Space Is the Place

2018 Volume 1 Number 1 ISSN 2535-549X Space is the Place Editor-in-Chief Senior Editor Graphic Design Nuart Journal Martyn Reed Emma Arnold Studio Bergini Nytorget 17 Nuart, Stavanger (NO) University of Oslo (NO) 4013 Stavanger Design Intern Norway Issue Editor Online Editor Albert Selim Susan Hansen Erik Sæter Jørgensen, Editorial Middlesex University, Sæter Jørgensen Printed in Norway Correspondence London (UK) Contemporary (NO/FR) by Kai Hansen Trykkeri [email protected] International Advisory Board Alison Young, University of Melbourne (AU) Laima Nomeikaite, The Norwegian Institute for Bahia Shehab, American University in Cairo (EG) Cultural Heritage Research (NO) David Pinder, Roskilde University (DK) Lu Pan, Hong Kong Polytechnic University (CN) Erik Hannerz, Lund University (SE) Mike Watson, John Cabot University (IT) Jacob Kimvall, Stockholm University (SE) Minna Valjakka, National University of Singapore (SG) Jeff Ferrell, Texas Christian University (US) Myrto Tsilimpounidi, Institute for Sociology of the Julia Tulke, University of Rochester (US) Slovak Academy of Sciences (SK) Lachlan MacDowall, University of Melbourne (AU) Pedro Soares Neves, University of Lisbon (PT) 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. Nuart Journal 2018 Volume 1 Number 1 Editorial Visual/Experimental 3 Martyn Reed, Editor-in-Chief 39 Lachlan MacDowall Space is the place From Peterhof Station to Crescenzago: Agit-Trains and Grifter’s Code Original Articles 43 Raphael Soifer 9 Christel Pedersen Blunting broken windows: Subversive weeds: Bio-activist Rio de Janeiro’s Olympic dreams strategies in urban interventions 57 Jonna Tolonen 17 Enrico Bonadio Unexpected beauty in urban decay Street art, graffiti and the moral right of integrity: 65 Oleg Kuznetsov Can artists oppose the destruction Kurskaya wall, Moscow and removal of their works? 23 Ulrich Blanché Interviews/Talks Street art and photography: Documentation, representation, 83 Jan Zahl interpretation Aesthetic destruction: At home with Ian Strange 31 Susan Hansen Heritage protection for street art? 89 Alison Young The case of Banksy’s Spybooth Art as interruption, and as intervention 96 Adrian Burnham Sticking it to the man: The visual activism of Dr. D. 104 Pietro Rivasi and Andrea Baldini Turning the white cube inside out: UN(AUTHORIZED)//COMMISSIONED 109 Thejas Jagganath The future of art is urban: Nicolas Whybrow on Art and the City Nuart Journal 2018 Volume 1 Number 1 3–6 Editorial: Space is Martyn Reed Editor-in-Chief Nuart Journal the place As many are already aware, after a sustained local pieces, and talks and interviews with key thinkers, campaign by various cultural gatekeepers to reduce curators and artists. the popularity and impact of street art in the city, the Norwegian Arts Council announced that they would The streets function not only as utilitarian be phasing out Nuart Festival’s annual funding. arrangements for travel and commerce, but also as The reason given was a lack of “faglig” competence deep repositories of meaning for those who occupy – for faglig read “professional.” Although, perhaps and move through them, as places of continually in this context we can read it as being “not of the contested perceptions and negotiated understanding. profession” – i.e., not belonging to contemporary The rise of the ‘neoliberal’ mural scene, has been, in art praxis proper. On the one hand, this has made life many cases, complicit with the growth of aggressive extremely difficult, particularly with regards to paying environmental design through ‘placemaking’ schemes. rent, supporting staff and admin in general. On the This is leading to new challenges for organisers, other hand, it has helped us to re-focus on who we are particularly as mural festivals now normatively and what we’re trying to achieve – and of course, who necessitate significant fees and funding. Getting a and what it is we are here to support. We hope that Herakut mural up ten years ago was quite different the Nuart Journal goes some way towards addressing to the considerable logistics, let alone economics, the concerns of the Arts Council and other arts involved in getting one up today. This top down professionals in showing that, although street art may ‘Disneyfication’ of street art culture must be resisted indeed be “not of the profession” it is worthy of serious – we need to shine a light back into the margins with scholarship. It is not the culture that needs to adapt to the resources and platforms that we have access to. fit the conservative mores of the institution, but the Murals are an important part of the urban garden, but institution that needs to develop ways to recognise we also need to understand them as being in symbiosis and support this vibrant, dynamic and fluid new with, and in debt to, the activist, the graffiti writer, the form of public art expression. trickster, the sticker, the paste up, the stencil and the tag. In that sense, Nuart is fiercely protective of the In this Editorial, I wanted to take the opportunity to term ‘street art’, no matter how corrupted. The ‘street’ outline some of our ideas in a more reflective way – is the grit in the oyster that creates the street art pearl, which I hope will give Nuart Journal readers a better if you like. Or, as Situationist scholar McKenzie Wark idea of who we are, and why we do what we do. At the (following Lefebvre) would have it, “the maggot within Nuart Festival this year, we’re encouraging artists to the fruit” (Wark, 2011: 106). work as much as they can outside the framework of the festival, to get off the beaten track and explore the Ultimately, and perhaps – for an organisation – periphery – the side alleys, the edgelands, and those paradoxically, we aim to support the disorganised less obvious spots in and around the city – areas with and unregulated rhythms and movement of the streets, the possibility of creating one to one encounters. to challenge the regulations of the municipality and This is not to say that we are abandoning the institution, and the growing privatisation of not only production of large scale works. We recognise that public space, but also mental space – our very mental these are an important and valuable aspect of the environment. In doing so, we hope to act as a counter culture – but to inspire agency in others, we believe to the growing forms of spatial exclusion attached to it is important to bring street art back to a more shrink wrapped consumerism and the authoritarian human, and less authoritarian, scale. Similarly, we monumentalisation of street art culture that Muralism are encouraging contributors to the Nuart Journal to has achieved. work on the peripheries of interdisciplinary street art scholarship and practice – thus, in this inaugural peer Street art is now being challenged – so many powerful reviewed issue, we have included not just traditional people and institutions appear to have a vested academic articles, but also experimental and visual interest in convincing us to lose faith in street art’s 3 Nuart Journal Silo “Mural.” Stavanger, Norway, 2018. Work and Photograph ©Martyn Reed power to effectively respond to, and reveal, our the opportunity of greater freedom, of greater space culture’s corporate neoliberal structural mechanisms. for artists to move through and work in. Uncurating if But conflict – be it generational, geographical or you like. economic – is the turbine that drives art forward. Urban public space, the arena in which we practice, This year, the Nuart Journal, and the Nuart Festival, is perhaps the primary battleground, an arena where take their title from Sun Ra’s Afrofuturist jazz different interests collide and different forces meet. classic Space is the Place. This is a knowing nod to At the same time, and perhaps for the first time in Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan’s (1977) Space and Place but history, it is a stage for broadcasting the ethics, values also a recognition that for some, art is the only way and ideas of artists who are on the frontline, fighting to escape the violence of reality. It’s a call for street power and the co-option of the culture whilst chasing artists, urban interventionists, graffiti writers, the happiness through the production of meaningful public marginalised, the dispossessed, the unloved poets, work in a post-truth age of Trump, twitter and teargas. unfashionable artists, academic punks, and out and out This year, Nuart rises to these challenges, initiating outsiders to come together and collectively support the new principles for collaboration whilst exploring development of a culture that we believe still maintains alternative methods of organising that will hopefully revolutionary potential. Although to some, at first allow the festival, the journal, and street art culture in listen, the abstract overload of Sun Ra’s free improv, general, to become adventurous again. A few weeks with horns squealing and blurting and squawking, ago, Nuart general manager James Finucane asked keys and organs growing ever more cacophonic, can “What is a festival – was Nuart ever a festival”? which sound like unlistenable noise, it’s not. Listen again, that gave pause for thought. Eminent geographer Yi-Fu tiny flurry of melody, that touch of be-bop – was that Tuan in his seminal Space and Place (1977) defined MC5, Sonic Youth, now Primal Scream? – that sense place as ‘security’ and space as ‘freedom.’ We are of ‘space’, of playfulness, of anything could happen.

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