Abstract
A book focusing on street art that arrives with an endorsement from Banksy (“My favourite criminologist in the world”) and opens with acknowledgements to a “who’s who” of street artists (not only Banksy, but also Blek le Rat, Cake, Kaff-eine, JR, and Swoon, among others) immediately announces its loyalties and prepares the reader for a sympathetic exploration of “unauthorized interventions in the public spaces of cities” (1). But Alison Young’s book is much more than a thoughtful, well-informed, and carefully researched riposte to reductionist framings of street art within the worlds of art, urban policy, and law – it is also a model of engaged scholarship and refreshingly animated first-person academic writing in which Young takes the reader not only into the underground world of street art, but through the academic thickets of cultural studies, urban studies, and legal theory to explore the implications of street art for conceptions of art, property, the city and citizenship.
Young opens the book by providing a brief history of street art, its distinct yet intertwined history with graffiti, and a review of the myriad ways in which street art has been studied recently. Her approach to her subject is multi-faceted – she argues that street art’s aesthetics, illegal status, and impact on urban space all must be taken into consideration to capture its many meanings. Thus, as she writes, the task she sets herself is “thinking through how a cultural practice can be art and crime and an aspect of urban space and a form of communication and a political gesture and constitute a new movement in art” (8). While Young frames her study of street art broadly, she grounds her thinking in a series of situated encounters – the “affective encounter” between a spectator and the work of art in public space; the artist’s decision to place the work in public space rather than in a gallery; and finally the law’s desire to situate the work as either legal or illegal.
Young matches her research methodology to her subject matter of “situational artwork” (8) (her term for street art). She self-consciously situates herself in relation to her subject, and writes through the appreciative and curious eyes of one who moves through the public spaces of cities (especially by walking, drawing upon the work of de Certeau and Walter Benjamin). The book opens with her first memories, at 16, of sighting illicit writing as she was traveling by train from her hometown into Glasgow – “MY DARLING FLOPS/I LOVE YOU.” The book is enlivened by numerous photographs of street art across many of the globe’s major cities – most photographed by the author herself – and interspersing each of the six thickly researched chapters are what she calls “encounters” – 1–2 page reflections on her experiences engaging with particular artworks. When she writes of street artists – in particular, of their motivations and decisions to place their work in public space with neither government authorization nor consent from property owners, and thus break the law – she does so guided by the principle that the artists should be allowed to “voice their views, experiences and histories” (9). One of the few quibbles I have with the book is that Young seems to generalize from the comments of noteworthy street artists that all those who engage in graffiti and street art are “attempting to add to the amenity of urban spaces” (163). Although I appreciate her desire to add an alternative understanding of graffiti and street art to “the relentless repetition of tired catchphrases such as ‘vandalism’” it does not strike me as necessary to subsume all possible motivations, whether resentment over one’s perceived marginalization, or youthful desire to break boundaries, or simply mixed motivations, say, into a desire to “add to the amenity of urban spaces” in order to further her argument. And, as she recounts in Chapter 5, when Young examines the law’s encounter with street art, she does so from the perspective of a researcher who has injected herself into Melbourne’s municipal policymaking realm with the aim of reducing the risks of criminalization and harsh sentencing typically meted out to “vandals” who engage in unauthorized graffiti and street art. Despite Young’s efforts to convince the municipality to relax their approach to graffiti and street art by demarcating three different zones of tolerance – including a “high tolerance” zone – the Melbourne council was unable or unwilling to frame graffiti and street art as anything other than that “to be managed, limited, controlled and … territorialized” (144).
Young’s unsuccessful foray into municipal policymaking presents an unresolved paradox of street art: as she details in Chapter 6, over the past ten plus years street art has been transformed from an underground subcultural activity to a cultural practice recognized by noteworthy art critics and museum curators as a significant, if not the significant, new genre of contemporary art, and embraced by leading cities as an important tourist attraction. Yet, this recognition has not led to any shift in the law’s framing of graffiti and street art as a crime. As Young argues, the “legislated city,” wedded to dominant conceptions of property ownership, authority, and propriety, has failed, or been unwilling to cede any space to what she calls the “uncommissioned cities” co-existing side-by-side. Street art provides a glimpse into and a representation of this other sort of city, a “public city” based upon an alternative understanding of public space in which function rather than ownership determines the publicity of a space. More broadly, “uncommissioned cities” suggest an alternative conception of citizenship, in which citizens (a la street artists), actively create, revise and imagine public space, rather than passively submit to the built environment and visual imagery dictated by government authorities and corporate property owners.
Young is only able to hint at what a co-existence between the “legislated city” and “uncommissioned cities” would look like – she recognizes the wide gulf between “those who wish to ‘protect’ their property” and those who believe they are entitled to practice what they see as an art form on the property of others, or similarly, between those who believe the authority to alter city spaces is “vested only in government agencies or through property ownership,” and those who believe that all are entitled to do so (163). She concludes her book by calling for a conversation between the two positions, and while her work only gestures at what such a conversation could actually accomplish, her work provides a keen appreciation of street art and the ways in which taking this cultural practice seriously can complicate and deepen our conception of how we experience the city and our citizenship within it.