Susan Hansen

‘This is not a Banksy!’: street art as aesthetic protest

This paper examines the dialogue and transformation of public space that occurred after Banksys Slave Labour was removed without notice from a wall in North London, transported to Miami and listed for auction. Despite the high-profile media coverage of the ‘theft’ of Banksys piece, the explosion of new works provoked by its extraction was for the most part simply erased as it appeared. We argue that the excision of Slave Labour provided a ‘gap in the sensible’ and the conditions of possibility for the emergence of a lively local intertextual visual dialogue, which transformed this otherwise apparently unremarkable London side street into an arena for aesthetic protest and critical social commentary.

Video installation as a creative means of representing temporality in visual data

ABSTRACT This paper describes the use of video installation as a creative means of engaging audiences in visual research. A detailed image-based overview of the project, 1247 Days on Whymark Avenue, is also presented. This interactive video installation offered viewers a level of phenomenological immersion in the compressed temporality and asynchronous dialogue captured by this visual research project. This film is part of a larger research project on the longitudinal photo-documentation of urban life (Hansen & Flynn 2015a). The project uses repeat photography to study street art and graffiti as visual dialogue.

Banksy’s subversive gift: A socio-moral test case for the safeguarding of street art

This paper discusses the fate of Banksy’s (2014) Mobile Lovers which was painted overnight on the door of the Broad Plains Youth Club in Bristol. The subsequent removal of Mobile Lovers from the youth club for safeguarding in the Bristol Museum afforded the work a seemingly neutral zone of protection. However, the museum was also represented as an agent of the city, and as a democratic space, where visitors, as ‘the people’, were encouraged to record their own preferences for the future of the work. Rancière’s conceptualization of democracy as a disruptive process, rather than an established consensual state of affairs, is employed to challenge an understanding of the museum’s strategies as self-evidently democratic. Despite the high profile dispute between the youth club and the City of Bristol over who should be considered the proper beneficiary of Banksy’s work, it was agreed that it should be considered a ‘gift’ to the community and should thus be protected. The case of Mobile Lovers sets a socio-moral precedent for the safeguarding of street art, as it represents a novel recognition of the wishes of the community and the intentions of the artist in determining the fate of street art, and a rare acknowledgement of the moral rights of street artists to determine the first distribution of their work, over the rights of property owners, who are otherwise able to claim the tangible artworks on their walls as individual, rather than community, property. Ultimately, the perception of street art in socio-moral terms as a ‘gift’ enabled an orientation to, and subversion of, the legal strictures currently prohibiting the recognition of the moral rights of street artists.This paper discusses a socio-moral precedent for the safeguarding of street art. This incident represents a novel recognition of the wishes of the community and the intentions of the artist in determining the fate of local street art, and a rare acknowledgement of the rights of street artists to determine the first distribution of their work, over the rights of property owners, who are otherwise able to claim the tangible artworks on their walls as individual, rather than community, property. The case discussed is that of Banksy’s (2014) Mobile Lovers which, by its site-specific placement, thwarted the possibility of acquisitive removal for private auction. Despite the high profile dispute over who should be considered the proper beneficiary of the work, it was agreed that it should be considered a ‘gift’ to the community and should thus be protected. The removal of the work for safeguarding in the Bristol Museum afforded a seemingly neutral zone of protection for Mobile Lovers during this period of conflict. However, the museum was also represented as an agent of the city, and as a democratic space, where visitors, as “the people”, were encouraged to record their own preferences for the future of the work. Ranciere’s conceptualization of democracy as a disruptive process, rather than an established consensual state of affairs, is employed to challenge an understanding of the museum’s strategies as self-evidently democratic.

Is It Any Wonder? On Commissioning an ‘Uncommissioned’ Atmosphere: A Reply to Hillary and Sumartojo

This article is a reply to Fiona Hillary and Shanti Sumartojo’s “Empty-Nursery Blue: On Atmosphere, Meaning and Methodology in Melbourne Street Art”, published in Public Art Dialogue in October 2014.1 Hillary and Sumartojo present a welcome addition to the literature on street art and graffiti in their sustained analytic focus on a particular work of street art and its place-based reception. However, their analysis of Adrian Doyle’s Empty Nursery Blue is compromised by their largely unacknowledged investment and involvement as commissioners and curators of the work. Further, Hillary and Sumartojo’s adoption of the concept of affective atmosphere and a positive sense of enchantment operates to discount viewers’ contradictory social-emotional responses to the work. While the authors’ attempt to incorporate authoethnographic methods appears promising, in practice this bears little in common with the critically reflexive practice of autoethnography, and is rather used as a circular rhetorical device to demonstrate the presence of the very notion of enchantment so central to the authors’ interpretation of Empty Nursery Blue. The liminal status of Empty Nursery Blue as apparently uncommissioned street art and as commissioned public art presents an unacknowledged tension at the core of this partial interpretation that may yet be ultimately productive of the very notion of wonder and enchantment. A critical expansion of the notion of enchantment to encompass a variety of affective responses and forms of material and ethical engagement is suggested.

Graffiti as a limit case for the concept of style: a genealogy of aesthetic impropriety

Summary This paper examines graffiti as an object that has historically confounded stylistic or formal analysis proper, although elements of this deviant form of mark making have been appropriated as expressive resources within the recognizable styles of modern and contemporary art. Critiques of the concept of style are now well established and this formerly dominant method of approaching the analysis of art historical objects has largely fallen out of favour in current scholarship. Beyond rehearsing these familiar critical points, it will be argued that a consideration of the limitations of this foundational disciplinary concept may be a paradoxically productive exercise if an approach is taken that examines the boundaries, or limits, to the kinds of objects and images to which the concept of style has been applied. It will be argued that a number of historically liminal categories of person – children, primitives, the mentally ill and criminals – inform the genealogy of perception of the contemporary liminal “styles” of graffiti, post-graffiti and street art; and that these limit cases, rather than being marginalized exclusions not worthy of analytic attention, are generative of the very coherence of the notion of style. Following Rancière [Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, London, 2013], it is argued that contemporary applications of the concept of style may lie in attending to the contingency and primacy of the processes of perception itself, an essential component of seminal approaches to style (e.g., Wölfflin, Principles of Art History. The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, Translated from 7th German Edition into English by M.D. Hottinger, New York 1932 and reprints, 1929[1915]) in determining our practices of looking.

“Pleasure stolen from the poor”: community discourse on the ‘theft’ of a Banksy

The removal of street art from community walls for private auction is a morally problematic yet legal action. This paper examines community reactions to the removal of Banksy’s No Ball Games for private auction. Five hundred unique reader comments on online newspaper articles reporting this controversial event were collected and analyzed. An emerging set of urban moral codes was used to position street art as a valuable community asset rather than as an index of crime and social decay. The latter discourse informed a repertoire that depicted No Ball Games as unlawful graffiti that was rightfully removed. Here, the operations of ‘the police’ (Rancière, 1998: 17) in the distribution of the sensible are evident in the assertions that validate and depoliticize the removal of No Ball Games. This repertoire was used to attribute responsibility for the work’s removal to deterministic external forces, while reducing the accountability attributable to those responsible for the removal of the work. A contrasting anti-removal repertoire depicted street art as a gift to the community, and its removal as a form of theft and a source of harm to the community. The pro-removal repertoire incorporates and depoliticizes elements of the anti-removal repertoire, by acknowledging the moral wrong of the removal, but yielding to the legal rights of the wall owners to sell the work; and by recognizing the status of street art as valuable, but asserting that the proper place for art is a museum. The anti-removal repertoire counters elements of the pro-removal repertoire, by acknowledging the illegality of street art, but containing this to the initial act of making unsanctioned marks on a wall, after which point the work becomes the property of the community it is located within. This analysis reveals an emergent set of urban moral codes that positions a currently legal action as a form of criminal activity.