Colston’s fall was good, but was it Art?
Today I went to visit the stump (as I have decided to call it) where the statue of slave trader Edward Colston stood in Bristol centre up until two days ago. There was a group of people who’d clearly come to see the result of history being made, including a group of men in Black Lives Matter tshirts filming (one of them got on the stump and started MCing but we couldn’t hear him). There were also several people who had brought their young children to witness, which was really beautiful.
We made the walk down to the harbour following the route Colston was dragged (we could see the marks left on the flagstones) to the site where he was chucked into the water. I was disappointed to see no one had made a fake blue plaque to mark the spot, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.
As I did this I was thinking about issues around public space, public art and the visual culture of our cities (as an art history student and a massive geek it’s kind of inevitable). As I said in the post I wrote the other day, the people banging on about how it was criminal damage and therefore bad are ignoring the fact that much of Bristol’s cool reputation, and tourist industry comes from street art, which is also criminal damage. Hell, Banksy is probably the most famous Bristolian ever, and his entire career is based on criminal damage.
Of course whether or not some painting on a public wall is considered to have artistic value as “street art” or to be criminal damage as “graffiti” is dependent on whether the piece can be considered to have value to the person naming it. My experience in Bristol is that local authorities will celebrate what they call “street art” when it can be used to bring kudos (and tourist revenue) to the city, but call the same thing “graffiti” when they need to get rid of it to show they are in control of a space.
Recently the site known as the Bearpit, which had been made a “community action zone” under the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft, was declared a “failed experiment” and should come back under control of the council, the demands for change always involved painting over the large amounts of “graffiti” in the space. This seems strange because the problems in the space were violence and drug use, neither of which have anything to do with paintings on the wall. So what is that all about?
People from all sides of the argument said that the painting made it feel like the space wasn’t under control of authorities. Of course whether you see this as a good or bad thing, whether it makes you feel free or afraid, really depends on your relationship with those authorities.
We’ve very starkly seen in recent times why many people would feel good about a space that doesn’t feel under control of the authorities, whether it actually is or not.
Street art had been officially allowed in the Bearpit and it had become an outdoor gallery with beautiful and ever changing murals on every surface and even a few sculptures, but once it was taken back all installations were removed and all surfaces painted grey. The hub of publicly accessible art had disappeared.
So why did I go on this tangent about street art in a story that’s supposed to be about the Colston statue? Well apart from the fact that I wrote an essay on it in my masters degree (EDIT: you can now read it here!), I feel like it highlights some interesting questions around what is considered “art” and “vandalism” and why. You often hear people say “that’s not art, that’s shit/illegal/immoral/etc”, but the real question is why can’t something be all of those things? Why does something have to be good, legal or moral to be considered art?
The only reason for this would be snobbery about what “art” is and does, that an object or act is only worthy of that classification if it’s deemed worthy. Also, by association, someone can only call themselves an “artist” if they’re similarly deemed worthy. My official stance on this as an art historian is that this is bullshit. Art is something that’s made by an artist, and an artist is someone who makes art. Yes it’s circular, fuck you.
Actually I would say this isn’t the entire truth — Art is also anything a culture decides is Art. There are lots of cases of objects being designated as Art who’s makers never considered themselves an artist. One example I also wrote about for my masters degree is American Folk Art, where objects like duck decoys, weather vanes and shop signs are exhibited in art galleries, giving them the “aura” of Art.
The purpose of this was to present the early colonisers as inherently “Modern”, and so deserving of the land they occupied. The category of “American Folk Art” was first created in the 1930s at a time when artistic movements like Cubism were celebrating work that was less realistic and more rustic.
They took a lot of inspiration from African sculpture (which they disgustingly called “primitive”), yet refused to classify it as “art” in the same way as they did their own work. But galleries in the US (particularly the New York MOMA) realised they could capitalise on artistic trends to big up their white ancestors, and the United States in general (note that you will never see native american work in an American Folk Art exhibition, though you will see plenty of romanticised images of “Indians”)
Recently people have started using the term “visual culture” to side step the need to address the whole “what is art” thing. Visual culture includes everything from design to fine art to individual style, even to things like food presentation. In my opinion visual culture is a much more useful and interesting term, mainly because it avoids all that elitist art bollocks.
And of course visual culture also refers to our public spaces.
Street art allows the people who inhabit a space to make decisions for themselves about the visual culture of that space. Through it urban landscapes become collaborative conversations between the people who inhabit them. So really how was bringing down the statue of Colston any different from this? This was a grand gesture which has altered the visual culture of the city. You could say it’s not art because it involved an object’s removal, but plenty of artists understand the value of negative space.
The act was very obviously meticulously planned out for the greatest visual impact, as it was dragged to a spot next to Pero’s bridge (named after a slave who lived in Bristol) that allowed the most people to witness the act. Almost like a piece of performance art.
As I’ve shown here an intrinsic part of the history of art is how authorities have designated various gestures as “art” or “not art” for political goals. So this is my argument that we declare the removal and disposal of the statue, the placement of the placards around the Stump, and all associated images and video as a fantastic piece of political street art, worthy of the great masters and deserving of preservation.
