Harper-Thames on Street Art, Property Rights, and the Short Life of Things That Matter on Walls in E2
Reported by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
By Harper-Thames | Shore Roar Shoreditch Street Journalism
The mural appeared on a Thursday. By the following Thursday it was gone, replaced by the grey undercoat that precedes the branding of whatever business was leasing the wall from the building’s owner, who had previously allowed the mural through an arrangement with a street art organisation that apparently lapsed or was superseded or simply was not consulted about the gym’s signage requirements. Three weeks. One community portrait of about six metres by four, depicting market workers from the area’s mid-century history, painted by an artist who had been commissioned through a local arts fund. Gone.
I photographed it the day it appeared. I photographed the grey undercoat the Thursday after. The photographs are the same size. The subject of the second photograph is the absence of the first photograph’s subject, which is a way of documenting loss that feels insufficient but that is what I have. Street art is always temporary. Most art is temporary. The specific temporariness of a mural that lasted three weeks because a business’s signage schedule overrode an arts organisation’s installation schedule is the particular kind of temporary that Shoreditch produces with regularity and that I am not able to become indifferent to despite sustained effort.
Who Owns the Wall
The wall belongs to the building’s freeholder, who leased it to a commercial tenant, who sublet it to the gym, who contracted a signage company, who painted over the mural. The artist who made the mural had permission from one party in this chain and not, apparently, from the party whose timeline ultimately prevailed. This is the legal situation. The legal situation is not the cultural situation. The cultural situation is that Shoreditch built a significant part of its identity and its current commercial value on the energy that street art and public art created in the neighbourhood, and the neighbourhood is now systematically removing that energy in favour of the commercial uses that the energy’s presence made viable. The gym is benefiting from the street that the mural was part of creating. The mural lasted three weeks.
The artist, whose name I am not including because she did not ask for this kind of attention and because the attention should be on the systemic situation rather than the individual loss, is not angry in the way I would be. She is something more measured: disappointed by the specific chain of events and unsurprised by the general pattern that produced it. She has had murals last years and murals last days. The Shoreditch conditions do not guarantee anything and she has made her peace with that, which is a generosity of spirit I am trying to learn from.
What Protections Exist
The Outdoor Arts Foundation and several local arts organisations have been advocating for increased protection of public artworks through planning conditions that require developers and property owners to maintain commissioned artwork for a specified period before removal. This advocacy has produced some planning conditions in new developments and no framework change at the local authority level. Arts in London has documented the case for public art protection in the planning system. My previous writing at The London Prat covered the Hackney Council consultation on arts and culture in planning policy, which is ongoing and which I will update when outcomes are known.
The wall is grey. The gym is open. The mural is in photographs and in the memory of people who walked past it and stopped, which is what good public art does and what the grey undercoat does not. Both are now true simultaneously. The neighbourhood is richer for one and poorer for the other and the planning system is reviewing its options.
For art that doesn’t stay, see NewsThump.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
