Editor-in-Chief Online Editor Copy Editor Nuart Journal Martyn Reed, Erik Sæter Jørgensen, Daniël de Jongh (NL) Nytorget 17 Nuart, Stavanger (NO) Sæter Jørgensen 4013 Stavanger Contemporary (NO/FR) Graphic Design Norway Editor Studio Bergini Susan Hansen, Middlesex London (UK) Editorial Correspondence University, London (UK) [email protected]

International Advisory Board Alison Young, University of Melbourne (AU) Lu Pan, Hong Kong Polytechnic University (CN) Bahia Shehab, American University in Cairo (EG) Mike Watson, John Cabot University (IT) David Pinder, Roskilde University (DK) Minna Valjakka, National University of Singapore (SG) Erik Hannerz, Lund University (SE) Myrto Tsilimpounidi, Institute for Sociology Jacob Kimvall, Stockholm University (SE) of the Slovak Academy of Sciences (SK) Jeff Ferrell, Texas Christian University (US) Pedro Soares Neves, University of Lisbon (PT) Julia Tulke, University of Rochester (US) Sabina Andron, The Bartlett Lachlan MacDowall, University of Melbourne (AU) School of Architecture, UCL (UK) Laima Nomeikaite, The Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (NO)

Nuart Journal operates under the Creative Commons Licence CC-BY-NC-ND. This allows for the reproduction of all articles, free of charge, for non-commercial use, and with appropriate citation. The copyright of all articles remains with the author of the articles. However, the copyright of the layout and design of articles published in the Nuart Journal remains with the Nuart Journal and may not be used in any other publications.

Produced with the support of Drago Publishing

NUART JOURNAL 2019 VOLUME 1 NUMBER 2 5–6 NUART JOURNAL 2019 VOLUME 1 NUMBER 2 5–6 nuart 2019 Volume 1 Number 2 ISSN 2535-549X journal Editor-in-ChiefEditor-in-Chief Online EditorOnline Editor Copy EditorCopy Editor Nuart JournalNuart Journal Martyn Reed,Martyn Reed, Erik SæterErik Jørgensen, Sæter Jørgensen, Daniël deDaniël Jongh de (NL) Jongh (NL) NytorgetNytorget 17 17 Nuart, StavangerNuart, Stavanger (NO) (NO)Sæter JørgensenSæter Jørgensen 4013 Stavanger4013 Stavanger ContemporaryContemporary (NO/FR) (NO/FR)Graphic GraphicDesign Design Norway Norway Editor Editor Studio BerginiStudio Bergini Susan Hansen,Susan Hansen,Middlesex Middlesex London (UK)London (UK) EditorialEditorial Correspondence Correspondence University,University, London (UK)London Eloquent(UK) [email protected]@nuartjournal.com Eloquent Vandals

InternationalInternational Advisory Advisory Board Board Alison Young,Alison University Young, University of Melbourne of Melbourne (AU) (AU) Lu Pan, HongLu Pan, Kong Hong Polytechnic Kong Polytechnic University University (CN) (CN) Bahia Shehab,Bahia Shehab,American American University University in Cairo (EG)in Cairo (EG) Mike Watson,Mike Watson,John Cabot John University Cabot University (IT) (IT) David Pinder,David Roskilde Pinder, Roskilde University University (DK) (DK) Minna Valjakka,Minna Valjakka, National NationalUniversity University of Singapore of Singapore (SG) (SG) Erik Hannerz,Erik Hannerz, Lund University Lund University (SE) (SE) Myrto Tsilimpounidi,Myrto Tsilimpounidi, Institute Institutefor Sociology for Sociology Jacob Kimvall,Jacob Kimvall,Stockholm Stockholm University University (SE) (SE) of the Slovakof the Academy Slovak Academy of Sciences of Sciences (SK) (SK)

Volume Editorial: Editorial: Jeff Ferrell,JeffMartyn Texas Ferrell, Christian Reed Texas Christian University University (US) (US) Pedro SoaresPedro Neves, Soares University Neves, University of Lisbon of (PT) Lisbon (PT) Martyn Reed Julia Tulke,JuliaEditor-In-Chief University Tulke, University of Rochester of Rochester (US) (US) Sabina Andron,Sabina Andron,The Bartlett The Bartlett Editor-In-Chief Lachlan MacDowall,LachlanNuart MacDowall, Journal University University of Melbourne of Melbourne (AU) (AU) School ofSchool Architecture, of Architecture, UCL (UK) UCL (UK) Nuart Journal

1 Laima Nomeikaite,Laima Nomeikaite, The Norwegian The Norwegian Institute Institute for Culturalfor HeritageCultural Heritage Research Research (NO) (NO)

Editor-in-Chief Online Editor Copy Editor Nuart Journal Martyn Reed, Erik Sæter Jørgensen, Daniël de Jongh (NL) Nytorget 17 Nuart JournalNuart operatesJournalNuart, Stavanger operates under the (NO) under Creative the Creative CommonsSæter Jørgensen Commons Licence CC-BY-NC-ND.Licence CC-BY-NC-ND. 4013 Stavanger This allowsThis for allows the reproduction for the reproduction of all articles, of Contemporaryall articles,free of charge, free (NO/FR) of forcharge, non-commercial Graphicfor non-commercial Design use, use, Norway Editor Studio Bergini and with andappropriate with Theappropriate citation. theme of citation.The Issue copyright II The– ELOQUENT copyright of all articles ofVANDALS all remainsarticles – is remainswith a thecities authorwith thatthe of author Polothe has of the visited as part of Khan’s expanding The theme of Issue II – ELOQUENT VANDALS – is a cities that Polo has visited as part of Khan’s expanding articles. articles.However,Susan However, the Hansen, copyright the Middlesex copyright of the layout of the and layout design and of design articles of publishedarticlesLondon published (UK)in the Nuart in the NuartEditorial Correspondence provocativeUniversity, link London to street (UK) art and urban culture’s delinquent empire, these are [email protected] by Polo to Khan himself. Towards provocative link to street art and urban culture’s delinquent empire, these are narrated by Polo to Khan himself. Towards Journal remainsJournalroots remainsandwith the the ‘creative Nuartwith the Journal joyNuart of destruction’andJournal may and not –maybe evidenced used not inbe any used most other in any publications.the other end, publications.Khan prods Polo to tell him of the one city he has roots and the ‘creative joy of destruction’ – evidenced most the end, Khan prods Polo to tell him of the one city he has recently in Banksy and Blu’s high profile acts of auto- never mentioned directly – his hometown Venice. Polo’s recently in Banksy and Blu’s high profile acts of auto- never mentioned directly – his hometown Venice. Polo’s iconoclasm, but also present in a plethora of quotidian, response: ‘Every time I describe a city I am describing iconoclasm, but also present in a plethora of quotidian, response: ‘Every time I describe a city I am describing human scale, unsanctioned urban interventions. The rise Venice’. In effect, Polo has been going home each time and human scale, unsanctioned urban interventions. The rise Venice’. In effect, Polo has been going home each time and Produced withProduced theof support festival-sponsored withInternational of the Drago support Publishing of Drago Advisory Publishing neoliberal Board muralism sits uneasily imagining the possibilities of what a city might be. of festival-sponsored neoliberal muralism sits uneasily imagining the possibilities of what a city might be. with theseAlison Young,ungovernable University forms of Melbourne of urban (AU) creativity. Issue Lu Pan, HongMany Kong of Polytechnic Polo’s descriptions University (CN) can be read as eloquent with these ungovernable forms of urban creativity. Issue Many of Polo’s descriptions can be read as eloquent II contains contributions that celebrate the work of street meditations on the city, culture, language, time, memory, II contains contributions that celebrate the work of street meditations on the city, culture, language, time, memory,

Number Bahia Shehab, American University in Cairo (EG) Mike Watson, John Cabot University (IT) art’s Davideloquent Pinder, vandals, Roskilde and University papers (DK) that critically examine Minnaor Valjakka,the general National nature University of human of Singapore experience (SG) in relation to art’s eloquent vandals, and papers that critically examine or the general nature of human experience in relation to attemptsErik Hannerz, to cultivate, Lund University instrumentalise, (SE) commodify, and Myrtoplace. Tsilimpounidi, What can Institute we collectively for Sociology imagine? Perhaps the attempts to cultivate, instrumentalise, commodify, and place. What can we collectively imagine? Perhaps the ‘protect’Jacob the Kimvall, art of Stockholmthe streets. University (SE) of theimaginable Slovak Academy is not of so Sciences ridiculous (SK) and fanciful as it sometimes ‘protect’ the art of the streets. imaginable is not so ridiculous and fanciful as it sometimes Jeff Ferrell, Texas Christian University (US) Pedro Soares Neves, University of Lisbon (PT)

2 Eloquent vandals are integral to a critical street art. sounds, maybe we already have the resources we need to Eloquent vandals are integral to a critical street art. sounds, maybe we already have the resources we need to Julia Tulke, University of Rochester (US) Sabina Andron, The Bartlett We needLachlan to recognise MacDowall, that University ‘vandals’ of Melbourne and those (AU) associated Schoolshape of Architecture, and create UCLthe environments (UK) we want to pass through We need to recognise that ‘vandals’ and those associated shape and create the environments we want to pass through with actsLaima of Nomeikaite, creative crime The Norwegian and resistance Institute are also capable and live in. with acts of creative crime and resistance are also capable and live in. of positioningfor Cultural and Heritage understanding Research (NO) their work in relation to The lead visual article for this issue, Jeff Ferrell’s of positioning and understanding their work in relation to The lead visual article for this issue, Jeff Ferrell’s critical theory/studies/history – and indeed often do so, ‘Sometimes the City’, offers a further meditation on collective critical theory/studies/history – and indeed often do so, ‘Sometimes the City’, offers a further meditation on collective while also recognising that they needn’t do this to be accepted imagination and the city, through his photo essay which while also recognising that they needn’t do this to be accepted imagination and the city, through his photo essay which into the field. The theme of this issue also raises critical features long lost photographs, scrounged from the rubbish into the field. The theme of this issue also raises critical features long lost photographs, scrounged from the rubbish Nuart Journal operates under the Creative Commons Licence CC-BY-NC-ND. questions about the use and mastering of specific forms bins of a large American city. Ferrell presents these tattered, questions about the use and mastering of specific forms bins of a large American city. Ferrell presents these tattered, This allows for the reproduction of all articles, free of charge, for non-commercial use, of languageand with to appropriate justify/block citation. entry intoThe thecopyright field of of contemporary/ all articles remainsstained, with the author yet startlingly of the evocative photographs as ‘a secret of language to justify/block entry into the field of contemporary/ stained, yet startlingly evocative photographs as ‘a secret public/finearticles. art However, discourse. the copyright of the layout and design of articlesarchive’ published of in urbanthe Nuart life, ‘a disorienting dérive through other public/fine art discourse. archive’ of urban life, ‘a disorienting dérive through other JournalIn this remains issue, with we the also Nuart explore Journal the and importancemay not be used of in anylives, other publications.other times, and other places… another city within In this issue, we also explore the importance of lives, other times, and other places… another city within storytelling and its relationship to the city, of narratives the city’. Ferrell’s quietly powerful visual essay is a deft storytelling and its relationship to the city, of narratives the city’. Ferrell’s quietly powerful visual essay is a deft with the power to turn a single space into a multitude of blend of scholarship and art. with the power to turn a single space into a multitude of blend of scholarship and art. places with different meanings to different people, stories Our lead academic article for this issue, Alison places with different meanings to different people, stories Our lead academic article for this issue, Alison that transcendProduced with the support‘history’ of Drago and Publishing bring in herstory, yourstory, Young’s ‘Art and Belonging: On Place, Displacement and that transcend ‘history’ and bring in herstory, yourstory, Young’s ‘Art and Belonging: On Place, Displacement and ourstory and theirstory – whilst freeing us from narratives Placelessness’, explores some provocative questions about ourstory and theirstory – whilst freeing us from narratives Placelessness’, explores some provocative questions about

Eloquent we no longer need. Italo Calvino’s 1972 novel Invisible Cities the way that street art relates to place, and its power to we no longer need. Italo Calvino’s 1972 novel Invisible Cities the way that street art relates to place, and its power to is a literary masterpiece that explores the imaginable both foster and dismantle spaces of connection and is a literary masterpiece that explores the imaginable both foster and dismantle spaces of connection and possibilities of the city. The book is framed as a conversation disconnection. Young explores the uneasy relationship possibilities of the city. The book is framed as a conversation disconnection. Young explores the uneasy relationship between Marco Polo, a 13th Century explorer and Venetian between street art and gentrification, before turning to between Marco Polo, a 13th Century explorer and Venetian between street art and gentrification, before turning to

Vandals merchant and the emperor Kublai Khan. The majority of critically consider the work of artists who focus squarely merchant and the emperor Kublai Khan. The majority of critically consider the work of artists who focus squarely the book consists Eloquentof short stories describing 55 fictitious onVandals the radically unsettling experience of displacement, the book consists of short stories describing 55 fictitious on the radically unsettling experience of displacement, 10 NUART JOURNAL 2019 VOLUME 1 NUMBER 2 10–19

ART AND BELONGING:

ON PLACE, DISPLACEMENT AND PLACELESSNESS

Alison Young University of Melbourne

Street art is often talked about as contributing to a sense of place. Mural projects, festivals, and street artworks are said to foster feelings of belonging, recognition, and connection to a place. More than this, street art is increasingly used in place-branding and in commercial transactions. This article poses some questions about the implications of the way that street art relates to place and both makes and unmakes spaces of connection and disconnection. It will begin with the use of street artwork to sell property development, identifying this as a contemporary characteristic of the now well-known relationship between art and gentrification. As a counterpoint to the commercialisation of the sense of place generated by street art, it examines the work of artists such as Ian Strange, Francis Alÿs, and Stanislava Pinchuk, who make art located in displacement, dislocation, and dispossession. ART AND BELONGING 11

INTRODUCTION time, it did not take long for this apparent correlation to be Where does street art take place? Found in train converted into a belief that commissioned art interventions tunnels, abandoned buildings, warehouses, train carriages would have the same effect on markets. Mural projects, in railyards, alleyways, and on rooftops, street art has usually involving large-scale gable end murals painted with never been found only in the street. The qualifying adjective the consent of residents or city authorities, can now be in the art form’s name provides an indication of simply one found in innumerable cities and towns. possible location for this cultural form rather than determin- Much debate has ensued as to whether legal murals ing the type of site that it must take place within. Beyond offer positive or negative consequences for neighbour- its lack of confinement to the physical space of the urban hoods, for street art culture, and for social attitudes to the street, the place of street art is always expanding, multi- presence of paint on urban surfaces (Kramer, 2010; McAuliffe, plying, proliferating. 2013; Schacter, 2014) and it is likely that mural projects and This article focuses primarily on street art rather mural festivals give rise to multiple, sometimes contradictory, than graffiti.1 The common characteristic found in both art and context-dependent effects that should make comment- forms (the application of paint to surfaces, generally without ators hesitant to generalise: a street art festival such as permission) allows us to raise questions about, firstly, the Nuart in Stavanger, Norway, will have a different history impact of the illicit application of paint to surfaces; secondly, and effect than the actions of a local council in Dulwich in the ways in which that cultural practice has been taken up London. However, one consequence of the proliferation of in the context of commercial property development; and, the presence of legal murals has been a very specific variant finally, the potential for art to locate itself in places of of the monetisation of the presence of paint on surfaces: displacement and dispossession. the work of street artists and graffiti writers can be incorp- As a cultural form, street art has always been orated into property developments themselves. interested both in the nature of place and in expanding the Gentrification is notorious for its ‘repurposing’ (or network of available locations in which to make art. Such cannibalisation) of places, usually turning old factories into an interest in proliferation has meant that street art, like apartments, or creating havens of consumerism inside graffiti before it, has travelled. Graffiti initially travelled now-defunct industrial spaces. In Fitzroy, in Melbourne, from neighbourhood to neighbourhood and city to city by property developers turned their attention to the 100-year- means of metropolitan and national train systems (Austin, old Star Lyric Theatre. It had been a theatre and then a 2001; Ferrell, 1998; Gastman and Neelon, 2010); after it neighbourhood cinema for decades; later, it was occupied began to be photographed and documented, images of by a discount homewares shop before sitting unused and graffiti could be acquired in zines and books. Street art, unoccupied for several years. Once slated for development, becoming popular and prevalent during the time of the rise 158 apartments are now to be built on the site. Prior to of internet platforms, was very quickly available to con- construction commencing, in 2017 the street artist Rone sumer and viewers through their computer screens and was commissioned by the developers to hold an exhibition, then smart phones (MacDowall and De Souza, 2018) called Empty, within the derelict building.3 Very quickly, street art was in many places at once. The exhibition was no doubt partly intended by the As it travelled, street art seemed to bring qualities of developers as a means of managing neighbourhood creativity, ‘edginess’, cool – and money. Often identified resentment, but the experience of the exhibition itself as a key marker of the ‘creative city’ or ‘cultural precinct’, transcended mere public relations (Figure 1. Rone, Empty. the presence of street art was used by city authorities for Photograph ©Alison Young). place branding to potential tourists and to encourage the Rone’s show combined site-specific work – painting clustering of ‘creative industries’ such as fashion, advertising, directly onto the peeling walls, around an existing mural and architecture in areas where street art could be found, from the building’s days as a theatre – with photographs in initiatives that drew from the ideas of Richard Florida’s of works he had painted in abandoned buildings whose ‘creative class’ (2005). In search of urban creativity, street locations were undisclosed. Those works, in buildings art was mobilised not only across topographies and clearly heading for collapse, acted as reminders to the geographies, but also across markets, with variable price show’s visitors that the Lyric building was also demolition- points thanks to the diversity of forms that street art could bound. The sparse installation also foregrounded the be shaped into: Banksy stencils printed on a tea towel, prints, architecture of the theatre, putting it on display as a kind T-shirts, action figures, as well as artworks sold through of anticipatory memorial to the imminent loss of the building auction houses and galleries and art collections (Young itself. Although the show ran for only ten days, more than 2014; 2016). 12,000 people attended. At its conclusion, the building was When street art stayed in place – on walls, in streets padlocked, and shortly afterwards, hoardings went up that – this stasis did not mean its images were exempted from announced its destruction. Within a few months, the building monetisation. Instead, painted walls in so-called ‘edgy’ was bulldozed, and gone, present only as the moniker of neighbourhoods became markers of value. To live or work an as-yet unbuilt apartment building. in an area where the walls had been painted by artists This example is in part a familiar tale of loss: some- meant a price that could be applied to rents and house thing that was once a community theatre is today simply prices, and one that would mobilise upwards over time. 2 another development opportunity. But the exhibition mana- As Schacter writes, ‘Of all the ways economic utility is ged to be more than that: for ten days, the building once generated within the Creative City, however, it is place more was a focal point in its community, and a space in making or place marketing that is highest up on the list’ which art was displayed, looked at, experienced, and (emphasis in original) (2014: 163). communicated as something that can be remembered. It The shift from ‘place marking’ to ‘place marketing’ thus seemed that art might reanimate the dying building. did not go unnoticed by those with a direct financial stake This proved, however, to be illusory: the exhibition was shut in the trade in housing and property. Once developers had down on schedule, the site was padlocked, and, shortly perceived a relationship between property values and the afterwards, the building was bulldozed to the ground. presence of illicit street art randomly placed on walls over An even more stark demonstration of street art’s 12 NUART JOURNAL

contemporary subservience to the interests of property street art’s present and future radical potential: asking can be found in a ‘display’ property, part of another develop- questions about the relationships of art (street art, graffiti, ment in Fitzroy, near the Lyric Theatre. The exterior of the and contemporary art alike) to space and to place. How building has been painted in colourful abstract shapes and can art respond to the now widespread phenomenon of signed by Sofles, a Brisbane-based graffiti writer associated displacement and disconnection from place? How can street with authentic, hardcore wall writing, albeit one who has art engage with placelessness? What can placelessness shown himself to be interested in commercial collaboration and displacement teach us that we might use to resist the (Figure 2. Façade by Sofles. Photograph ©Alison Young). co-optation of street art from place-making to place selling? That this development is another step along the path To pose some possible answers, or to begin a towards the annihilation of street art as anything other than conversation around these questions, I consider here work decoration is confirmed by the sign on an adjacent property by three artists. Two have been known in the past as street development, simply called ‘Fitzroy Ltd’, as if acknowledg- artists or graffiti writers; one has always been considered ing that the very idea of Fitzroy as a neighbourhood has a fine artist. All three combine multiple practices in their been reduced to a corporate signifier or a commodified work. All work in and away from their ‘home’ location; all ‘mood’ or ‘feel’ that an apartment purchaser can acquire. of them seek to problematise ideas of place, home, and As Schacter commented, ‘Street art has today come the inhabitation of space. to shed any radicality it may have once contained not simply through selling itself, but, perhaps more perniciously, through it selling a false notion of place’ (emphasis in original) (2014: THE PLACE OF HOME 162). Rone’s subsequent activities have starkly proved this As a graffiti writer, Ian Strange wrote as Kid Zoom. point. His projects have used the same key features that He left his home city of Perth, Australia, and went first to seemed so effective in Empty: liaison with a developer to Sydney and then to New York City, where he acquired a gain access to a site slated for development, installation reputation as an emerging star in the street art scene of site-specific works within the soon-to-be-demolished (Young, 2016). However, Strange instead chose to develop building, inclusion of photographs of works painted in un- an art practice that centred on large-scale sculpture named locations, and a highly limited exhibition schedule. 4 combined with painting and documentary video. He created With each project’s repetition of these features, the creativity a to-scale model of the house he grew up in, and exhibited of the projects seems to diminish, resulting in a practice it with a wall removed, showing the hollowed-out interior that seems less about art and more about the ‘artwashing’ rooms, a skull painted on its front façade, and with three of property development (Evans, 2015; Young, 2016). burned out family cars outside. Although described by In the relationship of contemporary manifestations Strange as a ‘homecoming’, it was clear conventional ideas of ‘street’ art to space and place, a paradox is at work here. of the family home, for Strange, had been called into question, Although it was once used to activate places, to make them and shown to be on the verge of destruction or deterioration. into dynamic spaces of contestation, challenge, encounter, In his next series of works, Suburban, Strange and atmosphere, when street art is deployed in soon-to- rendered the position of the family home even more be-developed derelict buildings, it marks the death of space. precarious. Suburban exhibited a range of pieces, using Instead of creating dynamic or activated spaces, these various media: a number of large photographs, a short commissioned interventions annihilate creative potential, documentary film, some large painted pieces of wood, and reducing locations to mere approximations of what the a video installation. The works focus on seven houses in place could be. It is not that street art festivals, projects, various American states, all already unoccupied before murals, interventions and actions can no longer activate Strange began working on them, but stripped of habitation places, but rather that neighbourhoods like Fitzroy (and and re-presented by him as ideas of suburban houses. Such Shoreditch and Williamsburg and Kreuzberg) are plainly a process involved a restoration of the houses’ façades: showing us what is at stake, and how things can go wrong. Strange added various kinds of domestic accoutrements We can no longer simply assume that street art (or even to the houses depending upon their state of disrepair and graffiti, thanks to the use of Sofles’s work in the example according to his desired image for them. At the same time above) can exist with the same kinds of impact or challenge as he strove to make these uninhabited houses conform to that it once did. Asking ‘What hope is there for Street Art?’ an image of typical habitation, Strange reworked the outer (2014: 170), Rafael Schacter pointed to a number of artists façades to mark the houses out as abnormal: one was engaging in ‘urban experimentation’ or ‘urban intervention’; painted entirely red; on another a gigantic skull adorned a these artists are ‘working to produce a new type of visuality wall; another was painted with a slashing red cross; another for the city, who have and do come to question their painted entirely black except for a perfect central circle. environments, who have and do question the intellectual Some of them were then burned down (by local fire-fighters) and physical milieu in which they stand’ (emphasis in original) and filmed by Strange as they blazed (Figures 3 and 4. Ian (2014: 171). Strange, Suburban. Photographs ©Ian Strange). While ‘urban interventionists’ make use of the city’s Strange has stated: ‘the documentation process environments to construct counter-narratives and question gives the work its final form’ (Strange, 2017). His art is thus the value and meaning of its milieu, it is also worth examining not so much an act of creation (although it is profoundly the insights of a number of artists whose work seems creative); rather, it records aspects of what already exists. simultaneously to focus upon place, drawing on locations His work performs an act of witnessing of the destruction to situate and structure their works, while negating the that is already intrinsic to these places. This thematic conceptualisations that underpin the meanings of ‘home’, became even more pronounced in his subsequent works, ‘city’, ‘property’, and even ‘place’ itself. Thinking through which continued to investigate the conjunction between the relationships of their resulting artworks to place and suburbia and destruction. space can assist us no longer to simply mourn street art’s In Landed, he created another model of his family lost radical impact, tempting though this is and satisfying home, this time a near-full size replica, which he painted though it may feel. Instead we might start to think about black and installed as if it was sinking into the ground. The ART AND BELONGING 13

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 4 14 NUART JOURNAL

Figure 6

Figure 5

Figure 7 ART AND BELONGING 15

idea, said Strange, was that the house had fallen out of the the idea of a particular space – the home – is given physical sky, as in The Wizard of Oz – a neatly humorous reference location in a type of building that many of us would immedi- to Australia (Young, 2016). For Strange, the work allowed ately find recognisable, only to realise that Strange has him to ask larger questions about belonging, evoking the alienated us from our memory of what a home might look relationship between the early British colonisers and the like, offering instead a series of images of the isolation and place in which they had landed. The half-sunken house precarious-ness of the suburban family home. showed something of the cataclysmic impact that Northern European cultures had had upon the land and its peoples. It delivers, said Strange, ‘a physical sense of whether this STRANGERS IN A FAMILIAR PLACE house belongs here. And from that you can ask, “Do we In the intervention, Fitzroy Square, part of his Railings belong here?… Does the city belong here?”’ (Young, 2016). series, the Belgium-born, Mexico-based artist Francis Alÿs For a subsequent series, Final Act, Strange worked walked around and around a square in London. 5 As he in an active disaster zone, in Christchurch, New Zealand. walked, he dragged a stick along the metal fence poles that Two big earthquakes occurred there, in September 2010 he walked past, eliciting a repetitive noise. He did this for and February 2011. In the second earthquake 185 people a number of hours and was filmed while walking; the film died. Over the course of both, much of the city’s central is edited into a 5-minute video that can be viewed online business district was destroyed. In addition, many of the (see further Edensor 2010 on this and other artworks about city’s suburbs were rendered uninhabitable. These sub- walking). As with much of Alÿs’s work, Fitzroy Square is urbs are in the ‘red zone’, with homes on land so badly far more complex than is initially apparent. The video damaged they will wait years for rebuilding (more than records the randomness of the event, including people who 8000 houses in Christchurch lie within the zone) (Johnston, have walked through the scene, just as Alÿs is doing – the 2013). Four red zone houses were made available to Strange camera stays for a while with an elderly, hunched woman by the New Zealand government’s Canterbury Earthquake who progresses slowly through the square. The sound Re-covery Authority. Strange cut into the houses, and, as made by the stick appears random, but it seems likely that he puts it, ‘after each cut was made, the interiors were Alÿs selected a stick that would make a melodious, musical painted entirely white… [The resulting images] highlighted sound – he ‘plays’ the fence, beating a rhythm as he walks. the negative space of the cuts in the houses, with light He could have used a metal rod to achieve a clanging, beam-ing out.’ (Strange, no date) discordant sound, or a larger stick, to produce a crashing His intention was ‘to open up the homes, expose and oppressive sound. Instead we are given a bell-like, their vulnerability and loss of function’ (Figure 5. Ian modest sound, that can be heard faintly as Alÿs walks away Strange, Final Act. Photograph ©Ian Strange) . This from the camera and with more clarity when he is filmed strategy was partly inspired by the works of Gordon Matta- closer to the camera. The work is of course full of choices Clark and Richard Wilson, and partly cognizant of the ways made by Alÿs, although we are encouraged to receive the in which homes in the entire earthquake affected region work as if it is a found event, a recording of something that were ‘split open, sunk on an angle or left with gaping holes’. any person could have made rather than an event staged The artworks were archived and acquired by the museum’s by the artist to produce particular sounds in a particular permanent collection as a record of these homes and all place. the other homes which have been demolished’ (Strange, What is this place anyway? The place chosen by Alÿs no date). is not random, in that he is circling one of London’s private More recently, Island, made during 2015-2017, focuses gardens, located within its urban squares. These private on ‘interventions directly undertaken on foreclosed homes gardens are locked, accessible only to those who live on through Ohio’s “rust-belt” region as well as research and the square itself and who are therefore in possession of a work created in Detroit and New York between 2015 and key. Paying attention to the work’s location renders Alÿs’s 2017’ (Strange, 2017): actions less random and less melodiously musical – the stick rapping on the fencepoles draws our attention to the Island aims to create a poetic connection stranger at the gate of the garden, the literal outsider, unable between the specificity of each GFC affected to enter the private garden, but repeatedly circling, circling, home and the larger themes they have come circling. How would the square’s residents have viewed to represent. Looking at the icon of the house Alÿs, as he walked round and round their private place? as a deeply vulnerable object and personal Were the individuals who traversed through the square vessel for memory, identity and aspiration’. rendered uneasy by his presence? In the minimalist, almost- Using ‘the metaphor of the desert island’, the nothing that is Fitzroy Square, Alÿs shows us that the home is presented as ‘a place of simultaneous unquestioned acceptance of the private spaces within public refuge and entrapment. Beyond the context space is worth our attention, is worth circling around and of economic foreclosures, the works touch around, asking: who controls this fence? Who is given on a wider idea of suburban isolation and passage into the garden, and who is locked outside it? angst. (Strange, 2017)

The works show, once again, ‘the house as psycho- DISPLACED IN PLACE logical symbol and the false sense of permanence it seems Stanislava Pinchuk is a Ukrainian-born Australian to represent’ (Strange, no date), and ‘direct markings on artist who, under the name Miso, was a well-regarded or cuts made into the homes, in an attempt to place the figure within Melbourne’s street art scene in the 2000s, psychological interior of the houses onto their exteriors’ creating elaborate, stylised hand-drawn paste-ups, often (Figure 6. Ian Strange, Island. Photograph ©Ian Strange). depicting women, that were installed in laneways in For Strange, the houses ‘are dwellings of projected Melbourne over a period of years (Figure 7. Street artwork memories from the viewer; of their childhood, of family, by Miso. Photograph ©Alison Young). But this artist has belonging and isolation’ (Strange, 2017). In all his works, in recent years been making very different artworks under 16 NUART JOURNAL her own name. The works represent obliteration and shatter marks on paper, framed under sheets of glass. By destructions of various kinds; they map sites of erasure forcing the spectator to look hard at the surface, to look and annihilation. As such they counter the tendency towards obliquely and make the shatter marks catch the light, Pinchuk forgetting effected by the passage of time and the makes us replicate her efforts in making these maps of disappearance of traces of violence into the landscape. destruction. These central devices – data-mapping, depictions To that extent, although the transformation from that are almost imperceptible, easy to overlook, and a ‘Miso’, street artist, to ‘Stanislava Pinchuk’, fine artist, might distancing from literal rendition of destruction – have seem familiar, the shift in name is not matched by a shift become the drivers of Pinchuk’s practice, and have provided in aesthetic topic. As Miso, the artist made ephemeral structure to her subsequent series of works. artworks that paid tribute to otherwise anonymous figures Fallout arose out of the ‘triple disaster’ of March from her memories, relocating them from the Ukraine to 2011, when the Fukushima reactor in northern Japan went the streets of Melbourne. As Pinchuk, she makes art into meltdown after an earthquake and a tsunami. Pinchuk depicting what ephemerality produces – diminishment and had been living in Tokyo at the time. Years afterwards, she disappearance. Her artworks examine spaces after the travelled to Fukushima to record the landscape in the displacement of their inhabitants, or spaces that individu- disaster’s aftermath. Here she photographed locations, als rendered placeless are displaced into, especially after identifying small signatures or apparently insignificant disaster and diaspora. places that would hold a key to the artworks she would later When Pinchuk turned her attention away from mak- make. In Fukushima, two things became significant for her. ing art for the streets, the streets initially came with her First, the nuclear clean-up involved digging up the radio- into her artworks. She began tracing maps on paper, active earth, bagging it, and removing it for burial: she saw conceptual maps that responded to the idea of walking trucks filled with bags of radioactive earth, some of it through city streets, in Melbourne and in Tokyo, where she spilling out, revealing the potential futility of the exercise. was living. Then in 2014, Russia began bombing the Ukraine, At the same time, she repeatedly encountered fishermen’s and Pinchuk found herself monitoring the news to try to nets spread across the ground; some had been stranded learn where bombs were being dropped. She channelled there in the disaster, others were in use by those who had this experience of distant but intense grief and distress crept back into the Grey Zone of the clean-up and who had into a series of artworks called Surface to Air. The name returned to their pre-disaster livelihood despite the potent- of the series held a double meaning, referencing a technology ial risks (Figure 8. Stanislava Pinchuk, process photo- of war, the surface-to-air missile, but also naming the drive graph for Fallout. Photograph ©Stanislava Pinchuk). to recover from submergence in trauma, to regain access Pinchuk mapped sites of soil removal, radioactivity to air after being buried in the deep earth of grief. The readings and landscape, generating a data map of a blighted artworks mapped explosion sites; Pinchuk created almost- landscape. Instead of hammering, she transferred the data invisible images by using tiny hammers to make rippling onto paper using a needle to create tiny pinpricks that, once

Figure 8

Figure 9 ART AND BELONGING 17

Figure 10 Figure 11

again, were almost invisible until caught by the light. The enormous encampment, with some of them living at this result was a map of twisted topography, enigmatic folds location for many months. In October 2016, the French and creases that destabilise our sense of what we are authorities evicted 6,400 people and bulldozed the encamp- looking at. The twisted mesh of the artwork also evokes ment, further displacing the already displaced. Pinchuk the fishing nets stretched across the poisoned soil (Figure went there to see the place that so many had hoped would 9. Stanislava Pinchuk, Fallout. Photograph ©Stanislava be but a stopping-off point during their journey to places Pinchuk). of safety, but which became a place of detention or suspension. After visiting Fukushima in 2015 and 2016, Pinchuk There she both documented the process of clearing the site decided to go back to her place of birth, the Ukraine, in and collected the numerous remnants of people’s lives in order to understand the impact on the region of the Chernobyl the camp, such as SIM cards, shaving cream containers, disaster in 1986. In 2017, the result was Sarcophagus, a and tubes of toothpaste. These were transported back to more than 6 metre long scroll of pin-pricked paper. The her studio in Australia (Figure 10. Stanislava Pinchuk, work’s name references the so-called sarcophagus, or context photo for Borders (The Magnetic Fields). Object Shelter, built in haste to contain the Chernobyl reactor Photograph ©Stanislava Pinchuk). after the disaster. And the work’s delicacy and fragility Once again, she sought to create artworks that allude draws attention to the fact that the sarcophagus at Chernobyl to the violence of displacement but which refuse its direct has been due for many years to be rebuilt, but delays have representation, and in which the process of their making stymied the project. Pinchuk’s work followed the same somehow enacts violence on the materials themselves. In process as used for Fallout : site visits, photodocumenta- Surface To Air Pinchuk hammered paper till it bloomed into tion, walking, field notes, and data mapping. The resulting shatters; in Fallout and Sarcophagus she pierced paper work is displayed in a glass case, requiring the spectator with needles, all processes that took months to enact. For to lean over, lean in close, shift the gaze from side to side this new series, to be called Borders (The Magnetic Fields), to try to see what is depicted – almost impossible to take Pinchuk learned a new skill: the making of terrazzo. She in in its totality, and meaningless when viewed as single combined the materials that she had collected from the marks or in sections. Jungle, and ground them into fragments; the resulting Having thus made two series of artworks that re- material was then sculpted into small, regular, precise sponded to places from which people had been displaced, shapes, box-like, tile-like. The fragments glint within the in 2017 and 2018, Pinchuk began making art about a location objects, displaced from their owners, ripped from the place at which displaced people had found themselves – the they were last possessed, held, or used (Figure 11. Stanislava refugee camp known as ‘the Jungle’ in Calais, which was Pinchuk, Borders (The Magnetic Fields). Photograph first established in 1994, when the Eurotunnel opened, and ©Stanislava Pinchuk). endured till October 2016. Displaced people had created an 18 NUART JOURNAL

Figure 12

HOW TO BE RADICALLY CONNECTED Faced with street art as a decorative addition to property TO SPACE BY BEING OUT OF PLACE developments in cities around the world, where can we Just as Ian Strange’s works in Landed, Suburban, find traces of the radical connection to place and space Shadow, and Island render unfamiliar and ominous the very that was so important in animating street art as an idea of the home, or haven, so Pinchuk’s Borders series international movement as well as conversations about the is intensely destabilising. It represents the end point of a role of art in everyday life the contemporary city? Although process in which the artist both replicates the process of fine artworks are far from immunised against the im- displacement – these fragments have been transported so precations and encroachments of the market, my suggest- far away from their owners and their last place of use – and ion in this essay is that the artists considered here offer simultaneously calls it into question in the strangeness of ways of looking both obliquely and critically at the degrad- the transformation of everyday objects into terrazzo. The ations inflicted by city-branding and property development tiny boxes and tiles, in which plastic shards mimic jewelled upon the practices of street art. inlays, are in themselves displaced, out of place, and when It is therefore worth following the paths traced by looked at invite the spectator to experience something of artists like Ian Strange and Stanislava Pinchuk out of the the destabilising force of displacement (Figure 12. Stanislava street art scene, as a means of considering the role of art Pinchuk, Borders (The Magnetic Fields), partial view. both in the dislocation from a sense of place, through the Photograph ©Stanislava Pinchuk). displacing effects of the gentrification process, and also Looking at them is therefore an uncanny experience, in being able to represent loss of the conversation with and and uncanniness is an affect dimension achieved by the in space through the trauma and rupture of displacement artworks of all three artists discussed here. To be uncanny, and placelessness. In Ian Strange’s work, the home itself as we know from Freud, is to be unheimlich, unhomely, to becomes a vacant site of trauma and loss; in Alys’s work have no place in which to belong, no home. In this essay, I the mundane acts of urban life such as walking, freighted have sought to pose questions about the ways in which with uncertainty of meaning, show how we require fences street art has been made to be too much ‘at home’ in the and borders for meaning and order; and in Pinchuk’s work, contemporary city: it is now so easy on the eyes of the we see how the places that we take for granted are always spectator that it has been reduced to a mode of urban about to be overwhelmed by a wave or to collapse into an embellishment or beautification. In its early years, street earthquake or to be destroyed by war or radiation – the art emerged as an art form with an uncanny affect – an things we hold on to are always on the point of being lost. encounter with an uncommissioned artwork generated a Despite what developers seek to communicate to us about moment of surprise, or shock or enchantment for the urban art in urban space as a guarantor of the value of property, spectator (Young, 2014). This uncanny affectiveness, which these artworks of displacement tell us that in every place derived from the street artwork’s radical connection to we are on the verge of placelessness; in each of our space, has been diminished, just as street art’s sense of possessions lies the moment of our future dispossession. political connectedness to public is increasingly diminished and at times seems to have been lost. ART AND BELONGING 19

Alison Young is the Francine V. McNiff Professor of Criminology in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Alison is the author of Street Art World (2016), Street Art, Public City (2014), Street/Studio (2010) (with Ghostpatrol, Miso and T. Smits), Judging the Image (2005) and Imagining Crime (1996), as well as numerous articles on the intersections of law, crime, and the image. She is the founder of the Urban Environments Research Network, an interdisciplinary group of academics, artists, activists and architects. She’s also a Research Convenor within the Future Cities Cluster in the Melbourne Sustainable Societies Institute, and is a member of the Research Unit in Public Cultures, an interdisciplinary group of academics, artists, policymakers and urban designers interested in communicative cities, mobility, networked cultures, and public space. Alison is currently researching the relationships between art, culture, crime, and urban atmospheres.

1 It is important to acknowledge that 3 Details of the exhibition can be 4 On the installation, ‘Omega Project’, street art and graffiti are related but viewed online at https://www. see Pepper (2017); on Rone’s 2019 distinctive practices with intersecting r-o-n-e.com/empty-project. Empty intervention ‘Empire’, see Best and sometimes antagonistic condensed and intensified ideas that (2019); Walker (2019). histories. had appeared in some Rone’s 5 The artwork can be viewed on Alÿs’s previous work, including the painting 2 The name given to the conversion website at http://francisalys.com/ of images directly onto large walls in of ephemeral, freely accessible fitzroy-square/. temporary spaces, and the painting artworks placed in the street into of a mural of a woman’s face on the markers of value is ‘the Banksy entire façade of a building awaiting effect’, coined in 2007 by the Wooster demolition and redevelopment, both Collective in New York City, online at in the centre of Melbourne. http://www.woostercollective.com/ post/the-banksy-effect; see also Young (2014)

References Austin, Joe (2001) Taking the Train: How Florida, Richard (2005) Cities and the Pepper, Fiona (2017) ‘Street artist Rone Walker, Alice (2019) ‘Street artist Rone Graffiti Art Became an Urban Crisis in Creative Class. New York: Routledge. transforms derelict Melbourne house for transforms Melbourne mansion New York City. New York: Columbia “Omega Project”’ The Age, 27 July, Burnham beeches in his installation Gastman, Roger, and Neelon, Caleb University Press. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017- Empire’, ABC News https://www.abc.net. (2010) The History of American Graffiti, 07-26/omega-project-melbourne-street- au/news/2019-03-05/rone-empire- Best, Paul (2019) ‘Artist Rone transforms New York: Harper Design. artist-transforms-derelict-house/ burnham-beeches-melbourne- derelict mansion in “Empire”, his most Johnston, Chris (2013) ‘Rising up in the 8744602. installation-street-art/10862082. ambitious work yet’ Financial Review 25 red zones of Christchurch’ The Age, 20 February, https://www.afr.com/brand/ Schacter, Rafael (2014) ‘The Ugly Truth: Young, Alison (2014) Street Art, December. life-and-leisure/artist-rone-transforms- street art, graffiti and the creative city’ Public City. London: Routledge. derelict-mansion-in-empire-his-most- Kramer, Ronald (2010) ‘Painting with Art and the Public Sphere 3(2): 162–176. Young, Alison (2016) Street Art World. ambitious-work-yet-20190222-h1bl98. permission: legal graffiti in New York Strange, Ian (no date) ‘Making Final Act’, London: Reaktion. City’ Ethnography 11(2): 235–253. Edensor, Tim (2010) ‘Walking in rhythms: online at http://ianstrange.com/works/ place, regulation, style and the flow of McAuliffe, Cameron (2013) ‘Legal walls final-act-2013/text/. experience’ Visual Studies 25(1): 69–79. and professional paths: the mobilities of Strange, Ian (2017) ‘Making Island’ Art graffiti writers in Sydney’ Urban Studies Evans, Mel (2015) Artwash: Big Oil and Monthly, November. 50(3): 518–537. the Arts. London: Pluto Press. MacDowall, Lachlan and De Souza, Ferrell, Jeff (1998) ‘Freight train graffiti: Poppy (2018) ‘”I’d Double Tap That!!”: subculture, crime, dislocation’, Justice street art, graffiti, and Instagram Quarterly, 15(4): 587–608. research’ Media, Culture & Society 40(1): 3–22. 30 NUART JOURNAL 2019 VOLUME 1 NUMBER 2 30–35

GRAFFITI AS GIFT:

STREET ART’S CONCEPTUAL EMERGENCE

Lindsey Mancini Yale School of Art

Drawing primarily on contemporary public discourse, this article aims to identify a divergence between graffiti and street art, and to establish street art as an independent art movement, the examples of which can be identified by an artist’s desire to create a work that offers value – a metric each viewer is invited to assess for themselves. While graffiti and street art are by no means mutually exclusive, street art fuses graffiti’s subversive reclamation of space with populist political leanings and the art historically- informed theoretical frameworks established by the Situationists and Dadaism. Based on two founding principles: community and ephemerality, street art is an attempt to create a space for visual expression outside of existing power structures, weaving it into the fabric of people’s daily lives. GRAFFITI AS GIFT 31

AN INTRODUCTION (AND DISCLAIMER) Hagia Sophia in Turkey; Napoleon's troops have been Attempting to define any aspect of street art or graffiti described as defacing the Sphinx in the eighteenth century; may seem an exercise in futility – for, as is the case with and during World War II, cartoons featuring a long-nosed most contemporary cultural contexts, how can we assess character alongside the words ‘Kilroy was here’, began something that is happening contemporaneously and appearing wherever U.S. servicemen were stationed (Ross, constantly evolving? – but the imperative to understand 2016: 480). In the eighteenth century, English poet Lord what is arguably the most pervasive art movement of the Byron engraved his name into the ancient Greek temple to twenty-first century outweighs the pitfalls of writing Poseidon on Cape Sounion – a mark now described as ‘a something in perpetual danger of becoming outdated. If cherished part of modern Greek heritage’ (Agence France- anything, this text serves as documentation of a moment Presse, 2008). In contemporary literature on the emergence in time: a moment in which I believe street art can be of modern street art, the above are typically the examples extrapolated from and understood apart from the art listed when laying out historical precedent for the graffiti movement from which it emerged: graffiti. movement that emerged in the 1960s. What is not often Because street art history is still being written considered, however, is the way in which this form of everyday – and because the question of whether the territorial mark-making contributed to the creation of a movement even belongs within the canon of contemporary more aesthetically-oriented art movement, street art: art remains open – comprehensive coverage can be found artworks similarly disseminated through public space that online. Of course, numerous print materials – books, zines, go beyond a means of expressing I was here. and academic texts – tackle the movement as well, but I Twentieth-century examples include fascist stencils, base my argument largely on online sources for two reasons: first employed in Italy and later throughout Europe, and first, because like street art itself, the internet is (for the used as a means of speaking directly to the masses (Martin, most part) universally accessible and coverage of street 2010). Mussolini’s face became a stencil icon, and Blek le art is published there to reach the greatest number of Rat – considered by some as the father of modern street people. Secondly, because the internet itself has played art – has cited early memories of these fascist stencils as and continues to play a dramatic role both in street art’s a major influence on his work (Bernard, 2007). From 1918 wide cultural reach and in the blending and mixing of styles to 1933, Constructivist posters were deployed during the across the globe (Courier, 2015). Bolshevik Revolution to declare the needs of the people Put simply, street art and the internet are inextrica- and dismantle the Tsarist autocracy in Russia (Clemans, bly linked, and it is the constant revision of both that offers 2016). In the 1960s and ‘70s, black communities in Chicago ample resources in the reframing and dissolution of rigid and Los Angeles were self-financing community murals in and binary constructs. Through an examination of primarily support of the Civil Rights movement, drawing upon the digital contemporary literature, both academic and journal- inclusion of Mexican and Latin American artists made istic, I present an argument that defines street art as a possible by the WPA murals of the 1930s (Cockcroft, 1977: movement under constant negotiation, one that can be 11). More recently, street art has played a role in some of viewed through a specific lens and with specific goals in the most significant political events of the past half-century. mind. Of course, not all street artists operate in the same Community members and artists alike used the Berlin Wall way or for the same reasons. But by analysing how some as a canvas for dissent against the divide (Jones, 2014), of the most prominent street artists – predominately Banksy, and stencils deriding Hosni Mubarak helped spread the Swoon, and Shepard Fairey – describe their motivations, fever of the Arab Spring in 2011 (Rashed, 2013). and by surveying the ways in which their work has been Many contemporary street artists are aware of their received and understood, a handful of commonalities come medium historically existing as both a form of graffiti’s into focus. Most notably, I assert that street art functions territorial mark-making and a means of community activism, as a gift: where graffiti was a reclamation of space for but I assert that it was not until graffiti became an aggressive what is ‘mine’, street art is an acknowledgement of the ‘us’. target of law enforcement in the 1980s that street art As with any art movement there are exceptions to every emerged as a substantively new entity, and began to develop rule, and personal ego certainly plays a role in a movement on its own aesthetic and historically-informed trajectory. centred around grabbing people’s attention. With what I When a 1982 Atlantic Monthly article introduced the ‘broken present here, I aim to prove that street art should be defined windows theory’ which specifically called out graffiti as by its sense of duty: vandalism with purpose, whether part of the plight of urban ruin (Kelling), parts of the political, aesthetic, or otherwise. movement evolved into something more appropriately named ‘street art’, drawing more upon its roots in community activism to unmistakably prove itself an asset to the people THOUGHTS AND REFERENCES ON who live alongside it, rather than a plague to be wiped out. THE HISTORY OF GRAFFITI AND STREET ART This shift is often cited as the medium moving from ‘graffiti’ Graffiti – a traditionally assertive marking of a name, to ‘post graffiti’ (Waclawek, 2010: 60), but I argue that this alias, or identifying design in public space – has existed for was actually the birth of contemporary street art, as tags millennia, with evidence surviving as far back as ancient became more elaborate and illustrative designs quickly Greece. In the preserved city of Pompeii, subversive mark- began to appear beside more unreadable scrawls. Street making was already moving beyond simple signatures to art emerged as a coexisting art movement – graffiti as a biting political caricatures – illustrations that would have gift – part of an evolutionary framework that didn’t replace been viewed as ‘profane’ in public conversation. Throughout but instead added on to the traditions graffiti began. It is history, however, much of graffiti remained documentary, dedicated to proving that visual expression, whether textual and existed as more of a historical record of someone or illustrative, sanctioned or illegal, can be an asset not an having been there (McCormick, 2011: 20). Unsurprisingly, injury. Banksy’s 2005 book Wall and Piece dedicates an most of these markings were made by those in military entire page to the broken windows theory, describing its service: Viking warriors left their names scrawled into the origins before recounting a letter the artist received from 32 NUART JOURNAL a man in London who complains that Banksy’s work is INCORPORATING CONTEMPORARY driving up the real estate prices in his neighbourhood. ‘Your ART HISTORY graffities are undoubtedly part of what makes these wankers Expanding definitions of art within the contemporary think our area is cool’, he writes, ‘You’re obviously not from movement has created space for both process-based works round here and after you’ve driven up the house prices and immersive installations. Street art exists between you’ll probably just move on’ (2005: 130). When an art form these two – it is immersive, experiential, and incorporates moves from depressing real estate value to drastically the totality of its environment as part of the work, which improving it (Senison, 2018), it has arguably become includes all surrounding viewers and activity. Street artists something different entirely; street art emerges from choose their locations carefully, and everything in view of graffiti while continuing to exist alongside it. a work is an integral element of the piece itself. ‘It takes me a while to pick my spots’, Lmnopi said, ‘I watch them for a little while first’ (Stavsky, 2017). Just as the Situation- STREET ART’S POPULIST ists began walking around the city to create an artwork of POLITICAL UNDERPINNINGS their experience in the 1920s, so does street art involve a In the eighties Keith Haring became a household viewer’s complete experience. And just as site-specific name when his murals and subway drawings – technically work incorporates the entirety of its surroundings, so does completed illegally yet not plagued by the stigma of vandal- a street artwork; as Richard Serra said of Tilted Arc, ‘to ism – catapulted him to international fame. Spreading remove the work is to destroy the work’ (Michalos, 2007: messages of love ( Dancing Heart, 1988) and fighting 179). widespread epidemics (Crack is Wack, 1986), Haring created It has often been said that street art is what you public work that was accessible, positive, and community- encounter on the way to a gallery, and because you’re not oriented even if it was illegal. This understandably left yet mentally primed for an art experience, the work is more viewers with the assumption that his work was supposed likely to affect you, merely through the serendipitous nature to be there and many spoke up in protest when it was of the encounter (Ruiz, 2011: 4). Public art functions similarly, removed (Keith Haring Foundation, 2016). In 1981, French but because commissioned work is typically more con- street artist Blek le Rat was revolutionising the medium by strained in its site of installation, this serendipity is not as deploying the first street art stencils, combining the pervasive as that experienced with street art – an art form authenticity of spray paint with the foresight of an existing not limited by content, form or location. In this way, street and deliberate, often politically critical design. As his name art borrows again from the art historical canon in that it is implies, he began by stenciling rats around his home city interventional. Just as Dadaists called some objects art- of Paris – something the artist describes as an apolitical works and physically smashed others, street art questions act, just a way to separate himself from the masses of the the very nature of art and the role our institutions play in city (Neu, 2017). But in the ‘90s and 2000s, Blek le Rat began disseminating the work of artists to the public. D*Face to use his work to speak for the voiceless, addressing remakes British currency with skulls, and Roadsworth poverty and homelessness in his stencils (Courbat, 2016). transforms cross-walks into shoe prints and dandelions By the turn of the twenty-first century, street art had arguably (Blackshaw, 2008: 52, 156). Street art attempts to blur the found a directive distinct from that of graffiti: speaking to boundaries between art and life by bringing more art into and for the community within which it exists, in messages daily life, just as the interventional works of the Dadaists that are both overtly critical of existing repressive power and the Neo-Dadaists were attempting to confuse art and structures and encouraging and representative of the life. A significant distinction here is that street art works communities they represent. to endow disenfranchised communities with art, while Dada This populist prerogative extends politically; much disenfranchises art from itself. In this way, street art flips street art is created in response to the damaging symptoms Dadaist philosophy on its head, proving the significance of of the larger economic trend of global wealth inequality. It art while Dadaism worked to prove its insignificance, or at is for this reason that many street artists consider themselves least, its potential for insignificance (Richter, 1965). While socialists, or at the very least anti-capitalists (as is also Dada was ‘born out of negative reaction to the horrors of the case with social practice artists and others). As public the First World War’ (Budd, 2004), street art emerged after space came to be commodified by advertising throughout nearly an entire century of relative peace, as a means of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, everyday people bridging the art world and the communities with which it were barraged more and more with forceful messages had lost touch. from companies trying everything possible to convert them into customers. Cuban street artist Jorge Rodriguez Gerada began with ‘culture-jamming’ in the 1990s with the collective DEFINING NON-BINARY DISTINCTIONS Artfux, illegally altering billboards to undermine the As evidenced by the easy exchange of the terms advertisement of harmful products like alcohol and cigar- ‘street art’ and ‘graffiti’ by the artists quoted above, it is ettes in poor areas (Bello, 2011). In 2002, he began creating clear the two are not mutually exclusive. Many examples multi-story charcoal portraits featuring local community can be understood as both, and there is little value in parsing members as a means of questioning ‘who chooses our semantics when a distinction between the two is not cultural icons and role models, our values and aesthetics’ universally available, accepted, or understood. At an (Blackshaw, 2008: 48). Graffiti initiated a reclamation of elemental level, the distinction has been understood as public space, and street art continues the tradition by related to the origins of the word ‘graffiti’, which comes offering an alternative to the hyper-consumerist visual from the Italian graffare, meaning to scratch (DeNotto, messages infiltrating our streets and airspace. Banksy 2014). Many interpret this as delimiting graffiti to text or cheekily acknowledged the street artist’s fight against symbolic mark-making, while any design that exists as a capitalism when he wrote, ‘We can’t do anything to change more complex composition might be considered street art the world until capitalism crumbles. In the meantime, we (Lu, 2015). In her 2010 book Graffiti and Street Art, Anna should all go shopping to console ourselves’ (2005: 204). Waclawek presents the notion that the difference lies in the GRAFFITI AS GIFT 33 work’s physicality: media such as wheatpaste and stencils tated by its existing in its natural environment: outdoors. that can be used to quickly replicate a design is indicative In 2010 Banksy told Time Out London, ‘I don't know if street of a street artwork, while freehand spray paint done on- art ever really works indoors. If you domesticate an animal, the-spot entails the level of risk and spontaneity associated it goes from being wild and free to sterile, fat and sleepy’ with graffiti (2010: 29). While useful, this definition is simpl- (Ward, 2010). As an art movement that originated on the istic and treats the two movements as binary. Instead, I street, as much in opposition to existing power structures believe the distinction lies in the motivations of the artist. as to the pedantic academia of the institutionalised art This is not the first time this idea has been proposed (DeNotto, world (Gleaton, 2012: 10), in many ways street art should 2014), but the ambiguity of art's interpretation itself has as exist only in visual form with no accompanying text or of yet kept the surrounding communities from putting it description required. ‘It is first of all about liberating Art into practice. Jill Weisberg has argued that the difference from its usual alienators that museums or institutions can lies in who the artist is attempting to reach: graffiti writers be’, Invader explains of his work (2016). Because of this, speak to one another through coded visual language, while there are limited statements directly from street artists street art attempts to speak to the masses, creating images about their practices, and this section of my argument will anyone can understand (Weisberg, 2012). While graffiti in some ways work directly against the wishes of these writers have been known to alter the style of their tags street artists whose work I am attempting to illuminate. according to the intended audience – thereby complicating Although many street artists disavow labels (even and Weisberg’s argument – there are still many stunning, detailed especially the label of ‘street artist’) and the notion of graffiti tags that viewers can appreciate as art without certain guiding principles, street art theory is certainly belonging to the specific group the graffiti writer was something that exists, and something these artists are attempting to reach. As contemporary artist Glenn Ligon aware of when they create work, regardless of the extent explains, ‘Like any artwork, things become richer if you to which they’re willing to discuss it publicly. In fact, in the know more about them but I don’t think that’s crucial’ (Sollins, preface to his 2015 book Covert to Overt, Shepard Fairey 2014). Just because a graffiti artist does not intend for their writes, ‘I find it humorous that fans of street art, a culture tag to be read by the layman doesn’t mean the average that is supposedly about rule breaking, have established viewer cannot appreciate it as art. Indeed, many contempo- so many rules for it’ (13). And while many rules do exist in rary artworks in museum galleries are equally incompre- one form or another for the artists themselves (Graffiti vs. hensible without a curatorial filter in the form of wall text Street Art Discourse Groups, 2012), we as spectators and or audio guide (Kuntzman, 2016). scholars of street art must come to understand street art Artists’ intentions have been debated for years, but theory within its societal, political, and art historical precedent there is a specific intention that I would argue is pivotal to in order to establish its origins and existence as a valid, the work of the street artist, and the beauty of the movement independent art form. I assert street art is based on two lies in the fact that each viewer is given permission to founding principles: community and ephemerality. decide for themselves. I would argue that a work of street The founding principle of existing for the community art is one created when the artist’s motivations are simply it is created within is, to a certain extent, assumed within to create something constructive, something that adds street art theory. As a reaction to the broken windows value. Unfortunately ‘value’ is a fairly relative and subjective theory, street art evolved from graffiti to become a gift to term, but it is something that I believe can be assessed the community, rather than a blemish. Furthermore, street through the visible amount of effort put forth by the artist art’s existence within public spaces and its literal removal during the work’s creation. At a fundamental level, I assert of the walls that keep many – whether for financial or social that any artwork completed in the public space that involved reasons – out of museums, implies a populism that includes an evident amount of time and effort on behalf of an artist all members of the public, rather than speaking to and for – and that was created with the intention of being seen and collectors with the means to understand complex, art appreciated by a general public – is street art. That which historical foils. Patrick Lydon, founder and director of a solely attempts to signify I was here or I made this is graffiti. socially-engaged network of creatives called SocieCity, Indeed, many public artworks – whether illegal, sanctioned, writes, ‘The positive examples [of street art] bring notions or commissioned – are both. And an argument can be made of community and economy closer together, instead of that every artwork is an attempt to establish I was here. continuing a dangerous global trend of pushing the two But it is the conceptual underpinnings of street art that farther apart’ (The Nature of Cities, 2016). Especially given make the movement fascinating and different from the art the ongoing trend of gentrification in America’s largest movements that preceded it. While still following the linear cities, a street art aesthetic has often been employed by progression of art history and emerging organically from commercial enterprises as a means of making areas and graffiti’s territorial reclamation of space, street art exists projects feel more ‘hip’. While some street artists have as an intermingling of political critique, twentieth century cooperated with and profited from these projects, many art history, the contemporary art world, and pop culture, more have used their work to fight gentrification, moving as necessitated by an interconnected world and globalised their art to more ignored areas of a city to increase property economy. value there instead. ‘It’s up to us as artists to decide if our work serves the community’s interest or the profit motive’, Brooklyn-based street artist Lmnopi told Street Art NYC. STREET ART THEORY ‘I try to approach my work with the community in mind. Because street art emerged from graffiti, many of When painting a mural on someone’s block, I take into street art’s founding principles originated as graffiti’s consideration who lives there and how can I reflect their unwritten rules. However, establishing ‘street art theory’ reality in my work’ (Stavsky, 2017). is as much a paradox as ‘street art exhibitions’, and there’s A secondary component of street art existing for a a reason graffiti’s rules are described as ‘unwritten’ (James, community is a dismissal of the notion of ownership – or 2012). Street art exhibitions have been long derided by rather, an expansion of ownership to include the community proponents of a movement which they believe is necessi- as a whole. When an artist creates a work for free, or even 34 NUART JOURNAL

when commissioned, the work in many ways functions as experience’ (Blackshaw, 2008: 22). Swoon writes that when a gift to the community itself, belonging to all those who she first started creating street art, ‘I loved that everything see and engage with it regularly, with its stewardship I made got eaten away’ (Deitch, 2011: 132). And Chicago entrusted to the building’s owner. Scholar Andrés Di Masso street artist Ron English told Widewalls, ‘as long as walls describes public space as the ‘natural arena of citizenship’, keep changing, the society, or societal consciousness, keeps and it follows that the art within public spaces is on some living’ (Kostov, 2016). Even commissioned murals from level a visual expression of citizenship (2012). Thus, its street artists are lost when a building is torn down – although physical iteration – at least psychologically – belongs to in these circumstances the artist does have more legal those community members who subscribe to the citizenship authority to protect their work. Simply just by painting ideas that the work expresses. ‘Citizenship status is defined outdoors, even when done legally, the piece itself assumes as a practical achievement that involves geographical a certain level of risk, because a weather event or a bucket commotions’, he writes, ‘the right to the city is the right to of paint could wipe the wall away in an instant. It is this be in and to produce city spaces in order to make them notion of ephemerality that contains within it the ghosts of public’ (emphasis in original). The distrust of police and the rules of graffiti: risk and spontaneity. A street artwork civic authority caused by a myriad of societal and political and its environment are inseparable – the piece is at the factors extends to the authorised public art installed and mercy of its surroundings, just as it imposes the artist’s promoted by those in power. By creating work in public will on the space. spaces, street artists are extending the psychological Both of these founding principles of street art theory boundaries of belonging by providing a perceived ‘unofficial’ – community and ephemerality – emerged through the work means through which community members can identify of contemporary street artists, many of whom were studying with their surroundings. Los Angeles street artist Stecyk or aware of the 1960s conceptual art movement, interventional said, ‘I think the most important thing about the street is art of the 1980s and ‘90s, and the site-specific, immersive that it really is commonly accessible space. The public has installations of recent generations that incorporate the a right to be able to speak.’ Now-renowned artist Swoon viewer as part of the piece. Well-known examples include said that when she first began wheatpasting illegally, ‘It Swoon (Pratt Institute), Shepard Fairey (Rhode Island was the first time I ever became aware of really intense School of Design), and Patrick Miller of the street art duo discussions over the nature of public space and whose Faile (Minneapolis College of Art and Design), all of whom spaces those were’ (Deitch, 2011: 132). This fidelity to began experimenting with street art during their under- community also fosters a sense of respect and collaboration graduate studies (Miranda, 2008). I assert street art is a between street artists themselves. One of graffiti’s unwritten merging of these art forms with the subversive, critical, rules states that you can only paint over another artist's and politically engaged medium of graffiti. A ‘politically work if you are able to create something better, and that engaged’ medium that began by declaring territory physically idea has carried over into street art, as artists often work has evolved to declare territory conceptually, for the people, collaboratively on a single wall or alleyway (Langley, 2017). to bring what existed inside museums and galleries into The definition of ‘better’, however, is often contested, which the fabric of their daily lives. has resulted in disputes between street artists as they continually repaint a single wall, each attempting to reclaim the space as their own (Walker, 2014). Street art’s emphasis CONCLUSION on constant, consistent improvement leads to the emergence Excessive capitalism, limited public funding for the of new media and styles. French street artist Miss Van arts, and an insulated art world made street art’s existence says her characteristic dolls began as self-portraits, used necessary in continuing the legacy of art as one of free as a visual representation for her name like an illustrated expression. Street artists have taken the parts of art history graffiti tag. ‘Graffiti has a very megalomaniac side; instead and the art world that speak and appeal to them, and turned of writing my name, I chose to represent myself through the system inside out, drawing upon graffiti’s rich history dolls’, she said (Blackshaw, 2008: 111). This idea can be to bring art back to a public excluded by admission prices traced back to the work of Keith Haring, who in his and a post-post conceptual art world. Even defining street autobiography shares that he first began using his Radiant art as I have done here may be a paradox as street art Baby icon as a tag to sign the work he was creating in public requires no explanation. But the evidence remains that the spaces (Gruen, 1992). In the same way art history is a street art movement is not only intertwined with but also chronicling of artistic ‘genius’, the streets choose their own emerged from graffiti – drawing on the history of site- geniuses – an artist crosses this threshold when they create specific art, the Situationists, and Dadaism, and driven by something the community would rather preserve than a desire to fight exploitative power structures in both the erase. And as street art became just as illustrative as it art world and the world at large. Whether it is a variation was textual, each street artist was pushed to develop of this definition or something wholly different, the academic individualised styles and images, ones that could be seen community surrounding street art has a responsibility to and recognised from afar and call viewers to come closer. understand its conceptual basis and art historical influ- What I assert as street art theory’s second guiding ences fully, and disseminate that information to the public principle, ephemerality, also coincides with the place in so that we can all come to better know and appreciate the which a work is created. Urban landscapes are constantly street art of our shared spaces. The term ‘graffiti’ carries changing, renovating, and updating, and a medium that the weight of the twentieth century with it; it is either seen began illegally was self-aware and never expected to remain as a point of pride by those who practice it, or it is a word for more than a few days or weeks. New York wheatpaste associated with vandalism, defacement, and crime. When artist Michael De Feo calls street art’s ephemeral nature the commercial and academic worlds ignore the difference one of its most important aspects: ‘The very idea that no between street art and graffiti, a tremendous disservice one can own it and it’s there for a limited time is essential is done to the former – an art movement based on building to its very meaning … [When] you recognise that you’re up communities that has been developing independently seeing something that won’t last, it creates a magical for decades. GRAFFITI AS GIFT 35

Lindsey Mancini (previously Lindsey Davis) is a digital editor and emerging street art scholar investigating public art’s potential as a transformative societal element. Based in New Haven, Connecticut, she currently works in communications at the Yale School of Art and as an adjunct professor of contemporary art at Eastern Connecticut State University. She is also the director of ArtAround, a nonprofit web platform for mapping art in public spaces.

References

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DOES PRESERVING STREET ART DESTROY ITS ‘AUTHENTICITY’?

Enrico Bonadio The City Law School City University of London

This note briefly comments on various ways street damaging the authenticity of these forms of art. Indeed, and graffiti artworks could and should be preserved. Indeed, as is the case with (more traditional) types of visual art, the recent boom of these forms of art – especially street the concept of authenticity is not just related to attribution, art – has enriched the discussion regarding its conservation. but is also dependent on the appropriate conservation and Local councils, property owners, and other entities display of the work (Phillips, 1997). An overall ‘authentic’ increasingly preserve murals (especially those created by experience surrounding a piece may be difficult to achieve famous artists), either by covering them with perspex when the object is encountered in a different situation or sheets, or even detaching and bringing them into indoor context from that which the artist meant, despite the efforts locations. In situ and ex situ methods of preservation, the conservator may have put in trying to present the work together with photographic documentation (another way in its original condition. Also, debates around the preserv- of conserving street and graffiti art for posterity) have ation of authenticity have often neglected the role of the been thoroughly commented on by scholars and comment- audience in creating and remodelling the context of the art, ators. This author will highlight such comments in this note for example where the public chosen to experience the and make the point that in case the decision to preserve ‘conserved’ art mainly consists of tourists who do not have these forms of art is taken, we should choose a method of enough knowledge and understanding of the work they are conservation which is the least disruptive to their authent- experiencing (Dutton, 2003). Such a scenario may sometimes icity as possible. occur in the street art world, especially where pieces Indeed, attempts to preserve street art are often created in the public environment are preserved for the criticised. It is not only anti-graffiti organisations that do sole purposes of exhibiting them to non-local audiences not like the idea. Street art insiders also frequently dis- and art tourists. approve of such plans as they fear that these moves risk DOES PRESERVING STREET ART DESTROY ITS ‘AUTHENTICITY’? 37

SPECIFIC CRITICISMS OF THE ROLE OF PHOTOGRAPHIC CONSERVATION PROJECTS DOCUMENTATION Several commentators stress that graffiti and street It has also been argued that, if preservation tools art are ‘participatory’, which means that anyone could paint are to be relevant and useful to these forms of art, they over the art, destroy it, add something to it, or complement would probably have to move from a methodology that it (Blanché, 2014; Chatzidakis, 2016). Altering street art can dictates the fixing of a stable and unchangeable narrative thus be considered as part of a ‘design dialogue’ (Merrill, pertaining to the past towards a discipline that tolerates 2015) or ‘democratic multiparty conversation’ (Hansen, alteration and erasure (Mulcahy and Flessas, 2016). A form 2015a) within the urban environment. Artworks placed in of preservation that meets these standards seems to be the street – the argument goes – cannot be properly photographic documentation (Merrill, 2015; Garcia, 2017). understood as ‘finished’ works created by just one person, Analogical and digital pictures have for decades enabled but they instead require constant exposure to change to the documentation and ‘conservation’ of street and graffiti remain authentic (Mulcahy and Flessas, 2016; Minty, 2006), art, and continuously make these forms of art accessible with damages to the art even being considered as ‘acts of to large audiences all over the world. The same can be engagement or ‘co-authorship’ rather than vandalism’ said of videos, especially those created by or on behalf of (Mulcahy and Flessas, 2016). artists to highlight their pieces and the way they are created. The participatory nature of these forms of art means Many of these pictures and videos can be easily found in their preservation would often undermine their authenticity specialised magazines and websites, as well as in social by freezing the artworks and the dialogue they spur in time media networks, such as Instagram, Flickr and Facebook, and space (Merrill, 2015: 383): using Alison Young’s words, where they are widely shared and commented on even by ‘conservation is not conversation’ (Young, 2016, 182). For people outside the street art and graffiti scenes.2 Interesting example, using perspex sheets to protect a street artwork attempts to document (and conserve) these forms of art – which may be considered as a form of in situ conservation by using such methodology are (i) the ‘100 Days of Leake – would effectively terminate the communication between Street’, a photographic project by architectural historian artists and turn the piece into a ‘civic amenity or, worse, a Sabina Andron. The project shows the changes on ten cultural commodity’ (Young 2016: 182), in addition to different walls in the famous London Graffiti Tunnel in the increasing the risk of its removal and commercialisation South London area of Waterloo over 100 consecutive days 3; (Hansen 2015a). Susan Hansen also argues that ‘street art’s and (ii) the longitudinal photo-documentation used by Susan invitation to engage in the city’s ephemeral dialogue is Hansen as a methodological approach to the study of street antithetical to traditional heritage frameworks’ (Hansen, and graffiti art, based on data collection which allows these 2017). These words are echoed by Laima Nomeikaite: forms of art to be analysed as visual dialogue (Hansen, ‘[framing] street artworks deprives citizens of the right to 2015b). experience them (in the public space and ephemerality) in Photographs and videos therefore play an important daily life and the broader right to engage with the city’ role in disseminating and raising awareness about these (Nomeikaite, 2017). Similarly, it has been noted by heritage- art forms, while also preserving the intangible heritage of focused scholars that the target of any conservation decision artworks that are often doomed to fade quickly. Even New must be the protection of the ‘significance’ of the place (De York’s Judge Block, in his 2013 decision refusing to enjoin La Torre, 2014); and that we should abandon the focus on the demolition of the famous 5Pointz site, stressed the the concept of material authenticity and the ‘preservationist importance of photographic documentation for conserv- desire to freeze the moment of heritage and to conserve ation purposes. He noted that ‘the plaintiffs’ works can live heritage as an unchanging monument to the past’ (Smith, on in other media. The … works have been photographed, 2006: 6). and the court, during the hearing, exhorted the plaintiffs Ex situ preservation would be even more damaging to photograph all those which they might wish to preserve.’4 to the authenticity of street art and graffiti, as it completely (In the subsequent decision of 2018, the same judge famously removes the work from its often crucial urban context sided with 5Pointz artists awarding them US$ 6.7m in (removals and relocations of street artworks have recently damages, as the owner of the site had whitewashed illegally occurred many times, with several Banksy murals receiving their paintings).5 such treatment). Indeed, the very meaning of most street Photographs of graffiti, especially illegal graffiti artworks is often dependent on their in situ nature and the (which is more likely to be removed quickly), are increasingly on-going dynamic relationship within the community in being shown in galleries and museums. Examples include which they exist (Young, 2013). Street and graffiti artists photographer Henry Chalfant’s curated exhibition of do not simply treat the city as a canvas; they also use the photographs of New York subway graffiti pieces from the streetscape as a structural element of their artworks. ‘70s and ‘80s.6 Exhibitions of graffiti pictures aim not only Anything around the actual piece is part of the artistic to document the art, but also to preserve its subversiveness. experience, including – it has been suggested – the taste For example, an exhibition in Modena, Italy, in 2016 named of pollution, the smell of dog’s excrement or take away ‘1984 – Evoluzione e rigenerazione del writing’ 7 displayed food, the noise of traffic and people’s conversation (Mulcahy photographs of illegal graffiti created by writers predomi- and Flessas, 2016) as well as ‘collapsed walls as a creative nantly from the gallery’s urban area. The aim was to allow background’ (Chatzidakis, 2016: 18) and ‘the genius loci, i.e. viewers to juxtapose the artworks in both the street – where the atmosphere, the smell, the noises, the tactile experience’ they are created and are usually perceived as vandalism (Blanché, 2018).1 Removal of street art pieces that aim at by the general public – and in a gallery space.8 The exhibition’s extracting profits and increasing economic interest in the organisers tried ‘to counteract the elitist nature of modern ‘preserved’ artwork would be even less acceptable from a artistic institutions’, by creating ‘a continuity between the heritage perspective: indeed, economic value is not recog- inside and the outside’ of the gallery and ‘literally turned nised as a legitimate heritage value by many values-based- inside out the boundaries of the white cube’ (Baldini, 2018: management practitioners (De La Torre, 2014). 27–32).9 In this case, as has been noted, pictures of graffiti constitute the works themselves (Rivasi, 2018), 10 and the 38 NUART JOURNAL

reproductions do not lack any of the main features that are heritagisation procedures to make them more ‘participatory’ relevant to the appreciation of graffiti (Baldini, 2018). Even and respectful of the rights of others. Alberto Frigerio and some graffiti artists support the idea of having photographs Elvira Khakimova, for example, have suggested a system of their works in a gallery. Italian writer Fra 32 confirmed where local communities would be encouraged to propose that coming across pictures of his own pieces in the 1984 selected pieces to be inserted in national lists of outstanding exhibition in Modena was ‘an experience that [felt] authentic’ street artworks, by requiring a minimum amount of signa- (Baldini, 2018: 29). tures. They also recommend local councils assess the Contrary opinions have also been voiced, however. conformity of the recommended art with pre-identified It has been noted that intangible conservation of street and parameters (Frigero and Khakimova, 2013). For instance, graffiti art through photographic and video documentation they should not carry any discriminatory or offensive is not enough to preserve it.11 Some argue that pictures messages or be dangerous for the public or the surrounding actually decontextualise the art, as in a photo ‘there is an environment, and any artworks incorporated into private obvious limitation of the impression that can be perceived properties would require the consent of the building’s owner. in the street’ (Nogueira Alves, 2017). Despite efforts to These are sensible requirements and should be coupled imbue the indoor environment hosting the picture with an with a consideration of the main precondition for listing a urban look and feel, photographs will never be able to street and graffiti artwork: its artistic merit. People who entirely recreate the real street atmosphere. In this way, have extensive knowledge and understanding of these it is difficult to keep the image of the street artwork authentic, artistic movements, be they artists, agents or curators, with the piece always subject to the interpretation of those should be involved when making the final decision. Leaving in charge of transferring the idea (Garcia, 2017; Blanché, the final say to assessors who are experts in traditional 2014). fine arts with no awareness of the creative processes and outputs of the street and graffiti art communities would be a mistake, as it may increase the risk of an underestimation SHOULD WE CHOOSE of the value of the art and its consequential destruction. THE PRESERVATION METHOD As mentioned, in situ preservation projects make WHICH IS LESS DISRUPTIVE TO AUTHENTICITY? more sense for street artworks that are commissioned or There is no doubt that any kind of preservation – be authorised. Take the mural entitled ‘Tuttomondo’ commiss- it in situ, ex situ, or via photographic or film documentation ioned to, and painted by, Keith Haring in June 1989 in the – effects the authenticity of street and graffiti art. Putting Tuscan town of Pisa. It has been restored and preserved perspex sheets over the work, removing and relocating via perspex sheets with the support of the local municipality, the piece, or introducing pictures of graffiti into galleries and in 2013 was also listed by the Italian Ministry of Culture will never create an experience exactly the same as directly as an ‘artistic-historical product of particular importance’.15 viewing it in its original street context. Therefore, if a The protective glasses are minimal, being just 2.20 metres decision is made to conserve a street artwork for posterity, high (while the entire mural’s height doesn’t exceed 10 one may need to choose the option that is least disruptive metres), and aren’t too close to the painting so that it can to the authentic artistic message. breathe. Glasses thus don’t spoil the view people have of The in situ method of preservation might sometimes the mural. Also, and perhaps more importantly, straight respond to this objective, especially if the artwork has been after painting the mural, Keith Haring himself agreed with commissioned or authorised. Perspex or other protective possible conservation plans (the artist would die just a few barriers, despite preventing or limiting the dialogue between months after) and even expressed his desire for the mural urban artists12 and carrying the risk of ‘musealising’ 13 the to last for many years and stressed the need to repaint it streets, nevertheless have some merit: they make it possible should the need to preserve it arise (Dickens et al., 2016). for the aficionados of these forms of art to continue to enjoy In situ preservation plans may not work for street the art in the same environment in which it was originally artworks that are created illegally, though. When it comes created. The selected method of in situ conservation should to such works, I share the concerns of the commentators endeavour to both protect the integrity of the artwork as that stress the participatory nature of street art and the much as possible14, and minimise the impact of screens or inadequacy of conservation projects: works produced barriers on its message and visual aesthetics (for example, illegally may indeed attract more ‘dialogue’ than comm- in terms of light reflection). Due consideration should also issioned or authorised pieces do, with fellow artists being be given to the rights of the property owner: while their more prone to leave their sign close to or upon the consent should arguably be sought and obtained where unauthorised work. As ex situ conservation is even less possible, in exceptional cases of outstanding art, in situ acceptable for the reasons highlighted above (especially if preservation plans should proceed even without their the art is site-specific and the relocation limits the free authorisation. In such cases, property owners could possibly enjoyment of the detached piece), the main tool to conserve be compensated if the conservation of the artwork nega- illegal street art appears to be photographic documentation. tively affects their ability to fully enjoy their space. Also, Of course, there have been attempts to protect in the decision to conserve the piece should be approved by situ illegally produced street artworks. An example is the as many stakeholders as possible, not only the owner of artwork by French artist Blek Le Rat entitled ‘Woman with the property (if different from the person who wants to Child’, stencilled in 1991 in the German town of Leipzig, conserve the art), but also the artist herself and the local which is now on Saxony’s state list of historical monuments, community which hosts the work: this is in line with findings and is protected by glass.16 The artist seemed even delight- of certain heritage studies that have considered heritage ed by this move, as the piece is important to him. He had experts as merely an equally interested party in heritage indeed painted it for a beloved woman – Sibylle – who would ‘with equal and valid views, but no more’, with a view to actually later become his wife. The investor and the town rebalancing ‘the input and negotiating power of all interested authorities also spent €9,000 Euros to preserve the mural, parties’ (Smith and Waterton, 2009: 153-171). and even sightseeing buses stop by it and let people admire Some commentators have advocated fine-tuning the piece.17 Although the preservation has been approved DOES PRESERVING STREET ART DESTROY ITS ‘AUTHENTICITY’? 39 by the artist and the property owner and – it seems – supported by the local community, it cannot be denied that the artwork looks less authentic than it was before. While someone may accept such loss of authenticity for the sake of preserving the art for posterity, street art ‘purists’ would understandably stress that such interventions run against the very essence of this form of art. It’s also for these reasons that – I believe – in situ preservation of street art should be limited to exceptional cases.

CONCLUSION The decision as to whether street and graffiti art should be preserved raises delicate issues. One of these is how to keep the message delivered by the ‘conserved’ artwork as authentic as possible, especially taking into account the original intention of the artist. We have seen that preserving a piece, either in situ with protective glass or ex situ (for example, via a surgical removal of the mural from the wall), or even through photographs, has always a negative impact on its authenticity (albeit, with different degrees of intensity). I recognise and accept that these options often are not optimal solutions. As mentioned, a decision to conserve in situ an artwork placed in the street should be made only in exceptional circumstances, particu- larly where the art is of value to the local community which hosts it and should obviously also take into account the artists’ wishes and the interests of owners of the property upon which the work is placed. Where this path cannot be pursued, the only acceptable option remains well-executed photographs and their dissemination in relevant circles.

1 See also Ed Bartlett, Street Art 6 An exhibition of pictures of ‘old school’ 11 See the interview with Christian 14 It has been argued for example that (Lonely Planet 2017: 150) reporting the graffiti was organised in New York in Omodeo, co-organiser of the above low-quality perspex glasses do not let opinion of the Portuguese artist Vhils: November 2016 at the Eric Firestone mentioned ‘Street Art: Banksy and Co: the wall breathe, which may damage ‘The context of the environment is Gallery . Henry Chalfant aficionado Good Guy Boris, available inserted in the list of ‘beni tutelati’. with the existing history of a place. I is an American photographer and on https://www.youtube.com/ don’t want to make works that ‘take videographer well-known for his watch?v=YF0dbIcAop8 16 Jan Schilling, Preserving art that over’ an area, but rather are a part of work on graffiti and hip-hop culture. was never meant to last, (May 7, 2012) 12 Yet, the ability to continue the the fabric of that space’. His pictures are in the collection relevant to muralism as well 7 In English ‘1984 – Evolution and barriers. Other artists and taggers (Cockcroft, Weber, Cockcroft 1997). Regeneration of Graffiti Writing’. could still leave their sign or mark 17 See the webpage at https://artsation. close to the artwork, and in particular com/en/journal/editorial/blek-le-rat- 3 See Dr Sabina Andron ‘100 Days of 8 Interview with Pietro Rivasi, curator in areas of the same wall which are in-leipzig, 15 April 2013. Leake Street’ 9 Baldini also stresses that graffiti 13 That is, converting the street into 4 Cohen v. G and M Realty L.P., Case ‘need not change to enter the ‘temples’ a type of museum (and thereby, by No. 13-CV-5612 (FB) (JMA) (EDNY of contemporary art: they are those implication robbing it of its true street 2013). institutions that need to change to integrity). That in situ preservation make room’ (Baldini, 2018). 5 Cohen et al. v G&M REALTY L.P. et carries the risk of ‘musealising the al., Case No. 13-CV-05612(FB) (RLM), 10 In the interview with Pietro Rivasi, street’ is a point made by art historian decision of 12 February 2018. the latter added that graffiti writers Christian Omodeo in a conversation themselves consider pictures as the author had with him in London alternative to the original pieces; in March 2018 during the Art on and that therefore showing pictures the Streets – Art as Intervention of graffiti in a museum or gallery conference at the Institute of matches writers’ practice of Contemporary Art. showing and disseminating their artistic outputs within the subculture. 40 NUART JOURNAL

Enrico Bonadio is Senior Lecturer in Law at City, University of London, where he teaches various modules on intellect-ual property (IP) law. He holds law degrees from the University of Florence (PhD) and the University of Pisa (LLB), and regularly lectures, publishes and advises in the field of intellectual property law. His research and teaching interests led him to give talks and lectures in more than 60 universities and research centres across the five continents. His current research agenda focuses on the intersection between visual arts – particularly street art and graffiti – and copyright (amongst other topics). He is currently editing a book entitled The Cambridge Handbook of Copyright in Street Art and Graffiti (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2019); he also recently edited a book entitled Non-Conventional Copyright – How Far Copyright Boundaries Can Be Stretched? with Nicola Lucchi (Edward Elgar, October 2018). Enrico has been a Visiting Scholar at Melbourne Law School (University of Melbourne, 2013), City University New York (CUNY Law School, 2016) and University of Tel Aviv (2018 and 2019). He is a Solicitor qualified to practise in England and Wales as well as in Italy. He practiced as an IP lawyer for several years, and frequently appears in the media as an IP expert. His research has been covered by CNN, Wall Street Journal, BBC, Washington Post, Independent and The Conversation, amongst other media outlets.

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