Whose side is the wall on?

Does this wall support the political statements it is making? And the more radical question: is this wall for or against people?

I thought of this question last night at the Collingwood Yards after the book launch of Sabina Andron’s Urban Surfaces, Graffiti and the Right to the City. At the launch, Andron tried to get people to think of questions to ask about a wall in the city.

As I left, I stopped at the wall to photograph a poster advertising her book. Someone had written “Free Palestine” in some white space on the poster. It was only then that I thought of my questions.

Not all walls are supporting, but almost all exterior walls are load-bearing. Walls support paint, graffiti, posters, and other materials that accumulate on their surface, just as canvas, wood, or paper might support other art.

Walls are used to exclude—who is in and out. Politically significant walls of separation, the Berlin Wall and Israel’s illegal wall in the occupied West Bank, are also famous sites for graffiti. The graffiti on these authoritarian walls points out that the more the wall is used to exclude, the less control there is of the other side. Ultimately, with both these walls, the wall builders created a surface that supported their opponent. This irony adds more quality to the work on these walls.

This is also true of graffiti on rail systems’ rolling stock and infrastructure. Melbourne’s public transport does not officially support graffiti; it works hard to prevent it, but it has provided many supports for it. Trains and the concrete sides of train tracks have been traditional supports for graffiti. Now, the pillars of the elevated railway tracks are used as surfaces for the urgent messages of radical graffiti and tagging. “Stolen Land”, “Genocide on your watch”, “Free Palestine”

State Premier Jacinta Allan would disagree with messages sprayed on the pillars, but she gave the city these new surfaces. The regular buffing of the pillars doesn’t discourage determined people from spreading a message to the hundreds of people who use the path for walking or cycling. The buffing discourages serious graffiti writers and street artists who don’t want their hard work removed, so none of the quality work associated with Melbourne’s street art exists on either side of the rail corridor pathway.

This is not a book review; I’ve only started reading Andron’s book. In chapter one, she is still laying the groundwork, explaining the semiotics of the city and how her approach differs in that she reads the signs rather than reading the space as a sign… Still, her idea of interrogating walls in the city is inspiring.

Melbourne Street Art January 2024

Like a nurse checking on a patient, I feel obliged to check in on Hosier Lane. The prognosis is gloomy for Melbourne’s famous street art lane, although the crowds of tourists are still visiting for a photo opportunity. They don’t care if pieces are tagged over; the grittier, the better. (If they want to keep the quality, the City of Melbourne and Culture Kings should pay Movida to serve tapas and drinks to a select list of artists to paint whenever and whatever they want to paint the lane.)

Hosier Lane hasn’t improved in years, but this Monday, I was surprised as the lane was full of fans, mostly young women, cueing up right around the block to the Forum for the Gracie Abrams concert. I’ve never seen anything like it, a line of people seated on one side of the lane.

I’m looking around at the other side of the lane, and a woman asks me: “Where is the Banksy?” I have to tell her that the Banksy is no longer. It was removed by council workers back in 2010, and unfortunately, there are no more Banksys in Melbourne.

I recommended that she see AC/DC Lane/Duckboard Place, where there also used to be a Banksy. AC/DC Lane/Duckboard Place is a horseshoe access lane generally blocked with bollards. It is a few laneways up from Hosier Lane, and there is still some quality street art in Melbourne. Some of these pieces in AC/DC lane are over a decade old, older than recent additions of windows to the building where the Cherry Bar used to be. Others are as fresh as milk.

Drasko, Untitled, 2024

On the tarmac of Duckboard Place, some spectacular Drasko stencils appear to rise from the surface. Drasko also has some classical-influenced low-relief sculptures cut into foam on the wall around Makatron’s figure of Bon Scott.

Rick Doyer, Untitled

Other recent sculptural additions to the lane were pieces by Rick Doyer; these colourful, three-dimensional, funky creations are high up on the walls. They look similar to the work he exhibited at Rubicon ARI in 2022, but I can’t be sure as I didn’t see his exhibition.

I was amused to see what appeared to be some paste-ups by primary school students from some school’s year six camp. Of course, their art has just as much right to up in the lane as Vale’s stencil.

Vale, Aboriginal Lives Matter

So if you want to see some of the best of Melbourne’s street art, murals, and paste-ups (no, not your letter-form graffiti, you will have to go further out of the city for that, nor your social media angel wings), then walk a few metres uphill to AC/DC Lane.

I was at AC/DC lane to meet architectural historian and urban scholar Sabina Andron, whose book has just been published by Routledge: Urban Surfaces, Graffiti and the Right to the City – Space, Materiality and the Normative (2023). Also, see her blog, especially her manifesto: “The right to the surface is the right to the city“. One doesn’t see many manifestos or blogs around now.