Baghdad's blast wall art

[truthpusher]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4229377.stm



Baghdad's blast wall art
By Roger Hearing
BBC News, Baghdad

Art finds a place amid a scarred city's sandbags and concrete
In a dull Baghdad world of concrete and razor-wire, chicanes and blast barriers, a little colour has just re-appeared.

Every official building or media base these days has a frontage of four-metre (13ft) high concrete walls to protect against bombs and mortars, but Iraqis have begun to see the grey expanse as a public canvas.

There is of course graffiti, but mostly great swirling apolitical exuberance - everything from retro-Chagall to prog-rock album-cover teenage fantasies.

Outside the French embassy, just two doors down from the BBC bureau, there is a profusion of images - wild horses, flying carpets, impossible towers and minarets, as well as a simple scene of an Iraqi farmer in a tractor coming back to his wife and children at the close of the day.

(snip)

Elsewhere in the city, security means glimpses of the art generally have to be snatched through curtained windows of our minivan - but the pattern of current popular expression all over Baghdad seems to be much the same - history or fantasy.

more:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4229377.stm

[seriousstan]

1. A people's culture will survive anything.

True beauty seizes even the smallest glimmer of light and prismatically gives us a rainbow.

[Javaman]

2. Just like the Berlin wall...

[leftchick]

3. yes indeed...

[Cooley Hurd]

4. At FDR's library in Hyde Park, they have a section of the Berlin Wall...

...and it's always struck me how, on the East Berlin side, the wall was unpainted and plain. However, on the West Berlin side, there's flourishing strokes of color left by cold war graffiti artists.

[NYC]

5. They were not allowed to paint it on the east side.

[Cooley Hurd]

6. I know - but it always struck me as a perfect metaphor...

...for the oppression suffered by those east of the iron curtain for so many years.

[NYC]

7. I have pieces of the wall from both sides.

The west side piece is blue. The east side piece is a large chunk of cement.

[leftchick]

8. check out this link...

http://www.dailysoft.com/berlinwall/art/berlinwallart_detail001.htm

I had no idea Keith Haring did some artwork on the wall as well. This is a fascinating website!

[Cooley Hurd]

9. Cool site - thanks, LC!

Haring's work is perfect for the wall. His androgenous, apolitical figures show man stripped of everything - a pure form.