Claim To Space

If you want to see the guts of a city, look to its alleyways. Peek around its corners and mind the stoops of its apartment buildings. Ride on its transit, look at its railcars. It’s in these places that seem unimportant or mundane that street art speaks volumes. Not the bright, beautiful, meticulous art that has the luxury of production during daylight, or the hyper-modern neons atop preserved heritage buildings—the unsanctioned stuff. In Vancouver, between the unequal distribution of wealth and faltering public services, and underneath the glossiness of city-approved murals, unsanctioned street art functions as a crucial marker of time and place, maybe now more than ever.

This is not evident anywhere more than it is in the Downtown Eastside, where artists and locals armed with spray paint can make a physical mark on the areas they inhabit—a brightly coloured and illegal claim to space. Unsanctioned street art is a record of who, where, what, and why— an indexical self-portrait of people with stories but no platform. Where the transition from Gastown melds into the drug-addled and badly impoverished DTES in the span of one block, tags and street art are often more permanent than residents, but exist to drive home one message: I was here.

Given its usually sudden and unforeseen appearance, unsanctioned street art surprises the unsuspecting commuter into participation. As artist or as witness, street art draws everyone into the narrative of conflict—once you’ve seen a cry for help or a wry commentary on gentrification, you can’t unsee it. Your recognition of the words or image makes it real, and the shared understanding of the space expands person by person, day by day. This is important in a city like Vancouver, where big rocks are regularly placed outside retail shops so people can’t sleep there—where public space is becoming increasingly inaccessible for the underprivileged, and the underprivileged are becoming increasingly underserved. Street art creates a shared knowledge of the city in a grassroots, counter-cultural narrative, like a new map. It diversifies the vocabulary through which we can discuss the conflicts that plague the city presently, like homelessness and the opioid crisis.

There are two kinds of street art that are often conflated into one picture of artistic democracy. There are the unsanctioned works, like the graffiti and clever stencil pieces that appear overnight; and then there is sanctioned street art, commissioned by the city, festivals, or businesses to add colour to drab, bare walls. When considering street art and how it functions, this difference is important—because one is a tool of counterculture and space-making in a city where public space is increasingly unavailable, and the other is a tool that co-opts a presumably democratic medium—the street—to expand an image of community-building that often effaces the grittiest neighbourhood conflicts.

What does it mean when public initiatives harness the medium of street art and the aesthetic of graffiti with funding from the city? It’s a bit like sticking a Banksy in a museum—it’ll bring people in, but it is so ironic it’s almost painful. The works are beautiful, and they elevate their surroundings, invigorating dark neighbourhoods with life and colour. These initiatives also re-map the city and its districts, but this is different from the mapping done by people whose communities have, for instance, been decimated by fentanyl.

This city-sanctioned map belongs to people that didn’t popularize graffiti as a tool of rebellion and revolution in New York in the 1970s, and they don’t use it to prove their existence in impoverished neighbourhoods. These works are the ones on lists titled “The Prettiest Walls + Street Art In Vancouver.” This is not to say, of course, that city-funded art is not worthy or valuable, but it is to say that we mustn’t conflate the two. Graffiti and street art is democratic because of the low barrier to entry, and at present, Vancouver is commodifying it like it has everything else.

By nature, unsanctioned street art is a fixture of democratic expression. If the streets are where humanity is reflected back to us unfiltered, street art organizes (and adds to) the chaos, like the wall text of a particularly overwhelming art installation. Street art is the manifestation of conflict, a marker of time and place at the edge of an alley that calls, “I lived here once” to passersby—because without those reminders, we are likely to forget.

Street artists—classically trained or otherwise—colour the city for what it is: a place of inequality, violence, pain, and the possibility of improvement. But while several crises rage rampant in very tangible ways on the streets every day, unsanctioned street art remains an anchor in reality. You can’t avert your eyes from something you’re not expecting.

GIVEN ITS USUALLY SUDDEN AND UNFORESEEN APPEARANCE, UNSANCTIONED STREET ART SURPRISES THE UNSUSPECTING COMMUTER INTO PARTICIPATION.

WORDS BY MEGAN JENKINS PHOTOGRAPHY BY FLORY HUANG