AESTHETICS OF GRAFFITI INSCRIPTIONS AS A REFLECTION ON THE VISUAL ENVIRONMENT OF THE CITY

Abstract

The article examines the practice of aesthetising graffiti inscriptions as a reflection on the industrial era of the twentieth century in the urban environment. The purpose of the study is to investigate the peculiarities of the aesthetics of graffiti inscriptions as a reflection on the visual environment of the city. The methodology is based on a systematic analytical approach. The study applies general scientific (theoretical and empirical) and special art historical methods of scientific knowledge. The integrated use of general scientific theoretical and empirical methods of scientific knowledge made it possible to analyse the visual range of graffiti inscriptions and to study the aesthetics of graffiti inscriptions.The scientific novelty was focused on the fact that graffiti artists see urban space through the prism of certain planes, the rhythm of shapes, lines, and colours that serve as a place to create their inscriptions. This position leads to an active practice of aestheticising the urban environment, which gives the urban space artistic expressiveness, changing its visual appearance and forming new visual accents. In the second half of the twentieth century, there were trends that reflected the crisis of the industrial era in graffiti inscriptions through a specific letter form and the internal content of these inscriptions: deliberate deformation of the letter grapheme, complex interweaving of letter forms, collage or additional decoration of the inscription. The article emphasises the urban context, as it gives graffiti a «street feel». The complex use of general scientific theoretical and empirical methods of scientific knowledge made it possible to analyse the visual range of graffiti works and to explore the aesthetics of inscriptions in the visual environment.Conclusions. Graffiti is becoming a sign of a heterogeneous signal of our time, when artistic styles and urban context are mixed to convey complex cultural and social messages. Such trends lead to a break with traditional forms and the creation of new distorted and often deformed inscriptions, which is a kind of «rebellion against» the urban environment.