Art and the senses

I’ve been thinking for some time about the ways in which we experience an artwork, whether it’s located in the street or in a gallery. The most conventional way in which to think about this would emphasize vision – after all, we are used to the idea that an artwork is something that we look at.

But this leaves out other sensory dimensions, ones which are not so commonly talked about in relation to art. Is it possible to hear an artwork? Can we taste it?

In some works, image and sound are certainly inextricably combined, so that it’s not really possible to think in terms of simply looking at it or listening to it: Bill Viola’s work is a great example. Some artists entirely ignore the visual in favour of the auditory: in 2008, for example, an artwork called Speed of Sound Nau Interactive Bells was installed in Union Lane in Melbourne (this laneway was mentioned in a previous post, Street art and ‘authority’): the sound of bells, chiming at irregular intervals, played from speakers installed at different heights along the laneway walls, so that the sounds increased and receded according to one’s progress along the laneway.

And I’m also pleased to be able to report that I have had the experience of eating art. Felix Gonzalez-Torres, a Cuban-American artist, created installation pieces in which lollies (or candies, or sweets, depending on which continent you live on) were strewn across a gallery floor or piled in its corners. Spectators were able to dip their hands into the artwork and pull out a handful of sweets to take home or to eat. You can get a sense of what Gonzalez-Torres’s wonderful work looks like if you click here – the tiny golden objects piled against the walls constitute one of his works, Untitled (Placebo – Landscape for Roni). I can still vividly recall how transgressive it felt, to pick up a piece of an artwork and put it in my mouth and taste it (it was lemon-flavoured, in case anyone is interested).

The spectator’s relationship to that particular artwork involved touch as well as taste: touching art is definitely something that is actively prohibited by most museums and galleries as illicit behaviour in relation to art: think of all those signs on the wall, saying ‘Do Not Touch’.

One of the most memorable instances in which I was able to touch an artwork certainly had a sense of the illicit about it. I was visiting a gallery overseas to chat with its director, and was informed by him that he had just received a shipment of works by one artist who would be featured in their next show. The director was hugely enthusiastic about this artist and invited me not just to look at the works but in fact to touch one. As I ran my fingertips over a tiny section of the work’s surface, I felt acutely aware of how forbidden such an act usually is.

In addition to the simple transgressive pleasure that came from touching a painting, I also felt a strong sense of how much my relation to the image was altered by the act of touching it: instead of standing facing it, as it would hang on a wall with me looking directly at it, it was brought towards me and held close to me, lying at an angle, slightly tilted from the horizontal, the light slanting off its surface, my gaze directed downwards, and my hand drawn towards it. Much later, I realized that part of the extraordinary charge that arose for me in this moment derived from the experience of relating, momentarily, to the artwork as if I was in the position of the artist. I don’t mean that I experienced a sense of acquiring any of the artist’s skills or abilities, but rather simply some of the privileges that come with the position of the work’s creator: the ability to touch it, the ability to stand close to it (rather than behind a white line in a museum), the ability to look at it from different angles.

(Of course, anyone who buys an artwork acquires the rights and power to do all these things too, but it’s interesting that it is the artist that was evoked by my altered position in relation to this work, not someone with sufficient financial resources to purchase it.)

What about smell? Does art have an aroma, an odour? Artists themselves are usually well acquainted with the olfactory dimensions of their work (from spray paint, oils, acetone, lacquer, glue, and many other substances) but it’s something that isn’t often discussed when we think about spectatorship. And yet those smells can have a powerful affective impact on the viewing of an artwork. When I went to see an exhibition by the wonderful Jose Parla at Elms Lesters Painting Rooms in London last October, many of the works on display were recently painted: as a result, the gallery rooms were filled with a perfume of oil and varnish, which made me, as a spectator, feel extremely conscious of the works as things which had been brought into being through the artist’s exertions with canvas, and paper, and paint.

It was on the same visit to London that I had the good fortune to meet the charming Nick Walker (you can see more about Nick here). As we finished our conversation about his work, in a small room at Black Rat Press, Nick indicated a neat pile of prints sitting on a trestle table, awaiting his signature before sale. He removed the protective cardboard from the pile, so that I could see the image below. But when the cardboard was lifted, an amazing smell drifted from the pile of prints: it was an intense, concentrated smell of paper, and it was strangely beautiful. I’ll never forget standing next to that table, under a low-hanging spotlight, gazing at these prints and inhaling their smell – a potent reminder that artworks are utterly material, not ethereal images floating free of the world of things.

Much of what I’ve been describing relates to the phenomenon of gallery or museum display, in which the smell or feel of an artwork is rarely encountered. When an artwork exists in urban space, the commonplace prohibitions of gallery spectatorship usually don’t apply – if you can reach it, you are perfectly free to run your hands over a paste-up, or, if you wanted to, there’s even nothing to stop you having a good sniff of a stencil.

That freedom is definitely an important part of how we look at street art and the sense of democratic spectatorship that often attaches to it. But this freedom of access comes with a downside, of course, as the artists belonging to the AMF crew from Sydney discovered, when they were arrested painting trains in London last year. The six guys have been given prison sentences ranging from 8 to 16 months (click here for more details about the case). How did they get caught? Police officers said they were alerted to the artists’ presence by hearing the rattle of spray cans and smelling aerosol paint. When it comes to art, our senses may lead us to an encounter with the sublime, but they can also be the means through which the force of law comes to be exercised.

Street Art and the Museum Revisited: Banksy on the Inside*

In November last year, I wrote about the exhibition, Street Art, at the Tate Modern in London. Artworks by street artists have been exhibited in commercial galleries on and off for many years, but this was the first time that a museum had showcased work by urban artists such as Blu, Nunca and Faile. After visiting the exhibition, I wrote about how I felt disappointed that the Tate had confined its exhibition of the works to the outer façade of the building. Although this provided the selected artists with a massive ‘canvas’ to work on, it also meant that when the exhibition ended, the works were buffed by the museum just as a council would buff these  works if they appeared on walls around a city.

Less than a year after the exhibition on the walls of the Tate Modern, street art has been brought into a museum space, and to an extent that I think it’s fair to say could not have been predicted. Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery has just opened its summer exhibition, Banksy versus Bristol Museum.

The title of the show acknowledges the tension that exists when street art is displayed indoors, or when works that some might say are best viewed in passing, on a street wall, are instead placed inside the rarefied space of a gallery. The exhibition’s context is implied as a contest, a struggle between Banksy, artist of and for the people, and all that is represented by a council-funded, conventional museum (and remember that Banksy once painted ‘Mind the crap’ on the steps of Tate Britain, in a nose-thumbing gesture at the hierarchies of art institutions).

To a certain extent that is all true: much ink has been spilt and many blog entries posted about whether street art ‘belongs’ indoors, and whether Banksy has ‘sold out’, and whether museums are being forced to ‘dumb down’ (for example, in the critical reactions to the New York Guggenheim’s Art of the Motorcycle exhibit’, or to the increasing tendency for bankable ‘blockbuster’ exhibitions on ‘safe’ topics such as ‘Impressionism’ to tour from museum to museum). No doubt some will make similar criticisms here of Banksy, the show, and the museum. (And there’s some worthwhile critical comment on the Indoor Street Art blog.)

But what’s left out of these criticisms is any acknowledgement of the value in staging an exhibition such as this – in bringing Banksy’s work not just ‘home’ to Bristol, but inside one of Bristol’s museums.

Banksy’s work has been in museums before, but in a very different way: in March 2005 he visited the Metropolitan Musuem, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Natural History in New York City and hung works on the walls, which were viewed by the museum’s visitors until noticed by security guards. In October 2003 he hung his own artwork in the Tate Britain and placed a fake piece of prehistoric rock art (showing a cave man pushing a supermarket shopping trolley) in the British Museum in May 2005.

It’s a long way from those outlaw actions to the current exhibition, and here’s where the show’s title, Banksy versus the Museum, is both accurate and misleading. Rather than being displayed in selected series of rooms, as would be the norm, these artworks have taken over the entire space of the Edwardian building. The show features not just sculptures and paintings, but also a series of large installations, including a recreation of the pet store set up in New York City last October.You can get a sense of what the show is like from the videos on the UK Street Art website, or have a look at this:

And so it really is as if Banksy has taken on and taken over the space of the museum – if there was a contest, then he is the victor. But of course what we are actually seeing is the product of a fantastic collaboration rather than a contest: a closely guarded secret, in which the museum closed down in order to allow the artist to set up his work throughout the galleries.

And so, in coming not just home but also inside the portals of the museum, does this mean Banksy has sold out in some way? I think not: the exhibition has actually been brought about in a manner that maintains many of the values of street art: while these are obviously not illicit artworks in any way, they have appeared before the public just as a work on a wall might do, the result of clandestine preparations and the efforts of an anonymous (well, sort of anonymous) individual. Just as the Cans Festival came as a fabulous surprise last year, the Bristol City Museum show provides a summer treat for those in the northern hemisphere. Not to be missed. Bristol? Wish I was there.

* Thanks to Peter, for suggesting the sub-title for this post.

Women and Cities: Swoon

Twitter is emerging as another way of getting information about urban art and street artists (I’m on Twitter as @scotinoz), and it was through Twitter that I learned today that Swoon’s Swimming Cities of Serenissima has arrived in Venice. For those of you who don’t know Swoon’s work, she specializes in large (life-sized) block-printed paper cut-outs, which are then wheat-pasted onto surfaces, which might be the walls in a gallery or in the street. She is based in New York City, but her work appears in cities all over the world. Here’s a great video of Swoon giving a presentation about her work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York:

While walking through Haight Ashbury with Russell Howze, veteran archivist of stencil art, I saw this piece by her:

It’s a quintessential Swoon piece: a woman, rendered in intricate detail, beautifully drawn, and placed with care in a space in which she appears to be glimpsed by the passer-by while she is engaged in some quotidian activity.

While I was in San Francisco, Russell also took me to the Luggage Store Gallery. This gallery has featured in an earlier post on this blog  (see ‘On tagging’, January 2009), and the gallery is certainly worth visiting just for a look at the archive of tags provided by its stairwell, but on the day that I was there it was also the site of an exhibition of Swoon’s work.

Instead of simply being pasted onto walls, as happens when Swoon (or any other artist) puts up work in the streets, here she had pasted them onto cardboard or wood, or other found objects, which were then displayed in a manner which lent them depth, perspective, dimensionality. These photos will give you an idea of what the works looked like:

Swoon had made use of all the space available, even extending her work over the gallery’s windows:

For the spectator, this provided the novel experience of standing inside and looking through an artwork to the street outside (a neat re-working of the constraints enforced on much urban art, in which the artwork can exist either in the street or in the gallery, but not in both places).

While one strand of Swoon’s work focuses on figures in the everyday, The Swimming Cities of Serenissima derives from what is emerging as another major interest, the built environment. As the website for The Swimming Cities of Serenissima states, the vessels are inspired by ‘dense urban cityscapes and thickly intertwined mangrove swamps from [Swoon’s] Florida youth’. It involves three vessels, ‘built from salvaged materials, including modified Mercedes car motors with long-tail propellers’, which have been sailed by a crew of 30 artists from Slovenia to Venice. The vessels resemble ships but also evoke the floating skyscrapers of Gotham or the counter-intuitive wonders of Venice itself.

This is the third floating sculpture made by Swoon (previously, she created the Miss Rockaway Armada which sailed down the Mississippi River, and The Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea, seven rafts which sailed from Troy, NY, to New York City). Reading about the remarkable floating cities created by Swoon made me remember another highlight from my visit to San Francisco, visiting CELLspace. This is a fantastic place combining studios and gallery space for at-risk youth and artists in the Mission District, to see Card Burg, a city being constructed from cardboard:

It was absolutely wonderful to wander among the towering skyscrapers and to see the small spaces of everyday lives within the metropolis – an incredible urban artwork about the nature of life in urban space.

I’m pretty sure that for anyone lucky enough to see one of Swoon’s swimming cities, the experience will be similar: wonder, awe and sheer pleasure. But I’ve also been thinking about these two separate strands in Swoon’s work: the individual and the urban. Individuals going about their business, sitting on the stoop, walking through the city. And cities: fantastic, miraculous spaces wrought by the imagination. It makes me wonder whether it’s possible for the two to be brought together: if the contemplative woman can be allowed to exist within the urban setting.

Of course, you could argue that this is exactly what Swoon’s street images do: the paste-up of a woman is placed in urban space. But I wonder if we need more than that. When I saw Card Burg, I realised that part of the pleasure in visiting that imaginary city was brought about by the exhilaration of – literally – walking tall among the city’s buildings. The altered dimensions of Card Burg meant that I stood almost as tall as the skyscrapers.

Similarly, Swoon’s swimming cities shift perspective and dimension: the city is produced in inevitable miniature, and is thus, somehow, tamed. To me, what’s important here is the transformation that’s brought about of the experience of being a woman in the city. For far too many women, city spaces are still the location for sensations such as anxiety, fear, intimidation. Is it possible for an artist to create an image of being a woman in the city that can acknowledge that reality and that can still seem beautiful? This isn’t a criticism of Swoon’s work, which I find inspiring and hopeful and lovely. But it’s important to note how difficult it is for art to do justice to the fact that, for many women, ‘walking tall’ in the city is fraught with risk as much as pleasure.

Street art and ‘authority’

Once again, it’s been a long time between posts. The main reason for this is that I contracted whooping cough just before Easter: it turns out that whooping cough is a highly nasty illness and there’s good reason why we vaccinate kids against it. Anyway, while convalescent, I spent a lot of time online: reading blogs, browsing through some great street art websites, and, of course, spending a bit of time on Facebook. Amidst the productive procrastination of all those mad quizzes, recently there’s been some fascinating reading provided by the responses to questions being asked on Facebook by the Wooster Collective (questions which range from ‘what’s your favourite hangover cure’ to ‘what is the best city for street art’). One recent question asked respondents to say what impact they thought it would have if street art were legal. Reading the comments (most of which indicated that something would be lost if street art were legalized) started me thinking about street art and its relation to authority and to the various government bodies and organizations that we might call the ‘authorities’.

Around the same time that the Wooster Collective were asking this question, I received an email from Russell Howze, stencil artist and author of Stencil Nation (it’s also well worth checking out both his blog and Stencil Archive, his fabulous resource on stencil art). In the email, he described the Anti-Graffiti Super Huddle (website here), a recent initiative in San Francisco designed to reduce, contain and eliminate graffiti in the city. Russell’s concerns were that the anti-graffiti strategies seemed to be coming thick and fast, and he asked whether any arts organizations were participating in these debates (to provide a counter-voice) and whether any politicians might want to develop initiatives that recognized the positive value street art could have for a city.

So here we have a great example of how the encounter between street art and authority is usually configured (the Anti-Graffiti Super Huddle with its objectives of zero tolerance and graffiti prevention) and we can also see how difficult it is to imagine ways in which that encounter might be transformed – an enterprise which would certainly be challenging but which could have many benefits for artists (perhaps reducing the chances of being fined or prosecuted) and for inhabitants of urban spaces (in allowing street art to flourish rather than struggle in the periods in between massive buffing exercises).

Certainly of relevance to the possibility of transforming the encounter between street art and authority is the news that recently the Wooster Collective were invited to the White House. Earlier in May, Marc and Sara, along with around 60 representatives from grassroots arts organizations, attended a briefing session with aides from the Obama administration and participated in workshops focusing on a range of key issues to do with the arts. As they say in the post on their website recounting the event, the issue they wanted to raise was ‘the need to better understand the issues around public and private space’ (for the full post, look here and scroll down to the entry for 13 May 2009).

In some ways, it’s no surprise that the Obama administration would invite individuals interested in street art to such a meeting. The Obama campaign demonstrated that it understood the positive capacities of street art – particularly so in relation to the widespread appearance in public space of the image of Obama created by Shepard Fairey. (You can read about this image and its role in the campaign here.) Fairey talks about his creation of the image in this video:

But in other ways, of course, it’s nothing short of mind-boggling that a government would engage in this sort of outreach towards individuals who have championed artwork that is oftentimes illicit. After reading about the Wooster Collective’s visit to the White House, I tried to imagine the equivalent in other countries – Gordon Brown including Banksy in a round table on the future of the arts in the UK, say, or Kevin Rudd inviting the Everfresh boys to Canberra for a discussion about arts funding.

The comparison isn’t quite an exact one, however: the Wooster Collective are not artists themselves; they are enormously supportive of street art in general and have promoted the work of a wide range of artists in many countries, and have generally raised awareness about street art in the community on an incredible scale. But they are not themselves known for engaging in the production of illicit images, and I’m guessing that this distinction is still important for those in authority, when they issue invitations to participate in such debate.

I am only speculating here – I don’t know who else was invited to the White House: there may have been a street artist there as well (but I’m guessing that Marc and Sara would have said if there had been). But once we get over the surprise and delight that such a meeting took place, what are the outcomes that we might hope for when street art, like Mr Smith, ‘goes to Washington’?

It’s an interesting question – partly because I’m still unsure of what this could lead to. I can see that there are a lot of things that can be gained in terms of the symbolic support it gives to street art(ists) and the potential for parlaying this kind of recognition into all sorts of consciousness-raising efforts. It’s hard to think of concrete outcomes partly because we really haven’t seen an encounter like this, at this level of power, and with so much potential. But I’m also pretty sure that there are some risks too, and this is because there are so many instances of the encounter between street art and authority at lower levels of government making things harder for street artists or leading to some pretty strange results.

Here’s one example: in Melbourne, a few yeas back, the City of Melbourne agreed to support a project whereby artists would be permitted to paint the walls in Union Lane, in the city centre. Union Lane is a narrow lane that connects one of the major retail thoroughfares (Bourke Street) with another shopping street running parallel to it, Little Collins Street. Many of Melbourne’s laneways possess great charm and character; Union Lane does not – it was a forbidding, gloomy stretch of laneway, its unrelieved concrete walls were plain grey on one side and on the other had been painted with an uninspired, bland mural which pictorialized various civic virtues (and which had been heavily tagged).

The Union Lane project was a fantastic idea, in many ways, and it was brought into being through the hard work of a lot of people. Several well-known, highly respected artists and experienced artists were commissioned to paint in the massive work that was to cover both walls for the entire length of the laneway (which is pretty long – a city block). These artists also mentored younger artists on the project. Visiting street artists joined in. The result was a collage of styles and images produced by dozens of individuals. Passers-by took photographs; tourists visited the site; many talked with the artists and learned something about street art as they watched it being carried out. You can see the lane as it was before, and the process of developing and painting the laneway in this video:

It sounds brilliant, and in many ways it was. Surely this would be an example of the encounter between street art and authority working at its best? Well, a few unexpected problems arose. Although the presence of a high quality piece on a wall usually inspires respect from other writers or artists (that is, they don’t go over the work), the Union Lane paintings have quickly been tagged. Some people have speculated that the stencilled words ‘Street art permit: City of Melbourne’ might imply to some that the site is one where anyone can and should put up, rather than a site to be looked at.

It’s also my suspicion that the initiative demonstrates how easy it is for there to be a clash between the expectations of those in ‘authority’ and the norms and practices of street art culture. The City of Melbourne put time, effort and money into the project, and as such, wanted to protect their investment and preserve the result. Graffiti writers and street artists, however, did not necessarily view the site or the project as one which deserved permanence and preservation (two things which are not really high on the list of priorities for many graffiti writers anyway) beyond the recognition of the skills of various artists who contributed to the project.

And so, as time has passed, Union Lane is gradually becoming shabbier. Because of this, there’s a risk that it will be held up some day as an example of why such initiatives fail to achieve any positive results. Could this have been avoided? Well, one possible strategy would have been to have recognized at the outset that permanence isn’t highly valued in street art and graffiti cultures and that a range of temporary surfaces (such as hoardings) could be attached to the walls of Union Lane for artists to paint and re-work over time, with the hoardings being removed and replaced periodically.

Such an approach would no doubt bring with it its own particular issues and potential problems, but at least it would demonstrate that those in ‘authority’ are not just dispensing largesse (which can be revoked) but are actively trying to understand how street art and graffiti work.

So I guess my main point is this: in any encounter with authority, street art and street artists need to expect that all will not go according to plan, and that any plan needs to incorporate contingencies as to what might happen down the track, when the expectations of those in authority are not met.

And I think, at the moment, this will always happen, because there’s such an asymmetry between the positions of those with power (councils, the Obama administration) and those without it (graffiti writers, arts organizations, street artists). (And it would be great if the Wooster Collective’s encounter with authority could lead to a discussion as to how street artists might work to render that relationship less asymmetrical.)

I don’t mean to be pessimistic, but over the years I have seen many instances of street artists or graffiti writers trying to engage positively with ‘authority’, and I have had some experience of trying to do so myself. If someone loses out, it’s usually the artist. (And I would love to hear from anyone who has had experience of trying to work with ‘authority’ – whether successful or unsuccessful.)

So when street art ‘goes to Washington’, it’s going to be essential to have a clear idea of what street art can gain from the encounter, what ‘authority’ can offer street art, and what risks might lie ahead, even with an administration that has shown remarkable understanding and appreciation of all that street art can offer the community.

The art of the space

Once again, it has been a long time between posts, and, once again, apologies for the delay. Same excuse: I’m (still) finishing a book, and am spending every minute I can trying to fix up references, check quotations, and, yes, write bits of chapters. Almost done: hopefully by the end of April, after which normal blogging will be resumed!

But even though I’m not posting as much as I should be here, I’m still looking at art, still living by certain images. In the last few months I’ve seen a lot of works around Melbourne by the same artist, and I have taken photographs of some of them. I keep coming across more: I spotted some more last night, and am hoping to go and photograph them soon.

Here’s one I kept seeing, in the hot days of the summer, since it’s in a laneway off a street that I drive past most days:

And if I don’t drive down that one (Elgin Street), I’m driving down Grattan Street, where I kept seeing this:

I also discovered one not far from the Law School at Melbourne University:

What really appeals to me about these images is not just their graphic, characterful humour and style, it’s the fact that the images work so well in the spaces they have been placed in. Whether it’s the boxy shape of the switching box on the corner opposite the Law School or the narrow space between a billboard and the corner of the wall on Grattan Street, the artist had made images which respond to the spaces they inhabit. The space enhances the image, and the image gives the space a buzz. Look closer, and from a different angle, at the one on the switching box near the Law School:

Here you can see how the artist is working with three-dimensional space, not just placing an image on a flat surface, but making the most of the possibilities offered by the box, extending the image around the corner and onto a second side, to make an image which works from different angles and which draws our attention not just to itself but to the space it occupies. Really satisfying to look at…

And if anyone knows who the artist is…..let me know!

On tagging, again: Cheyene Back’s appeal

It’s been a while since I have been able to write any entries – many apologies. I am trying to finish a book on cinema and have entered what is hopefully the last few months of that process. So I have my head down, working hard on that, and that means there’s a bit less time in the day at present.

But I did want to note what’s happened in Cheyene Back’s appeal against the sentence which was imposed upon her after she was caught tagging the outside wall of a cafe in Sydney, as previously written about in this blog. A magistrate in the Sydney Local Court had sentenced her – in a total rush of blood to the head – to a three month prison term. She appealed against this to the District Court and Judge Greg Hosking reduced her sentence to a twelve-month good behaviour bond with no conviction recorded. He commented that the previous sentence did not take into account the fact that terms of imprisoned are intended to be imposed only as a matter of last resort.

All good, yes? Well….. not quite. Judge Hosking said that it was unusual in the extreme to impose a prison sentence on a young woman with no prior record for the crime of putting graffiti on a wall – “as serious as that matter undoubtedly is”. The key issue for Judge Hosking, then, is the age and prior record of Back, rather than the issue of whether or not imprisonment is an appropriate sentence for writing a tag on a wall (and we are not talking about ‘bombing’ the city of Sydney with hundreds of tags, but rather a single tag written on a wall).

In case anyone might interpret his reduction of Back’s sentence as a wildly pro-graffiti move, Judge Hosking commented: “I’m not condoning what she did for a moment. People in Sydney are sick of graffiti, there’s no doubt about it”.

And Greg Smith, Opposition spokesperson for Justice, leapt into the media fray by adding his two cents’ worth: he thought it would be unfortunate if Judge Hosking’s reduction of the sentence meant that others were not deterred from ‘defacing property’. As The Age reported, when Mr Smith was asked if Back should be behind bars, he said: “Personally, I think she should. I think graffiti is a very serious offence. I understand that the culture hasn’t been to [imprison offenders] and we’ve got to change that culture, otherwise our city is just going to be … an eyesore.”

I know much ink has already been spilled (or many keyboards tapped on) in relation to this case, so I just want to say this. It’s amazing how graffiti can ‘press the buttons’ of – what would you call it? – ‘mainstream culture’ or ‘the dominant order’ or whatever. Clearly, the idea of a girl tagging a wall is irritating or infuriating to such a degree that both a relatively senior judge and a politician can feel able to comment that they would like to see her in prison rather than risk her (or others) tagging the walls of the city.

Two things: first of all, prisons are full. Why add to their overflowing population by sending Cheyene Back or any other graffiti writer there? Second, it is now well-documented that imprisonment can have hugely negative impacts on people’s lives – in fact, in the case of women, it would appear that imprisonment affects the mortality rate of women who have been to prison. So why do these powerful individuals – a judge, a politician – feel so comfortable saying that they would like to put this young woman in prison?  What is it about tagging that drives out both reason and reasonableness?

Bill Viola: ‘Ocean without a shore’.

These last few weeks in Victoria have been all about heat, fire and drought, and so there’s a certain aptness in writing about an artist whose works often make use of water. Bill Viola is an American artist whose work, Ocean without a shore, has recently been purchased by the National Gallery of Victoria. It has been installed for a number of weeks, and I finally managed to get to see it. As with the other times I have seen Viola’s work, I was completely awestruck by it.

The work was originally made for the Venice Biennale, where it was installed in a small chapel. Each of its three screens took the place of altar pieces within the chapel, and the setting must have generated an amazing atmosphere in which to view this work. Here’s  a short film about the installation of the work in Venice:

The NGV installation retains a sense of the work’s engagement with the sacred and the uncanny by placing it within a very small, darkened room. The spectator sits on a low bench just inside the room, a low bench reminiscent of a church pew. Each screen is placed on one of the three walls, in a manner very similar to the Venice installation. Unlike a standard chapel altar piece, however, the images within the screens are moving.

Each screen shows the same scenario, performed by a different person. A blurry figure stands at a distance from ‘us’, or, from the ‘front’ of the image, if the screen constitutes some imaginary ‘front’. These images strongly evoke depth of field – the figures start in the distance, walk forwards, halt, look around, turn, then walk away. When they have each returned to their starting point, each one is succeeded by a new figure (although this moment of succession is never possible to see on screen – I found myself always either distracted by the other screens or simply unable to make out the exact moment of transition due to the fuzziness of the figure once it has receded into the depth of the screen).

The figures do not move in synch with each other; they come and go in series, sometimes in the same order (left panel, then centre panel, then right panel), sometimes not (left panel, then right panel, oh, then left panel again, then centre panel, then right panel… and so on). The speed of the figures is slow: they are in fact shown in slow-motion, which makes their movements seem both ponderous and tentative, and which adds to the ominous tone of the piece.

And what else is happening as each figure makes this slow walk forward and back? There is, as with all Viola’s work, a great deal more going on, consisting mainly in the thick texture of the artwork itself. As each figure draws near to ‘us’, they pass through a wall of water. Digital effects mean that we do not see the water, except as after-effects – droplets, spray, sprinkles – after each figure passes through it. But what we really are being invited to look at is the transformative capacity of the water: the individuals are of course drenched by the water, so that previously frizzy hair lies flat, or a light coloured shirt is soaked dark.

But more than this, passing through the water wall plunges the figures into rich, deep colour and sharp focus. No longer grey and blurry, they seem fully present as they stand and look around, sometimes seeming even to gaze directly at the viewer. They exhibit no pleasure or joy, however; their moments are still solemn and hesitant, and after a short time, each figure turns and walks back through the invisible water (which we still see only in its after-drops) and back into black and white indistinction.

While this takes place, we hear a dull continuous, almost industrial thrumming sound, which crescendos to a cascade of noise whenever a figure approaches and moves through the water wall. Here’s a short clip which gives a sense of what this looks and sounds like:

Viola is, as many of his other works will confirm, fascinated by the anunciatory and transfiguring power of water. A number of years ago, I had the experience of seeing one of his works, Five Angels for the Millenium, at the Tate Modern in London. Here’s a video clip  which gives an idea of what this work is like – you have to persist till the end for the extraordinary pleasure of the last few seconds:

That work was installed in an enormous, extremely dark room; five gigantic screens were installed on the walls, each showing a single figure plunging into and out of water in extremely slow motion. For the viewer the experience was utterly disorienting: I found my gaze compelled by the screens, and the surrounding darkness meant that I often did not see other spectators on the periphery of my visual field, so that I would bump into people while moving around to view the screens. Thus, just as the figures in the work were plunged into dark water, so the spectator was temporarily immersed in darkness: ‘all at sea’, as if moving through an unlit ocean.

In the NGV piece, although water plays a large part (as you can tell, both from my description and from the title of the work), we are not being invited to feel any such consonance or connection with the figures depicted, or to measure our experience in comparison with theirs.

On the contrary, the invisible wall of water marks a threshold – between the worlds of the living and the dead. For Viola, the figures in each panel are ghosts. The work makes literal the archaic term for a ghost: shade. Faintly visible in blurry grey tones they come towards us – the living – and attempt to press themselves into our world, but are always, after each brief return, forced to withdraw, to fade once more into the shadows where they belong.

The triangulation of the three screens, with each successive apparition gazing at the spectator, provides a melancholic sense of a threshold that cannot be surpassed, of the limits of life for us all, and of the irrevocable rupture that death brings about. It’s an artwork of immense power, and, in the immediate aftermath of the devastation brought by bushfires in Victoria, it’s an artwork that seems made for this sad time.

Tagging, part 2: how a signature can lead to prison

The previous entry was about some apects of social attitudes to tagging; however, it didn’t mention one of the most important aspect of how people think about tagging – that it constitutes a crime.

Precisely which crime depends upon the jurisdiction you are in. In Victoria, it could fall under the Summary Offences Act, or if you are caught carrying something like a marker pen or a spray can, you might be prosecuted under the new Graffiti Prevention Act (see my previous post in September 2008, called ‘Clamping down’). Some jurisdictions have graffiti-specific legislation, like Victoria’s new laws, while others prosecute tagging and other graffiti activities under more generic headings.

But of course the thing is that calling tagging (or any other graffiti-related activity) a crime sets off a whole series of consequences. First of all, it categorises the activity as something that ’society’ should be concerned about, should condemn, and should try to prevent. Next, and directly following on from that, it perm its the involvement of the police and other crimino-legal agencies and institutions, and authorises them to ‘respond’ to graffiti. Relatedly, it allows councils to create local laws which authorise the removal of graffiti (consider the fact that councils are compelled to have ‘graffiti management plans’, mainly because graffiti is considered criminal, but not ‘public urination reduction plans’, or ‘bag snatching abatement plans’). Subsequently, if an individual is discovered engaging in a graffiti-related activity, such as tagging, by these crimino-legal agencies (most likely the police), then the categorisation of tagging as ‘criminal’ means that they can be arrested, charged, and prosecuted. Once that’s done, then further consequences follow: an on-the-spot fine, perhaps, or an appearance at the Childrens or Magistrates Court.

Many people assume that when individuals get prosecuted under laws prohibiting graffiti-related activities the punishments available are not harsh. Some might assume the penalties are ‘lenient’.  (After all, it’s only a property crime, right? It’s not as if we are talking about interpersonal violence.) Others might say that the available penalties are ‘not harsh enough’ (and would argue that the effects of property crimes accumulate such that their overall effects are considerable).

So perhaps it’s useful to be reminded that the punishments are not ‘lenient’ or ‘not harsh enough’. A couple of days ago, an 18-year old girl, Cheyene Back, in Sydney was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment for writing on a wall in a cafe. (Check out here what the Everfresh boys had to say about this. And click here to read a thoughtful opinion piece about the case by Kurt Iveson.)

According to one news report (thanks for sending the link, Noah!), she wrote her ‘nickname’ (which I presume means her tag) on what’s described as the ‘public wall’ of the Hyde Park Cafe. I’m not sure what ‘public wall’ means – is it the outer wall, or does it mean something else? ‘Public’ wall sounds like ‘legal’ wall, but given that the action led to her being ‘caught’ with ‘a black texta at the scene’, that surely can’t be right. (Perhaps someone from Sydney who knows the Hyde Park Cafe could enlighten me as to what the ‘public wall is…)

Whatever it is, Cheyene has been convicted of the offence of ‘intentionally destroying or damaging property’, and she will go to jail as a result. And all through the chain of consequences set up by the categorisation of the act of writing one’s name on property belonging to another as ‘criminal’.

On tagging

I’ve been on holiday for a few weeks, and on my first night back in Melbourne I watched the ABC’s broadcast of The Eternity Man, a filmed version (directed by Julien Temple) of an opera which has been performed in London and Sydney, among other places. The music is by Jonathan Mills, with a libretto by the late poet, Dorothy Porter (information about The Eternity Man here).

The Eternity Man tells the story of Arthur Stace, whose name will be familiar to many Australian readers of this blog as the man who chalked the word ‘Eternity’ in meticulous copperplate script on Sydney’s streets, walls and buildings for decades. The identity of the word’s author was for many years unknown, and the reality of Stace’s existence – a formerly homeless alcoholic who was almost certainly schizophrenic – came as a shock to many who had speculated as to what individual might have such perfectly flowing ‘penmanship’. Stace’s handiwork, although initially decried as ‘graffiti’, was eventually recast as an idiosyncratic aspect of Sydney’s identity, with this process of redefinition reaching its apotheosis, long after Stace’s death in 1967, in Sydney’s Millenium celebrations for the arrival of the year 2000, when the Harbour Bridge was lit up by thousands of fireworks spelling out the word ‘Eternity’ in Stace’s handwriting.

The Eternity Man continues this investment in the figure of Stace, representing him as a melancholic, enigmatic loner, hallucinating his memories and anxieties around Sydney, calming his fears and uncertainties through the repeated inscription of one single word.

While watching the film, it struck me that what Stace was doing was ‘bombing’ the city – the word ‘Eternity’ is like a tag, written over and over, and Stace’s nocturnal wanderings and indiscriminate interest in any urban surface was a version of going ‘all city’, covering urban space with the author’s tag. A few decades ago, when Stace was writing ‘Eternity’ all around Sydney, his actions were regarded as graffiti. But now, it would be hard to find any contemporary examples of his activities being described in this way. What prevents Stace being viewed as a ‘graffer’ and the word he wrote being thought of as his tag?

Well, of course, an obvious answer would be that Stace clearly didn’t belong to any kind of crew and was not interested in graffiti culture. Well, yeah, of course not. But that doesn’t really answer the question why it is that a clear separation is now being made between Stace’s writings and ‘graffiti’.

That Stace is to be regarded as a kind of artist (rather than as a ‘graffer’ or as a ‘vandal’) is signalled to the spectator through the film’s construction of a thoroughly aestheticised frame for Stace’s compulsion: when he is shown walking through the city at night, significant events from twentieth century history are projected onto walls around him, in a manner that evokes the artwork of Shimon Attie (if you’re not familiar with Attie’s wonderful artwork, there’s a nice summary with some examples here). The opera thus constructs him as eccentric and possibly mentally ill, but certainly not as a criminal.

And watching The Eternity Man got me thinking about others who write words on the city walls but who are not portrayed in mainstream culture as enigmatic but admirable figures. The copperplate script used by Stace is in many ways as exacting and as particular a way of writing as the calligraphy used by taggers, who often spend a great deal of time refining and perfecting their signatures. Despite the complexity of their lettering and despite the time put into the development of a tag, tagging is certainly the aspect of graffiti which tends to be the most reviled. It is often called ‘scrawl’ or ‘scribble’; it is condemned for being illegible. Taggers are similarly criticised: some news articles compare taggers to dogs urinating on lampposts, and taggers often get called ‘vandals’.

So it’s interesting to imagine taking the admiration directed at Arthur Stace and his copperplate script and turning it towards the effort it takes to develop and execute a good tag. A few years ago, Melbourne artist Xero wrote a piece called ‘In Defence of Tagging’ which put forward a detailed argument as to why ‘putting up a tag is not mindless. It represents imagination, dedication to an artform, and the willingness to take a risk in a public place to achieve an aesthetic outcome (even if it is one that we don’t happen to like)’.

In Xero’s view, all tags, even if some don’t look aesthetically appealing, are worthy of our thoughtful consideration, because their very existence says something about the author’s commitment to making an image (out of letters), in public space, often at some risk to themselves (of injury or arrest). I think there’s a lot of validity to that argument, but I also want to mention here some particularly interesting tags.

For example, Doug Pray’s documentary Infamy showcases Earsnot tagging around New York City, in broad daylight, unfazed by passing pedestrians.

Then there are ‘celebrity’ tags, put up by famed writers such as Twist/ Barry McGee(whose tag is elegant and elaborate) and Neckface (whose tag’s status derives both from a certain mystique around its author and from the vast number of places it has been inscribed).

You can see Neckface’s tag towards the top of this image (taken at the tagged-all-over Luggage Store Gallery in San Francisco):

The work of Melbourne’s most prolific taggers, the 70K crew, can be seen in this image (taken by Ben Pederick):

A decade ago in Melbourne, anti-consumerism slogans were written around Melbourne, accompanied by the author’s tag in the chunky lettering of a thick black marker pen: ‘SHUT UP AND SHOP’.

There are of course stencils which act like tags, so that the spectator, on seeing a particular icon, might recognize the image as a kind of signature (Banksy’s rats have this function; so do the robots stenciled by Ha Ha in Melbourne).

And some tags may be calligraphically audacious, unconventional, or simply pleasing for their symmetry and form. Here’s one of my favourites, taken in a street near where I work:

I don’t think anyone is going to be composing an opera about any of these artists any time soon (sadly), but perhaps looking at the incredible heterogeneity found within the apparently homogeneous category of the tag will contribute to a conversation about what tagging means – both to those who do it and to those who look at it.

2008 – the best and worst….

Newspapers are full of these ‘best of…’ and ‘worst of…’ lists right now, and reading some of them got me thinking about some of the great (and not so great) moments in art and cinema this year. What follows is a really incomplete – and really subjective – list of images that I’ve been happy to live by in 2008. In no particular order (and apologies for repeating some topics already written about, but they still deserve to be mentioned as some of the great moments of 2008):

•    Jose Parla’s work. I saw his show at Elms Lesters Painting Rooms in London, and I think his images are gorgeous. You can read more about Jose’s work here.

•    Miso and Ghostpatrol’s show, ‘Nesting and Dying’, at metro5 Gallery in Melbourne. Beautiful works, beautifully installed in the space.

•    Seeing Brad Downey’s presentation of a series of short films about his ‘street sculptures’, at the Tate in London.

•    The Kill Pixie show at Until Never Gallery in Melbourne.

•    C215’s work, all over London in July. Some of it is still around, like this:

•    The JR show at Lazarides. Haunting.

•    Being shown some new works by Elbow Toe, freshly unpacked and ready to hang, at Stolen Space in London.

•    Meeting the artist who paints these cats all over Amsterdam:

•    Walking around San Francisco with Russell Howze.

•    Regan Tamanui’s portrait of my daughter. Love it!

•    Spotting new Invader works around Melbourne several times during this year. How many did he put up? Fantastic!

•    Watching the Mikosa mural evolve.

•    The Cans Festival in the Leake Street tunnel. Awesome. Both times.

•    Meggs’s show at Dont Come gallery in Melbourne.

•    Seeing Hunger, by Steve McQueen.

•    Seeing the Peak Hours sticker being put up on the London Underground. I would still love to know whose work that is… Thanks to everyone who contacted me about the sticker.

•    Seeing Gilbert (of Gilbert & George) walk past on Brick Lane.

•    The Sidney Nolan show at the NGV. I’m not an Australian, so I don’t have the attachment to the Ned Kelly iconography that an Aussie does, but I still thought Nolan’s images were breath-taking.

•    Meeting Laser 3.14.

•    Logan Hicks’s show at Stolen Space in July. No space could have suited his works more.

Regrets….

Every year has to have some of these. Again in no particular order:

•    Too many great shows missed, one way or another. MuTate Britain in London, the Poesia Urbana show at Famous When Dead Gallery, Acorn’s solo show in Melbourne, Locust Jones at Until Never. And many more. What can you do?

•    Not photographing the ‘little diver’ stencil by Banksy in Cocker Alley before it had silver paint poured over it. I walked past it so many times, always thinking, ‘yeah, I’ll take a picture some other day’. Strange how something becomes part of the cityscape and then – gone.

•    The Victorian State Government’s new anti-graffiti laws. Perhaps 2009 will bring some greater appreciation of street art in Victoria – but I will not be holding my breath.

•    The Bill Henson debacle. So many people should be ashamed of their roles in this business. And its aftermath continues, with new, incredibly strict, rules governing the production of images of children.

•    All those times I didn’t have my camera with me when I came upon some amazing image on the wall.

This is the last post for 2008. Back in a few weeks.