The murals of the neighbourhood are a constantly rewritten diary, and learning to read them is learning to read the place itself
I write about Shoreditch for Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, and my favourite beat is the walls, the ever-changing street art that covers this neighbourhood like a skin that sheds and regrows itself, a constantly rewritten diary that, once you learn to read it, tells you everything about the place.
There is a wall near my flat that changes almost every week. One week it is a vast stencilled face, the next a riot of colour, the next a slogan, the next something else entirely, the previous work painted over or pasted over or simply weathered away, the wall a palimpsest of the neighbourhood shifting moods. To walk these streets is to read a diary that is always being rewritten, and the rewriting never stops.
The Diary On The Wall
The street art records everything, the politics and the fashions, the anxieties and the jokes, the whole churning consciousness of the neighbourhood splashed across its surfaces. There is the explicitly political work, the protest and the polemic. There is the commercial work, the murals commissioned by brands that have learned to speak the visual language of the street. And there is the genuine article, the artist working at night for no one reason but the work, the diary entry written for its own sake.
I have spent years learning to read these walls, documenting them in my column before they vanish, and I have come to see the street art as the truest record of the neighbourhood, more honest than the cafes or the offices, because it is made without commercial intent, or sometimes with it, and learning to tell the difference is learning to read the place. The wall does not lie, or when it lies, it lies in a way that tells you something true.
The Commercialisation Of The Spray Can
The serious thread, which I keep returning to, is the commercialisation of street art, the way a form that began as illicit, anti-commercial, genuinely subversive, has been embraced by the very forces it once defied, the brands commissioning murals, the property developers using street art to add cool to their developments, the subversive form domesticated into a marketing tool. The walls record this too, the genuine work and the corporate imitation side by side, the co-optation visible to anyone who has learned to read.
And yet the genuine work persists, the artists still working at night, still writing the diary for its own sake, still treating the walls as a canvas for something real, the form refusing to be entirely co-opted, the subversive impulse surviving alongside its commercial imitation. The walls hold both, the genuine and the fake, the diary entry and the advertisement, and reading them means holding both in view, which is, in the end, how one must read the whole neighbourhood.
So I will keep reading the walls, documenting the work before it vanishes, learning the neighbourhood through its ever-changing skin, the diary that is always being rewritten, the truest record of this restless place. The wall near my flat will have changed again by the time you read this, the previous entry painted over, a new one in its place, the diary continuing, the neighbourhood writing and rewriting itself, one wall at a time.
The history of street art in the neighbourhood traces the broader history of the form, from the early illicit graffiti, genuinely transgressive, genuinely illegal, to the gradual emergence of street art as a recognised form, to the current moment of full commercial embrace, the spray can that began as a tool of rebellion now wielded as often by brands as by rebels, the form transformed by its own success.
The artists who work these walls range across the full spectrum of the form, the anonymous nighttime taggers, the recognised street artists with international reputations, the brand-commissioned muralists, the property-developer-employed decorators, the whole ecosystem of the form, the genuine and the commercial intertwined on the same surfaces, the neighbourhood walls a gallery of everything the form has become.
The ephemerality is essential to the form, the work made to be painted over, the wall a temporary canvas, the impermanence part of the meaning, the diary entry that will be erased to make room for the next. This ephemerality resists the commodification that has overtaken the form in other ways, for the work on the wall cannot be sold and removed without ceasing to be what it is, the street art that becomes a gallery piece a different thing entirely.
The documentation of the work, the photographing of the walls before they change, has become a form in itself, the archive of the ephemeral, the record of the diary that is constantly erased, the photographers and the bloggers and the columnists like myself preserving in image what cannot be preserved in place, the walls living on in the documentation after they have been painted over in fact.
The tension between the genuine and the commercial runs through the whole form, the subversive impulse that gave street art its energy in constant tension with the commercial embrace that has domesticated it, the artists negotiating their own relationship to the money, some refusing it, some embracing it, some trying to take the money while keeping the edge, the whole form working out, on the walls, its relationship to its own success.
More in this vein at The Daily Mash.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
