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Design articles:
Officially mediocre, unofficially awesome
by James McGoram
1 June 2010
There’s a cold wind blasting up the hill from Avondale, and I hunch deeper into my jacket. The street ahead of me glistens in the dark. An occasional car passes to the whir of it’s wiper blades. It’s cold, about 4 degrees and drizzling on this early Monday morning . I mooch my way to the train station, cursing my normally enthusiastic support of public transport. It’s mornings like this I wish I owned a Hummer.
Public transport is not glamorous. Buses and trains do not usually inspire design monologues, but neither are they entirely devoid of art and culture. For example, it’s a regular and pleasant distraction for me, ensconced in my seat on the train, to watch the rich and varied tableau of Graffiti that streams past my carriage. An ever-changing scene, the canvas itself shifts as buildings come, go or are in-vain re-painted.
I love how dynamic it all is, this unauthorised scrawling. Because even though some building owners have given up and do nothing to protect their rear-ward facing walls, others fight on, unaware that each re-paint is also a re-birth, a chance for something new to live in that space. And the space itself is dynamic, aggressive and competitive. It’s art that has to fight it’s way to the surface.
The backs of buildings, particularly commercial ones, are ugly. I spent years studying architecture, and they don’t fill the textbooks with photos of the service entrance. If some disaffected young dude wants to paint his message all over the arse-end of Avondale, I’m (quietly) in support of it. I know that it’s armchair anti-establishment, I know I’m not doing anything rebellious by kinda liking it, but I feel that these guys painted this stuff so that people could look at it, and I’m happy to be one of those people.
On this particular morning, I was mentally running through my material for today’s post. It had nothing to do with graffiti. The night before I’d taken down three pages of notes and references, quotes and ideas. I was prepping for something big, a scathing treatise on the failure of the design community to engage with public sentiment, or something like that. You know the kind of thing. Shit was going to be articulate.
As I sat there, blankly staring at my reflection in the glass ( I do look good in murky reflections,) the train pulled into the new Grafton station. Some of you may not be familiar with the Western Line, but this station is built in an artificial canyon of gleaming white concrete walls. To make it seem a little less, well, oppressive, and to deter potential taggers, the council has hired someone with an old copy of photoshop to create 3 metre high graphics. These run the length of the platform, in two colors; black and vomit-green. They show blurred and grainy images of old Auckland buildings (many of which have been rather ironically knocked down to make room for things like, well, train stations.) They are so fucking ugly that the design-part of my brain literally spasmed when I first saw them.
Seeing them again this morning triggered something anew. Along with a mild nausea, I realised that my qualms about the public attitude toward design should not be focused on the new Super-city logo, but on the real, street level attitude towards art and decoration that lumps us with rubbish like this. This pseudo-decoration, that anyone with a reasonable aptitude with MS Paint could have put together in about 10 minutes, is the officially sanctioned ‘art’ that thousands of passengers have to look at every day. I realised then that I’d be seeing a hell of a lot more of this crappy wall than I would of any new council logo. You want to talk about branding a city? This is where that shit happens, on the wall of a goddamn train station.
A few hundred metres down the line, and the criminal art re-asserts itself. Vibrant and rebellious for sure, but much more than that. In a world where art is temporary and goes through a short life-cycle, with many practitioners vying for attention, you get something biological happening. The art evolves. It gets better and, well, to stretch the analogy a little further, it gets more fit for it’s environment. To put it bluntly, the graffiti down the back of Newmarket would eat the Grafton mural for breakfast, then ask for a double espresso to wash it down (OK, so maybe not an espresso, but something perhaps a little more ’street’.)
For about the next 10 minutes I dwelt on the idea that maybe, although it wasn’t to my taste, the official mural was more appropriate. It was tidier and in-offensive. And perhaps visitors to the city would be less intimidated by it. But I came to realise something; this is all about territory and ownership. It’s not about art, or taste or style. It’s not about ‘tidiness’ or civic pride. It’s about territory. Like a wolf pissing on a rock, or bears gouging a tree, to tag something is to mark your territory, to proclaim your presence against the wishes of others. I saw then that the city could never tolerate giving sanction to this art, except in tidy, neutered snippets, devoid of their natural environment. In the end, the real power of such art is not in it’s isolation, but in it’s juxtaposition with the mediocre mural in the Grafton canyon.
The graffiti is a personal brand for each artist, and a genuine one – suggesting that the official emblem represents those that own buildings rather than paint on them. And as we know, an identity is a hard thing to describe. Nothing I’ve seen in design discussion in recent months resonates with me personally as a symbol of our city. I was born here, and I’ve lived here my entire life, but I don’t have a pohutakawa tree on my front lawn and I don’t own a fucking yacht. So how can we ask so much of design? How can we ask a logo to be a gateway to this vague and unresolved feeling toward a place?
Who knows? And I guess I’m glad that I’m not the one that has to design it.
The train pulls into the smoky cave that is Britomart. I grab my laptop, pull my jacket about me once more and head to the surface. It’s getting light. As I duck for shelter under the eaves of a building, I notice the hoardings around a construction site for a new bank. Words, images and colour are scrawled along it’s length – not painted by a graffiti artist this time, nor printed on a vinyl coating, but carefully arranged by a graphic designer. One such message tells me to watch out for cars, ’cause getting run over hurts. Nice typography, I think to myself, and head off into the city.