Thoughtfactory: Leica poetics

Leica, film, snaps, chronicles, cliches

Posts for Tag: urbex

about street art

Every piece of street art is temporary. It exists on a  wall for a while then disappears. All that remains are photos that circulate the Internet. It is an example of the precarious in art that signifies a transient, uncertain, state  that is in contrast to established or stable ones.  The ephemeral nature of street art  acts to defy or subvert traditional views of  fine art.   

Thankfully, street art is no longer  seen as vandalism of private property.  Its visual creativity, which is   increasingly being  infused with graphic design, is now recognised to have  emerged  from outside the establishment of  the contemporary art institution. 

CDH in Paint Wars: Graffiti v street art  says that there has been an ever widening gap between street art and graffiti; graffiti has remained oppositional while street art has drifted to become the most mainstream contemporary art practice.

This position holds that street art is increasingly populated with artists whose ambitions are to secure good gallery representation, whilst  graffiti culture has no such aspiration.

CDH's argument is that commercial street art heavily trades on the street cred of the outlaw persona that accompanies it, but writing largely paid the price for this credibility. Writers are the ones breaking into train yards and going to prison, while street artists are putting up legal murals or token stencils in back laneways and occasionally having their work buffed. 

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street art opens up new spaces

Adelaide has very few recent urban ruins.  So this does not provide a  fruitful way to explore the past  and the present caused by economic downturn, natural disasters,  environmental accidents, or a rustbelt city's decline.  What it does have is a lot of nineteenth century heritage buildings that stand empty. It is these building that many use to frame  Adelaide   as backward because it rejected “progress" in the form of   post-war architectural internationalism.  Preserving  the old is seen to be  condemning the city to stagnation. 

Adelaide's decaying buildings and empty urban  lots that have been marked by street artists, such as Jules:  

In spite of the the zero tolerance policy of the early 2000s to steet art these sites of architectural decay are empty spaces or vacant lots  often  became a fluid  open air gallery walls for street artists.   In these places in our cities, often  unloved, the street art transforms and creates meaning where perhaps none existed before. This kind of  transitory street art is quite different from the monochromatic tags that appear overnight on your wall or fence  or the practice of capping (ie., disrespectfully defaced works by prominent street artists). 

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urban exploration in Adelaide

I started wandering into empty sites, alleyways and empty buildings in Adelaide. It was  a way of getting to know the city that I was living in,  a form of urban exploration into Alt-Adelaide   in a world increasingly marked by the transitory, liquidity  and precariousness. 

Urban exploration is usually associated with  exploring  little-known urban spaces like abandoned buildings, rooftops, construction sites, drains, transit and utility tunnels and more. Michelle Dicinoski in The Future that never took Place: exploring Detroit's Abandoned Buildings  in Meanjin says that:

Urban exploration, or ‘urbex’, can be described as ‘seeking out, visiting and documenting interesting human-made spaces, most typically abandoned buildings, construction sites, active buildings, stormwater drains, utility tunnels and transit tunnels’. That’s the definition given by Jeff Chapman, aka Ninjalicious, a Canadian explorer who literally wrote the book on urbex with his guide Access All Areas. 

The increased interest in urban exploring (or  ‘place hacking’) may well result from  the growth in surveillance technology and the shrinking of public space. 

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