Ruins and rise of graffiti art
Warren Feeney discovers why graffiti and street art have played such an important role in post-quakes Christchurch.
Recently completing his PhD at the University of Canterbury, researching graffiti and street art in post-quake Christchurch, Reuben Woods maintains that graffiti and street art have played a central role in the city’s recovery and renewal.
He also says he does not envy anyone who is striving to stop graffiti art. ‘‘It is an impossible task, because it is always going to find a way to exist. Graffiti has a history of being unsanctioned that is fundamental to its evolution. We will continue to see it progress through the unofficial nature of its activities on public buildings and public spaces.’’
Woods’ doctorate, Painting Ruins: Graffiti and Street Art in Post-Earthquake Christchurch ,is the most comprehensive research undertaken on public art in Christchurch following the February 2011 quakes. As a postgraduate in the Art History and Theory Department, he brings an objectivity and independence to his subject that remains absent from all published material to date.
He began writing about graffiti art as an art history student in the mid-2000s. At that time, it had become more prominent, partly due to the rise of international hiphop culture, but in New Zealand there were also artists like the Auckland-based Askew, who belonged to a new generation of graffiti art. ’’I was at the university studying art history and wanted to know; why wasn’t any one talking about graffiti art?’’
Woods also travelled through North America and Europe and acknowledges experiencing graffiti art as a genuinely international art movement was also important.
He returned to Christchurch more conscious of the connection of local artists to a history of graffiti. ’’I got in contact with Icarus, Wongi ‘Freak’ Wilson and Jacob Yikes. Wongi and Icarus were the first two that really helped me out, especially in talking with artists in different settings for graffiti art.
‘‘The earthquakes provided a context for it in the city. The Christchurch landscape itself was going to provide inspiration and there was already this global explosion. The interesting question was how would that play out in Christchurch?’’
In Painting Ruins, Woods describes the unique nature of post-quake Christchurch, detailing how graffiti and street art responded out of necessity and instinctively to the city’s environment. ‘‘The historic significance, the emotional impact of the quakes, the widespread and highly visible damage, and the constant change … all rendered this complicated urban space an attractive one for intrepid artists.’’
Woods’ thesis documents artists whose work ‘‘filled and marked these spaces with a multitude of issues’’.
‘‘Their unsanctioned nature revealed the need to engage with the altered environment with a sense of immediacy.’’
He highlights Christchurch residents’ need to make sense of the ‘‘loss of sites of intimate memories – houses and halls, schools and sports clubs, community centres and churches and corner dairies’’.
Unsanctioned public art took up the challenge. For example, Lyttelton street artist Delta placing small crosses created from salvaged material as memorials to lost buildings. ‘‘The crosses were not grandiose markers of place in the manner of ‘official’ memorials, but were ephemeral, guerrilla additions.’’ The cordoning of the central city, prohibiting entry, also fuelled responses.
Woods considers street art in its broadest sense, noting works like Band Aid Bandits’ Best Demo 2012, in Victoria St, and the ‘‘variety of public interventions in Christchurch’s worst affected suburbs and the cordoned-off central city: hand-painted messages and ‘independent public art’.’’
He also discusses how graffiti and street art changed when George Shaw, a collector of works by Banksy arrived. ‘‘Shaw was a huge boost because of the opportunities he presented to local and international artists. The impact of Rise is significant. It cannot be undervalued. One thing it was able to achieve was to bring a lot of people into an engagement with the works of artists they may have not considered previously.’’
Woods maintains that differences in the aesthetics and ideologies of graffiti and street art became more evident. ‘‘While celebrated by many, Rise and From the Ground Up inevitably raised questions about the connection between the presentation of graffiti and street art and the appearance of uninvited ‘vandalism’ around the shattered city.’’
Woods also asks for a wider consideration of graffiti art’s relationship with the culture of the city. Has public art produced by the Christchurch Art Gallery (CAG) or SCAPE encouraged unsanctioned graffiti, as a rebuttal to the inner-city presence of these more ‘‘official’’ arts organisations? Graffiti artist Slepa’s response, ‘‘Keep your s... 4 the gallery’’, to the CAG’s reproduction of Tony Fomison’s No! on an inner-city building, suggests this is likely.
He also draws attention to the city council’s response, which, surprisingly sought to define an art form it had previously never given serious attention to categorising. Woods observes that its anti-graffiti programme, maintains that street art ‘‘involves a relationship between the property owner and the artist … whereas tagging is damage to property, there’s an invasion of property owners’ rights’’. Highlighting the outsider and insular nature of graffiti culture as central to how it defines itself, Woods says that ‘‘now you have the total opposite – the sense of definition coming from authority’’.
‘‘While many artists embrace both the opportunities inherent in working with permission and the traditions of working without permission, other artists remain adamant that their work loses power when sanctioned. The question of how the divergent strands of these art movement might continue to exist is a pertinent one, not just in postquake Christchurch, but in a wider global sense.’’
His comments on the public response to graffiti and street art draw attention to the reality that, like all good art, they reveal as much about their audience as they do about the artist’s aesthetics and ideas.
‘‘When Rise was at the museum, I was standing in the alleyway space of the exhibition. Within five minutes, three children ran into the alleyway and one excitedly said to the others, ‘This is real graffiti’. Then two old ladies came in, and one said, ‘This I do not really get. I don’t really like it’.
‘‘The art world has generations and generations of artists and audiences, and now the definition and experience of art that many have grown up with has been graffiti art.’’