You Only Live Once

I wonder if the first early adopter Neanderthal got in kak when they decided to vandalise their community’s cave wall with crude and cumbersome representations of animals and squiggles? I imagine the angsty young Wayne wasn’t satisfied with hurling rocks, and attempting to set fire to things by rubbing sticks together (mental), he wanted to reimagine the space with his so-called art. But, the tribe spoke, Wayne’s vision was akin to destroying the natural beauty, he was told to pack up his materials and grow up, and rumpus time was declared over. It would be aeons before Wayne would be revered as a rock artist.  

Who decided Wayne wasn’t just some juvenile delinquent with a penchant for adrenaline seeking behaviour, but actually an artistic genius who pioneered a movement? What is, after all, art?

I’ve lost count of the occasions walking around a gallery, where some bombastic parent, with a muted pastel crew neck sweater, scoffs about the fact that his son or daughter could do loads better than the artist in question. This dude’s prodigal kid meanwhile, has a sticky lacquer and is busy groping every available artwork and yelling about an imminent snack emergency. Maybe this is performance art? Father and Child: Seen in a Gallery, 2018. 

The perennial question looms, ‘But is it art?’ And our response to this seems to all be in the title, or in the location, or perhaps, it’s all in the frame?

You may be familiar with My Bed. Not my literal bed obviously, this is a family show. My Bed is probably my favourite contemporary example of The Emperor’s New Clothes. And, this is a grandiose claim because for those of you who’ve heard me bleat on before, you’ll know that I am bossies for the Emperor’s clothing metaphor. But stay with me, this is a greatie. My Bed is a 1998 artwork by Tracey Emin, and it is just a dazzling display of how to reframe domestic ineptitude. Watch this space for My Sink, My Laundry Basket, and My Bedroom Chair. I have an overactive imagination and I’ll find a story out of absolutely nothing, but even my propensity to BS my way out of a hat was tested by Tracey’s siff bed. 

Yes, Tracey’s bed is grim. It’s reflective of depression, and a foray into alcohol abuse and using sex as a coping mechanism. Wikipedia nails it by saying, ‘When she looked at the vile, repulsive mess that had accumulated in her room, she suddenly realised what she had created.’ I think the key here is “created”. What a loophole. One woman’s mess, is Charles Saatchi’s next exhibition. And to those parents, and critics, poo-pooing this, Tracey defends herself as a lank trailblazer at the apex of creative genius. Sure your teenager can have a filthy unmade bed, but their failure to exhibit it in a prestigious white-walled gallery is where Tracey’s got the edge. Emin points out, ‘No one had ever done that before.’

That sure is dope Tracey, but is it art?

Is the crux of the matter that art is just about blazing new trails and being the first person to push boundaries a step further than anyone else? Is it by testing the very geography of art? Michael Ondaatje poignantly said, ‘Do you understand the sadness of geography?’ The very fact that geography stifles us is because it draws lines, defines boundaries, and declares borders.

So is something art because of its geography – where it’s placed?

As we understand it, art happens in a space. If tradition is anything to go by, these spaces are white walls owned by white faces. Traditionally, art is art, because it happens in a vacuum. But what does this do to storytelling and expression? Mapping, boundaries, ownership, geography, are prescriptive, and that’s not to say we don’t need structure, of course we do. However, we need to be able to reframe, to break rules, to make a mess. As my legendary English teacher Moira Lovell told me, ‘You can break the rules when you know them.’ 

Is rule breaking the essence then? Is it in understanding the distinction between a morose teen scratching their initials into a desk, using a permanent marker to write E+K 4Eva on a bathroom door, spraying YOLO over an existing piece of street art, or actually understanding how rules can be broken to create order?  

Creating order out of chaos is no mean feat. It’s an exercise in “iconoclashism”. Tension occurs when we observe clashes between cultures, where we change the visual landscape of public space, when we create, react, and respond. In short, it’s when humans move from passivity to interactivity. And it’s in asking questions about whose public space we are cultivating.

The normative happy medium is the reason we have Christmas cracker jokes, beige colour palettes, and elevator music. These “inoffensive” public systems are developed because they’re neutral and therefore no one can take umbrage to them. But what happens if you’re not neutral and are highly offended by panpipes playing Strangers in the Night, or working in a municipal building with yellowing beige walls? Is public life supposed to be moving from one space to the next in a state of catatonic bland liminality. Should we not be engaged in public space?

The theorist Clements highlights the fact that we need to engage with communication and space. We need to look at context and discourse. He observes that a shift happens when art is ‘displayed in public as opposed to hermetically sealed white cube gallery spaces’. When this happens we can change the frame and art can ‘become the central focus for a range of competing discourses.’ Applying this argument, we become better citizens of the world when we are faced with questions, when we encounter struggle, and when we observe clashes. 

The latest clash in Hilton is not just manifesting on election posters (yuck), but it’s being whispered in passing. To be honest I’m surprised Hilton Chat isn’t going gangbusters about it, but I think electricity is occupying most of the bandwidth. Here’s the thing, someone has “vandalised” the community Rainbow Bridge. A woman literally came into the gallery and announced that everyone needs to be angry about this. It’s “unacceptable”. It’s “diabolical”. It’s “not right”.

Jono and I immediately drove to the tunnel to look for the offending graffiti, and I won’t lie I was hoping for more. I was hoping for a rich combustive expletive. Instead I got “YOLO”.

Although well done, is there a more offensively beige phrase than YOLO? Are the millennials trolling us?

Sure, there was a time when YOLO was cool, and for a moment it was akin to saying cowabunga in the early nineties. But, like cowabunga, it was a fart in the wind. Maybe, in a few decades YOLO will be like high waisted jeans and make a comeback?

Ideas and trends spread through innovators and cavalier mavericks who take hold of something and share it with the world. Then early adopters weigh in, paving the way for the masses to climb on board. The masses are what make something go from alternative or counter-culture, to mainstream, and they’re the reason we have fashion and trends. Finally, the trend drops off when the laggards come on board. They’re the very late adopters, usually old folk, and they’re the death knell to something being cool. Close your eyes and remember the first time your mum said YOLO. It was probably the last time you said it. 

So, there Jono and I were, looking at the word YOLO painted over the rainbow. My knee-jerk reaction as a writer was to be offended by YOLO. I wanted better. I wanted poetry in motion. I thought to myself, ‘If people are going to lose their shit over this, it needs to be worth losing their shit over’. Of all the words to choose, they chose “YOLO”.

Jono, however, smirked in a satisfied way, and said, ‘I like how they’ve gone over as many colours of the rainbow as they can which will make it harder for people to fix.’ The artist in him was looking at the big picture. He was changing the frame.

Street art is not hermetically sealed. It’s communal. It’s a changing landscape and a changing story. We can feel nostalgic for what came before it, and we can be sad when things feel like they’ve been ruined. But reframe. Ondaatje explains, ‘We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.’ And I for one am bloody grateful for that, because panpipes suck, and apparently you only live once. And everything changes, even art.