On urban murals

I have always been fascinated by murals. For years I have been taking pictures of them, thinking I might use them one day.

A tiny exhibition, The Street: Reclaim the Mural at the Whitechapel Gallery in east London, made me write this piece. It showed glimpses of the history of the fast-disappearing tradition of London murals. It also demonstrated how inadequate an interior exhibition space was to present the art of the mural.

Murals are not graffiti. They are supposedly community things – local, contextual, always retrofitted (or are they?). They are not illicit, subversive, particularly challenging or disturbing. It is usually only because of their coyness that they are allowed to survive. But I still like them.

They are often designed by committee, which is never a great idea. But after that, they live, weather and fade – and become better. They become memories.

Murals are like adjusting layers – they smooth bare corners, soften exposed party walls, surprise and greet the solitary walker.

At some point, someone decides there should be a mural somewhere. But who? How? Is it a community? How do they find the artist/artists? What do the planners have to say about it?

So what do I like about them?

They are part of the city (sometimes more than the building). They give a temporary refuge to contemporary figurative artists.

They are often intricate, like carvings on the facade of a cathedral. They are idealistic and utopian.

They do not pretend to be art – maybe something for sightseers, but not art. They are free. They do not sell and are not for sale. They are anonymous (to me), but they feel very personal.

I like their random locations in cities. Murals appear and survive where they can – a self-organising organism of sorts. They are often temporary. They disappear when the city gets more “complete” – when the unwanted gaps are filled and corners are architecturally “addressed”. A map of treated wounds.

They are at a threshold. They seem to stand for what they are not. They slot into gaps, fill the emptiness, hide the flatness, dematerialise solids and complete the picture.

They are often twee, but engaging nonetheless. Most do not intend to antagonise but (naively?) to connect – perhaps a more difficult mission than the subversive interventions of the more radical muralists and graffitists.

I like the way, too, that they often seem fading and abandoned. No need to patch them up. Memories, traces…

The small ones are often more interesting. They are more of a gentle intrusion. Not group portraits designed by a committee thinking of an overarching and grandiose celebration of local history. Instead, they appear as small, almost unnoticed secrets. And, when discovered, they become yours, and you love them even more for that.

There is a tiny one on Newman Street, off Percy Passage: a woman in a nightgown looking down from the fake window of the top floor over a pub.

Who knows why is she there? Maybe she relates to the prostitute who was murdered above that very pub in the opening scenes of the movie Peeping Tom, which was filmed here in 1960.

I loved this one opposite the Paris flat I once stayed in. I didn’t notice it at first. There was a tree. The tree had a shadow. After a couple of days I realised that the shadow did not move…

Then there are all sorts of “unintended” murals – fading old adverts, planted ivied walls, party walls indecorously bared while a new construction is on the way… or a demolition has just happened…  But these “murals” are more in the eye of the beholder.

There is a great potential in these urban paintings. It is one of the rare opportunities to mix scales and produce amazing surrealist pieces, works that make us ponder established relationships between buildings and the city. They are literally blank canvases, free for experimentation.

Interestingly, it seems that British murals only play with this sort of experimentation when they are clearly classified as art. Remember when the Tate Modern had its external walls decorated by world-renowned graffiti artists? A sad moment – street culture appropriated and tamed for the “public good”.

Murals can be playful and humorous – something that architecture (sadly) can never afford to be without being fiercely ridiculed and short-lived.

There is also something quite primordial about murals. In a sense, they evoke the prehistory of art. There are fewer spatial limits or conventions. Real painting indoors is rarely given such an opportunity of endless extension.

Also intriguing is the way murals border on worthlessness – they are temporary and fugitive. They don’t even wait for their hour or stand for an occasion. In most cases even their raison d’être has been forgotten.

Two cities

There are many more urban murals in Paris than in London. They seem to be more of a Latin thing. I wonder why. The climate? Outdoors as indoors? Or a more relaxed planning regime?

Whatever the answer, they say something distinctive about a city: its atmosphere, its residents, and their relationship to the city. Paris is relaxed, still very artisanal and bohemian.

The more murals you make, the better you get. Paris gets all sorts of murals – realistic, abstract, surrealist, monochromatic, three-dimensional …  Trompe l’oeils.

In Paris these murals don’t particularly relate to their context – at least not in the overdetermined way that many London ones do. London murals often try to encapsulate important events and people associated with an area. French murals are more inventive, more artistic, more poetic, and rarely moralistic. They are often bold and witty.

It also appears that in France there is less of a distinction between mural and graffiti – between sanctioned as opposed to illicit wall painting. These two merge – or they were, perhaps, never separated. They nourish one another. That is maybe why Parisian murals are more contemporary, more relevant, and contribute to their city and our enjoyment of it. (One should, however, remember the miles of aggressive and charmless graffiti in the banlieues and along railway lines.)

In other European countries murals also appear much more advanced than what we can see in Britain.

Belonging

There is a multitude of publications on murals in bookshops. What is odd about them, however, is that they show murals as pictures – front-on and close-up.

No city, no buildings, no texture of the wall.

They are, thereby, missing the main point of urban murals: the context, the city, the angles, the light.

Space is intentionally eradicated from those images.  But space is exactly what makes them click in their natural habitat. These books are attempting to turn murals into the wrong kind of art objects – art that belongs in galleries or within the pantheon of “art”.

Architecture

Can architects do anything to encourage murals? Or would that be a patronising gesture, better avoided?  Maybe murals are at their best when spontaneous.

Though maybe the recent architectural fashion of endless patterned facades springs from architects’ dreams of being urban artists.