Abstract
In 2014, Google announced a new initiative for its Cultural Institute. Called the Street Art Project, the online database was seen by many (Google included) as a continuation of the Google Art Project, in that it sought to make street art from around the world more easily accessible to interested audiences. The company acknowledged that such art was temporary, and that, by virtue of the artwork’s eventual disappearance, it would eventually become an important record of preservation for the practice. However, in its focus on the physical artwork, the project unwittingly highlights a problematic trend in street art’s protection as intangible heritage: one where its safeguard often becomes overpowered by the tangibility of its material elements. Exploring Google Street Art through the lens of Melbourne, a city that has long negotiated with street art and graffiti as forms of cultural heritage, this article outlines the consequences of such tangibility for the intangible artwork. It argues that any protection of intangible heritage requires a tacit acknowledgement of the subjectivity which surrounds its experience: those community reactions and responses whose wide variability help define that heritage as something intangible.
On a lonely street corner in the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy, a crushed can stares defiantly at the shapes of passing figures unaware of its presence (Figure 1). Folded into itself, and tinged with the stains of accumulated rust, it appears barely discernible beneath the street signage which identifies its location. Its eyes, once clear-eyed and polished, are now watered with the corrosion and decay not uncommon of objects long-since abandoned, home to a set of nails which supports the figure’s public placement. From beneath this gaze, an elongated pair of cartoonish arms extends from either side of its torso, flapped in the breeze of Melbourne’s unpredictable weather.
CCTV camera plaque; Fitzroy.
You would be forgiven if you were to pass by such a figure and not take notice. In the creative distraction established by Melbourne’s many street artworks, the object positions itself as an inconspicuous addition to the city’s already busy landscape. It is one of many characters created by the local artist Junky, whose public art includes thousands of miniature, face-like works created from discarded refuse (soda cans, bottle caps, etc.) attached to surfaces throughout the city. Yet this object, this solitary figure on the corner of Leicester and Fitzroy Streets, appears different from the others, in that it appears to be guarding a similarly inconspicuous placard. Bearing an inscription whose content comes to being through the barrier of a protective surface, its message reads as follows: In order to protect Melbourne’s reputation as Australia’s street art capital, CCTV cameras have been installed in areas deemed to be urban hotspots. These cameras will serve a dual purpose, firstly to ensure that culturally significant works are protected for future generations to enjoy, and secondly, to be used as evidence against the artists should their work turn out to have no cultural significance.
As highlighted by the inscription, however, this framework of street art as heritage has also been accompanied by a host of problems related to its protection. Even after the city’s first discussion of situational art as intangible heritage in 2008, when the National Trust in Victoria discussed plans to review Melbourne laneway street art at a symposium on Intangible Cultural Heritage (Brown, 2008), there has been little consensus within the community as to how such artworks should be documented. In the City of Melbourne local government area, for example, the placement of Plexiglass over Banksy’s Little Diver in 2008 created a community dissatisfaction so great that an unknown figure eventually poured silver paint behind the protective surface, later writing the words ‘Banksywoz here’ in place of the now-invisible stencil (Young, 2010). But this struggle of intangible safeguard should not be understood as something specific to the situational artwork. While there are aspects of heritage protection singularly applicable to street art, such as those which affect the appearance of political graffiti at heritage sites (Burdick and Vicencio, 2015), many of these problems ultimately arise from the absence of any clear framework within the UNESCO Convention on Intangible Heritage. As stated in the 2003 Convention, intangible heritage includes a diverse array of practices that range from oral traditions to social practices to knowledge regarding nature and the universe, and its variability echoes the similar breadth of possibilities which encompass its safeguard. Safeguarding is introduced by the Convention (2003a: 3) as ‘the identification, documentation, research, preservation, protection, promotion, enhancement, transmission…as well as the revitalization of the various aspects of such heritage’, with each State Party, ‘in a manner geared to its own situation’ (2003a: 6), given extreme latitude in its application of safeguards toward those relevant practices.
One unintended effect of this versatility, in addition to the omission of countries like Australia from UNESCO’s current list of Convention signatories, 2 has been a model of physical protection within intangible practices, one whose efforts to overcome the disappearance of ephemeral heritage irreparably damages the integrity of that content. Indeed, such heritage has often been absorbed by the tangibility which gives shape to, but does not define, its intangibility. The 2008 review of Melbourne laneway street art by the National Trust in Victoria, for example, featured assurances by the then-cultural manager that individual (and likely temporary) classification, as opposed to a permanent blanket listing, would be applied to artworks recognized as intangible heritage (Brown, 2008). While the Trust did emphasize the experiential significance of such artworks, as highlighted by its offer to gather public comments from the community, it predicated classification on the artwork’s material ephemerality, even suggesting interviews with artists in order to maintain each object’s cultural integrity (Brown, 2008).
Rather than provide a solution to these conceptual problems, digital media, as indicated by the very title of this article, typically operates as an extension of these physical preservation efforts. The object of its focus appears not on the experiential but on the ephemeral. It is a near-literal proof of life that, as practiced by communities across Melbourne, requires tangible evidence to validate any claims of intangible heritage by interested parties. In one such case, a 2012 survey of ‘significant’ street art sites by the Melbourne City Council (2014) took care to only isolate those markers which defined the artwork’s tangibility, relying on photographs alongside metadata which captured (where possible) each artwork’s location, artist, and time of creation. The Council (2014: 4) described material decay as a secondary, even unintended aspect of being for the situational artwork, explaining in its 2014 Graffiti Management Plan that ‘Since this study was undertaken some works have deteriorated significantly’. It posited such objects as something less-than their original outlines, and it made no effort to appreciate the intangible artwork in any state other than the immediate aftermath of its completion. For the Melbourne Council, digital media became a way to protect such artworks not just from their material decay, but from the experiences which defined that decay, creating an isolation that separated each artwork from the meaning of its public placement.
To invoke Lovink’s (2011: 149) review of Joseph Weizenbaum, this application of technology for intangible safeguard reflects ‘the difference between hearing and listening’, wherein the ‘personal and social tensions’ created by street art’s ephemerality have fostered a false assumption that such tensions can ‘be resolved by simply declaring them a problem’. As local government authorities like the Melbourne City Council (2014: 6) continue to articulate archival photography as the only realistic hope for street art’s documentation, they invariably obscure what the city’s events have already highlighted. That intangible heritage requires a mode of protection committed to the sensitivity of its intangibility: what this article posits as the presence of negative space. As its name suggests, negative space protects that experiential space which surrounds living traditions, born from those cultural objects most important to intangible heritage. To use the language of UNESCO (2003a: 3), it encompasses those ‘practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, [and] skills’ initiated by the ceremonial function of ‘instruments, objects, artifacts and cultural spaces associated therewith’. It is a sensory space that consists of what’s experienced, as opposed to what exists: A subjective voice whose importance for intangible protection has thus far been eroded by the influence of its physicality.
Though material protection serves a necessary function in the documentation of intangible heritage, this article argues that such protection must seek to clarify its content rather than delineate it. It is through analysis of Google Street Art, chief among the documentary archives which populate the digital street art landscape, that we can therefore identify the importance of negative space for the intangible artwork.
Inside the tangible archive
But before we can begin any analysis of the Google project, we must first trace the archive back to its origins in order to assess its consequence for intangible heritage. Derrida and Prenowitz (1995: 9), in their psychoanalysis of Freud and the archive, trace the archive’s etymology to its earlier manifestation of arkhe, which they argue names at once where things commence and where authority commands, but which also forgets that it shelters these meanings. Extending these observations into the archive’s process of discovery, Foucault and Sheridan (1972: 129) explain the archive as ‘the law of what can be said’. They describe it as a system that simultaneously defines its enunciability alongside its functioning, one which ‘differentiates discourses in their multiple existence and specifies them in their own duration’ (1972: 129). However, it was Derrida and Prenowitz (1995: 17) who translated the archive’s relationship of enunciability and functioning into the ‘retrospective science fiction’ likely to be created by technology’s impact on the psychoanalytic archive. Citing computers, printers, and especially electronic mail among a variety of other ‘geotechnological shocks’, they mused that this archival earthquake would not have limited its effects to the secondary recording, to the printing and to the conservation of the history of psychoanalysis. It would have transformed this history from top to bottom and in the most initial inside of its production, in its very events. (1995:17)
The preservation of intangible heritage through the archive thus represents a significant moment for Google, as the company has, until now, focused its efforts exclusively on the documentation of cultural property and architectural sites. Street art’s ‘transient nature’ is noted as a primary concern for the Google project (Google, 2014), whose efforts ‘to preserve this ephemeral art form’ appeared on great display when the company announced, in 2015, that it would be doubling the number of items within its street art collection (Google, 2015). But despite its acknowledgement of the ephemerality which surrounds street art, there appears no mention of this intangibility within Google’s archival practice. Its documented artworks exist not as moments within a larger process but as final products validated in the proof of their existence, a series of photographs whose lack of reflexivity creates an agency of voice that speaks for the situational object without any regard to the meaning that comes from its experience. In a promotional conversation with The New York Times in June 2014, Amit Sood, the Director of the Google Cultural Institute, even highlighted the initiative as nothing more than an extension of the company’s other projects, stating that ‘I’m not treating street art as anything different from what I would do with the Impressionist collection I’m getting on Art Project’ (Donadio, 2014). For the Google archive, then, street art exists as something temporary: A disappearing ‘property of artistic interest’ more akin to an object of fine arts than an example of intangible heritage (UNESCO, 1970: 2).
This is not to say that such a tangible focus should be considered unusual for the protection of intangible heritage. While Google Street Art represents, at least for Derrida and Prenowitz (1995:18), just one symptom of ‘the unlimited upheaval under way in archival technology’, it also highlights the effect of archival technology on ‘the very institution of the archivable event’. Appreciative literature for graffiti and street art has, since the 1980s, consisted primarily of photocatalogues that highlight the situational artwork’s visual aesthetic. One need only look as far as Cooper and Chalfant’s widely influential Subway Art alongside the documentary efforts of artists and writers in order to understand the archive as a long-accepted arbiter of the artwork’s transmission. 3 Indeed, as the most recent and ambitious chapter in the archive’s tangible protection over street art, Google Street Art merely perfects what many of these archives previously sought to accomplish: a strategy of physical preservation that recreates, rather than documents, the situational artwork. As of this writing, Google Street Art features over 13,000 items from contributing partners around the world, and its format echoes the method of display necessitated by the printed photo-catalogue. Like the authorship of graffiti’s early photographs, contributions to Google are provided through organizations whose names are attached to their submitted photographs, each of whom collate their images according to a variety of metadata. The resultant items, featured in high-quality resolution, reflect the same object-centric approach initiated by the photo archive, with the added guarantee of continuous updates from the project’s preapproved partners.
This accumulation of artworks in an unparalleled aggregation of information fulfills what Lovink (2011: 153) describes as an underlying reality for Google, whose primary focus on profit rather than sustainable public archives causes its projects to suffer as much from ‘data obesity’ as they do an indifference ‘to calls for careful preservation or naïve demands for cultural awareness’. It reflects what has become, in the age of possibility promised by digital media, the virtual replacement of intangible heritage via the tangible archive. As a consequence of the consumer impulses which drive private corporations (and private individuals, as seen through the litany of coffee-table books dedicated to street art’s aesthetic), this archive promotes itself not as the authority for intangible heritage but as the most useful guide for its consumption. It eliminates those obstacles which have, in the case of Melbourne, so long prevented the protection of situational art, and in the inevitable erasure of the physical artwork, its contents eventually replace the intangibility of their featured heritage.
In this literal translation of artwork to archive, the situational object loses all meaning beyond its visibility, and it communicates what Benjamin and Zohn (1992) warned as the decaying influence of art’s mechanical reproduction on the artwork’s aura. Defining the aura as ‘the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be’ (1992: 300), Benjamin and Zohn argue that ‘by the absolute emphasis on its exhibition value the work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions’ (1992: 302), enveloped in what Berger (1972: 21) concurs as ‘an atmosphere of entirely bogus religiosity’. As Berger (1972: 21) goes on to elaborate, the work of art’s reproducibility modifies its subject from a living artwork into a static representation, one whose ‘first meaning is no longer to be found in what it says, but in what it is’. Tagged murals and deteriorating pasteups become damage for the tangible archive, and in the primacy afforded the unaffected image, the situational artwork assigns itself a materialistic binary. It is not an image in decay so much as an image that disappears, something that exists until it ceases to be.
Such assertion of graffiti as an objective artwork is a perspective confirmed by the metadata that accompanies Google’s items. All of the project’s artworks feature some combination of information related to location of placement, type of medium, and creating artist, details which underscore a deep belief that street art’s ‘true value can be appreciated only in relation to the fullest possible information regarding its origin, history and traditional setting’ (UNESCO, 1970: 1). Perhaps, for this reason, the project withholds participation to those preapproved organizations that sign a contract stating ownership of contributed photographs (Donadio, 2014), a selectivity of admission that echoes the mention of museums, libraries, curators, antique dealers, and other ‘qualified staff’ in Article 5 of the UNESCO Convention (1970: 3) related to cultural property. There is an assumption of authority that resides in these permitted groups, who, in the absence of such familiar hierarchy as museum curators, gallery owners, or even the artists themselves, can provide information about an artwork that would otherwise not be available to the casual observer. By virtue of this reimposed construction of ‘experts’ and ‘non-experts’, the tangible archive distinguishes itself as a place of privilege. It is an exclusionary resource whose authenticity relies on its solidification of distance between object and viewer, only able to be uncovered through a never-ending ‘archaeology…that questions the already-said at the level of its existence’ (Foucault and Sheridan, 1972: 131).
Ironically, it is in this confidence of protection over the material artwork that the tangible archive literalizes its corruption of intangible heritage. As illustrated by the project’s Online Exhibitions, participating organizations appear to have mostly provided street art that they themselves helped sponsor. The multiyear initiative behind Artists Lane in Windsor, for example, was co-organized by the artist Facter from contributing partner Invurt, and many of the artworks highlighted by Sunshine Lane in Brunswick were only realized through the efforts of Land of Sunshine, which often invites artists to use that space. 4 Such propinquity, however, is to be expected in the structure of metadata required by Google Street Art. In a conversation with The Guardian, Isabel Rojas-Williams from the Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles highlights that while she and her staff document a large array of artworks around the Los Angeles area, ‘for lack of finances and lack of manpower, we can’t put them in there [Google] unless we have the information, name of the mural, the artist, the exact location and maybe biography’ (Riefe, 2015). Project partners therefore face a struggle of documentation which makes it difficult for them to include artworks that they themselves did not curate, and while it would be unfair to assert this claim of sponsorship over the entirety of the Google archive, an authorship of visibility nevertheless becomes apparent.
The result, apart from an imposed hierarchy of documentation that prioritizes some artworks over others, is an ‘erosion of the accuracy of the intellectual infrastructure (metadata)’ that governs Google Street Art (Dalziell and Genoni, 2015: 50). Endowed with equal claims of legitimacy to the project’s contents, Google’s 94 contributing partners create their own tags of ‘objective’ information for each of their uploaded images. But in their isolation from one another, as well as their contrast of opinions as to how some street art should be classified, the archive swells from a forum of scholarship into a redundancy of information. A cursory search of the Google Cultural Institute reveals that many of the mediums listed offer categories which overlap with one another: among others, options exist for paint, acrylic paint, oil paint, and spray painting, the last of which contains only 40 items at present count (a surprising rarity given a street art collection of over 13,000 items). This raises practical concerns for the project’s usability: Sometimes, images are not only unhelpfully labeled by participants but also misattributed. In one such example, Global Street Art Foundation confuses Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada’s digital signature alongside C215 in an image produced by the latter, and in another instance, the Wende Museum’s ascribed date of Jun 27, 1905 to an image by Thierry Noir contradicts the artist’s date of birth in 1958 (Figure 2). Through this self-imposed collapse of the situational artwork, the project unconsciously destroys what Duchamp (1973) describes as the spectator’s contribution to the creative act: Those audience experiences whose contrast of interactions with the artwork legitimizes street art’s classification as intangible heritage. It is a space only able to be felt, rather than seen. However, it is this erasure which enables us to trace the fault of street art’s protection back to the enunciative discourse created by the Google archive’s tangible framework.
Thierry Noir, 1905.
A mispronunciation of heritage
While the archive exists both in the visibility of its statements and in the negative space of things unsaid, its application, as evidenced by Google Street Art, has been limited to the audibility of its content. Foucault and Sheridan (1972: 119) offer perhaps the most vigorous defense of the tangible archive, arguing that ‘Our task is not to give voice to the silence that surrounds them [the archive’s statements], nor to rediscover all that, in them and beside them, had remained silent or had been reduced to silence’. Rather, it is ‘to define a limited system of presences’ that treats statements ‘as being always in their own place’, (1972: 119) one whose ‘enunciative domain is identical with its own surface’. But this treatment of the archive as defined exclusively by enunciated statements ignores the documentary possibilities which compose its negative space. According to Foucault and Sheridan (1972: 119), this space becomes overpowered by the ‘discursive formation’ of the archive’s statements: ‘a distribution of gaps, voids, absences, limits, divisions’ which avoids any presupposition ‘that beneath manifest statements something remains hidden and subjacent’.
Confined to its materiality, the tangible archive restricts intangible heritage to the immediacy of its enunciation. It perpetuates what Kraidy (2013: 2) refers to as the foundation of ‘Plato’s Digital Cave, where images of shadows projected on the wall…are mistaken as reality and embedded into one’s version of that reality’. 5 As discovered by Kraidy (2013: 2), during his review of media use during the Arab uprisings, the fault of this reality can be traced to the anonymity which affects the Digital Cave’s shadows, whose ‘arbitrary tweets, faceless Facebook posts, nameless blogs, concocted videos, [and] shady informers’ obfuscate any delineation between events as they happened and events as they were witnessed. Such voices sacrifice their subjectivity (and by virtue their authority) in order to create a representation of truth that rises beyond their participation. However, it is this purported objectivity which erases any credibility from their statements (and, in the context of Google Street Art, their artworks). What you see becomes all that is there, as the tangible archive’s items are unable to be anything other than the product of how they are presented. It defines situational art not by the space which encapsulates its intangible experience, but by the exteriority which governs its visibility.
In this reimagined tangibility of the intangible artwork, Google Street Art ultimately fulfills many of the dangers that Jeff Malpas (2008) highlights as a consequence of new media’s nonconceptual approach to heritage documentation. Building on Heidegger’s observations about the vast range of changes created by new technologies, Malpas (2008: 197) describes ‘the apparent obliteration of the near and the far in the face of the technological transformation of the world’ and its effect on our understanding of place. Like the Google archive, new media tends toward the treatment of place as locational rather than existential (2008[: 207). Its recreation of places (and, in the case of Google Street Art, artworks) ignores the ‘complexity of relation’ that exists within such places, the variables of which are unable to be virtually replicated (2008: 206), and in her journey through ‘the cityscape – a space both imagined and experienced’, Alison Young (2014: 61) identifies this existential place as an essential facet of street art’s intangibility. The graffiti writer and street artist, she explains, each inhabits the ‘uncommissioned city’ rather than the ‘legislated city’, and as such, they ‘are always already responding to a city’s surfaces, spaces, architecture, and aesthetic’ in contradistinction to the average citizen (2014: 88). The artwork’s interruption of the city’s predetermined place thus modifies that place’s meaning through its unanticipated practice of use. As becomes evident through examples like the ‘stay-up’, a throw-up painted in an extremely high, difficult to reach (and difficult to clean) location, street art cannot be separated from the knowledge of its placement. Its existence is one of reference, both to its surroundings as well as its spectator’s habit of travel. As the viewer twists and moves through public space, the street artwork bends against the orbit of their wandered path: A directional engagement entirely dependent on an initial attraction of gaze, and one which highlights ‘the dynamic dialogue that graffiti and street art, as living traditions, rely upon’ in their development (Merrill, 2015: 383).
Such qualitative factors, however, appear unacknowledged by Google Street Art’s World Collection of images, which fall victim to the same consequences of globalization initially highlighted by the 2003 UNESCO Convention on Intangible Heritage. Alongside the ‘renewed dialogue among communities’ created by its geographically limitless scope (UNESCO, 2003a: 1), the project also ‘give[s] rise…to grave threats of deterioration, disappearance and destruction of the intangible cultural heritage’ by encouraging its users to enjoy artworks from around the world as if they were physically present. Though Heidegger and Hofstadter (2000: 163) confirm this ‘abolition of every possibility of remoteness’ as a direct consequence of technological innovation, they also take care to note that such achievement does not equate a subject’s visibility with the comprehension of its meaning, writing that ‘the frantic abolition of all distances brings no nearness: for nearness does not consist in shortness of distance’. One helpful illustration of this misunderstanding appears in the archive’s acquisition of street art from Melbourne, a collection whose holdings were recently expanded in March 2015 through a collaboration between the webzine Invurt and the Melbourne-based website Land of Sunshine (Facter, 2015). From Artists Lane in Windsor to the always-iconic Hosier Lane in Melbourne’s City Centre, a great many of the images highlighted by the project are from the narrow, bluestone alleys which comprise the city’s laneway system. Indeed, any examination of the project’s street views for Artists Lane, Hosier Lane, Croft Lane, Sunshine Lane, and Blender Lane would unfairly lead one to the conclusion that most street art in the city tends to aggregate within the hidden spaces provided by the city’s laneways, and it would ignore the ability of these artworks to appear in more open environments. No mention exists of how often graffiti appears during excursions through suburbs like Fitzroy and Collingwood or along the rail lines of the city’s metro system (Figure 3), and in the narrowed focus of the tangible archive, such suggestion of difference or space beyond the image inevitably falls away. ‘There is but one perspective offered’ by Google Street Art (Isaac, 2016: 14), as artworks once embedded in the experience of their cities are now equalized in the uniform gaze of the archive.
Pieces along Hurstbridge Train Line; Fairfield.
It is, in essence, a spectatorship without whom ‘there can be no investing of meaning’ in street art’s situation of place (Malpas, 2008: 203), and it contradicts the requirements of protection outlined in Article 15 of the 2003 Convention. Any safeguard of intangible heritage, the Article (UNESCO, 2003a: 7) notes, should ‘ensure the widest possible participation of communities, groups, and, where appropriate, individuals that create, maintain and transmit such heritage’. Highlighting what Hennessy (2013: 61) remarks as ‘a shift in perspective on the role of culture bearers’ for UNESCO, this protection involves ‘participation at the local level, rather than top-down’, and it acknowledges the limits by which intangible heritage can be expressed or communicated. As seen through the example of situational art, there exists no preapproved authority to assist the spectator in bringing the street artwork to interpretive fruition. In the absence of any such commentary, the artwork’s definition relies instead on the representative conditions of its audience’s engagement. Its value is one which only retroactively emerges through a contrast of discussion among the individuals familiar with its practice, and its transference to the digital archive thus necessitates the dual responsibility of ‘user builders’ to play significant ‘roles in both making meaning from digital archives and making digital archives meaningful’ (Dalziell and Genoni, 2015: 47). Rather than create an expansion of this negative space, however, Google Street Art discards these voices as unnecessary reactions to a product already completed. Its images behave not ‘as an aide-mémoire’ (2015: 52), able to ‘represent multiple “realities,”’ but as a series of truths far removed from the encounters which once gave their tangibility meaning. The project’s ‘threshold of existence’, to borrow Foucault and Sheridan’s evaluation of the archive, ‘is established by the discontinuity that separates us from what we can no longer say’ (1972: 130).
Lefebvre and Moore (1991), in their equation of everyday life with fertile soil, anticipate this separation of audience from artwork, arguing that those who have only handled flowers look upon soil as something dirty. But ‘flowers and trees should not make us forget the earth beneath’ they explain (Lefebvre and Moore, 1991: 87), nor should they, in the case of Google, discourage any alternative interaction with the documented artwork in situ. Yet as evidenced through the documentation of intangible heritage via the tangible archive, ‘the indirect criticism of the everyday in works of the past which emerged from that everyday appeared only too frequently to devalue it’ (1991: 87). The lone artworks judged suitable for Google Street Art are those which remain completely unaffected by the influence of their surroundings, with any subjectivity of encounter rejected in favor of a more complete representation of the artist’s intentions (which in turn become indistinguishable from the artwork itself). However, this artwork should be understood as only in the infancy of its intangible value. As Merleau-Ponty and Smith (2005: 236) go on to explain, any ‘objective’ representation, similar to that of an architectural plan or a diagram of a cube, is incomprehensible without its association to past experience: ‘one emerges from blind, symbolic thought only by perceiving the particular spatial entity which bears these predicates all together’. Any meaning that we conceive from words or objects is derived ‘from our experience as embodied subjects’ (2005: 236), and in its dogmatic assertion that ‘the object is in itself, or absolutely, without wondering what it is’, the tangible archive ‘destroys the object’s internal structure’ (2005: 237).
This should not be considered much of a surprise for the tangible archive. It is, at its core, a repository of the past; it documents those things that have already happened without any recognition of its exclusions, effectively enshrining its contents within a vitrine of its audience’s subjugation. Like Merleau-Ponty and Smith’s six-sided cube, the situational artwork via Google Street Art ‘is not only invisible, but inconceivable; it is the cube as it would be for itself’ (2005: 237). We can see a diagram of the artwork in its genesis, but we have no sense of understanding about the place it inhabits or the manner in which it reveals itself to the passing spectator. It is an image without detail: a memoir of encounter predicated on the veracity of an unfulfilled moment, and in order to properly safeguard intangible heritage (and, in this instance, the situational artwork), we must therefore answer the tangible archive with a new solution for its experiential space: that of the intangible archive.
The practice of intangible safeguard
Though introduced as a new concept by this article, the roots of the intangible archive (and its contrast of value with the tangible archive) appear as far back as 1984, when Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant came together to publish Subway Art, one of the most authoritative examinations of New York City graffiti. The contrast of styles between Cooper, a photojournalist, and Chalfant, a practicing sculptor, pushed both figures to create ‘a better picture of graffiti work as an art form and as part of the life of New York City’ (1984: 7), providing us with an early example of negative space both as it exists (Cooper) and as it disappears (Chalfant) from the archive. Where Cooper chose to document ‘art on the trains as part of the whole urban environment’ (1984: 6), Chalfant ‘focused his attention on the paintings, isolating them from their environment’ (1984: 7). The material focus of Chalfant’s photography can, in many ways, be seen as a precursor to the documentary strategies enacted by archives like Google Street Art. Yet Cooper’s placement of those artworks within a broader context highlights the experiential value which encompasses graffiti’s encounter. The artwork remains the focus of her pictures; however, she uses that artwork’s tangibility as a point of connection between itself, herself, and the gazes of other audience members. She posits the artwork not just as an aesthetic object, but as a self-reflective lens into the traces of everyday life, one whose appearance highlights an otherwise unnoticed conversation of movement and practice through the city.
The difference between intangible and tangible archives (whether online or offline) can perhaps be most easily explained through what Mitchell (2005: 85) observes as the difference between images and pictures, where ‘you can hang a picture, but you cannot hang an image’. Drawing on the analogy of ‘biological science’, Mitchell expands on his distinction of the image from the picture, positing that Perhaps, then, there is a way in which we can speak of the value of images as evolutionary or at least coevolutionary entities, quasi life-forms (like viruses) that depend on a host organism (ourselves), and cannot reproduce themselves without human participation. (Mitchell, 2005: 87)
Tourists in Hosier Lane; Melbourne CBD.
Of course, the intangible archive’s manifestation need not to be limited to this example of ‘pictures’ and ‘images’, which merely serve to illustrate its functions rather than delineate its boundaries. In a recent locative website devoted to Melbourne street art, for example, students at the University of Melbourne adopted various forms of storytelling and often self-generated media to create personal and imaginative investigations of the city’s public spaces. The project, titled Street Art deTours, investigates the ways in which situational artworks engage with, and are affected by, the stories that surround their locations. Organized around the concept of detours – ‘geolocated experiences composed of roughly five stops whose imagery and content are entirely created by those authors that have chosen to contribute them’ (Isaac, 2016: 5) – the website identifies itself as a conscious rejection of the virtual submission created by archives like Google Street Art. Though in and of itself not an archive, due to its omission of metadata and other organizational elements, the project evokes many of the same attachments to negative space such as those required by the intangible archive. Like the intangible archive, its statements work to enunciate the negative space of what is unsaid (in this instance, the experiential travel completed by detour authors and followers) rather than the immediacy of what is expressed. It prioritizes participatory engagement over the objectivity of the situational artwork, and it encourages comparative modes of reflection between community members: a meditation of physical experience only able to be imagined through the intangible archive’s accommodation of negative space.
Any efforts to interrogate the intangible artwork are consequently affected by the inclusivity created by its sensitive safeguard. As noted in this author’s review of Street Art deTours (Isaac, 2016: 8), each detour artwork ‘assumes a meaning at once specific to, and reflective of, its narrative author’, with a definition indistinguishable from the perspective of its original contributing partner. In one such example of the project’s detours, titled ‘The Metamorphoses: Examining a Roman Poet’s Magnum Opus Through the Unorthodox Lens of Fitzroy Street Art’, artworks in the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy become transformed into an exploration of those subjects which exist in Ovid’s narrative poem (Figure 5). As seen through ‘Madness, Bacchic, or Otherwise’ (Isaac, 2016: 7), labeled Stop 1 of the above detour, the theme of ‘temporary psychosis’ easily places itself within the psychedelic drug use of the artwork’s central character. The figure finds its parallel with the likes of Philomena, Procne, and Hades, characters whose otherwise-unacceptable behavior becomes excused by the same apology of psychosis which fuels their actions. The documented artwork, like other examples featured by Street Art deTours, exists not as an object of itself but as a response tied to a subjective moment within its evolution. It is an ‘image’ which illustrates the artwork’s impressions rather than dictates its tangible form, ‘representative of the detour author’s gaze and meant to be compared with the follower’s own experience of each street art site’ (Isaac, 2016: 5).
Student Project from Street Art deTours.
As seen through the Google archive, the importance of such contrasted interactions cannot be understated. Returning once again to Google Street Art and its Virtual Tours section, which uses panoramic technology to virtually place users across different sites, it becomes evident that any analysis of the intangible artwork finds itself limited to the tangibility of its digital rendering. It negates what de Certeau and Rendall (1984: 93) describe as the ‘manifold story’ created by a user’s movement through public space. ‘[I]n relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other’ de Certeau and Rendall (1984: 93) observe, being, as they are, ‘shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces’. Users may be able to visualize the physical aspects of Google’s locations and artworks in extreme detail, but they have no sense of how they, or others, would respond to those spaces, or even how those artworks adapt to the dialogue of their environments. Indeed, scrolling through the project’s User Galleries, in which participants create their own ‘gallery’ with images from Google’s collection, it appears that each item’s metadata greatly structures the gallery’s overall commentary. Users typically inflect their analysis with details like an artwork’s title or material composition, and the only information referenced across the galleries is that which is seen or provided by the project, whose system of classification sets the tone of direction for the artwork’s digital encounter. Careful guardianship thus controls the project’s topology through its ‘domiciliation’ (Derrida and Prenowitz, 1995: 10), as the tangible archive’s authority over a past (and to locations) to which we cannot speak asserts a discursive ownership that, in contrast with the intangible archive, ‘delimits’ our own contributions (Foucault and Sheridan, 1972: 130).
Conclusion
In Google Street Art’s suppression of negative space from the safeguard of situational art, the project, like other forms of new media, highlights an unseen danger of intangible protection: the conversion of intangible items (through their documentation) into objects of digital heritage. The fault of this alteration, however, lies not with the technology of new media. As Hennessy (2013: 68) writes, ‘Participatory media production processes…[involve] the transformation of intangible cultural heritage into digital heritage’, and they are an unavoidable consequence of digital preservation, whose collection of content is ‘“born digital”, [where] there is no other format but the digital object’ (UNESCO, 2003b: 1). The responsibility for this failure instead appears in the tangible archive’s failure to refer to anything other than what it explicitly shows. In the eventual erasure of the situational artwork, the Google archive becomes one of the last resources for that artwork’s documentation and indeed its very record of existence. Certainly, it appears the most visible, and in the distance between its appearance and disappearance, the street artwork hurtles into a discursive silence of the archive’s own making. The incredible quality of its digitization charges any alternative representation of the artwork as something inadequate, and it is here that the digital artwork defines itself not as an extension of any subjective experience, but as a self-contained object constitutive of digital heritage.
The struggle of new media to maintain the intangible raises a familiar, if tired, adage specific to the development of technology: just because something can be done, does that mean it necessarily should? As evidenced by the application of Gif Art to Google Street Art, new media’s preoccupation with its own capabilities often plays a large role in the conceptual deterioration of its content. Gif Art’s cycled display of ‘moving’ images, while a colorful aspect of the project, reifies those assumptions of static visibility which plague the documented artwork, as its images are only able to be changed through conscious efforts of manipulation from creating artists. The concern for new media, then, appears more about how to make full use its technology rather than how that technology should be thoughtfully applied. It therefore becomes unsurprising that in this struggle of protection, scholars like Merrill (2015: 384–385) have argued in favor of subcultural graffiti to be recognized as ‘alternative heritage…whose integration into formal heritage frameworks might be considered more disadvantageous than beneficial to their safeguarding’.
But to attach such a label of ‘alternative heritage’ to subcultural graffiti, or any form of situational art, discourages our ability to critically engage with the full scope of possibility for street art’s intangible safeguard. Indeed, it ignores those very interactions which facilitated its initial recognition of worth. To borrow the analogy of Heidegger and Hofstadter’s jug, its ‘thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that holds’ the changing artwork (2000: 167), whose negative space ‘We suddenly lost sight of…at the moment, in fact, when the illusion intruded itself that science could reveal to us the reality of the jug’ (2000: 169). Such representations of intangible heritage must, in the words of Dalziell and Genoni (2015: 52), ‘become nomadic, alighting in new contexts, new archives, where they accumulate a range of data and stories’, and if we are to commit ourselves to street art’s classification as something intangible, then we must understand its influence as far greater than the materiality of its external form. This value resides instead within the negative space created by street art’s ‘social value’ (Harris, 2011): that uncontainable void whose circulation of discourse retains the voices and memories of experiences otherwise forgotten by its tangible digitization.
Rather than consider the ways in which graffiti contradicts current models of heritage protection, it becomes much more productive – even necessary – to consider how these models can be adapted and altered for the negative space essential to intangible heritage. As highlighted by Derrida and Prenowitz (1995: 18), intangible documentation requires a creative and thoughtful application which recognizes that ‘archivable meaning is also and in advance codetermined by the structure that archives’. Preservation affects not just how we remember things, but how we treat them, and as such, its structure requires a strategy of intangible protection far beyond any mere recognition of negative space. Like Street Art deTours, we must construct ‘images’ that are at once firmly rooted in the moment of their experience and yet fully engaged with the contrary perspectives of their surrounding communities, for it is only through orientation to street art’s situational placement that we can begin to dismantle the tangible archive and recognize the significance of our own contributions toward the practice of intangible safeguard.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Chris Honig, Margaret Borowczyk, Lachlan MacDowall, and Alison Young for their support, comments, guidance, and many conversations throughout the completion of this article, with gratitude to those reviewers who were able to help make this final version possible. Any errors remain entirely my own.