Everyone’s Talking About Post-Vandalism: How Street Aesthetics Inspire Artists

Actually, that goes really well with Berlin. A new term is currently making a name for itself in art: post-vandalism. The magazine “Kunstforum” dedicated an entire issue to the phenomenon. The trend was started by Irish artist Stephen Burke, who launched the “post_vandalism” Instagram account in 2019. 60,100 followers today. Tendency: rapidly increasing.

Burke posts art by global stars as well as sprayers and little-known newcomers on his account. The common feature is that they all deal with the not smooth ironed, so somehow Berlin city, with scratched windows and sprayed walls and this garbage can look and firewall feel they process in their art.

Scribbled house walls and old electricity boxes

The hallmark of the post-Vandal aesthetic is that it spills off the streets into off-spaces, into chic galleries and even international museums. Case in point: Swedish artist Klara Lidén once set up two filthy power boxes in a white gallery space. Or one remembers Katharina Grosse, the great installation artist and famous sprayer, how she sprayed the historical exhibition hall in the Hamburger Bahnhof right out into the courtyard, onto the pavement and onto the Rieckhallen.

Birgit Rieger is the art editor of the Tagesspiegel and has been on the move in Berlin’s art scene for many years. In “Rieger’s Round” she roams through museums, exhibition rooms and studios every Wednesday.

An early impetus for Stephen Burke was his interest in tags and graffiti being removed from the city. Even after the cosmetic correction, there is no denying that there was something there, something always remains, mostly strange blocks of color on rough house walls, which in themselves have something painterly about them.

In his interview with Kunstforum, Burke says he was “obsessed” with graffiti removal for a while. A creative game of appropriation and reappropriation. In addition to overpainting, he also became interested in protective devices that are intended to prevent people from messing around with other people’s property, such as climbing protection devices; they are now part of his own art.

Berlin wouldn’t be an art capital if you couldn’t go to a gallery here to see post-vandalism live. At Alexander Levy in Moabit, Felix Kiessling dimmed the gallery space. Inside is an overturned Kawasaki machine, the rear wheel of which is spinning in an endless loop.

The bike’s lights are coupled to a data system that reacts whenever lightning strikes the earth’s surface anywhere in the world. And it flashes all the time. So the lights flicker. “Echtzeit” is the name of the exhibition in which Kiessling brings other forces of nature into the gallery space in addition to lightning. These technical, sometimes very poetic arrangements give you a sense of nature for a moment, which we sometimes hardly notice in the city.

How nice it would be if everyone who wants to destroy did it in the gallery space in an energy transforming way. Then we would be over it. Really post-vandal.

To home page