Harper-Thames on Street Art, Restoration, and the Specific Problem of Making Raw Things Look Finished
Reported by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
By Harper-Thames | ShoreRoar.com
There is a mural on a building a few minutes from where I live that I have walked past almost every day for four years. When I first encountered it, it had been there for approximately two years already, and in those two years it had acquired the specific weathered quality of outdoor paint under London conditions: slight fading in the sections that receive direct sun, some moisture damage at the bottom edges where winter rain had worked at the paint, a small section in the lower left where someone had tagged over the original work with a marker that itself had begun to fade. The mural depicted something figurative and somewhat surreal in the tradition of East London most interesting street art, executed at a scale and quality level that placed it in the category of genuinely significant public work rather than decorative content. I walked past it every day. It became part of the geography of my daily life in the way that good art in public space does: always there, periodically noticed with fresh attention, carrying a different quality of meaning depending on the light and the season and what kind of day I was having.
The Restoration
Someone cleaned it up last month. I do not know if this was the original artist returning to the work, the building owner commissioning maintenance, a council initiative, or something else entirely. The process involved repainting over the weathered sections, replacing the faded colours with versions of the original palette, removing the tag in the lower left, and restoring the sharp edges that weathering had softened. The mural now looks like it was installed last month. It was not installed last month. It was installed six years ago, and the six years were part of it, and removing the evidence of the six years has produced something that looks like a reproduction of the original rather than the original itself.
This is a specific problem with street art restoration that the art world has been grappling with for as long as street art has been considered worth restoring. The weathering is not damage to be corrected. It is the record of the work’s presence in the world over time. A painting in a museum does not weather in the same way because it is protected from the conditions that produce weathering. A mural on a Shoreditch wall is not protected because that is the point — the unprotected engagement with the environment, the accumulation of time in the paint, the tag that someone added because the wall was there and the marker was in their hand and the impulse was real even if the result is not what the original artist wanted. All of this is the mural existing in its context rather than existing as an object separated from context. The restoration has separated the mural from its context. The mural is now clean and bright and six years younger and slightly less itself.
The Public Art Question
The question of who owns public art — in the sense of who has the authority to make decisions about its maintenance, restoration, or removal — is genuinely complex in the case of street art that was, in many instances, installed without formal permission from the building owner and that has subsequently become valued precisely because of its unsanctioned character. The building owner has legal authority over the wall. The original artist has a moral claim on the work, subject to the UK’s limited artist resale and moral rights provisions. The public has an interest in the work’s continued existence, expressed through the social media attention and the tourist photography and the neighbourhood identity that attaches to significant pieces. None of these interests necessarily align, and the restoration decision may have been made by whoever had the most immediate authority without the fuller consultation that the complexity of the interests warrants.
There is a Banksy piece that appeared in Waterloo Place in London last month — a statue of a man holding a flag over his face, which has been interpreted with the enthusiasm that all Banksy works receive — that has presumably been preserved in its original condition under the specific protection that being a Banksy affords, which is a protection not available to the vast majority of street art that does not carry the brand value of the world’s most famous anonymous artist. According to Street Art News, the preservation and restoration of significant street art works is an increasingly active area of practice, with cities including London developing approaches to the management of street art heritage that try to balance preservation with the raw context that made the works significant. The mural near my flat is freshly restored. It will weather again. In two years it will look like it always looked. I will walk past it every day. This is how art in public space works: it is never quite finished.
Harper-Thames writes about Shoreditch art and culture. Her homepage is at The London Prat.
For more East London art and culture, visit The Daily Mash.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
