Graffiti – or street art – is a divisive issue that tends to divide people into two camps: those who are convinced it is criminal and others who see it as a way of beautifying cities. Bloggers Denise Lee and Courtney Chaisson have approached the subject in two different ways. While both discuss graffiti in terms of its artistic qualities as opposed to its vandalistic bent, Lee looks at the appropriation of street art into official public art, and Chaisson explores the ever-changing nature of artist Blu’s work and its interplay with multimedia. Both writers set out to tackle the larger implications of graffiti within a city, how it speaks to residents, and its impact on the art world.
Denise Lee focuses on Ken Lum’s glowing white “Monument”, a fine artist’s take on the East Van cross that has been a symbol of the working class of East Vancouver for decades. Originally painted on surfaces from walls to skate parks to jackets, the reappearance of the cross in such a blunt context “tapped into deeper East Van imaginings, the collective memories of the experience of a working class East-ender in a city that often favoured the West” (Lee 2011). Creating official art out of something that was formerly street art, and at that, very political, is appropriate in this instance because “street art usually attempts to share attitudes rather than to alter communal perceptions radically” (Romotsky and Romotsky 1976:654). The cross creates a stronger sense of community as well as a staunch pride for belonging to that community. Somewhat ironically, the piece was commissioned by the Olympic and Paralympic Public Art Program despite both the organization’s inclination to be relatively West End-centric and also the cross’s origins in “places too illegitimate for a future public art installment” (Lee 2011). When conceived of as a sort of political resistance, one article states that graffiti “makes sense only if it remains illegal” (Brighenti 2010:321), which contrasts the idea that “Monument” makes a statement of defiance to the West End.
Contrary to the static landmark that is “Monument”, Courtney Chaisson discusses the tendency of many modern street artists not to be confined by their canvasses of walls, but to engage with their environments in a new way. The video Chaisson uses to illustrate the nature of his work, “MUTO”, is essentially a stop-motion animation depicting all sorts of creatures from street artist Blu’s imagination taking over the city. Blu’s piece is an extreme example, but it never stays the same for long. In many people’s eyes, graffiti is temporary only in that it is sometimes painted over only a few hours after its creation, but it “can be ephemeral, spanning only a few minutes. It can also exist momentarily in one form, then in altered states continue for considerable time” (Romotsky and Romotsky 1976:653). Works such as Blu’s that transcend conventional boundaries of street art reflect that graffiti “interacts and often overlaps and interweaves with the fields of other practices” (Brighenti 2010:316) such as design, law, politics, and market. Says Chaisson, “the trend towards fluid art has a positive impact on our society” (2011) due to the message’s ability to reach further than possible before.
The two blogs connect in that both engage with the physicality of graffiti. In the case of Ken Lum’s installation piece, a traditional graffiti piece has become 3D, a space of its own, and acts a statement of East Vancouverites’ fierce pride. Italian artist Blu, however, uses space temporarily to bring to life the intricacies of his imagination. Both these examples of the evolution of street art reflect the idea that it forms a “radical interrogation of public territories, a questioning of the social relationships that define the public domain” (Brighenti 2010:330). Territory and space are redefined in the works of both Blu and Lum. “Monument” establishes the boundaries of East Vancouver as official – the cross represents a history of street art and working class solidarity, and in its current incarnation cannot be simply painted over. “MUTO”, on the other hand, represents a revolution in static street art and a move from works meant to mark territory to ones meant to expand the canvas of the street and to inspire, whether “produced legally or illegally, intricately planned or spontaneously created, functional or purely decorative, amateur public art is the effort to make the world at large reflect something of the individual” (Romotsky and Romotsky 1976:653).
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