Dec 5, 2022
Venazir’s People & Places
Looking Carefully at Street Art in VR
Some street art is more than just one piece in one place. Some street art just keeps going. A lot of Venazir Martinez’ street art keeps going for a whole block, sometimes on both sides of the street.
A whole block, one artist’s vision. Nice immersive experience for the people of Baguio City, Philippines. Beautifies their world and shows them the people who have always lived there and what they do, in a continuous procession of scenes.
Photography can document this work but it cannot come close to reproducing the experience of being there.
Maybe Virtual Reality can come close.
Some of Venazir Martinez’ public art was recorded by the Google Cam on top of the Google Car in this funny-looking rectilinear format at a high resolution.
Viewed in a browser, like Chrome, it looks like this, depending on which direction you‘ve chosen, because the camera records the full 360 degree view with each image:
In a VR headset, it feels like you are right there at 84 Military Cutoff Road in Baguio City, looking at the paintings.
Her work is distinctive even at a quick glance. Most street art does not look like this.
It also rewards a longer viewing, with its detailed depiction of culture. Her goal is to show the bodies and styles of all the people where she lives.
She refers to herself as a Visual Anthro-preneur.
Her work makes the physical world around her look better and shows people we can all relate to. But I wonder how much of the loving detail is appreciated or even noticed as people drive or pedal or walk by, intent on getting where they’re going.
In Virtual Reality (VR), we can step out of our normal life and our usual place and find ourselves in any kind of world — including one featuring Venazir Martinez’ street art.
We can give her work that longer view and let it show us more.
And You Don’t Have to Go Through the Issues of Traveling in the 2020s!
I wouldn’t mind traveling all over the Philippines, with a special stop in Baguio City. Realistically, I won’t and neither will most of the eight billion of us now on the planet.
VR can help us give serious street art the attention it deserves — and it extends this opportunity to the whole world. That seems like a pretty big deal to me.
Why?
The original graffiti of the 60s and early 1970s, tagging, called attention to the tagger.
It didn’t take long for artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Lady Pink to start elevating their work to an art form, long before Banksy came along. But Banksy is the one whose ‘name’ became synonymous with a higher level of street art — street art that makes you think.
The girl being seized by an ATM on Rosebery Avenue in London (2008) is classic Banksy.
No surprise that it was his home town of Bristol, UK that saw street art as a friend not an enemy before most other cities. Street Art Festivals beautify an urban area in a way that lasts, at least for a while — and brings tourists.
Over the past ten years hundreds of cities made street art their ally and now feature large public mural art — multistory expressive paintings that make you feel.
Venazir Martinez’ work isn’t like Banksy’s or like the gigantic emotional murals painted by artists like INTI, Judith De Leeuw, or Lula Goce. Or like the celebrity portrait genre that Joseph Bankslave paints in Nairobi along with countless others in every city.
She represents a new and different thread — street art simply depicting real people the way they are.
She is not alone. As the first Public Artist in Residence for the New York City Commission on Human Rights, Tatyana Fazlalizadeh has painted the people she meets on the sidewalks every day. Her work allows people who aren’t glamorized media personalities to be seen and to see themselves reflected in the world artistically.
What Fazlalizadeh does for working people and people from marginalized communities in New York, Venazir Martinez is doing for indigenous people in the Philippines.
The accuracy of her renditions of clothing and activities is how she shows respect as an artist for the subjects of her work. She has taken the time and gotten to know the people she is depicting.
This form of street art is especially important in the upheavals and transitions now occurring everywhere. The mainstream ideas that have helped us make sense of the modern developed world aren’t working. We need something new and everyone knows it.
It can’t be as simple as flat-out adopting the operating principles of indigenous living, even if we could — because those principles did not evolve for the kind of world we have created. Somehow the rational scientific approach, which has produced some pretty cool results, needs to be put in service to all of life in a way that can last reasonably well for everyone.
When I see paintings of people working and playing like these people are, it makes wonder about other ways I could be living.
Tom’s work has not appeared in The New York Times, New Yorker Magazine, The New Republic, the New England Journal of Medicine, or anything New at all.
He only publishes in obscure journals and, once upon a time, PBS Program Guides. Otherwise he just gives his work a URL and sends it packing on the web at places like Medium and Sub-Stack, where he enjoys a modest following.
