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| Wall mural at the corner of Pender and Gore, with mailbox graffiti |
In this post, I will be looking at the presence of graffiti in the Gastown/Chinatown area of the Downtown Eastside. It is an area that was quite recently viewed as the seedy underbelly of Vancouver, and to a certain extent it still is. The reason why I thought of this area is that recently both have been growing and changing into cultural centres – one into a heritage/young hipster hang out and the other a family friendly cultural area. I noticed that the graffiti in this area was always appropriately located around the consumer aspects of the growing districts (only barely infringing on store fronts, or being erased off important structures) and what seemed like an attempt from graffiti artists to associate with larger works, in multiple cases commissioned for expression of the cultural area, without actually tagging over them. Although in a sense the examples of graffiti I saw fit with the traditional view of resistance, they also resisted in a manner that was not overstepping certain boundaries of the consumer area, lest it be erased.
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| Wall mural behind SFU, note the tag over the original tag |
My search for graffiti began in Gastown, by the new SFU School for the Contemporary Arts, otherwise known as the old Woodward’s building, a re-emerging symbol of consumerism, that has had some recent tension between community members over its place in Gastown. One piece of graffiti I found here was a wall mural tucked around the corner of the building by the parking garage. It was quite an interesting piece of art, depicting a jungle with a purple sky. However, the graffiti art had been painted over with other graffiti in one spot, right over the original tag. I’m not sure if this was in good humour, a competitive statement or just a random act, but his particular mural, being more typical than the ones I will shortly discuss, did not seem official, making it seem to me more susceptible to alterations by unknown individuals. This contrasts to the more elaborate murals, which were huge, elaborate works of graffiti wall art, and no had attempts to tag over them. It may have been that the smaller tags could be scrubbed off and the picture repaired, but I noticed that although there was graffiti lacking on the wall murals themselves, there was plenty of smaller graffiti surrounding them. In fact, particularly in Chinatown, most of the graffiti I saw was on buildings and other surfaces surrounding larger wall murals, like the mural of Lao Tzu at the corner of Pender and Gore, depicted at the beginning of
this post. It seemed there was no desire to graffiti over one of these works, but a desire to be associated with
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| The side of a small grocery. If you look very closely, you can see the graffiti |
them. Otherwise, Gastown and Chinatown had their share of small scale graffiti, often clumped in alleyways, or scribbled into a nook, or in a couple cases in Chinatown inconspicuously written on to a shop wall of a smaller business, never a bank or large shop.
Describing street art as something that is inevitably consumed due to its public nature, Visconti et al say “given that architecture and urban design ‘are among the very few truly inescapable—and therefore public—art forms’ (Carmona and Tiesdell 2007, 179), the street art practices transforming them highlight the difficulty in representing what public space is or should be, that is, of an ideology of public space” (Visconti et al 2010: 1) Given the consumer aspect of both these communities, I think this observation applies well to the situation of Gastown/Chinatown. Whether posh shops or a thriving market community, graffiti artists tend to put their work where it will be seen by strolling consumers. Of course, one does not see much graffiti when they stroll down Robson street. It’s presence still has to do with the fact that Gastown and Chinatown are still seen as “lower class” areas, and as Ley and Cybriwsky describe “the power to claim territory endues the claimant with both identity and status among his peer group.” (Ley and Cybriwsky 1974: 494) These areas are still trying to be claimed by the DTES graffiti artist, who assert that Chinatown and Gastown are still their domain, yet still fall within rules of the growing consumer area. If they don’t, their graffiti will be erased, which brings
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| Outer wall of the Sun Yat Sen Gardens. If you look closely, you'll see there's an extra paint job that doesn't match. |
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| The old Woodward's W, now for display, has been graffitied on. It has been partially covered up, but not erased |
me to my last pictures and my last point: as depicted in two obvious graffiti erasures on the Woodward’s “W” and the wall of the Sun Yat Sen Chinese Gardens, there are consumerist sections of these areas that are becoming dominant that do not fit with the ideology of traditional graffiti art, yet graffiti artists are still trying to claim them, despite what seem to be enforced rules not to.
Citations
All images my own
Visconti, Luca M. et al
2010 Street Art, Sweet Art? Reclaiming the “Public” in Public Place. In The Journal of Consumer Research 37(3). http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/652731 Accessed February 7, 2011
Ley, David and Roman Cybriwsky
1974 Urban Graffiti as Territorial Markers. In Annals of the Association of American Geographers 64(4): 491-505. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2569491 Accessed February 7, 2011
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