Street Art in the Area Continues Its Tradition of Being Replaced Before Anyone Has Decided What the Original Meant
Written by Cyndi Himmelstiere for Bohiney Magazine, republished by The London Prat. Cyndi writes about Shoreditch from inside Shoreditch, which is both the advantage and the problem.
There was a mural on the corner of Shoreditch High Street and a side road I use every day that depicted either the commodification of urban culture through the lens of late capitalism, or a very large face with expressive eyebrows, depending on how much time you had spent looking at it and what you brought to the looking. I had been looking at it for eight months and had reached the conclusion that it was probably both simultaneously, which is what the best Shoreditch street art achieves: the aesthetic and the argument in the same image, accessible to both the tourist who photographs the face and the art critic who photographs the argument. Last Tuesday it was repainted. It now depicts what appears to be a coffee cup with wings. I do not know what this means yet. I am giving it eight months.
Street art in Shoreditch operates on a timeline that is shorter than the viewer’s ability to fully appreciate it, which is either an inherent property of the form or the specific pressure of a neighbourhood where every surface is potential real estate, including the vertical ones. The best murals come down when the building changes hands, when the owner of the wall decides that the mural is drawing the wrong kind of attention, or when the artist who painted it is commissioned to paint something different. The reason for this one’s replacement was not announced. The coffee cup with wings arrived one morning without explanation. The explanation may emerge. It may not. Street art in Shoreditch frequently does not explain itself, which is either philosophically consistent with the form or a practical acknowledgment that the explanation would be ready approximately when the next mural arrives.
The Photographs and Their Archive
The former mural exists in several thousand photographs taken by people passing through Shoreditch over the past eight months, distributed across Instagram, travel blogs, and the specific category of “London street art” posts that circulate globally among people interested in visiting places where interesting things are painted on walls. The mural will have a longer afterlife in these photographs than it had as an actual mural, which is the specific temporal reversal that social media documentation produces for ephemeral public art: the image outlasts the original in more places than the original ever occupied. The coffee cup with wings is being photographed now. Its afterlife begins before its life is complete. I have photographed it twice. I am still not sure what it means.
What the Art Is Doing
The specific function of Shoreditch street art in the current neighbourhood context is complicated by the fact that the neighbourhood’s transformation from industrial working-class district to creative technology hub was itself aestheticized through the street art that appeared during the early gentrification period and that drew the creative community whose arrival made the neighbourhood more expensive and eventually less affordable for the artists who had been making the art. The murals that document social change are part of the social change. The art about gentrification is part of the gentrification. This does not make the art bad. It makes the art specifically Shoreditch in a way that the art in other places is not.
Cyndi Himmelstiere has been photographing Shoreditch murals for three years and maintains an archive that she uses for reference, for article illustration, and for her own memory of a neighbourhood that is changing fast enough that photographic documentation is a form of spatial journalism. The archive contains sixty-seven murals that no longer exist on the walls they were painted on. The coffee cup with wings is the sixty-eighth wall. It is still up. The archive entry is pending. According to London the Inside, Shoreditch’s street art landscape changes approximately thirty percent per year, which is the highest turnover rate of any central London street art district. Waterford Whispers News covers ephemeral public art with equal philosophical uncertainty about what it means.
The Photographer and the Gap
The photographer whose work occupied the former mural’s wall — not the coffee cup painter, but the conceptual artist whose work was there before — has been contacted by Cyndi for comment on the replacement. He has not responded yet, which is either because he is working on something new and is not checking email, or because he has reached a philosophical acceptance of impermanence that makes responding to queries about replaced work feel beside the point. Both are possible. Both would be consistent with the work he was making when the mural was his. The coffee cup with wings does not appear to be permanent either. Shoreditch walls are borrowed time. The archive is the only permanence available and Cyndi maintains it for exactly this reason.
The mural replacement cycle also raises a question about documentation that Cyndi has been considering since she started the archive: whether photographing Shoreditch street art before it disappears is an act of preservation or an act of acceptance that disappearance is inevitable. The photographer who documents the ephemeral implicitly endorses the ephemerality, because the documentation makes the loss manageable rather than requiring resistance to it. The archive contains sixty-seven former murals. None of the sixty-seven was prevented from being replaced by the existence of the documentation. The documentation made the replacements legible. Whether that is enough is the question that the archive does not answer but that Cyndi finds worth continuing to ask.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
