the route from cave paintings or
4 Graffiti, Street Art, Urban Art
__________________________________________________________________
ancient Pompeii, until they arrive at a new form of graffiti - the New York subway
graffiti executed with a spraycan. 2
In this chapter I will try to follow the history of the development of this
particular term and how it relates to other terms relevant in this study, such as those
of street art and urban art. The usage of these terms will be traced in academic
articles, relevant magazine articles, and books published on these subjects since the
1970s.

1. 1970s: Early Years of Misunderstanding

Tagging as a basic activity of spraycan graffiti writing first appeared in
Philadelphia at the end of the 1960s. It did not have real success until it moved to
New York. 3 Very quickly, the writing of one’s nickname and the number of the
street the person lived in on the inside of a subway trains became a trend. In a
couple of years, the tags became larger and more elaborate, then moved to the
outside of the trains until the light graphic form was no longer sufficient to cover
large surfaces. Throw-ups and pieces which could cover the large surfaces
followed and spray paints became irreplaceable for achieving this goal. 4 Authors
of this form of graffiti referred to themselves as writers and to their activities as
writing. Their concept did not relate to the traditional graffiti. Nevertheless, one
can understand why scholars, and later on the community, were more comfortable
in using the term graffiti and graffitists. At the time of the 1960s and 1970s,
dominant graffiti discourse was grounded in latrinalia, a type of graffiti found in
public restrooms. It seems that during that period academics made the distinction
between indoor and outdoor graffiti according to their content. Those written
outside were usually names and not considered interesting since they were just
egocentric expressions of their authors. Those written inside were anonymous but
more elaborate and therefore more suitable for analysis. At the time, researchers
focused on graffiti with political, homosexual, and racial content, and differences
between the male and female graffiti in public restrooms. And even though some
authors have concluded that graffiti are an accurate indicator of the social attitude
of a community, 5 they still called it ‘aggressive behavior’ based on other studies
they had consulted and on the 1939 frustration-aggression hypothesis. 6
Since graffiti in the New York subway were only nicknames and since they did
not elaborate on their social conditions, they were not considered interesting by the
intellectuals who were at the time focused on other types of graffiti. Moreover,
previous studies had marked political, sexual, homosexual, and racial latrinalia as
aggressive and this definition was applied to spraycan graffiti as well, since they
produced a very obvious visual change in the urban surroundings. Most of the
authors have failed to recognise the particularities of spraycan graffiti activities,
and without conducting a thorough research and analysis, they have included this
activity in the graffiti family and labeled it as aggressive. 7 In the previously
mentioned study from the 1977, The Handwriting on the Wall, there was an effort
 Ljiljana Radosevic 5
__________________________________________________________________
to analyse spraycan graffiti - the authors called it urban graffito. The authors of the
book were the first ones to use a Freudian methodology in graffiti analysis, since
they were dealing with latrinalia of all types. In page after page, they apply
Freudian theory to human feces, the smearing of feces, the smelling of feces, and
being inspired by it. Unconventional and obscene words are seen as symbolical
play with ones feces. This groundbreaking study unfortunately attached dirty,
smelly, subconscious, and deviant meaning to spraycan graffiti by putting it in the
same context with latrinalia.
Even those academics and journalists who had an explicitly positive attitude
towards spraycan graffiti were disregarding the fact of how the authors of these
graffiti referred to themselves and to their activity, thus committing a huge
ethnographic mistake. And instead of writers, they become graffitists, condemned
to a burden of previous academic discussion of what graffiti is. By taking a stand in
defense of spraycan graffiti, authors like Baudrillard, who wrote about it in the
1976, employed very aggressive language to describe what they thought was worth
fighting for. Thus, attaching to spraycan graffiti a militant vocabulary which,
combined to previously mentioned connotations, produced a very negative public
attitude towards this visual expression (see table).

2. 1980s: Era of Changes

It is necessary to mention some historical facts in order to understand certain
important changes that took place during the course of the 1980s. Spraycan graffiti
had attracted the attention of the art world in the first half of the 1970s, but only
after severe police actions and chemical cleanings of the subway trains, writers
started to consider serious art careers. Destruction of writers’ corners, places where
writers could gather for peer review and acknowledgement, left writers without
recognition of their work. Since trains were cleaned on a regular basis, writers
moved to the walls of the neighborhoods and handball courts. Therefore, only the
galleries opened in Soho gave the writers from different neighborhoods the
opportunity to meet and be appreciated. The end of the 1970s and the beginning of
the 1980s marked a new interest of the art world in spraycan graffiti. It is important
to mention that at the beginning of the 1980s, spraycan graffiti were introduced in
Europe through galleries and the mass media (hip hop culture, videos, and movies).
And even though protest art has been very strong in Europe, this form of graffiti
has been understood first and foremost as art.
Breakthrough academic research about spraycan graffiti was published in
1982. This was an ethnographic study of spraycan graffiti, Getting Up, undertaken
by Craig Castelman. This serious and thorough academic research recognises the
importance of the fact that graffiti artists called themselves writers, and how this
form of graffiti essentially differs from others. Academic circles could finally
understand what these graffiti artists were doing and why. On the other hand, two
books which are considered to be graffiti Bibles, Subway Art and Spraycan Art,
6 Graffiti, Street Art, Urban Art
__________________________________________________________________
had a more practical approach. They were full of photo material which, along with
the basic information about graffiti activity, served as a textbook for future
generations of writers. But those books were descriptive, they did not attempt to
analyse or define, and they were simply reporting the occurrences within the
graffiti world. They were doing something that should have been done ten years
earlier. Those authors who have dared to characterise spraycan graffiti, like the
Italian art historian Francesca Alinovi, continued to use militant language in their
descriptions. So spraycan graffiti could not find a new discourse. One major
change, though, happened during this era: the term street art appeared. This new
term was considered to be a component of spraycan graffiti discourse and its
integral part. Already in 1985, Allan Schwartzman made a clear distinction
between these two visual expressions:

While graffitists, kids who had no voice, mark up their streets to

establish themselves as a force to be reckoned with, these
traditionally trained artists who have taken to the streets have
chosen to participate in daily life, to claim a voice the art world
denied them. […] Without the burden of history on their
shoulders, graffitists have the freedom to do anything, and
graffiti has a direct emotional appeal. The street work of
traditionally trained artists is tempered by aesthetic postures.
Unlike graffitists they have chosen to work in functional modes,
documentary styles, or “styleless” styles, for direct access… 8

Back then, traditionally trained artists, as Schwartzman conveniently calls

them, had integrated with graffiti artists for a couple of years, and this encounter
had changed both the spraycan graffiti and future street art (further along in the
text, spraycan graffiti will be referred to as graffiti). This is the time of Basquiat
and Keith Haring (and other artists less known today like Kenny Scharf), who were
inspired by graffiti strategies and visual representations but did not produce
graffiti. The art world and some academics have put the label on their work and
turned them into graffiti artists. And here again we face the widely spread misuse
of the term graffiti. What these artists have been presenting in the streets was done
by different means and different strategies. And these have become typical for
contemporary street art. Those traditionally trained artists usually used stencils,
paste ups, posters, stickers, site specific interventions, and so on. Authors who
have recognised the difference between these artistic interventions and graffiti have
been defining it in a very different manner (see table). One has to admit that these
attributes and descriptions sound more artistic and less militant, more acceptable
and less threatening.
Another major academic theory to have a huge impact on graffiti appeared in
1982. The so-called broken windows theory by Wilson and Kelling, led to zero
 Ljiljana Radosevic 7
__________________________________________________________________
tolerance policies around the world. This theory was very much disputed after the
year 2000. Nevertheless, it had a huge impact on graffiti and street art communities
and activities. And yet, it mentions graffiti in only one sentence, calling them
‘harmless display [of disorder].’ 9

3. 1990s: A World Culture

If the 1980s marked the spreading of graffiti, the 1990s was the era of their
global impact. Around the world, graffiti developed as an independent culture
producing its own discourse through magazines, documentaries, and books. This
new culture became self-sustainable and self-sufficient. Those who wrote articles
for graffiti magazines or book introductions employed the language of earlier
authors who had discussed graffiti in a positive manner; that is, they adopted the
strong, militant, aggressive attitude and language.
The visual expression of graffiti changed immensely during this period.
Exciting new styles like the Berlin 3D style or the Barcelona anti-style were
introduced. The concept of graffiti stayed pretty much the same but visually they
changed beyond recognition. Subway trains, local trains and highways still played
a big part of graffiti production but well elaborated murals become a new standard.
New styles brought more freedom in artistic expression, and extraordinarily
technical skills, once recognised only by peers, were now blossoming in, for
example, photo-realistic characters. The focus moved from elaborate nicknames
towards narration and figuration, strategies employed by street artists in the mid-
1980s. Different techniques of execution were also used, so they could no longer
be called spraycan graffiti. During this period, they became post-graffiti. Since
they became more ‘readable’ for the general audience, communities started to
perceive them once again as art and with new insight.
During this era, a very small number of street artists have been active, but
scattered around the Western world, they could not constitute a movement or a
community. And by default, they were merged with graffiti both in academic
writing and in articles from graffiti subculture. And even though works of street art
were very distinctive and closer to fine art, they were illegally executed which
immediately forced them in the same discourse with graffiti. This is of course the
main distinction between fine art and art without permission - the legal aspect.
The legal aspect is something that also changed profoundly during this period.
Zero tolerance policy was introduced in New York in 1994 and has been
considered to be very desirable for most of the cities in the Western world. With
such a strict policy, the main center of production of styles and innovations has
been moved from New York to Europe. 10 Zero tolerance policy had the strongest
support in Scandinavian countries and in 2005, it affected most of the European
cities. Even though this policy is concerned with the general state of the public
spaces, it has particularly affected the graffiti movement through severe financial
punishments and jail sentences. Therefore, most of the academic research during
8 Graffiti, Street Art, Urban Art
__________________________________________________________________
the 1990s has been dedicated to the zero tolerance policy. This naturally led to
quite unfavorable attitudes and uses of language.

4. 2000s: Internet and Street Art, Auction Houses and Urban Art
With the creative center in Europe and Latin America, and with the ever
stronger zero tolerance policy, graffiti were experiencing another crisis. This crisis
did not affect the international graffiti community, but it did affect the strategies
employed by graffiti artists in order to keep them doing what they do. And thus
street art as we know it was born. It had a different visual expression but was
nonetheless illegal and almost as effective in taking over the public space and the
internet. Many graffiti artists had been experimenting with street art and some of
them retired from graffiti and became street artists. Generations of graffiti artists
have had traditional art or design training and they could bring different influences
to both the graffiti and the design world. Just like in the mid-1980s, some
traditionally trained artists took their art into the streets. This trend was led by
graphic designers, but all other artists followed. So once again there is an
overwhelming mix of graffiti, design, illustration, tattoos, comics, and so on. And
this time, it produced the street art movement which took over the throne in public
discourse about art executed without permission. Written documents which were
following the graffiti movement naturally appropriated street art because most of
the artists producing it were related to the graffiti world.
In the production of street art, artists are using techniques and strategies known
to fine art since the advent of conceptual art, that is, the same ones used by
traditionally trained artists in the 1980s. Another important remark is that street art
is primarily character-based. Street artists were also the first ones to recognise the
power of the internet. All these factors make street art more understandable,
agreeable, and more loved than graffiti. Art history and philosophy offered
numerous theoretical backdrops and possibilities which corresponded with the
visual dimension of street art and its strategies. And so the art world was finally
able to incorporate, theorise and to great extent commodify the independent and
illegal art movements. But this time the academic articles and numerous books
published on the subject took street art as a dominant discourse through which they
could include graffiti as well. During this period, books and articles dealt with both
visual expressions and are using both terms to define graffiti and street art as unit.
Another trend appeared during this period: the interest of the art market in
street art and graffiti production. Unlike in previous times, this interest lead to
exhibitions in major art institutions such as the Tate Modern in London, MOCA in
Los Angeles or the Fondation Cartier in Paris. The art market also played a huge
role in this recognition, especially at the beginning of the 2000s and with the
interest in Banksy’s work. In this situation, the term urban art became very handy
because it could be used as umbrella term for graffiti, street art, and other
contemporary production which did not fit under any other definition. Most of the
 Ljiljana Radosevic 9
__________________________________________________________________
books published during this period and concerning the topic mentioned use this
term either as a dominant or as an additional term with an explanatory purpose.

5. Conclusion
Since the 1970s and the proliferation of New York subway graffiti produced
with a spraycan, there have been numerous shifts in academic writing in
understanding what graffiti and street art are. In order to perceive the full
complexity of these terms we can try to understand them as genres, and then put
them in different discourses, an academic one and one originating from culture
itself. Each genre could be discussed by each discourse and produce a different
meaning. Thus, at the beginning, there was a trend of including the new practice of
spraycan subway graffiti into an already existing academic discourse about
historically accepted graffiti. From academic point of view, this period established
spraycan subway graffiti as a dominant term within the graffiti family, and from
that time on, it is be very likely that one can think of spraycan subway graffiti
when saying graffiti. At the time, when graffiti subculture established its own
discourse, it included street art in it. We can see that graffiti as a genre was
dominant in all the discourses until the 2000s, which is when the genre of street art
started to take over. The graffiti subculture kept the term graffiti as a dominant
genre, but academic discourse largely shifted to the use of street art which now
included graffiti as well. Then to top it all, the term urban art came into use. It
moved freely through discourses and genres in order to show unity between them.
This was not always justifiable.
It is clear that in the future academic circles will need to come to a consensus
about the use of the terms mentioned. Otherwise, it is likely that the meaning of
these terms will become even more fluid and therefore leave readers even more
confused.

Notes
1
Ernest L. Abel and Barbara E. Buckley, The Handwriting on the Wall (Westport:
Greenwood Press, 1977), 3.
2
This form of graffiti has quickly evolved and there has been an attempt within the
subculture to explain them with different terms during different periods. Therefore,
we could also use the terms - writing, spraycan graffiti, and post-graffiti.
3
Tagging is writing a signature with marker or spray paint. The point is to do it as
often and as much as possible in order to be appreciated by the peers.
4
A throw-up is a quickly executed piece consisting of an outline with or without a
thin layer of spray paint for fill-in. A piece, short for ‘masterpiece’ is a complex
and artistic form of writing featuring stylised letters, colour, depth, and a variety of
designs.
10 Graffiti, Street Art, Urban Art
__________________________________________________________________

5
Terrance L. Stocker, Linda W. Dutcher, Stephen M. Hargrove and Edwin A.
Cook, ‘Social Analysis of Graffiti’, The Journal of American Folklore 85, No. 338
(October-December, 1972): 356-366.
6
They were often referring to the book written by group of authors under title
Frustration and Aggression published in New Haven in 1939.
7
I do not wish to imply that subway graffiti would not be found aggressive if they
were examined, but only to point out that they were not given enough thought.
8
Allan Schwartzman, Street Art (Garden City: Dial Press, 1985), 63.
9
James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, ‘Broken Windows’, The Atlantic
Online, 1982, accessed February 25, 2012,
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/198203/broken-windows.
10
Paris has partially been employing it since the 1995, initially intended as a way
to keep streets ‘clean’ for the 1998 World Cup.

Bibliography
Abel, Ernest L., and Barbara E. Buckley. The Handwriting on the Wall: Toward
Sociology and Psychology of Graffiti. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1977.

Alinovi, Francesca. ‘Twenty-First Century Slang’. Flash Art 114 (1983): 23–27.

Baudrillard, Jean. Symbolic Exchange and Death. London: Sage, 2002.

Barenthin Lindblad, Tobias, and Martha Cooper. Tag Town. Stockholm: Document
Press, 2008.

Castelman, Craig. Getting Up: Subway Graffiti in New York. Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1982.

Chandes, Herve. Born in the Streets: Graffiti. New York: Thames and Hudson,
2009.

Chenus, Nicolas, and Samantha Longhi. Paris: De la Rue à la Galerie. Paris:

Pyramyd, 2011.

Deitch, Jeffrey, Roger Gastman, and Aaron Rose. Art in the Streets. New York:
Skira Rizzoli, 2011.

Greene, Judith A. ‘Zero Tolerance: A Case Study of Police Policies and Practices
in New York City’. Crime and Delinquency 45, No. 2 (1999): 171–187.
 Ljiljana Radosevic 11
__________________________________________________________________

Klanten, Robert. Urban Interventions: Personal Projects in Public Places. Berlin:

Gestalten Verlag, 2010.

Kuittinen, Riikka. Street Art; Contemporary Prints. London: V&A Publishing,

2010

Lachman, Richard. ‘Graffiti as Career and Ideology’. The American Journal of

Sociology 94, No. 2 (1988). Accessed January 7, 2012. http://www-
us.ebsco.com.ezproxy.jyu.fi/online/direct.asp?AccessToken.

Lewisohn, Cedar. Street Art: The Graffiti Revolution. London: Tate Publishing,
2008.

Mailer, Norman, and Jon Naar, The Faith of Graffiti. New York: Praeger
Publishers, 1974.

Millie, Andrew. Anti-Social Behavior. Berkshire: Open University Press, 2008.

Accessed January 20, 2012.
http://site.ebrary.com.ezproxy.jyu.fi/lib/jyvaskyla/docDetail.actionadv.x=1&d=all
&f00=all&f01=&f02=&hitsPerPage=500&p00=graffiti&p01=&p02=&page=1&id
=10273871.

Nguyen, Patrick, and Stuart Mackenzie. Beyond the Street: The 100 Leading
Figures in Urban Art. Berlin: Gestalten Verlag, 2010.

Stocker, Terrance L., Linda W. Dutcher, Stephen M. Hargrove, and Edwin A.

Cook. ‘Social Analysis of Graffiti’. The Journal of American Folklore 85, No. 338
(1972): 356–366.

Ullrich, Andreas. Stickers 2. Berlin: Gestalten Verlag, 2009.

Wilson, James, and George L. Kelling. ‘Broken Windows’. The Atlantic Online,
March Issue (1982). Accessed February 25 2012.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/198203/broken-windows.

Vincentelli, Alessandro, and Katharine Welsh. Spank the Monkey. Berlin:

Gestalten Verlag, 2006.

Ljiljana Radosevic is researcher at the Center for Research of Contemporary

Culture, Department of Art and Culture Studies, University of Jyväskylä, Finland.
 __________________________________________________________________
Table 1 - Descriptions and attributes of graffiti, street art and urban art in research
1970s
Grafitti oldest form of graphic expression; mushroomed into
NY; hottest contemporary art movement; explosion;
aesthetic exercise; expropriation; grassroots media
men; personal logos; highly stylized; exotic
calligraphy; act of vandalism; dirty shame; pastime;
anger and virulence; hostile environment (subway)
invites vandalism; strike back at system; can't be
ignored; scribbling your name across public property;
flashing dry markers like a knife; to cultivate a name;
defending turf; self-reliant; the power of ubiquity;
maximum visibility; altering the flesh of wagons; like
action painters; completely out of hand; rhinestone
Graffiti, Street Art, Urban Art
hordes; New Realism; a sport rather than an art;
masculine romance; magic marker boom; new style of
writing; enjoyment in the act of writing; rebellion;
since 1970s (Part 1)
experiment; totemic designation; an orgy of graphics;
extraordinarily violent; ephemeral; incredible baroque
Appendix
Street
Art
Urban
Art
12
1980s
mammoth swaths of colour; cryptic text; harmless display; environment is
uncontrolled and uncontrollable; art of the frontier; crossed frontiers to conquer;
sophisticated linguistic missiles against the barriers of language; cunning and
cryptic; barbarous and futuristic; its insidious strength disarticulates conventional
language; they surface from suburban ghettos; emerged from the depths of the
subway; sanctified by the success of graffiti; invaded NY art scene; a young army
of combative dark-skinned artists who together wage a war on language; raises
graffiti art to the level of cultured phenomenon; hermetic culture; the underground
culture of the “wild one's” has launched an attack on the culture; army of letters;
noble warriors of the words; defence garrison personified by a real soldier with a
talent for painting and drawing; intelligent enough to spray paint on the walls
without surrendering to pure wild instinct; kids longing to be somebody; spray
can art; public art; arresting beauty and energy of graffiti art; neighbourhood
transformed by mysterious hand; graffiti lettering; B-Boy characters with their
aggressive poses; allegiance to street rules; illegal social activity; writers
appropriate public space; deviant; abilities to spray-paint and outwit the police; to
male graffiti writers' sexism is integral part to their bravura conception; safe way
New Wave art; Visual Punk; underground creativity; modest “masterpieces”;
camouflaged; sacrificing confrontation for surprise; salient mode of
postconceptual art; new graffiti punks; New Wave graffiti; hard to ignore
aesthetic potential of the stuff; hard to mount a multimillion-dollar public-
relations campaign against it; process of adapting strategies of Wild Style; avant-
soup; receptivity to graffiti is the difference between uptown and downtown
sensibilities; potential for unsanctioned strategies to change art; mostly illegal acts
against the grain of acceptable behaviour; changing our thoughts on what else
public art can be; is intended to shake us from passivity; street artists dedicate
their art to Life; too visual to pass by; use standardized stencil to erase personal
signature; they have chosen to work in functional modes – documentary styles –
or “styleless” styles for direct access; participate in daily life; to claim a voice art
world denied them; art that was free to do its public job since it had no
responsibility to the continuum of Art; talks about socially relevant themes trough
aesthetic values without being imprisoned by them; new public art;
13
__________________________________________________________________
1990s
Grafitti constant battle between NY Transit Authority and minority adolescents; propagated by
music industry; next logical progression in art history; graffiti trains brightens the place
like a bouquet from Latin America; its uniqueness was difficult to define and evaluate;
aesthetically low-grade stuff; illegal and hazardous activity; poor minority criminals;
so-called street art; grey area between crime and public nuisance; an easily accessible
and effective way to communicate; graffiti threaten the quality of life in affected areas;
risk-taking is main motivation; property damage; impossible to read; a blight; low-
grade misdemeanour; monetary damage; city looks as though it is under siege;
insidious nature; highly visible offence; visual pollution; visual terror; symbols of
youthful disobedience; complex codes of street symbolism; ultimately destructive;
creative art form; language form; taggers are like creative writers; illegal public art;
stylized system of subcultural status; successfully broadcasting itself; postmodern
criminality; anti-authoritarian politics of anarchism;
Ljiljana Radosevic
Street
Art
Urban
Art
2000s
Graffiti writing actually saved lives; NY street art; writers had only
aesthetically altered the appearance of the property; extremely controversial
and misunderstood; sociological subculture; juvenile delinquency;
historical phenomenon; regulatory problem; hard to categorize; urban
“others”; legitimate artistic pursuit; creating their own media to combat the
perception of writers as immoral idiots; mind-blowing art; street art; the
pure unmediated expression; most natural manifestation of public art;
defacement; destruction; anathema to a ‘civil’ society; facile scrawl on
private property; revolutionary imagery on reclaimed space; extreme and
powerful facet of the graffiti performance; condemned for providing
unpleasant ‘ugly’ aesthetics and ‘unsightly’ surrounding; it violently
confronts the viewer; anti-social activity; ephemerality is the part f the very
process of street art; anti-graffiti industry is a multi-billion pound business
in UK; pure practice of aesthetic exercise; no other movement since
Cubism or Surrealism has developed such a distinctly new language;
Street artists update the heritage of the Renaissance and stimulate dwellers
to establish a critical relationship with the city; stencil mimics the
marketing practices; urban design mostly relates to an aesthetic practice
applied in favour of the beautification of public architecture and urban
style; street art is illicit and subversive in nature; is not concerned with
typography; is reflective to the place where it is installed; street art and
graffiti are cross-fertilizing; a progression in terms of art/street art/public art
is very healthy one; cartoon figures, stencils of collaged graphics and black-
and-white photocopies have become a global archetype for street art; they
are in competition with fly posters and advertisers; street art must build a
defence-shield against corporate theft; acting out a Robin Hood-like
activism; less destructive and rebellious in nature (than graffiti); it would be
wrong to apply broad over-arching rules to (street artist’s) practice; artists
find the atmosphere and process more open than that of the hard-core
graffiti-writing; stencils are more friendly than tags; there is no such thing
as urban art or street art – only art itself; defy all attempts to categorization;
Street art has become Urban art by virtue of the nearly endless variety of its
languages; nurture and inspire all the fields of the visual and graphic arts;
advertising, design and fashion, challenge is to successfully make the
transition from the walls of the cities to the walls of homes and galleries
without losing the soul of street art; era of 2010s; contemporary urban art is
from now on movement of today and of tomorrow; urban art is a measure
of our relationship to the urban experience; stickers, posters, extensive
murals and stencil graffiti, sculptural scurrilities, and subversive
interventions in the standardized visual worlds of our cities; is a
 Visual Kei: Practices of Gender and Body in a
Translocal Subculture

Nadine Heymann
Abstract
In this chapter, I give a brief insight into my PhD thesis about Visual Kei in
Germany. The translocal subculture Visual Kei has its roots in Japan and is
designated by a specific aesthetical practice and habitus. I ask which codes, which
(body)routines (that is, which practices) the protagonists in Visual Kei incorporate
to become intelligible subjects. Do or can the protagonists in their everyday
practice make an emancipative claim and disrupt a heteronormative gender
regime? I would argue that the critique in Visual Kei is one that is deeply inscribed
in its practices - a practical critique. It is less a practice of resistance. I would rather
describe it as a fractious practice against heteronormative images of bodies and
gender.

Key Words: Gender, body, subject, practice, translocal subculture, Visual Kei,
desire.

*****

1. Introduction
‘I am in-between.’ That is how Hiroki describes herself, as we met on a warm
sunny day in 2010 in Hamburg, and talked about gender, body and desire in Visual
Kei. Hiroki is eighteen years old and for four years she is a ‘Visu’ - that is, one of
the most common self-depictions of the protagonists in Visual Kei in Germany.
But what is Visual Kei and why does Hiroki speak of being ‘in between?’
In recent years, Visual Kei has been very prominent in the media in Germany.
Along with Manga and Anime, the possibilities of web 2.0, and high speed
broadband internet, Visual Kei came from Japan to Germany in around 2000. In
the first years altogether unnoticed, Visual Kei got a lot of attention by the
mainstream media, as in May 2005 a concert of Dir en Grey in Berlin was sold out
within one day, and more than 3000 people came to see the Japanese band.
Visual Kei is a subculture with its roots in Japan. The term literally means
‘visual system’ and relates to the slogan of one of the most famous Visual Kei-
bands X-Japan: ‘Psychedelic violence crime of visual shock.’ Influenced by Glam
Rock, the New Romantics, Goth and artists like David Bowie, Kiss, Twisted Sister
as well as by Japanese Kabuki Theatre, the first Visual Kei bands came into
existence in the early 1980s. The music touches a large variety of genres, like
Goth, Metal, Glam Rock up to Pop, sometimes all mixed in one song. Accordingly,
Visual Kei is characterised by a crystallisation around a certain style of music
called J-Rock.
16 Visual Kei
__________________________________________________________________
But, as one can guess from the term, Visual Kei is not only known for the
music; it has something to do with a specific type of clothing, make-up, hairstyle,
tattoos, piercings, and fashion, in short, with a specific aesthetic practice. This
aesthetic practice is interconnected with a specific set of practices of body, gender,
desire, and new forms of relationships.
The protagonists follow a specific aesthetic subcultural style in which the
heterosexual gender dichotomy is put into question. In the reproduction of the
mostly male musicians’ aesthetic, the protagonists in Visual Kei have wild, dyed
hair and plenty of dramatic make-up, black or white clothes, leather or lace, skirts
or dresses; bodies are slender, pale, hairless and with few muscles. Representations
of gender and body get fluid. It is impossible to identify gender by sight;
androgyny is all that counts and bodies seem to be endlessly malleable and
changeable. This irritation of the heterosexual gaze caught my interest and, as with
Clifford Geerts, I wanted to know: ‘What the hell is going on there?’ 1
But, as one can guess, this simple question is just a first impulse to start the
research. When I started to look closer, I wanted to find out which codes, which
(body)routines - in short, which practices - the protagonists in Visual Kei
incorporate to become intelligible subjects, acknowledged by others and by
themselves. I follow the thesis that the subjectivity and agency of subjects is only
comprehensible in specific cultural and social relations and settings. They are
socially constituted and they do not have any basis in an authority previous or
beyond the social settings on which critique or resistance could be reinforced. I ask
how the individuals in Visual Kei become attributable subjects through their
practice and whether or how their performativity of gender and body opens up
possibilities outside normative conceptions of gender, body, and desire. This led
me to ask how performative resistance or subversion can be actually realised in
social practice. How does the objection against social terms become efficacious in
substance? And how can subjects, which cannot elude their social provenance,
nevertheless accomplish a (political) transformation? And last but not least, can the
practices in Visual Kei be described as subversive? Do they have a transgressive
potential?
It is implied by my questions and by my points of interest, and it comes out of
my personal activism in the queer subculture in Berlin that my approach has a
queer-feminist angle. What does that mean for my research?
It is my notion of queer politics and my political engagement that laid the
foundation for my interest in generating knowledge about subcultural practices of
body, gender, and desire from a queer-feminist perspective. Queer theory has
decrypted heteronormativity as a powerful social element which runs through
gender order, biographies and perceptions of bodies, identities, families, nations or
classes. In this, gender and sexuality are arranged on the line of normality and
abnormality. Briefly, queer theory has its focus on the subversion or transgression
of gendered or sexual dichotomies, and this is the lens I am looking through in the
 Nadine Heymann 17
__________________________________________________________________
context of my research. Since I am doing my PhD in cultural anthropology, I am
working constantly at the interface of queer-feminist theory and cultural
anthropology, trying to make this productive for my research. Thus a lot of
methodological questions arise which, due to a lack of space here, I cannot go into
at this point.
I regard the outcome of my study as ‘situated knowledges,’ as Donna Haraway
coined the term. For her, ‘objectivity’ is not only an epistemological problem, but
rather a political one: ‘I would like a doctrine of embodied objectivity that
accommodates paradoxical and critical feminist science projects: Feminist
objectivity means quite simply situated knowledges.’ 2 With Haraway I assume,
that only a partial perspective - that means a limited location, situated, and
embodied knowledge - results in a comprehensible, responsible research that opens
up for critique and is able to be called into account. In my work, I try to mark the
position from where I am speaking. I try to mark my split and contradictory self,
and mediate my various standpoints. This account touches on not only political or
epistemological questions, but it is also about ethics, which became very clear in
my research and constitutes an interface of queer-feminist theory and cultural
anthropology.
My approach is an ethnographic one. For one and a half years, I conducted
fieldwork in this subculture in Germany. At the core of my data collection was a
participant observation. This means that I took part in the daily life of a group of
protagonists in Visual Kei, mostly with people living in Berlin, Köln, Leipzig, and
Kiel. As Visual Kei came to Germany with the help of the internet, and since the
protagonists use the internet a great deal, I spent a good deal of time on social
networks like Animexx, Myspace, and especially Facebook to communicate with
them and follow them. Most of the time, I met the people in real life and afterwards
we connected on an internet platform. Besides that, I accompanied the protagonists
when they visited concerts of Japanese bands, conventions, meetings, when they
went shopping, and when they were hanging out at McDonalds or Starbucks. One
central occasion for meeting many protagonists, who designate themselves as
Visus, was the Berlin Visual Kei Meeting (Bevit) which takes place three or four
times a year. This is an event which is organised and carried out by the young
protagonists. They are around fourteen to twenty-three years old themselves.
But before I point out some practices at the Bevit, I will give you an overview
of the theoretical setting of the study.

2. Studying Subcultures: Queering Anthropology

With its roots in Japan and its specific German imprint, Visual Kei can be
marked as a translocal subculture.
In my research, finding answers to the questions, stated above, I first relied on
subcultural theory. Given the rejection of the CCCS’s particular notion of
subcultural theory and the endless assortment of contexts in which the term
18 Visual Kei
__________________________________________________________________
subculture is applied, I follow Paul Hodkinson who suggests a new definition of
the term that centres on cultural substance and not on the former use focusing on
youth, working class-ness, collective resistance, and deviance. Furthermore, his
conception of a ‘translocal subculture’ transcends the limitations of the local
communities which have conventionally been in the focus of subcultural
ethnography, consequently being better suited for the study of subcultures in the
age of global networking and travelling.
In his study about the UK Gothic subculture, Hodkinson elaborates four criteria
of cultural substance which circumscribe his notion of subculture. Identity,
commitment, consistent distinctiveness, and autonomy cumulatively shape the use
of the concept of subculture. 3 In this way, subcultures can be described as
‘distinguishable from more fluid elective collectivities by their level of substance,
something indicated by the relative satisfaction by a given grouping of the criteria
outlined.’ 4
It is especially Hodkinson’s notion of identity-related processes in subcultures
which I found useful for my study. It stresses a shift away from the mystical stories
of resistance, towards a closer regard of motivations, meanings, and experiences of
actual protagonists. Nevertheless, it was not enough to answer my questions.
Subcultural theory only strives to answer how the individuals in Visual Kei
become attributable subjects through their practices and whether or how their
performativity of gender and body opens up possibilities outside normative
conceptions of gender, body, and desire. In the CCCS’s notion of resistance, it is
often a specific aesthetic style in which the subversion appears. But is style and
resistance enough to explain how social change is possible, how gender and desire
are constructed, and how the protagonists become intelligible subjects?
In a meandering pattern between theory, data, and the field, in my search for
continuative answers, I address the works of Judith Butler and Pierre Bourdieu,
who are concerned with the possibilities of political intervention, subjectivation,
and agency. Despite their differences, there are parallels allowing them to relate the
two theoretical accounts. Along with other components, it is the role of practice in
both theorists which is striking. Based on this, I form the thesis that Butler and
Bourdieu relate to practice in order to explain how subjectivity is generated. In
light of their theories, I try to examine whether the practices in Visual Kei have a
subversive potential and how gender and bodies are (re)produced in this
subculture. But what are the practices in Visual Kei? To shed light on this, I would
like to take you to the Bevit.

3. In-Between at the Bevit?

It is a nice and warm day in Berlin, 2009, and I am on my way to my first Bevit.
In the course of my research, I recently took my first steps to get access to Visual
Kei and the protagonists in it at this time. At the Bevit, I wanted to meet two
people. To begin with, there is Tara, one of the organisers of the Bevit and at this
 Nadine Heymann 19
__________________________________________________________________
time 22 years old. The other person is Miku. I heard and read a lot about him and I
was sure that he might become an important person for my research as he is well
established in the subculture in Germany and was into it from the start. 5 We
arranged our meeting at the Bevit via email and SMS, and Miku announced himself
like this:

Yes, we will be there :) We will be there around three or four.

Address me in any case. Oh, and I am blond now. And I think I
am going to wear a leather jacket with leo [leopard skin]. Love
Miku. 6

Many protagonists change the colour of their hair quite frequently, and Miku has,
in contrast to the last pictures I saw of him, blond hair. As you might have noticed,
it is common for Visus to discard their given name. Instead, they use Japanese
names like Taiji, Miku, Waru, Sano-chan or Tara, which refer usually to J-Rock
artists or other Japanese figures. By doing this, it is impossible to categorise the
individual’s gender by knowing the name. Typically in German you can guess the
gender by knowing the name of a person.
When I arrived at the Bevit, I was excited and scared, what reminded me of the
‘researcher’s fear of the field’ that Rolf Lindner describes. 7 I was afraid that I
might do something wrong and access to the field would fail. I was afraid of what
the Visus might think of me. These fears vanished as I met Tara, who co-organised
the Bevit, at the entrance and she invited to join their meetings and asked me to
connect on Animexx. Unfortunately, she was very busy, so that I went strolling
through the other rooms of the venue. There were stands where you could buy
Japanese food, magazines, second-hand clothes, accessories, books, etc. In the
main hall, there was a Cosplay competition going on. Cosplay is made up of
Costume and Play, and the protagonists try to dress like their favourite J-Rock star.
Near the stage, I spotted the ‘leo’ leather jacket and Miku. A group of people were
gathered around him.
When the competition was over, I introduced myself to them and Miku told me
he did not have time to talk to me (he needed to do a photo shoot), but that I could
join them if I wanted to. So, we went outside into the surrounding park and as I sat
under a tree with Miku’s friends. He was posing in front of the camera like a real
superstar model.
Once he finished, he came to me and the first topic he addressed was not Visual
Kei. It was his body and his gender. He told me that he has ‘always felt like a guy,’
he was always androgynous, and dressed this way. Miku wanted to be addressed as
‘he’ and I used the opportunity to ask the others around us about their gender
positioning. One of them also wanted to be addressed as ‘he’ and the other one was
not sure about it and said: ‘I am something in-between.’
20 Visual Kei
__________________________________________________________________
4. Conclusion
During my research, it became obvious that Visual Kei is a subculture that is
dominated by girls and transgender-identified individuals. In their practices of
gender and bodies, they put the dominant dualistic gender order in question. As the
preceding description of the Bevit is just a glimpse in Visual Kei, I will briefly
summarise some of the main findings.
I suggest that the practices of the protagonists show a specific sensitivity
towards matters of bodies, gender, desire, and sexuality - the heterosexual matrix is
not apprehended as self-evident. In their practices, the synchronicity between sex
and desire is put into question and thus concepts of gender, bodies, and desire are
opened up for reinterpretation. Thereby, Visual Kei discloses a space of feasibility
and experience for adolescents. It can be described as a ‘safe place’ for young
people to contest gender, body images, and forms of relationships. As Visual Kei
has no explicit political agenda, it is possible to be hedonistic without being
political. This is often a ‘precondition’ in many queer subcultures. However, I
argue that in the practices of the protagonists, you can read incoherencies,
fragilities, and thus possibilities for shifting bodies and genders. This is nothing
that the protagonists intentionally conduct. Of course, they have a notion that they
are not ‘normal’ and are ‘extreme,’ and some of them started to visit the Berlin
CSD and like it there. But up to now, all this has not manifested itself in a political
positioning.
Subsequently, the pivotal question is whether the Visus in their practices can be
understood as ‘emancipative’ or ‘political’ without having a particular notion of
that or reflecting on that possibility. Is a critique of social conditions or the
resistance against them dependent on an external view as a judgemental criterion or
source for reflexivity? I would argue that the critique in Visual Kei is one deeply
inscribed in the practices - a practical critique. It is less a practice of resistance. I
would rather describe it as a fractious practice against heteronormative images of
bodies and gender. These fractious practices are notably apparent in bodily
practices: socially formed, biological, and gendered bodies are, as defined by
Bourdieu ‘necessarily politicized bodies, an embodied politics.’ 8 Positions and
dispositions of bodies in Visual Kei are not coherent with a naturalised, normalised
gender dichotomy, and hence are able to irritate and unsettle. They are fractious
politicised bodies.

Notes
1
Quoted by Klaus Aman and Stefan Hirschauer, Die Befremdung der eigenen
Kultur. Zur Ethnographischen Herausforderung Soziologischer Empirie (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 20.
 Nadine Heymann 21
__________________________________________________________________

2
Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism as a
Site of Discourse on the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies 14
(1988): 581.
3
Paul Hodkinson, Goth: Identity, Style and Subculture (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 29.
4
Ibid., 33.
5
He is featured in some articles about Visual Kei.
6
Miku, SMS 15.08.2009; translation N.H.
7
See Rolf Lindner, ‘Die Angst des Forschers vor dem Feld’, Zeitschrift für
Volkskunde 77 (1981): 51-70.
8
Pierre Bourdieu, Die Männliche Herrschaft. In Geschlechterkonstruktion in der
Sozialen Praxis, eds, Irene Dölling and Beate Krais (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1997), 186.

Bibliography
Aman, Klaus, and Hirschauer, Stefan. Die Befremdung der eigenen Kultur. Zur
Ethnographischen Herausforderung Soziologischer Empirie. Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1997.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Die Männliche Herrschaft. In Geschlechterkonstruktion in der

Sozialen Praxis, edited by Irene Dölling, and Beate Krais, 153–217. Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1997.

Haraway, Donna. ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism as a

Site of Discourse on the Privilege of Partial Perspective’. Feminist Studies 14
(1988): 575–599.

Hodkinson, Paul. Goth: Identity, Style and Subculture. Oxford: Berg, 2002.

Lindner, Rolf. ‘Die Angst des Forschers vor dem Feld’. Zeitschrift für Volkskunde
77 (1981): 51–70.

Nadine Heymann is a PhD student in European ethnology at Humboldt

University, Berlin, Germany. She is interested in queer theory and the theories of
practice, subjectivation, gender, subculture, and youth. The title of her dissertation
is Visual Kei: Practices of Body and Gender in a Translocal Subculture.
 Crossing the ‘I Love You Bridge’: Gentrification and the
Contemporary Picturesque

Samantha Bernstein
Abstract
This chapter examines processes of gentrification in the context of picturesque
aesthetics. Economically disadvantaged urban areas have held aesthetic value for
the middle classes since the mid-nineteenth century when picturesque aesthetics
were transposed to an urban context. The picturesque valorises rough and irregular
spaces and their inhabitants, foregrounding the individual’s composition of derelict
objects as art. Since the beginning of the industrial era, the middle class has
defined itself in part through its aestheticisation of subjects not traditionally
considered beautiful, a process evident in nineteenth-century urban writing from
Britain and America. Existing studies of literature aestheticising poverty focus on
images of tragic or degraded ghetto dwellers; this research neglects the parallel
literary tradition in which ghetto life is romanticised, and poor characters offer
more possibilities of emotional fulfillment to wealthier ones. The picturesque
evokes people and places in which material lack is counterbalanced by aesthetic
vibrancy, and by a richness of experience and social interaction. This chapter
connects popular nineteenth-century literature that romanticises urban ghettos to
the gentrification of neighborhoods such as Sheffield’s Park Hill, a former council
housing estate now under redevelopment. Such areas have become desirable not
only because their dilapidation made property inexpensive, but because the middle
classes find decay and architectural irregularity aesthetically compelling, and
perceive the working classes as generating a sense of community and experiential
authenticity. By charting the development of the urban picturesque, I theorise how
and why middle-class identity formation is connected to the appropriation and
transformation of working-class areas.

Key Words: Gentrification, picturesque, middle class, working class, authenticity,

appropriation, urban writing.

*****

A developer called Urban Splash has for the past few years been regenerating
an apartment complex in Sheffield, England, that was formerly social housing.
Recently, a piece of graffiti - a declaration of love written on a bridge between
buildings - became part of the advertising for the Park Hill project. The ad uses a
moment in the lives of Park Hill’s former residents to convey the attractive
edginess of this renovated ghetto to prospective buyers. Such a tactic is effective,
this chapter will argue, because an important aspect of middle-class identity is the
ability to aestheticize rough and derelict places. The aesthetic and philosophical
24 Crossing the ‘I Love You Bridge’
__________________________________________________________________
compulsion toward poverty has a long history. Raymond Williams has
demonstrated that the pastoral, which glorifies shepherds and humble rural abodes,
can be traced to the third century B.C.E. 1 In the late eighteenth century,
picturesque aesthetics resituated pastoral nostalgia within an incipiently modern
experience of change and loss. As industrialisation depopulated the British
countryside, William Gilpin’s handbooks on picturesque composition were
fervently seized upon by wealthier members of British society, who undertook
tours of northern England, Wales, and Scotland in search of suitably rugged
scenery, which could be aesthetically enhanced by the well-placed inclusion of a
moldering windmill, ragged cottager, or group of gypsies. ‘Picturesque
composition,’ Gilpin wrote, ‘consists in uniting in one whole a variety of parts; and
these parts can only be obtained from rough objects.’ 2 This quotation articulates
two primary facets of the picturesque, which are also the reasons it has persisted
into the present. First, its emphasis on perspective - there must be someone to unite
the disparate, irregular parts into a unified whole. The picturesque is inherently
subjective; it exists as framed by an individual’s perception, so the psychological
and physical distance from poverty that allows its appropriation as art is embedded
in the art itself. Second, Gilpin’s fascination with rough objects transformed people
and things that were formerly considered insignificant or even repulsive into valid
artistic subjects. 3 The picturesque invests the individual composing the scene with
the power to designate aesthetic value.
By the mid-nineteenth century, picturesque tourism was no longer a rural but
an urban pastime. Most often this tourism was performed vicariously, by reading
the literary journalism that had begun taking London’s slums as subject matter,
depicting the sometimes vile but often vibrant and humorous characters found on
the city streets. The ruined rural abbeys and cottages of picturesque compositions
were replaced by renderings of crooked tenement buildings and their inhabitants in
works such as James Grant’s Sketches in London (1850), and Pierce Egan’s Life in
London (1841), which propelled interest in urban under-classes across the
Atlantic. 4 ‘Slumming’ became a popular pastime among the wealthier classes. 5 By
the end of the century, the word ‘picturesque’ was frequently used to describe
urban ghettos and their residents, and indeed, these works served a similar purpose
to the sketches produced and consumed by middle-class people a generation or two
before: they helped to reify middle-class identity. 6 In Distinction, Bourdieu’s
influential work on class and taste, the sociologist identifies what he calls ‘the
aesthetic disposition,’ 7 which is, put simply, the ability to appreciate the purely
formal, separated from content or function. A facet of the cultural preferences by
which the upper classes distinguish themselves from the lower, the aesthetic
disposition is not only the ability to appreciate art, but to designate artistic objects
as such: it is, Bourdieu explains, the ability to apply ‘the specifically aesthetic
intention to any object, whether or not it has been produced with aesthetic
intention.’ 8 Aestheticising objects not traditionally considered appropriate material
 Samantha Bernstein 25
__________________________________________________________________
for art is precisely the directive of picturesque aesthetics. Gilpin’s handbooks
effectively offered a set of guidelines for expressing upper-class taste: perceiving
the aesthetic value of physical roughness and irregularity and celebrating
simultaneously the natural and the construction of the natural as art. The
availability of such guidelines would be particularly welcome to an emerging
middle class insecure about its social position. Picturesque aesthetics made
available for popular consumption the aesthetic disposition, a mode of perception,
and representation predicated on ‘the distance from the world … which is the basis
of bourgeois experience.’ 9 This distance, both physical and psychological, was
significant to the increasing numbers of middle-class people living in cities
teeming with the poor.
The middle class is a complicated social category, one which cannot be
properly delineated in so small a space. For our purposes, the most salient aspect of
this broad and economically heterogeneous class is that it proceeds from individual
self-definition as much as from economic position - it is ‘more of a state of mind
than an actual economic status.’ 10 Defining social class is a particularly complex
task in the United States, a nation founded on belief in economic mobility and the
end of enforced deference to the powerful. Despite these ideals, the emergence of a
middle class in America resulted from the growth both of extreme wealth and
extreme poverty. Class inequality was, by the mid-nineteenth century, a serious
social problem; antebellum economic instability, especially the depression of 1857,
made homelessness highly visible and caused poverty to ‘seem a chronic rather
than a temporary condition.’ 11 We can, therefore, read the picturesque sketches in
George Foster’s work of literary journalism New York by Gaslight (1850) as
satisfying the desire to believe in American equality, and in the economic
opportunities afforded by American democracy to smart and honest individuals. To
pass over these optimistic renderings as romantic fantasy, however, ignores what
they say about class relations. Picturesque sketches of ghettos elide the suffering
found there, 12 but the depictions of the wealthy in such narratives are often highly
unflattering: the hard-working, faithful Bowery inhabitants scorn ‘the codfish
aristocracy’ who gets rich off the labour of others. 13 A joyous, affectionate scene
depicted between Mose and Lize, the Bowery ‘b’hoy’ and ‘g’hal,’ is contrasted
with a comparable exchange between ‘the Broadway dandy’ and his society lady,
whose affectations and emotional restraint are revolting compared to their poorer
counterparts. If attendance at good theatre and residence on Fifth Avenue are the
expected desires of the middle classes, such aspirations are thoroughly undermined
by the picturesque Bowery resident, ‘the most original and interesting phase of
human nature yet developed by American society and civilization.’ 14 Picturesque
renderings of the ghetto both bolstered middle-class identity by making art of the
‘rough objects’ in the urban landscape, and troubled aspirations to wealth by
deriding the wealthy and praising the poor. The precarious position of many
middle-class people makes this class dynamic particularly intriguing: while trying
26 Crossing the ‘I Love You Bridge’
__________________________________________________________________
to climb the social hierarchy, middle-class readers were compelled by the
colourful, spontaneous lives of the working class.
Distance and the spectator’s gaze create power, but they also engender longing
and articulations of lack. Recent studies have considered the salacious aspects of
slum literature, 15 and the construction of ghettos as sites of fantasy about
transgression. Such an approach, although helpful in understanding the appeal of
literature about vice and squalor, does not explain the pervasiveness of works that
romanticise and sanitise ghetto life; existing scholarship dismisses such literature
for effacing the suffering of the lower classes. 16 In a strange way, however, urban
picturesque narratives are a means of addressing class issues, without the
moralistic or sensationalistic elements of other slum literature. Scandal and
didacticism are certainly present in New York by Gaslight; as we have seen,
however, many of Foster’s ‘rough’ characters are morally and aesthetically more
appealing than the wealthier people in his work. In much urban picturesque
literature, ghetto residents are, as Uvedale Price exhorted that picturesque subjects
be, ‘free and unconstrained.’ 17 This freedom is contrasted with the limitations
attributed to the upper classes. The ‘b’hoys’ and ‘g’hals’ of New York’s east side
are described as ‘strong and piquant characters;’ they are ‘as happy and care-free
as a bird.’ 18 Malcolm Andrews has written of London:

[N]atural Picturesque variety and individuality in the

social…context was thought to have survived only outside the
culturally dominant middle classes, and particularly among the
poorer classes, where there were apparently no homogenizing
cultural constraints. 19

The desire to escape the cultural conformity and emotional constraint of middle-
class life - to imbue that life with the vigor and close personal bonds that working-
class communities are perceived to possess - helps to drive gentrification today.
In a study of gentrification in Canadian cities, Tom Slater writes that this
process is part of ‘a deliberate middle-class rejection of the oppressive conformity
of suburbia, modernist planning, and mass market principles.’ 20 The characteristics
attributed to working-class areas by picturesque aesthetics makes them the perfect
antidote to this negative conception of suburban life. Older neighborhoods
generally possess greater architectural variety; owning a home with original
features such as ceiling moulding creates a pocket of freedom from the mass
produced objects that pervade modern life. The rejection of conformity is not only
physical but psychological: many middle-class people who purchase homes in
working-class areas report feeling a sense of liberation or independence as a result
of their choice. 21 They have escaped the ‘living death’ of the suburbs.’ 22 The
breach of middle-class convention constituted by living in a working-class
neighbourhood is itself desirable - a statement of social and political values.
 Samantha Bernstein 27
__________________________________________________________________
Middle-class people who purchase homes in working-class areas are
predominantly socially liberal, and express the desire to identify with the working-
class residents. 23 It is notable that ‘districts where condominium development was
the dominant form of embourgeoisement were more likely to endorse conservative
politicians,’ whereas areas in which new residents preserved old structures tend to
vote more progressively. 24 By moving to working-class areas, middle-class people
attempt to imbue their lives with the ‘individuality’ that the picturesque has long
associated with poorer people, to elude the ‘homogenizing cultural constraint’
endemic to middle-class life, and to enact their concern with wealth inequality. At
the same time, the appropriation of economically disadvantaged areas remains an
expression of the aesthetic disposition: middle-class individuals can reify their
class identity by designating ‘rough objects’ as aesthetically valuable.
William Dean Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes (1889) offers insight into
the complicated class relations that underlie the middle-class taste for picturesque
aesthetics. By the time this novel was published in 1889, ‘picturesque’ had become
shorthand for a type of quaint, poignant charm found in marginal people and
places. Delight in the picturesque had also become more problematic. The interest
of the protagonist, Basil March, in picturesque slums and their inhabitants is often
depicted ironically, as evidence of middle-class intellectuals’ lack of ethics.
Discussing his plans to write sketches of New York’s slums, March says, ‘[t]hose
phases of low life are immensely picturesque. Of course we must try to get the
contrasts of luxury for the sake of the full effect.’ 25 This statement is, however,
followed by a sense of shame about the selfishness and insularity of his life.
Throughout the novel, March’s enjoyment of picturesque characters is shadowed
by a sense of his moral failure as a liberal American citizen. As Julie Ellison has
aptly written, ‘[i]n the throes of liberal guilt, all action becomes gesture, expressive
of a desire to effect change or offer help that is never sufficient to the scale of the
problem.’ 26 This is precisely the dilemma expressed by March in his one moment
of full self-awareness, in which he admits the injustice of capitalist economics and
articulates his sense of the middle class’s powerlessness within the socioeconomic
structure of his society. Realising that the lot of the middle class is to ‘truckle to
the proprietary Dryfooses’ 27 - that is, to grovel to the wealthy - March perceives
wealth inequality as an ineradicable aspect of American life. The picturesque, in
Hazard, is not a way of effacing the problem of poverty, but a means of depicting
how the middle class attempts to deal with its reality. I would like to suggest that
many of the politically leftist individuals responsible for gentrification are similarly
attempting to grapple with this seemingly insoluble inequality. Today, when social
conventions no longer separate poorer from wealthier (although all manner of
social conditions do), appreciating the picturesque can be seen as an attempt to
express solidarity with those less economically fortunate.
As in other picturesque literature, much of what March sees when he looks at
the poor through his metaphorical claude glass is what he feels he lacks in his own
28 Crossing the ‘I Love You Bridge’
__________________________________________________________________
life. To him, the absence of material comfort is also an absence of conventions that
restrain spontaneous social interaction and dull emotional responses. Thus, the
‘joyous screams’ of children, and the ‘scolding and gossiping’ women that please
March in a ‘picturesque’ ghetto street, represent a disordered but intense life of
connection with others and with the world. The poor have ‘forgotten death a little
more completely than any of their fellow-citizens’ 28 - they live immersed in the
present, in the experience of being alive. The full-contact living which compels
March is most significantly evoked in his diatribe on the horror of flats and the
benefits of tenement-houses. While ‘poor people can’t give character to their
habitations,’ the fact that people of the Marches’ class ‘do give character to the
average flat’ means that the flat is ‘made for social show, not for family life at
all…. The flat means society life; that is, the pretence of social life.’ 29 Bourgeois
life is, for March, characterised by distance, and in this case the conventions of his
class create distance even within families. Poor families are idealised as possessing
a unity denied to middle-class ones, and this unity results from their enforced
proximity. 30 The emotional distance produced by the aesthetic disposition, and
evoked by the pervasive human suffering in urban environments, is also a limiting
element of middle-class life. March’s yearning for community and spontaneity, for
an intensity of experience which he believes he sees in New York’s slums, offers
insight into the continuing interest of the middle class in working-class
neighbourhoods. Middle-class people who purchase homes in such areas often
express a desire for community that they feel is lacking in the suburbs; working-
class areas are ‘presumed to offer the warm, supportive communal existence
denied in the suburbs. 31 The physical environments of working-class
neighbourhoods like Sheffield’s Park Hill and Toronto’s Parkdale or Kensington
Market possess the roughness popularised by picturesque aesthetics, while the
areas’ inhabitants are perceived as being more unique and as having stronger social
bonds. The graffiti ‘I Love You’ on a crumbling bridge suggests lives lived out in
the open, with emotions unconcealed, the same qualities the urban picturesque has
always invested in the working class. 32 The new residents of urban ghettos
appropriate these neighbourhoods not simply because they are less expensive than
suburbs or condominiums, but because they appeal to a facet of middle-class taste.

Notes
1
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto and Windus,
1973), 14-20.
2
William Gilpin, “Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel;
and on Sketching Landscape: To which is Added a Poem, on Landscape Painting’,
in The Picturesque: Literary Sources and Documents, Vol. 2, ed. Malcolm
Andrews (Sussex: Helm Information, 1994), 19.
 Samantha Bernstein 29
__________________________________________________________________

3
In their study ‘Images of Decay: Photography in the Picturesque Tradition’,
Wolfgang Kemp and Joyce Rheuban (October 54 [1990]: 102-133) explore how
the picturesque contributed to the ‘democratization of the subject’ which they call
‘the great artistic project of the nineteenth century’. Kemp and Rheuban, 111.
4
Stuart M. Blumin, Introduction to New York by Gaslight by George Foster
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 20-22.
5
Deborah Epstein Nord, ‘The Social Explorer as Anthropologist: Victorian
Travelers among the Urban Poor’, in Visions of the Modern City: Essays in
History, Art, and Literature, eds. William Sharpe and Leonard Wallock
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 122-134.
6
Stephen Copley and Peter Garside, eds., The Politics of the Picturesque
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 7.
7
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans.
Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 28-29.
8
Ibid., 30.
9
Ibid., 54.
10
Chris Baker, ‘What is Middle Class?’, The Washington Times, 29 November
2003, A1.
11
Gavin Jones, American Hungers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008),
21.
12
The ethics of picturesque aesthetics have been debated since their inception.
Ruskin famously criticised it in The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1855); Melville
coined the term ‘povertiresque’ to capture the simultaneous attraction and
revulsion to poverty engendered by the picturesque. See Jones, American Hungers,
52-53.
13
George Foster, New York by Gaslight (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1990), 171-172.
14
Ibid., 177. As Inger Sigrun Brodey has observed, ‘interesting’ gradually became
‘a code word for identifying whether or not a scene or an individual conforms to
the aesthetic requirements of the picturesque.’ See Ruined by Design: Shaping
Novels and Gardens in the Culture of Sensibility (New York: Routledge, 2008),
190.
15
See for instance Keith Gandal, The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen
Crane, and the Spectacle of the Slum (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Also, Giorgio Mariani, Spectacular Narratives: Representations of Class and War
in Stephen Crane and the American 1890s (New York: Peter Lang, 1992).
16
On this point, see for instance Gavin Jones, American Hungers. See also
Benedict Giamo, On the Bowery: Confronting Homelessness in American Society
(Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989). Giamo identifies an ‘urban
picturesque school’ including such writers as Edward Townsend and William Dean
30 Crossing the ‘I Love You Bridge’
__________________________________________________________________

Howells, but does not offer an explanation of the historical or aesthetic precedents
for such a school.
17
Uvedale Price, Essay on the Picturesque (London: J. G. Barnard, 1810), 39.
18
Foster, New York by Gaslight, 174-175.
19
Malcolm Andrews, ‘The Metropolitan Picturesque’, in The Politics of the
Picturesque, eds. Stephen Copley and Peter Garside (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), 287.
20
Tom Slater, ‘Gentrification in Canada’s Cities: From Social Mix to “Social
Tectonics”’, in Gentrification in a Global Context, eds. Rolwand Atkinson and
Gary Bridge (London: Routledge, 2005), 41.
21
Tim Butler, Gentrification and the Middle Classes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997),
1-3.
22
Ibid., 158.
23
Ibid., 153. Much of the scholarship on gentrification does, however, concern the
displacement of poorer residents.
24
David Ley, ‘Gentrification and the Politics of the New Middle Class’,
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 12 (1994): 70.
25
William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes (New York: Boni and
Liveright, 1889), 195.
26
Julie Ellison, ‘A Short History of Liberal Guilt’, Critical Inquiry 22 (1996): 344-
371.
27
Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes, 536.
28
Ibid., 81.
29
Ibid., 83.
30
Ibid., 84.
31
Peter Williams, ‘Class Constitution through Spatial Reconstruction? A Re-
Evaluation of Gentrification in Australia, Britain and the United States’, in
Gentrification of the City, eds. Neil Smith and Peter Williams (London: Allen and
Unwin, 1986), 71.
32
The ubiquity of ‘street culture’ in mainstream taste - suggested by the use of
graffiti in a condo ad - is a vast subject, of which this chapter has necessarily
addressed only a small part. I have had to sidestep, for instance, issues regarding
race which in discussions of marginalisation and otherness (especially in America)
are always present.

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Tourism in Britain, 1760-1800. Aldershot: Scholar, 1989.
 Samantha Bernstein 31
__________________________________________________________________

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32 Crossing the ‘I Love You Bridge’
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Oxford University Press, 1996.
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the Beautiful… with Remarks on Burke and Reynolds. London: Hereford, 1801.

—––. Essays on the Picturesque, As Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful;
And on the Use of Studying Pictures, for the Purpose of Improving Real
Landscape. 2 vols. London: J. Mawman, 1810.

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 PLATE DXXIX.

NITRARIA SCHOBERI.
Schober’s Nitraria.
CLASS XI. ORDER I.
DODECANDRIA MONOGYNIA. Twelve Chives. One Pointal.
GENERIC CHARACTER.
Corolla 5-petala, cucullata.
Calyx 5-fidus. Stamina 15. Drupa 1-sperma.
Blossom five-petalled, hooded.
Empalement 5-cleft. Chives 15. Berry oneseeded.
SPECIFIC CHARACTER.

Nitraria foliis integerrimis, obtusis.

Habitat in Siberia.
Pallas’s Flora Rossica, vol. i. tab. 50.
Nitraria with entire leaves, blunt.
Native of Siberia.
REFERENCE TO THE PLATE.
1. The empalement.
2. A petal.
3. Seed-bud, chives, and pointal.
4. A chive magnified.
5. Seed-bud and pointal.
6. The same magnified.
This species of Nitraria is named after Schober, a physician and lover of
botany in Russia. It grows in the barren salt deserts near the Caspian Sea,
particularly about the salt lakes in Siberia, and is also found in Astracan. It
bears reddish berries of a salt taste, is a very rare plant in our gardens, but
successfully cultivated by Mr. Bell, who not only puts salt to the roots, but
also on the foliage. From a plant of his thus treated our drawing was made
last summer. Only one more species of the genus has yet been discovered.
 PLATE DXXX.

B I G N O N I A U N C ATA .
Hooked Bignonia.
CLASS XIV. ORDER II.
DIDYNAMIA ANGIOSPERMIA. Two Chives longer. Seeds covered.

ESSENTIAL GENERIC CHARACTER.

Calyx 5-fidus, cyathiformis. Corolla fauce campanulata, 5-fida, subtus

ventricosa. Siliqua bilocularis. Semina membranacea, alata.
Empalement 5-cleft, cup-shaped. Blossom bell-shaped at the mouth, 5-cleft,
and bellied beneath. A pod of two cells. Seeds winged, with a skinny
membrane.
SPECIFIC CHARACTER.

Bignonia foliis conjugatis, longo-lanceolatis, acuminatis, et tribus cirris

acutis uncatis.
Bignonia with conjugate, long-lanced, acuminate leaves, and three hooked
sharp tendrils.
REFERENCE TO THE PLATE.
1. The empalement.
2. A flower spread open, the segments of the border cut off.
3. Seed-bud and pointal.
This new species of Bignonia flowered for the first time in England in the
stove of A. B. Lambert, esq. Boyton. We have seen it (but not in flower) in
other collections, and have heard it called by the specific title of
ophthalmica: but as no reason could be assigned for that appellation within
the reach of our inquiry, we have named it from its hooked tendrils. It is an
autumnal-flowering plant running to a great length, with frequent blossoms,
is a native of Cayenne, and was introduced by Lord Seaforth.
 PLATE DXXXI.

V E R O N I C A D E RW E N T I A .
New Holland Veronica.
CLASS II. ORDER I.
DIANDRIA MONOGYNIA. Two Chives. One Pointal.

ESSENTIAL GENERIC CHARACTER.

Corolla limbo 4-partito: laciniis infimis angustioribus. Capsula bilocularis.

Blossom, border 4-parted. Lowest segments narrower. Capsule two-locular.
SPECIFIC CHARACTER.

Veronica foliis lanceolatis, oppositis, alternis, dentatis: floribus spicatis,

axillaribus: corollis parvis, pallide violaceis, fragrantissimis.
Veronica with leaves lance-shaped, opposite, alternate, and toothed. Flowers
grow in spikes from the axillæ of the leaves. Blossoms small, of a pale violet
colour, and very fragrant.
REFERENCE TO THE PLATE.
1. The empalement.
2. A blossom spread open.
3. Seed-bud and pointal.
This new species of Veronica was communicated to us by A. B. Lambert,
esq. It is a native of Botany Bay on the banks of the Derwent, and was sent
over by one of the settlers. The abundance and agreeable fragrance of its
flowers render it deserving a place in any collection.
 PLATE DXXXII.

PROTEA HUMIFLORA.
Low-flowering Protea.
CLASS IV. ORDER I.
TETRANDRIA MONOGYNIA. Four Chives. One Pointal.

ESSENTIAL GENERIC CHARACTER.

Corolla 4-fida, seu 4-petala. Antheræ lineares, petalis infra apices insertæ.
Calyx proprius, nullus. Semina solitaria.
Blossom four-cleft, or of four petals. Tips linear, inserted into the petals
below the points. Cup proper, none. Seeds solitary.
SPECIFIC CHARACTER.

Protea foliis lanceolatis: ramis plurimis adscendentibus: floribus confertis,

procumbentibus.
Habitat ad Caput Bonæ Spei.
Protea with lance-shaped leaves, with many ascending branches. Flowers
crowded together, and lying on the ground.
Native of the Cape of Good Hope.
REFERENCE TO THE PLATE.
1. A flower complete.
2. Seed-bud and pointal, summit magnified.
Of this perfectly new species of Protea we have represented the entire plant,
just as we found it growing in the conservatory of G. Hibbert, esq., where it
has flowered for the first time in this country. In the flowers it resembles the
P. cordata, in its foliage the P. canaliculata, allied to each and yet removed
from both. The procumbent situation of its crowded blossoms gives a
singularity to its appearance, and altogether it is certainly a very interesting
species. It should be planted in a light loamy soil, and kept in an airy part of
the green-house.
 PLATE DXXXIII.

CACTUS COCCINELLIFER.
Cochineal Torch Thistle.
CLASS XII. ORDER I.
ICOSANDRIA MONOGYNIA. About twenty Chives. One Pointal.

ESSENTIAL GENERIC CHARACTER.

Calyx monophyllus, superus, imbricatus. Corolla multiplex. Bacca

monolocularis, polysperma.
Empalement one-leafed, above, tiled. Blossom of many folds. Berry of one
loculament, many-seeded.
SPECIFIC CHARACTER.

Cactus prolifero-articulatus: articulis ovato-oblongis, sub-inermibus.

Habitat in Mexico.
Tuna cochenillifera.—Dill. Elth. tab. 297.
Cereus proliferous-jointed. Joints are of an ovate and oblong form, and nearly
unarmed.
Native of Mexico.
REFERENCE TO THE PLATE.
1. A flower cut open.
2. The same shown from the outer side.
3. A longitudinal section of the seed-bud.
4. The cochineal insect as retailed in the shops.
5. The same shown from the under side.
6. A larger and darker sort.
7. The same shown from the under side and magnified.
Cactus coccinellifer is a native of Mexico, where the principal culture of cochineal is situated, under
the torrid zone, where little or no rain falls during half the year (from the beginning of October to
about the end of March); as rain destroys the insects, and is injurious to the plants. The dryer the soil is
the better they succeed, as their roots are very impatient of water. Although the insects are found
naturally upon the plant in those climates, the cultivators, we are informed, always stock their young
plantations with insects of their own rearing, which are larger and finer than the wild sort, and give a
more brilliant colour. These they breed under sheds in the rainy season; and, when the spring
 commences, always fresh stock their plantations, scattering a few breeding insects upon each plant,
and in a few days the surface appears speckled over with them, each bringing about 300 at a birth. In
two months after they begin to collect, by scraping the insects from the bark with the blunt edge of a
knife; nor need they any other preparation than immersion for half a minute in boiling water, which is
done by dipping them in a kind of sieve, and afterwards drying them in the sun, or by a common fire.
Three collections in this manner are generally made in six months; fresh breeding insects being always
replaced upon the plants after gathering. Other species of Cacti also breed the insects; but this is
always preferred, as a man can gather from the coccinellifer ten pounds a day, while from the Tuna,
Opuntia, and other thorny species, he could not gather two ounces. The plants are generally placed in
lines from north to south, that both sides may have the benefit of the sun; and they consider them fit to
bear insects at the age of 18 months. Although it is neither a new nor a rare plant, yet as an interesting
one, and rarely seen in blossom in England, we presume it will be acceptable to our readers; nor is
there any tolerable figure of it which we have seen, unless that of Dillenius in the Hortus Elthamensis,
which is not in every body’s hands. Our drawing was made in July 1808, at the Countess de Vandes'
collection at Bayswater.
 PLATE DXXXIV.

JUNIPERUS DAURICA.
Daurian Juniper.
CLASS XXII. ORDER XIII.
DIŒCIA MONADELPHIA. Chives and Pointals on different Plants. Monadelphous.
GENERIC CHARACTER.
* Masculi flores.
Amentum ovatum. Calyx squamosus. Corolla nulla. Stamina 3.
* Fœminei flores.
Calyx 3-partitus. Petala 3. Bacca 3-sperma, tubulata, tuberculata. Calyx
inæqualis.
* Male flowers.
Catkin egg-shaped. Empalement squamous. Blossom none. Chives 3.
* Female flowers.
Empalement 3-parted. Petals 3. Shaft 3. Berry 3-seeded, hollowed, and a little
swelled. Cup unequal.
SPECIFIC CHARACTER.

Juniperus foliis oppositis, acutis, imbricatis, decurrentibus, passim patulis,

subulatis.
Pallas’s Flora Rossica, vol. 2. p. 13. tab. 55.
Juniper with opposite leaves, acute, imbricated, and decurrent, here and there
spreading, and awl-shaped.
REFERENCE TO THE PLATE.
1. A female flower magnified.
2. Seed-bud and pointals, magnified.
3. A berry.
4. The same cut in two, with a seed detached.
 The plant here figured is from the arboretum of the Marquis of Blandford
at White Knights, where we first noticed it in 1806, growing in the greatest
perfection, and bearing abundance of fruit, which it still continues to do
annually; and being a finer species than any we before possessed, is an
interesting addition to our collections of hardy evergreens. It agrees perfectly
with the figure and description in the Flora Rossica, and also with the
original specimen in the Pallasian Herbarium (now in the possession of A. B.
Lambert, esq.)
The plant from which our figure was taken is above twelve feet high, and
wide in proportion. The male plant we have not seen. Gmelin informs us (in
his History of the Plants of Siberia) that in the town of Janisca the Cossacks
burn the twigs of this plant to fumigate those who are afflicted with obscure
diseases, or those which they superstitiously suppose to be excited by devils,
of whose agency they are extremely credulous, and whom they believe to be
pacified with smoke and hideous noises, as being congenial to their own
nature.
 PLATE DXXXV.

T R O P Æ O L U M P I N N AT U M .
Winged Nasturtium.
CLASS VIII. ORDER I.
OCTANDRIA MONOGYNIA. Eight Chives. One Pointal.
GENERIC CHARACTER.
Calyx 1-phyllus, calcaratus. Petala 4-5, inæqualia. Nuces 3, coriaceæ.
Empalement one-leafed, spurred. Petals 4 or 5, unequal. Kernels 3,
coriaceous.
SPECIFIC CHARACTER.

Tropæolum foliis sub-peltatis: lobis obtusis, inæqualibus: floribus pinnatis:

petalis quinque, cuneatis, apice dentatis.
Nasturtium with leaves nearly shield-shaped. Lobes obtuse, and unequal.
Flowers winged. Petals 5, wedge-shaped, and toothed at the end.
REFERENCE TO THE PLATE.
1. A flower spread open.
2. Seed-bud, chives, and pointal.
3. Seed-bud and pointal.
This nondescript and beautiful species of Nasturtium we met with in the
select collection of the Countess de Vandes at Bayswater. Our figure
represents the entire plant; but by whom introduced, or whence a native, we
have not been able to learn. It appears to succeed well with the treatment
usual to other Tropæolums; and, if it should seed with us, will no doubt be
abundantly cultivated for the brilliance of its elegant little blossoms. It
flowers during the summer months.
 PLATE DXXXVI.

P R O T E A A B R O TA N I F O L I A , m i n o r .
Small Southernwood-leaved Protea.
CLASS IV. ORDER I.
TETRANDRIA MONOGYNIA. Four Chives. One Pointal.

ESSENTIAL GENERIC CHARACTER.

Corolla 4-fida, seu 4-petala. Antheræ lineares, petalis infra apices insertæ.
Calyx proprius, nullus. Semina solitaria.
Blossom four-cleft, or of four petals. Tips linear, inserted into the petals
below the points. Cup proper, none. Seeds solitary.
SPECIFIC CHARACTER.

Protea foliis tri-furcatis, filiformibus, acutis: floribus parvis, ramos

terminantibus in umbellis confertis.
Habitat ad Caput Bonæ Spei.
Protea with leaves three-forked, thread-shaped, and pointed. Flowers small,
and terminate the branches in crowded umbels.
Native of the Cape of Good Hope.
REFERENCE TO THE PLATE.
1. A leaf.
2. A bract.
3. A flower, one tip magnified.
4. Seed-bud and pointal.
Throughout this small divided-leaved section of the genus Protea there is
a similarity of appearance in the foliage, that makes the specific differences
appear less distinct than they really are. The small-flowered species is a
compact bushy little shrub, about fourteen inches high, and nearly the same
in width, requiring a light sandy loam, free access of air, and a little attention
to preserve it from the partial humidity of the atmosphere.