Loosely Assembled

A Missing Wall
During the Spring of 2010, the prolific and highly collected street artist Banksy apparently painted a mural on a wall in Detroit’s crumbling Packard automobile plant. Then, soon after, it was gone. It was not buffed, not painted over, not washed away. The entire wall it was painted on had been carefully removed. It turns out that a local art gallery was to blame, or thank (depending on your take on the rest of this story), for the disappearance. The 555 gallery thought it’d be a shame if this piece vanished, so they decided they’d move it to a safer, although private, location, where they could preserve and protect it from vandalism, or worse, from the savage thump of a wrecking ball.

Whose Rubble?
Many people cried foul, describing this act as theft (some claiming the intentionally public artwork has been stolen from the public domain, other that the physical wall, although nearly rubble itself, is still private property, deserving of respect). But as Jeremy Korzeniewski points out on autoblog.com, “As much as the city of Detroit would like to do something about the the 3,500,000-square-foot [abandoned] facility, nobody seems quite sure who owns the dilapidated building.” The massive chunk of real estate seems to be in some pretty complicated ownership limbo, providing a convenient narrative mirror for the dilemma brought to the surface during this ordeal over the ownership rights of street art.

The Property Problem
Part of what makes this topic difficult and interesting to articulate is the fact that much street art is done, in part, as protest against the perceived tyranny of private property. In some cases being thought of as a form of civil disobedience, breaking the rules to change the rules, introducing the world to a vision of what could exist. In the case of street art, the vision is a world decorated and annotated with the hopes and dreams, criticisms, humor, celebrations, mysteries, and challenges of the people who walk, work, and live in those streets. A world where creativity and expression are celebrated. A world that acts as a mirror into the collective hearts and minds of the society itself. Art that acts to negate the aesthetic rights of property owners in favor of the aesthetic rights of those most exposed.

Therefore, where private property is respected and protected, street art can only be seen as having a negative value, as being a criminal activity, and as being inherently corrosive to the social fabric of our cities. But, from a perspective where private property is seen as part of an infrastructure of exploitation and control, a grass roots reinvention of one’s own surroundings is seen as an empowering expression of hope.

Many graffiti kids are not necessarily steeped in the revolutionary political interpretations of their intuitive acts of rebellious art. In fact their personal tendencies might very well lean heavily in the opposite direction once the carrot of financial reward begins to grow in the fertile soil of urban mythology. How much does it cost to convert an act of protest into an act of support? How much does it cost to transform a critic of private property into a zealous defender of it? How much can your art crime be worth?

The complexity of such questions creates a rich platform of diverse opinions upon which to build powerfully controversial social experiments. It is therefore not uncommon for some to consider the [array of situations around the] Banksy brand, and others, as a kind of media theater delivering high potency doses of conceptual and civic irony to an unsuspecting audience throughout the socio-economic tapestry of our cities.

Susan Farrell of Art Crimes states it clearly when she says, “I have no idea how Banksy feels about this wall and its fate, but it’s important to consider that Banksy might actually be a performance artist doing street-media theater and not a stencil artist doing walls.”

Recursive Violations as Creative Context
While the actions of the 555 gallery is being defended as benevolent, some art thefts are simply done as selfish acts and the irony is unintended, as in this NYPOST article about actor Adam Shulman stealing a piece in broad daylight.
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This one is a detailed account of someone trying (but failing) to steal a different Banksy wall. Apparently they got this far, then had to leave, but when they returned to finish the heist, someone else had scored the booty. The blog post is a plea for the second thieves to compensate the first thieves who did most of the hard physical labor.

But other times the irony is front and center, as with Property Games T-Shirts that feature collages made from photographs that claim copyright of images of other people’s graffiti on other people’s property. A theft of a theft of an art crime.

Then we have a community blog for people to post stories and examples of artwork being stolen, copied, misappropriated, etc. It’s wonderfully called You thought we wouldn’t notice. They have a section dedicated to intellectual property theft of graffiti.

Authenticity
After the city of Melbourne apologized for painting over yet another Banksy stencil, a slew of “copies” started cropping up but were discredited as fakes. How was the authenticity of the original one established? Authenticity also has to be considered when you realize people are selling some of this original (stolen, found, gifted) artwork for non-trivial sums of money (at the time of this posting, the Jamaican Banksy wall was back on the market for $50,000).

At least this rat is blunt enough to give us the cold hard truth on the question of authenticity!


(img by cidsoe)

Ephemeral Isn’t Synonymous with Unwanted
Another element of the active critique on banal architecture that graffiti manifests is one of stasis vs ephemerality. The built environment is created by artists who move from one project to the next, availing themselves of new challenges while not quite realizing the long term periods of inflexibility their buildings impose on those who are not fortunate enough to partake in a continually changing landscape of possibilities. There may be something deeply seeded in humanity that expects, craves, even needs, a certain level of change within our physical environment from time to time.

Graffiti artists quickly adjust to the fact that their work is not permanent, that it may be buffed or covered with another piece at any time. Some might presume that acceptance of the ephemeral nature of their work should automatically be interpreted as a general lack of interest in its fate. This presumption underestimates the subtle intuitive intelligence that any true artist has for the arcane contextual nuances within their particular practice. Basically, these guys are making this work every day, of course they think about the temporary nature of their art, and of course those realizations and thoughts seeps into the work itself on some level. If they are building examples of a new kind of world, it’s one that fluctuates and glistens from moment to moment with the changing interests and thoughts of the collective social entity that inhabits it. Moving this kind of work as an intended act of benevolence results in a preserved specimen captured from the wild and provides little more that a shallow spectacle, reinforcing the encroaching dominion of a culture which seeks to understand others through the analysis of decontextualized relics.

This work is more that just the visual image. We value the visual portion of the work because we live in a culture that has commoditized visual iconography, but we fail to value the context and site-specificity because we are not yet able to commoditize location and context. If the 555 gallery had some way to remove and preserve the entire area in which the discussed mural was originally situated, I’m sure they would have. As we stand today, context is simply something we are willing to forfeit. But context is so much more that just the physical surroundings of a piece of street art, it also includes the contemporary prevailing social and economic climate, the legal and political landscape, the fickle vernacular interpretation of short and long term historical destiny, the time line of ancestral artwork on that particular wall, the life and circumstances of the artist at the time of, and since the creation of the artwork, as well as so many other interconnected layers of information. There aren’t current methods available for preserving or even recognizing all the pertinent contextual forces that come into play for the formation of this type of artwork which uses context as a core part of its concept.

Attention Economy
While some interpretations may attribute ideological ardor as the primary drive to produce ephemeral street art, others point to the more fundamental human desire for attention and appreciation. Putting artwork on the streets, with all it’s dangers and pitfalls, may simply provide the quickest and most efficient route to artistic recognition. After all, the streets thrive without curators, committees, or resumes. The streets offer direct access to a huge variety of eyeballs.

All this talk about assumed motivation is here simply to demonstrate how a variety of responses could emerge to the guerrilla collection of guerrilla art, and how the experience of having your own artwork stolen could be a gigantic ego boost in the quest for validation and relevance. If your art is already on display for free, and people still feel the need to snatch it up, to hoard it, there is surely some trickle of pride coming along as well.

Evolving Values
Vandalog takes a rational and balanced view of these topics, bringing into perspective a very important idea: in the future, people will think of these issues very differently.

Will new economic forms evolve around these questions?

Edge cases sometimes become normative.

[update]
It occurred to me a day after posting this that I may not have clearly articulated something critical about all of this debate. So many of the arguments around street art, rights, property, preservation, context see to take it for granted that there is actually such a thing as a “right answer” or a “right position”. While listening to a fascinating lecture by historian Frank Gavin I was struck by the pragmatic way in which so many very difficult decisions need to be made. The notion of what’s “the right choice” is incredibly flexible depending on the myriad of pressures and obstacles that relate to the outcome and impacts of the decisions. One choice impacts many other choices. The road to a functioning and satisfying future doesn’t depend so much on what’s best for the current players in the direct present, but on the complex web of interactions that those choices are apart of, now and in the future.

Maybe it’s not about “what’s right” but about “what’s best”.

One city’s plague is another city’s blessing.

You might have heard the news that the Melbourne city council issued a pubic apology for accidentally painting over a piece of graff by the world famous artist banksy. This blew my mind, in a good, but confusing, way. Of course I find it encouraging that a city council can recognize the cultural and creative heritage of street art, but it brings up so many questions.

Before the questions, I want to start with a few facts I dug up about the situation in Melbourne.

Melbourne seems to have a strong history of street art going back to the 1970s, but has just recently started officially sanctioning specific pieces, walls, alleys, and tunnels throughout the city. The city has issued 26 permits so far, 16 of them being retroactive, meaning they were already bombed out spots that were later recognized and officially approved. Just look at this official city government url: http://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/ForResidents/StreetCleaningandGraffiti/GraffitiStreetArt/Pages/Registeredstreetartapplications.aspx.

The official website for Melbourne tourism promotes walking tours of these areas dripping with graff. The tours ironically conclude with an hour of “fabulous wine and cheese”.

One quote from the recent news reports caught my eye.
“We will now be acting to implement retrospective legal street art permits to ensure other famous or significant street artworks within the city are protected.” said Melbourne city council chief Kathy Alexander.

Protected from …. the city? What about protected from modification or destruction by other artists? or when property changes ownership? or when a property owner decides he’d like to sell the wall itself to an art collector, at auction, or on ebay? What about later modification by the same artist? If it’s protected, who owns it? What happens when that famous artist paints outside a sanctioned zone (this is apparently what happened with the parachuting rat)?

Apparently, recreations of the buffed banksy work are now popping up, and while they are not generally attributed to him, could this live in a grey area of legal clearance?

Being curious about the actual letter of the law regarding street art in Melbourne, I wrote to the city council as follows:

Lots of news around the banksy paint over, i’m wondering if i could ask some historical questions around street art in Melbourne?

I found the list of street art applications, many being retroactive. Is there much prosecution in Melbourne for graffiti?

Do painters still create this work in secret?

Is there any official distinction between ‘tagging’ and ‘art’?

If prosecution does still happen, how would the new banksy copies be handled, specifically as stencils are almost digital in the way they can be reproduced. Is there anything happening in terms of graffiti piracy?

Are copyrights recognized for street art in Australia?

I read in one report that your city council is considering issuance of graffiti licenses for famous artists, how will the identity of there artists be established, especially international ones who need to remain anonymous?

In the case of the ‘banksy woz ere’ instance, does that council consider that an act of vandalism? Would those perpetrators be liable for a higher property destruction fine? what if they claim to be banksy himself? what if they were a licensed street artist?

i know this is a lot of questions, if you have time to answer just a few, it would still be much appreciated.

cheers,

If I hear back, I’ll be sure to update this post.

Here are some images of Hosier Lane where the accidental buff took place.

The conversation about permission or sanctioned street art isn’t limited to Melbourne, here is a conversation on fatlace.com asking artists what legality might mean for the art form itself, historically based in a confrontational stance against prevailing laws.

Here is another relevant quote from an essay by Caleb Neelon (aka Sonik):

… the notions of “legality” and “permission” are pretty fuzzy. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve personally been arrested for painting a legal wall, and have been painting a wall illegally only to have the property owner walk up, tell me how nice I was for painting his wall, and buy me lunch. There are plenty of abandoned and public property spaces that are painted regularly by graffiti writers where the property owner could never be found in order to ask permission. In any case, the process of obtaining permission to paint, for free, what is by any objective account an act of community service deserving of respect and gratitude, is often completely degrading to an artist and guarantees bland art in the spirit of compromise. It is to the artistπs credit that they get fed up and create multiple works without permission in the time that it would take for the paperwork to clear (or not) for one.

Not all permission walls are safe. Sometimes cops buff them, sometimes bizarro anti graff vigilantes buff them, but then get arrested themselves because buffing graffiti without permission just makes you a really boring street artist yourself!

Welcome to another installment of the Outsider Linguistics series, where I propose new and unfounded causation models for societal paradigms via casually perceived linguistic quirks. This installment looks at relationships and word appendages between friends and enemies, and attempts to propose a model that connects the way we speak to the way we see the world.

Plausibly originating in the arts, the word frienemy attempts to perform a balancing act between the boolean concepts of friend and enemy, most commonly indicating that the term ‘enemy’ is the root concept, thinly veiled by the suffixation of the nearly complete “frien”. A frienemy is someone who appears to be, or starts out being, your friend, but reveals himself to be your enemy, although possibly without disrupting the friendship. Regardless of the etymology, our common English understanding of friend and enemy posits them as polar opposites, concepts that have no relationship to each other besides their opposition. Friends and enemies don’t come from the same places, don’t share a common root, don’t have the ability to change sides, cannot transform or migrate. They are purely distinct and repel each other. This is where the power of the term frienemy comes from, it’s the dangerous and tenuous balance between these naturally opposed forces.

Many years ago, I found it amusing and quaint that in Spanish, the words for friend and enemy were closely related, amigo and enemigo. Amusing because the linguistic pattern matching part of my brian is ticklish, and quaint because it was clear to me at the time that a less distinct cut between the expression of these concepts represented less experience in, or a lack of honest evaluation of, the harsh realities of the world (i was in high school ok?). If spanish speakers see their enemies as simply ‘un-friends’ does this mean there could be potential migration back and forth between these two states? Are these relationship states simply different sides of the same coin, endpoints on a slider, or are they more akin to oil and water, fundamentally different? Could these specific questions be related to the nature of all conceptual opposites?

Several years later, as part of an art based propaganda war between rival meme gangs (CitAC and N.I.N.E.), one widely distributed sticker dared it’s readers to “stop pretending you have no enemies”. It could have also read, “stop pretending opposites don’t exist.”

Frienemy is still a rarely printed word, but it recently showed up in a headline of an article about the future relationship between the governments and economies of China and the United States. I wanted to know if more languages follow the English model or the Spanish model, and if anything could be learned from this about our cultural connections to the ideas of opposition.

A very quick survey of some languages available through google’s translation tool (limited to roman based characters) reveals the following pairings.

friend as the root:
ami ou ennemi (french)
amigo o enemigo (spanish)
mik apo armik (albanian)
amic o enemic (catalan)
prijatelj ili neprijatelj (croatian)
přítel nebo nepřítel (czech)
priateľ alebo nepriateľ (slovak)
vinur eða óvinur (icelandic)
amico o nemico (italian)

enemy as the root:

related but not using modification through appendage:
vriend of vyand (afrikaans)
vriend of vijand (dutch)
Freund oder Feind (german)
zanmi oswa lènmi (haitian creole)

seemingly not related:
cara nó namhaid (irish)
teman atau musuh (malay)
rafiki au adui (swahili)
arkadaş ya da düşman (turkish)
ffrind neu gelyn (welsh)
ħabib jew ghadu (maltese)
friend or enemy (english)

Has a mashed up term like frienemy also evolved in Irish, Malay, Swahili, Turkish, Welsh and Maltese? Is the concept of a backstabbing friend, or a wolf in sheep’s clothing, as culturally powerful in these places as it is in our own?

The larger group, that does use friend as the common root, would presumably have a tough time inventing words that sit between their already intimate terms. Is there no need for further disambiguation between ami and ennemi? Are these cultures more tolerant of differences in general? less prone to violence? more cooperative? How do their political structures relate to their languages? Do these languages have more examples of appending suffixes to denote opposites? Is there a difference in how a language sorts verbal polarity internally? Does it matter if we are talking about polarity in nature or culture? between objects or people?

English makes at least one notable use of the suffixed polarity model with male and female. If we had completely unrelated representations of these concepts, would we understand each other more or less fluently? Would we feel more or less antagonism? Would we have more of less equality in the work place?

Can the structural relationships of our words predispose our cultural emotions and priorities?

‘Tis hard to say which is a more compelling, or more primary, interpretation of the notion of “Robots Mimicking Humans Mimicking Robots”, the reversible Palingram or the infinitely extended Möbius loop.

They both tell a different story about our fascination with, and relationship to, simulated humanity, machine intelligence, creator and creation. As a proposed next step, I’d personally like to see another robot manning the remote controls of this robot, perhaps creating some kind of command based feedback loop, susceptible to minute changes, enabling a kind of machine evolution of culture.

Enjoy