Cyndi Himmelstiere on sanctioned murals, Instagram walls, Banksy attribution myths, and whether street art that is officially welcomed is still street art in any meaningful sense
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
There are companies that offer Shoreditch street art tours. Multiple companies. Competing tours. This is not a criticism of the companies or the people who take the tours; it is an observation about what it means when a form of expression that began as unauthorised intervention in public space — a thing done without permission precisely because the permission is the point — becomes a tourist product sold to people who want to see what the unauthorised intervention produced before it is painted over or removed or, in the current Shoreditch scenario, given a blue heritage plaque and incorporated into the neighbourhood’s brand.
The street art that draws people to Shoreditch is substantially not the street art that is happening in Shoreditch. It is the street art that happened in Shoreditch over the past twenty years and that has been preserved, documented, and in some cases deliberately maintained because it is a commercial asset of the neighbourhood’s identity. The active street art — the new work being put up without permission, the paste-ups that appear overnight and are painted over within weeks, the tags and stencils and interventions that are the continuing practice of a form of art whose defining characteristic is impermanence and unsanctionedness — is not what the tours show, because it is not accessible on a scheduled Wednesday afternoon walk.
What the Tours Do Show
The tours show: the Cargo wall on Rivington Street, where a rotating selection of murals has been commissioned since approximately 2008 and where the work is genuinely excellent and the artists genuinely talented and the whole thing entirely official, permitted, and paid for. The Famous When Dead building on Chance Street, which has hosted large-scale murals by internationally known street artists and which has been reproduced in enough travel photography to have become an address as much as a building. The various Banksy-attributed works, some of which are genuinely Banksy and most of which are not, all of which are surrounded by tourists with phones on any given weekend, and some of which are protected by plexiglass because the demand to see them and photograph them has made their preservation a commercial interest.
The Banksy question in Shoreditch is its own comedy. Because Banksy does not authenticate individual works publicly, and because the commercial value of a work attributed to Banksy is substantial, the number of works in Shoreditch that are described by street art tour guides as “believed to be Banksy” or “thought by many to be Banksy” or “in the style of Banksy, possibly” has grown far beyond what Banksy’s documented visits to the area could plausibly have produced. This has produced a neighbourhood that is simultaneously a genuine site of significant Banksy work and a site of enthusiastic Banksy tourism applied to things that are not Banksy, creating an information environment in which no individual tourist has a reliable mechanism to distinguish the two.
The Actual Current Scene
The actual current street art scene in the E1 and E2 postcodes — the work being done by artists who are working now, without permission, on walls that have not been commissioned — is on the edges of the tourist circuit: the railway bridges around Haggerston and London Fields, the industrial units around Bethnal Green Road where the audience is the workers and residents rather than the visitors, the back streets where the work goes up and comes down without being documented in a coffee table book about East London art. This work is harder to find and more interesting, partly because its conditions of production are closer to the conditions that made the original Shoreditch street art scene significant. The tour does not go there. The tour goes where the product is, which is where the art has already become a product. Both are worth seeing. Only one of them requires booking in advance.
The street art that is currently being produced in Shoreditch and its immediate surrounds — the live painting events at gallery openings, the commissioned murals that appear on schedule and are documented before the paint is dry — occupies a curious position in the tradition it draws from. The artists involved are, in most cases, genuinely talented. The work is, in many cases, genuinely good. The conditions of production — commissioned, permitted, documented, insured, sometimes streamed live — are the opposite of the conditions that defined the tradition from which the work draws its aesthetic and its cultural authority. This is not unique to street art. It is the standard condition of any countercultural aesthetic that has been successfully absorbed into the mainstream cultural economy: the form is maintained while the conditions that gave the form its meaning are transformed. The question that follows — whether art produced in these conditions is street art in any meaningful sense, or whether it is gallery art that happens to be outdoors — does not have a clean answer. The tradition has been absorbed and it continues to produce interesting work. Both things are true. The people who maintain that only the unsanctioned work is real street art are not wrong. The people who maintain that the quality of the work is independent of the conditions of its production are also not wrong. Shoreditch’s street art exists at the intersection of both positions, which is an uncomfortable place to stand and an interesting one to look at.
Cyndi Himmelstiere writes from Shoreditch for The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Her homepage is at prat.uk/author/himmelstiere.
Also authenticated at NewsThump | The Daily Mash | The Poke
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/shoreditch-street-art-tour-who-is-it-actually-for-cyndi-himmelstiere/
