Two Parisian museums dealing with the representation and integration of graffiti subculture: Musée de la Poste and Palais de Tokyo

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1. INTRODUCTION  
 
 
 
During my studies I was particularly interested on revolutionary, avant-garde and anti-
conformist arts that are usually judged inappropriate by art historians for their political 
beliefs and because they have broken the canons of established previous art movements, 
as happened for Surrealism, Dadaism, Futurism, etc. A questioning of authority and a 
demand for social change within a society that marginalizes and discriminates artists is 
a common theme connecting theses artistic countercultures. Throughout my internship 
experience one special event inspired me to write about the emerging graffiti 
subculture: when the skateboarder and photographer Richard Gilligan won “Showcase 
select 2012”, Ireland’s contemporary photography awards at the Gallery of Photography 
in Dublin.
1
 This experience made me realize how the art institutions have recently 
become interested in this anti-conventional form of art and culture. The fact that 
museums and national galleries, as well as other kinds of art projects are supporting 
graffiti, an illegal art form, indicates its general acceptance and absorption into the 
mainstream art world. Due to the inherent political as well as creative conflict in the 
reception of these types of art, a general discussion of their importance and meaning 
could benefit from further critique.  
In the English Oxford Dictionary the term graffiti is defined as follows: 
 
‘noun (singular graffito /-təʊ/) 
[treated as singular or plural] 
 
Writing or drawings scribbled, scratched, or sprayed illicitly on a wall or 
other surface in a public place.
2
 
 
 
 
The Italian word Graffiti comes from Graphium, Latin evolution of the Greek term 
Graphéin which means writing, drawing and painting, and it refers to those marks that 
originally appeared during the ancient Roman Empire and are found in places such sites 
as Pompeii, the Domus Aurea of Emperor Nero (AD 54-68) in Rome, Hadrian's Villa at 
                                                         
1
 Gallery of photography, http://www.galleryofphotography.ie/2013/04/22/showcase-select/ (accessed 10 
February 2013) 
2
On line Oxford Dictionary. http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/graffiti (accessed 3 March 
2013)
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Tivoli. Other variations of graffiti were also the Egyptian graffiti in the Pyramids, 
Viking graffiti in Ireland, Mayan graffiti in Tikal, Guatemala. This ancient form of 
graffiti has an enormous importance because it proves the existence of peoples, different 
aspects of their societies and historical changes. In fact, graffiti has always been the 
medium to primarily express humankind’s experiences of everyday life.  
Religious symbols, military inscriptions, human and animal shapes, wild inscriptions, 
erotic visions, animal and flower decorations, mythological figurers, poems, popular 
names and nicknames, dates and places documenting emigration flows, political 
personalities’ names and political symbols, urban landscapes are all examples of 
common drawings which appeared over and over on walls of churches and houses, 
castles, rocks, isolation cells, quarries and catacombs revealing not only lifestyles but 
also beliefs and values throughout centuries.
3
  
Looking back to some specific periods in history, for instance during the May 68, other 
forms of graffiti can offer valuable insight into its political messages. Political graffiti 
represents the voice of speechlessness, in other words a form of expression for 
underground political groups, student movements or marginalized and dissatisfied 
people. This form of graffiti is generally inspired by periods of political tension, during 
revolutions, under occupation or in countries where there is a fight for autonomy. 
Examples are the French Revolution in 1789, 1848’s revolution, the advance of the 
Prussians in 1870 in Paris, the German occupation in Paris in 1940, the Tunisian war for 
independence from 1954 to 1962 and the May 1968 manifestations.
4
 In addition, the 
place par excellence where graffiti tends to show up is on walls: the Berlin wall, the 
Belfast wall in Northern Ireland and more recently on the Palestine wall. Although 
sometimes political graffiti can be strongly provocative in order to transmit this general 
disappointment, it can use humour, parody, poetry and art that let the streets of cities 
speak about the society in which we are living. The public street is the most democratic 
space, the preferred arena for the people to come together, the place where it is possible 
to complain and to ask for societal changes every time the mass needs to share this 
message. The groups creating this kind of graffiti, in general, possess some ‘subcultural 
elements’ because of the symbols or slogans that show class struggles and introduce the 
imbalance of power and the need to resist the dominant systems.  
                                                         
3
 Christian Colas, Paris Graffiti les marques secrètes de l’histoire (Paris: Parigramme editions, 2010), 17-
116.  
4
 Ibid, 86 – 139.
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In the May 1968, graffiti has accompanied the riots and the revolution that marked one 
of the great turns of the 21
st 
century. The Parisian folk of the 1968, notably students in 
philosophy, arts and political sciences spread political messages artistically and 
poetically through graffiti and slogans which are still very popular: “Be realistic, 
demand the impossible”, “the more you consume, the less you live”, “Be young and 
shut up! ”, “under the cobblestones, the sand”, “it is forbidden to forbid.”
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With the boom of Hip Hop culture in the eighties urban graffiti became a worldwide 
movement and it also began to be exhibited in museums and galleries. However, street 
art and the art world are two different realities: whereas the first is synonym of artistic 
freedom and autonomy, the second is traditionally defined by a conformity to artistic 
norms that dictate the art culture system. Moreover, in the street the artist can easily 
become popular via public exposure, on the other hand museums and galleries are 
places restricted on exposure. Besides, the street offers a variety of supports and more 
inspirations than the limited space of the ‘white cube’. Nonetheless, a lot of graffiti 
artists have accepted to enter and to collaborate with the attractive institutionalized art 
world mainly for two reasons: museums and galleries are prestigious places and the 
artists’ need to be part of a system that recognizes them as such.  
The passage from street to museums seems to be a compulsory step for graffiti artists’ 
recognition, but once intramuros graffiti artists may have to conform their works and 
this can alter the essence of graffiti itself. Eventually graffiti can lose its appeal and 
credibility as has happened for the first generation American graffiti artists who began 
to produce artworks on canvas to respond to galleries increasing interest in exhibiting 
graffiti indoors. The difficulty spotted by the art critics to define the art of graffiti, as 
will be explained later on, demonstrates how severe is the integration and 
institutionalization of this subversive form of art. In fact, the central problem of urban 
art revolves around the transition from the street to the museum, an important issue that 
brings us to my research question: how are currently the art institutions dealing with the 
representation and integration of graffiti? Which are the contemporary museum 
approaches to graffiti? Is there a canon for graffiti that is exposed in museums?  
The difficult recognition of graffiti will be addressed in different steps: the second 
chapter provides the methodology.  
                                                         
5
 Stéphanie Lemoine and Julien Terral, In situ: un panorama de l’art urbain de 1975 à nos jours (Paris: 
éditions Alternatives, 2005), 20.
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The third chapter presents a theoretical approach which explores the subject of graffiti 
as a matter of subculture, its values which have been analysed by several cultural 
sociologists and the Gramscian interpretation of the ambiguous relationship between 
subculture and the dominant culture.  
The forth chapter illustrates the history of urban graffiti in the USA and how this 
underground movement is connected with the Hip hop culture which was born in the 
Bronx and at a later stage it was adopted by the communities of ‘la banlieue’ in France. 
Moreover, a different form of urban art in France already existed before the boom of 
American graffiti as it will be explained in the forth chapter along with the assessment 
of the time.  
The fifth chapter offers an overview of the first graffiti art exhibitions in the USA and in 
France and it problematizes the acceptance of French graffiti in the institutionalized art 
world. After a brief description the first attempts to integrate graffiti intramuros, the 
fifth chapter describes two case studies: “Above and beyond street art” at the Post 
Office museum in Paris and “In the bowels of Tokyo Palace” at the Palais de Tokyo in 
Paris. For each exhibition a general profile and artists’ portfolio are included, both 
suggesting two different graffiti scenes and two opposing displays. As both of these 
museums have commissioned pieces of work specifically for the events, this serves as a 
case to investigate about the museums approaches to graffiti.  
Since the early eighties graffiti has been studied by art historians and sociologists. 
Seeing that graffiti and Hip Hop went hand in hand, the practice of graffiti was 
interpreted in the social sciences as a potential tool of this social movement. In the 
chapter “Graffiti esthéthisme populaire” in Actualité graffiti, the French sociologist and 
professor at the University of Perpignan Antigone Mouchtouris has analysed the topic 
of graffiti in relation with Hip Hop, as a consequence writers tended to convey specific 
values linked to Hip Hop culture through which young people expressed their social 
exclusion and expression of the "self" due to the alienation of big suburbs and due to the 
increasing gap between center/periphery. In addition, the sociologist Antigone 
Mouchtouris made clear that graffiti is the expression of popular culture, that is to say, 
the expression of immediacy that becomes the evidence of people’s life conditions, and 
he also alluded to the controversial need of subculture to resist and to be incorporated at 
the same time.
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Antigone Mouchtouris and Kheira Belhadj-Ziane, Actualité graffiti. Acte de colloque (Perpignan: Presses 
Universitaires, 2008), 79-92.