Pictured: Juan Devis “Departures,” with Lydia Hernandez (NYT)
A modernization of the art of the mural is profiled in the NYTimes with Cybermural: The Web as the Wall, a series by multimedia artist Juan Devis that combines the traditions of muralism with street photography to tell the story of a changing landscape in Boyle Heights while exploring it's history.
Visually the project seems clearly inflected by European modernism, starting with Dada and Surrealist photomontage. While editing, Mr. Devis said, he sought inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s 1928 book “One-Way Street,” a stream-of-consciousness meditation based on objects encountered in an imaginary Parisian street.
There is also the influence of film. To Rita Gonzalez, a curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art who works on many of its contemporary Latino art projects, “Departures” suggests the “city symphony” films of the 1920s, movies that limned the patterns and rhythms of urban life, like Walther Ruttmann’s 1927 “Berlin: Symphony of a Great City” or “Manhatta,” a 1920 paean to New York by the painter Charles Sheeler and the photographer Paul Strand.
NYTimes reporter Carol Kino introduces the works as a "twist on the Los Angeles muralism of the 1970s, a movement born from
the Chicano civil rights movement when Mexican-American artists like
Judy Baca, David Rivas Botello and Willie Herrón adapted the Mexican
muralist tradition for their own time."
Combined video and sound to an online exhibit platform does take the craft of the mural to the new level. However, the use of photography for storytelling in the form of Mexican Murals is not that new.
In fact, it was Judy Baca and the UCLA Digital Mural Lab at SPARC that began using photography in digital based works as far back as 1996 with the series Witnesses to LA History: Estrada Courts. It continued in 1997 with "The History of the Mark Taper Forum" and "The History of the Ahmanson Theatre", two 50 by 5 foot murals that can still be seen on the exterior of the Center Theater Group offices. (Disclosure: I assisted on several of the pieces).
Leading the Estrada Court series for the UCLA Digital Mural Lab was Alma Lopez, who later went on to use contemporary photography for her own works that led up to "Our Lady", a piece that raised controversy in 2001 for it's portrayal of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
In April 2004, a Los Angeles artist began a series of digital
panels combining archived photography with street
photography to tell the story of a 100-year-old barrio in Riverside, where it still hangs at the Casa Blanca Learning Center (It also had filmed documentary footage used in multimedia form online, though in a simpler
form and was up only briefly in 2005). That series led to an exploration to the identities of Latinos in the Inland Empire that again used street with archived photograph that recently one panel on display at the Regent Gallery Downtown and the Biscuit Lofts in the Arts District.
Juan Devis as a filmmaker and new media artist, and the other noted works that use digital means to advance the traditions of storytelling may be fulfilling "a prophecy" by another muralist, David Alfaro Siqueiros, who felt murals would someday would combine the moving picture and photography.
The real twist of the NYTimes article is how it allows digital composition of murals, even if not exhibited in large-scale outdoor form, to have a contemporary identification and contradicts some curators who consider the digital mural a quaint use of folk art imagery with no real urban voice.
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