URBAN CONCEPTUALISM

City is the art and art is the city. A lot of artists are using city as a place to create and as a source of inspiration. There are a lot of artists who are using city as a medium to create their art as well. In art as well as in literature urban themes started to spread very quickly since the beginning of twentieth century. Art started to move closer and closer to the city until the city become the part of the art. There are even conceptions of the city as a form of art itself. Why art and the city are so close to each over? What causes this strong relationship between them?The cities had changed completely, after industrial revolution in the end of ninetieth century. They become the force which dragged mass of people to move in after the Second World War. Post industrialization had created something what now we call the metropolis. Cities were growing up so quickly that the human mind could not understand the real size and possibilities of this structure. It started to form a new lifestyle. City had become the way of living and thinking. Due to the famous writer Jonathan Raban city is the mix of illusions, realities and myths which creates art: ‘…the city goes soft; it awaits the imprint of an identity. For better or worse, it invites you to remake it, to consolidate it into a shape you can live in. You, too. Decide who you are, and the city will again assume a fixed form round you. City had become not a space we suppose to see, but the space we want to see and to live in. Metropolis of our days had become the space where lots of different realities could exist together and never meet each over. And then living in the city becomes an art. This world allows you to play with your surrounding as well as with your personality. You can change your environment and even your identity whenever you want to do it. Unreality and irregularity becomes the game and the art. On the over hand, city could become the monster as well as a game. It could become the demon; it could drag you into loneliness, social uncertainty. Single personality can melt in the crowd and never come back in to existence again. Urban anonymity and the lack of cosiness as well as personal futility is one of the most important art themes in twentieth century. You are surrounded of mass of unfamiliar faces then you are living in the city. Usually it makes you tired and confused in relationships with others. After all you can find yourself being detached from the lives of other people and then you are constrained to stay in inaccessibly private community of your own head.There are a lot of artists which tried to express this tension between a person and his surroundings, a tension between a man and the city. From my point of view one of the best examples is American painter Edward Hopper. Usual streets become something mystic and somehow uncanny in his works. People in those streets seem lost and ill, they are painted statically sitting or standing, but the light and the shadows around them and on their face makes them look like an anonymous reflection of everyone’s of us inner frustration. Hoppers’ paintings reflect the dark side of urban living; he shows what is hidden beneath the surface of ‘American dream’ and consumer society lifestyle. The other artist, which used the theme of urban desperation, was T. S. Eliot. He called his poem about the city ‘The Waste Land’, it is a paradoxical metaphor, because city is physically and emotionally overcrowded place, but if one can not comb out what he need the city becomes a waste land. ‘Unreal City,/ Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,/ A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,/ I had not thought death had undone so many.The city is unbelievably wide creative object and subject in the same time, because it contains all the most essential art themes for humanity, such us the death, the beauty and the mythological stories of all kind. All these motives look fresh, interesting and actual in the context of metropolis, because the city is the most modern place in that sense that it is from the beginning till the end all created by the human beings. In the Western world after the philosophy of Nietzsche there was no god: ‘Where has God gone?’ he cried. ‘I shall tell you.We have killed him - you and I. We are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? ... Do we not smell anything yet of God's decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. The humans were forced to become gods themselves. Metropolis is the offspring of this human creation. This creative play reflects very well in the works of ‘Archigram’. This team of famous British architects created a new way of interpreting the city, new point of view to design and architecture. They played with the philosophy of the city and created it as an inadaptable concept of existence, as a way of subsistence, of utopia.Metropolis is thing which has no fixed meaning; you can understand it in a lot of different ways. His streets could become anything you would like to; it could become the space to exhibit an idea or an art or it could become the arena of the war. When new non-commercial trends in art began to take shape, the artworks moved from galleries to the streets and became interactive with the city itself. Guerrilla artists use the city as a war zone, where they are fighting with the stiff and fake ideology of the consumer society: ‘I don’t want people to just sit and look at my work/I want them to interact with it. I want to have an impact.’ - WT Interact. They are using well known signs and placing them in well seen public spaces in purpose to reach and refresh the minds of the passers by. Street art is usually political and conceptual, because they are using art as a form of critics of the society. Street art differs from other art forms in the fact that it has no external boundary between the image and the environment: while a traditional painting can be moved from one gallery to another without the artistic credibility of the painting being affected, guerrilla art is environmental, the surface it is applied to being as fundamental to the piece's meaning as that which is applied. This idea has evolved to such a degree that contemporary artists now often see all the work they do as a single piece being added to over time while older, less developed elements of the piece are being erased by graffiti removal efforts and other artists in competition for space.The city is soft, it has no fixed identity, it is constructed and unreal, and this is why we all can have a city of our own. Living in metropolis means living in theunreality, somewhere between nightmares and illusions. Living the life which is set between the underground and the towers. The city itself has no face; it is the land of the possibilities and choices. It is the extension of our identity and it is you who decide what to take and how to use this chaos. So the city could become a hell, a paradise, the land of silence or the land of the mercy. The art is like the city – it is the idea which awaits the imprint of our identity. The artist in metropolis is an impersonal observer, who is looking and recreating what he sees and spreading his vision of city to the others in that way creating the new mythology. He is the one who decides the laws of the eternity.