Street Art, Public City

Law, Crime and the Urban Imagination

Alison Young

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135143596
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art & Politics

What is street art? Who is the street artist? Why is street art a crime?

Since the late 1990s, a distinctive cultural practice has emerged in many cities: street art, involving the placement of uncommissioned artworks in public places. Sometimes regarded as a variant of graffiti, sometimes called a new art movement, its practitioners engage in illicit activities while at the same time the resulting artworks can command high prices at auction and have become collectable aesthetic commodities. Such paradoxical responses show that street art challenges conventional understandings of culture, law, crime and art.

Street Art, Public City: Law, Crime and the Urban Imagination engages with those paradoxes in order to understand how street art reveals new modes of citizenship in the contemporary city. It examines the histories of street art and the motivations of street artists, and the experiences both of making street art and looking at street art in public space. It considers the ways in which street art has become an integral part of the identity of cities such as London, New York, Berlin, and Melbourne, at the same time as street art has become increasingly criminalised. It investigates the implications of street art for conceptions of property and authority, and suggests that street art and the urban imagination can point us towards a different kind of city: the public city.

Street Art, Public City will be of interest to readers concerned with art, culture, law, cities and urban space, and also to readers in the fields of legal studies, cultural criminology, urban geography, cultural studies and art more generally.

Chapter 1

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The situational artwork

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Histories of street art

When did I first notice an unauthorised intervention in the public spaces of the city? I was about sixteen years old, and sitting in a train carriage with a friend, who pointed out to me words that had been painted on a wall next to the train line that ran from Paisley, my home town, into Glasgow:

MY DARLING FLOPS

I LOVE YOU

My friend and I speculated as to who might be the author and the intended audience. Perhaps a commuter who would see the message from the train? We wondered how old the writing was and whether it would come as a surprise to ‘Flops’, if it was an affirmation of an existing love, or a declaration of a new one.

As an example of illicit writing in public space it is a charming one, likely to be inoffensive to most people (perhaps evidenced by the fact that it had not been removed by the train company, and indeed was to remain in place for many subsequent years). But what is important about this instance of unauthorised writing is that its communicative nature is apparent at the same time as its illegality. It was obvious to me that the writing was ‘out of place’ but also that there were ways of understanding why it had come to be there. Its very existence created the opportunity for speculation as to its author, its intent and its reception. Perhaps the unknown writer of these words sparked what was to become for me a long-lasting interest in illicit writing and images in public space.

Many years after seeing that declaration of love on the train lines, I carried out research on political slogan writing in Melbourne, on graffiti cultures in Melbourne, and on a collaborative project with Mark Halsey interviewing graffiti writers around South Australia. More recently, I started studying the emergence of what came to be known as ‘street art’, which soon showed itself to be both distinct from graffiti and intertwined with its history. My aim was to trace and to interpret the ways in which street art is both distinctive and interconnected with other cultural forms, in order to account for its complex history, as it has progressed from subcultural activity to mainstream indicator of ‘urban cool’.

So much for the biographical history of my intellectual engagement with the activity. When did street art itself begin? Was there a day when someone created the first piece of street art? Unofficial mark-making in public space has a long history.¹ Some claim that Aboriginal rock art constitutes the first public art; others point to cave paintings in Lescaux and other locations. As Fleming (2001) details, mark-making in public spaces was common in Elizabethan England, and there is extensive evidence that for decades before modern graffiti came into existence, tourists wrote their names at places they were visiting and soldiers while on a tour of duty or overseas posting wrote messages such as ‘Kilroy was here’. If we are seeking to pinpoint when the graffiti of tags and ‘pieces’ began, many point to the activities of Darryl McCray, aka Cornbread, a tagger in Philadelphia from 1967 onwards (Gastman and Neelon 2010), and others identify the ‘sharpie’ culture of Melbourne in the 1950s as having established tagging in the city. As is now well documented (see especially Castleman 1984; Chalfant and Prigoff 1987; Cooper and Chalfant 1988; Snyder 2009) graffiti originally took hold in American cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia and New York and was then exported to other cities and countries initially through books (Subway Art, 1988), films (Style Wars, 1983, Wild Style, 1983, Beat Street, 1984), magazines, ‘zines and websites (the international website Art Crimes being one of the earliest and most wide-reaching).

At some point, maybe in the late 1990s, or maybe a little earlier, a new form of mark-making in public spaces came into existence, and this would later become known as ‘street art’. It is not possible to specify the date of the advent of the first street artwork. Nor is it especially advisable. Thinking about street art in such terms depends upon imagining that street art had a definite starting-point – a moment when other kinds of image-making such as slogan-writing or graffiti had to make room for this new art form. Street art, while distinctive, is also related to other cultural practices (such as graffiti or writing political slogans) and this complicates any attempt to work out exactly when and where street art ‘began’ in the contemporary city.

The appearance of cities is shaped by the authorised activities of architects, urban planners, builders, advertising agencies and others. For many years, the cityscape has also been transformed by the efforts of unauthorised individuals: activists writing their beliefs on the walls; graffiti writers tagging and piecing along the train lines; skateboarders carving up the streets; and street artists placing stencils, stickers, paste-ups and other objects on the surfaces of the city. Some activities pre-date the street art that we are familiar with today, others have coexisted with it since its inception. Just as it is neither easy nor desirable to create a rigid categorical separation of street art from these other activities, so street artists should not be cordoned into a distinctive group: some of the artists now associated with street art began as taggers; others are motivated by their politics to write slogans on walls as often as they might create a paste-up; or a group of friends who skateboard together might also make art.

So what is street art? What is a street artwork? And why argue that our responses to the street artwork are crucially important in determining whether our urban centres can ever be(come) public cities? In thinking about street art and the city in this way, I draw on the work of many notable thinkers, including Amin and Thrift (2002); Butler (2012); Iveson (2007); Lefebvre (1996); Mitchell (2003); and Watson (2006). However, in the concept ‘public city’, I am intending something rather different to Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’ or Mitchell’s ‘social justice in the city’: that is, a public city in which there exists a commons of the image (see Chapter 2), an aesthetically driven cityscape (see Chapter 3), networks of laws (see Chapters 4 and 5), and a landscape that is materially produced through hierarchies of taste and cultural capital (see Chapter 6). The notion of the ‘public city’ names a space and a moment in which citizens can inhabit all of these dimensions at once. To think about the street artwork in public space is obvious; to raise questions about whether street artworks can help create a public city is rather less so. The ‘city’ of a public city is more than its streetscapes, cartography, planning, economy and neighbourhoods; it is an image, a symbol, a mood, an atmosphere and a sensibility. The shift from a focus upon public space, important and necessary though it is, to a consideration of the public city itself allows us also to ask how we live in the city, and what we desire to experience there.

This is not to argue that physical place should be overlooked: far from it. The street artwork takes much of its meaning from its location in public space, on private property. From this complicated location, myriad questions arise, to do with conceptions of place, ownership, and boundaries. To write about the challenges posed to regimes of property, community and authority by street art necessitates the consideration of what the urban imagination involves, and what a street artwork can look like. While this sounds simple, the construction of such categorical frameworks is in fact fraught with difficulty. First, there is the issue of how street art and street artworks are defined (and therefore constituted). Is it the type of image created that determines whether we are looking at a street artwork – a stencil on a wall, perhaps, or an object hanging from a street sign? Or perhaps it is the particular creative activity that produced the artwork (stencilling, tagging, pasting up posters)? Alternatively, perhaps the artwork’s production without permission results in an image being defined as street art? Perhaps street art is something that can be fixed within a particular historical period – the late 1990s and 2000s?

None of these characteristics is definitive, however. And, as the years have passed since street art emerged as a cultural practice, new forms such as yarn bombing and street sculpture have become commonplace on city streets. In the early 2000s, street art predominantly involved stencilled images; a decade later there is a far greater diversity of practices and images. This is not to say that the answer to defining street art is to adopt an inclusive stance, whereby any and all artistic activities and resulting images can be considered to be street art. For some commentators (for example, Grant, 2012) activities such as yarn bombing and cup rocking dilute the subversive challenges presented by illicit art, by virtue of their proximity to craft as opposed to art. Others point out that, despite many shared characteristics, graffiti and street art have very different historical antecedents and thus should not be homologised. The difficulties and undesirability of attempting to historicise street art by fixing its origins at a particular point in time are thus magnified when we take into account the lack of agreement among commentators as to what street art is (and whether it should even be called ‘street art’, rather than anything else, will be discussed shortly).

Invoking the illegality of an image as a central definitional feature is also problematic. Some street artworks are created without permission; others are created with the consent of the property owner. An implicit hierarchy within street art culture tends to give greater significance or credibility to works created without permission, and artists who call themselves street artists but who have never or rarely put up illicit work can sometimes be regarded as less authentic, or as attempting to benefit from street art’s fashionability. Moreover, the spectator who stumbles across an artwork may not be able to determine whether an artwork was authorised or not; sometimes passersby assume a work is illegal simply because it is in public space or is painted in a particular style. (Artists recount instances in which local residents have called the police on the assumption that a mural is illicit despite the artist actually having permission; conversely some have tacitly relied on a passerby’s assumption that a work is permitted when it was not.)

In terms of whether street art has a particular historicity, this is easy both to establish and to undermine. On the one hand, the term ‘street art’ began to be used in the early to mid-2000s, with reference to artworks placed in public space without permission and often, at that time, involving stencils and pasted-up paper images. However, such street-based images did not appear from nowhere, sharing connections with graffiti writing (which began in the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s), political protest (slogans had been written on walls in cities all over the world for many decades, and protest movements have for many years printed and pasted-up posters), punk culture (which emphasised the hand-made, local and subversive, and which utilised a similar aesthetic), Situationist art (which emphasised the alignment between art and politics and rejected any claim to separate the two) and drawing also upon a more general desire to make marks in public and private spaces, whether evidenced in ‘latrinalia’ (writing on toilet walls), carving initials on school desks and on the stone of ancient monuments, painting images on cave walls, and writing on walls within private homes.²

Street art, although a distinctive phenomenon with many discrete characteristics, intersects with a range of other activities and practices, and draws meaning from these other phenomena, while evolving attributes of its own that operate to constitute an image in public space as a street artwork (or not). For example, words stencilled on the pavement might well be the illicit work of a street artist, as in San Francisco when a group of artists called ‘The Strangers’ created a stencilled narrative that could be read cumulatively by the pedestrian walking in the vicinity of Dolores Park.³ However, such stencilled words can also be created by government organisations and advertising agencies: in Melbourne, the Victorian Government placed stencils on the pavement exhorting individuals to use sunscreen, and companies such as Nike and Moonlight Cinema employed an advertising agency to stencil their logos on pavements around the city. In these instances, it is fairly clear that the resulting stencilled words are not a street artwork; in other situations, it is less apparent, such when I saw the words ‘Taxi to the Dark Side’ stencilled on the streets of Shoreditch in London; this turned out to be the advertising campaign for a documentary film.

For a long time, little was written in academic literature about street art. There was some engagement with graffiti, much of which focused on the question of whether graffiti could be categorised as art or crime (see for example Gomez 1992). Alternative approaches were provided by Ferrell (1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998) and others who engaged with graffiti writing communities as examples of subcultural formations and awarded them a central position in the development of what became known as cultural criminology. Initially focusing upon specific social and cultural practices (such as dumpster diving, graffiti writing, skateboarding and heroin use) in a way that constituted their practitioners as marginal(ised) or minoritarian, cultural criminology has since been expanded and refined such that these activities can now be regarded as components within culture generally, variously labelled and positioned within social hierarchies.

Other approaches seeking an alternative to the art/crime dichotomy include the Deleuzean stance that Mark Halsey and I took in arguing that graffiti writers see space differently, with vision operating haptically to construct a different mode of being in space (see also Haworth, Bruce and Iveson, 2013). Similarly, urban and cultural geographers saw graffiti writers as engaged in the construction and re-appropriation of urban spaces, sometimes able to contest dominant uses of the city and sometimes reabsorbed into the cultural mainstream (Dovey, Woodcock and Wollan 2012). Street art is often classified as being exemplified by a particular practice (stencil art, for example, or culture jamming), but as street art has continued to diversify, it is clear that there is no one determining art practice involved. Further, stencils have been used by advertising companies, corporations and local councils; billboard jamming is sometimes used by advertisers; graffiti can be incorporated into paste-ups just as paste-ups can be incorporated into graffiti. By the late 2000s, diversity and interconnectedness constituted key aspects of street art, complicating any straightforward definition of the activity.

How has street art been viewed in recent academic literature? From the mid-2000s, the idea of ‘street art’ as a distinct cultural practice has received newfound awareness in academic literature (Bou 2005; Lacayo and Miranda 2005; McGaw 2008; Ganz and Manco 2009; Lewisohn 2009; Austin 2010; Banet-Weiser 2011; Waclawek 2011; McAuliffe 2012). In sum, then,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of plates
• List of figures
• Plates
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The situational artwork
• 2 The cities in the city
• 3 Cityscapes
• 4 Criminalising the image
• 5 Street art and spatial politics
• 6 Transformations: urban imagination in the public city
• Bibliography
• Index