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Murals in architecture Vandalism / Art

Fig. 1 - E.1027 interior mural

Olivia Balan MArch 1508467

Table of contents

List of figures

Introduction Contextualisation and literature review Blu. The protest of an artist Banksy. Fighting the commercialism of his art Le Corbusier. Commissioned mural Le Corbusier. Vandalising E.1027 Conclusion Bibliography

List of figures 1. Cover photo - Le Corbusier, ‘E.1027 interior mural’, Available from: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/67/b9/16/67b916c0d94716c94de34300f9c58165.jpg [Accessed 20 May 2016] 2. Banksy, ‘Boring’, Available from: http://banksy.co.uk/out.asp [Accessed 20 May 2016] 3. Blu, ‘Mural in Kreuzberg’, Available from: http://www.americansforthearts.org/news-room/art-in-the-news/original-artists-paint-over-twoof-berlins-most-famous-murals [Accessed 20 May 2016] 4. Blu, ‘Painting over the mural in Kreuzberg’, Available from: http:// www.americansforthearts.org/news-room/art-in-the-news/original-artists-paint-over-two-of-berlins-most-famous-murals [Accessed 20 May 2016] 5. Blu, ‘Black wash over the mural in Kreuzberg’, Available from: http:// www.americansforthearts.org/news-room/art-in-the-news/original-artists-paint-over-two-of-berlins-most-famous-murals [Accessed 20 May 2016] 6. Banksy, ‘Gallery’, Available from: http://banksy.co.uk/out.asp [Accessed 20 May 2016] 7. Banksy, ‘Cleaning’, Available from: http://banksy.co.uk/out.asp [Accessed 20 May 2016] 8. Banksy, ‘Elephant’, Available from: http://banksy.co.uk/out.asp [Accessed 20 May 2016] 9. Le Corbusier, ‘Pavillon Suisse exterior’, Available from: http://images.adsttc.com/media/images/515f/c8a0/b3fc/4bc5/2600/0205/ large_jpg/le-corbusier-france-paris-pavilion-suisse-06-samuel-ludwig. jpg?1365231774 [Accessed 20 May 2016] 10. Le Corbusier, ‘Pavillon Suisse mural’, Available from: https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/409053578627999287/ [Accessed 20 May 2016] 11. Eileen Gray, ‘E.1027 view from the sea’, Available from: http:// www.agentofstyle.com/2014/02/10/the-price-of-desire-featuring-eileen-gray-le-corbusier-villa-e-1027/ [Accessed 20 May 2016] 12. Le Corbusier, ‘Mural in E.1027’, Available from: http://www.agentofstyle.com/2014/02/10/the-price-of-desire-featuring-eileen-gray-lecorbusier-villa-e-1027/ [Accessed 20 May 2016] 13. Eileen Gray, ‘E.1027 close-up’, Available from: http://www.agentofstyle.com/2014/02/10/the-price-of-desire-featuring-eileen-gray-le-corbusier-villa-e-1027/ [Accessed 20 May 2016] 14. Eileen Gray, ‘E.1027 interior’, Available from: http://www.agentofstyle.com/2014/02/10/the-price-of-desire-featuring-eileen-gray-le-corbusier-villa-e-1027/ [Accessed 20 May 2016] 15. Banksy, ‘The joy of not being sold anything’, Available from: http:// banksy.co.uk/out.asp [Accessed 20 May 2016]

Introduction

In this essay I ventured into finding the relation between the idealistic notion of art being a creative expression of beauty and emotion, and the more practical use of art, the kind that stems from needs and purposes other than expressing oneself. In trying to identify whether these two notions are mutually exclusive or inclusive, and in what way, I studied a few pop artists, street artists, from different times and places, such as Richard Hamilton, Andy Warhol, Banksy, Keith Haring, Sheperd Fairey, while also looking into Atlas of emotion, by Giuliana Bruno, and her view on the emotional journeys in art, architecture and film.

When does making art stop being about beauty and emotional power and starts slipping into consumerism? And does that commercial drive that brings art to light actually diminish its beauty or power? Chekhov and Dickens wrote for money, just as Warhol and the Eames turned their creativity into profit. Arguably, the sole price of a piece of art should not be of too much relevance to its subjective ever-changing artistic intrinsic value. Some street artists however, feel very strongly that their work, and that of their peers, would only make a statement and reach its intended audience if it remains untouched by financial gain.

As quite possibly the most common popular art form in existence today, this contemporary aesthetic practice has taken numerous different physical forms (from apparently ‘vandalistic’ tagging to ostensibly ‘artistic’ muralism).

(Schacter and Fekner, 2013, p. 9)

Contextualisation and literature review What gives a piece of art its attribute of being art? Who has the authority to decide what qualifies as art or a poor imitation of a certain style or plain uninspiring? Is it the author himself, his or her peers, art critics, or the general public? Is its value decided by how much effort was put into it, how lengthy and complicated the thought process was, how easy it reaches the audience or the emotional reactions it stirs?

The reasons and ways in which an idea materializes into a piece of work or art can vary from financial pursue to the creative itch, from using it as therapy to trying to striving for acceptance or recognition. Similarly, the ways in which the same object engages people are very different, and they are not solely dependent on each individual’s personal interpretation of it, but rather they are wired to the context in which it was revealed, time, place, other people’s opinions of it, and so on.

Take for instance a mural on a public building - it can add or reduce the value of the building, regardless of whether the mural was commissioned or not, but depending on the public’s reaction to it. In one case study I am going to analyze one such situation, where the reactions were split, and the majority decided the fate and meaning of a mural - a decision so strong, that even after the death of both the architect and the painter and surfacing evidence of the mural actually being vandalism, it still persists.

In another instance, a mural can be an intentional, integral part of an architectural symbol, it can add value to the general outlook of the building and even increase its market price. Since this is the result of the muralists’ fame, such changes in architecture are subject to the rather unpredictable, manipulated or very aware, fleeting opinions of the general public.

Fig. 2 - Boring

This essay questions the status of such murals in relation to architecture and aims to bring into focus some overlooked aspects going into the appreciation of a mural and its impact in architecture. Although the understanding of art in general, and of murals in particular, will always be a highly subjective and emotional one, this essay sets out to prove there is still room for a more skeptical and critical analysis.

Blu. The protest of an artist.

This is the case of Italian street artist Blu, who decided his large graffiti wall in Kreuzberg, Berlin, was not to be made the tourist attraction of the neighborhood, when plans for building a hotel overlooking the wall were set in motion. Therefore, in an idealistic Fountainhead manner, he painted over it in black.

The two murals they painted over were often referred to as Berlin’s most iconic street art. Since then, the German capital has been full of speculation as to who did this and why. Many assumed that property developers had killed off their beloved mural, and few realised that the people behind it were the ones who created it in the first place.

Seven years after the monumental wall pieces came into being, they felt it was time for them to vanish, along with the fading era in Berlin’s history that they represented. The story of the mural is directly linked to the history of this district of the city, which used to border directly on to East Germany.

The first piece, a collaboration between Blu and French artist JR, depicts two figures in the act of unmasking each other, showing the “east side” and “west side” gang signs. In 2008, the artists added a second mural on a wall next to them: a businessman chained by his golden watches.

These pieces boldly claimed worldwide attention, becoming what Siegfried Kracauer in 1930 described as Raumbilder: unconsciously produced spatial images, which are the “dreams of society”.

Fig. 3 - Mural in Kreuz

zberg

Fig. 4 - Painting over Unintentionally, they had created an ideal visual representation of the imaginary Berlin of the naughtiest and its promises: a city full of wasteland offering plenty of space for affordable living and creative experimentation among the ruins of its recent history.

These features became the main attractions and the mantra of the recently departed mayor Klaus Wowereit’s notorious “poor but sexy” Berlin. The murals took their involuntary place in this reality as a pilgrimage site of guided street art tours, as a photo opportunity for countless greeting cards, book covers and record sleeves. The city started to use the aesthetics of resistance for its marketing campaigns.

But by this time the neighbourhood had already found itself in the thick of gentrification, with fierce protests against rising rents. And of course art – especially highly visible public artcontributes to this process.

While Berlin on the one hand prides itself on its art scene, its failed urban development and cultural policy squandered much of the city’s rare spatial potential, and thereby also jeopardised the existence of its main attraction – the artists.

They found themselves to be their own biggest enemies, contributing to their own displacement.

Gentrification in Berlin lately doesn’t content itself with destroying creative spaces. Because it needs its artistic brand to remain attractive, it tends to artificially reanimate the creativity it has displaced, thus producing an “undead city”.

This zombification is threatening to turn Berlin into a museum city of veneers, the “art scene” preserved as an amusement park for those who can afford the rising rents.

Still, why would an artist agree to destroy his own work instead of endorsing official attempts to preserve it as a public work of art? Out of despair? Clearly not. Rather out of sorrow. From the first moment of their existence, Blu’s murals were doomed to disappear. It is the nature of street art to occupy space in celebration of its uncertainty, being aware of its temporality and fleeting existence.

Fig. 5 - Black wash o

r the mural in Kreuzberg

over the mural in Kreuzberg

Fig. 6 - Gallery

Banksy. Fighting the commercialism of his art.

‘The art world is the biggest joke going. It’s a rest home for the over privileged, the pretentious, and the weak. And modern art is a disgrace - never have so many people used so much stuff and taken so long to say so little.’

(Banksy, n.d.)

Another artist on the forefront of anti-consumerism is the more prominent British enigma, Banksy, who, in 2007, updated his website with an image of an auction house, with the people in the room bidding on a picture with a written message expressing his surprise about how anyone can spend money on what he thinks so little of - so called art pieces - albeit his art.

Over the years, Banksy has continued to make his feeling on the commercialism of his art exceedingly clear. He calls galleries that sell his work “unauthorized”, and used to be represented instead by The Pest Control Office, which was, in effect, another extension of the artist’s darkly humorous manifesto. The simple website informs owners, anxious to authenticate and sell their freshly excavated and exceedingly valuable Banksy treasures, that the authentication process is ‘lengthy and challenging’, as many pieces ‘are created in an advanced state of intoxication.’ As for legitimately buying a work from the artist – forget about it. Pest Control states that there is currently ‘something/nothing available.’ (Pest Control Office, n.d.)

Now granted, Banksy is not in need of money, unlike many of the street artists he identifies with. He is estimated to have a net worth upwards of $20 million, and recently discussed the internal struggle of profiting from his artwork with the Village Voice, stating that ‘commercial success is a mark of failure for a graffiti artist.’ Many call him a sell-out, however, if it were not for his early (and very profitable) successes, he would not have the financial freedom to use his artwork and notoriety to get his point of view across.

Fig. 7 - Cleaning

Take the water tank on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, overlooking the Pacific Coast Highway outside of LA. Thinking the old tank was abandoned, Banksy painted a caption on the side of it ‘This Looks A Bit Like An Elephant’, and instantly turned it into a tourist attraction and a potential money-maker for two owners of a media design firm that bought the tank from the city of LA with plans to remove and sell it. There was just one complication – the homeless man, Tachowa Covington, who had been living inside of it for seven years and suddenly had his home destroyed.

Banksy heard about the situation, and within hours had reached out to Covington, giving him enough money to get an apartment and support himself for an entire year. This was not enough for the artist. He went on to remove the water tank from his website, and refused to authenticate it for the new owners. The result? Instead of a profitable sale at auction, the tank ended up in a scrap metal yard.

So, what do you do if you wake up tomorrow morning, the lucky ‘owner’ of Banksy’s latest creation? Congratulations, you are now in the moral dilemma of a lifetime. The mural could sell for well over a million dollars at auction, should you wish to cash in on it. Do you break out the excavator and call Sotheby’s? Do you preserve it for public enjoyment with security guards, metal gates or Plexiglas? Or, you could let it go organically the way of most street art – destroyed by a fresh coat of paint, another street artist with his own vision, or a city employee wielding a buffer.

Banksy has said, ‘Graffiti art has a hard enough life as it is, before you add hedge-fund managers wanting to chop it out and hang it over the fireplace. For the sake of keeping all street art where it belongs, I’d encourage people not to buy anything by anybody, unless it was created for sale in the first place.’

So, we know what Banksy would want you to do. But if you decide to go the other route, before you hire the crane, just remember what Pest Control warned you about: the authentication process is ‘lengthy and challenging’, as many pieces ‘are created in an advanced state of intoxication.’

Fig. 8 - Elephant

Le Corbusier murals - art and/or vandalism

In 1933, with the opening of the Pavillon Suisse, a dormitory for Swiss students in Paris, the President of the Cité universitaire —the community in which the building resided—was appalled by Le Corbusier’s brutalist gesture of leaving the curved rubble wall exposed to the inside of the students’ dining lounge. He directed Le Corbusier to cover it up with pictures, this despite the architect’s adamant opposition to the decorative arts.

Le Corbusier had intended the exposed wall as manifestation of his belief in a direct, honest use of material. He understood the rustication and coloration of the stone as part of a larger palette, a palette that — conspiring with the roughcast concrete ‘legs’ of the building—offered contrast to the ultra-slick block of sleeping rooms.

A traditional French wall, the rubble design had been employed by Le Corbusier to great effect at the Villa de Mandrot a few years earlier. Its carefully construed mortar projected beyond the face of the wall and appeared a veil in front of the stone itself.

In 1933, in the initial years of Great Depression, Le Corbusier could only do as his client directed. His cover up though, would not be of the arts-and-craft kind; rather he would conceal the wall with a photomural.

Fig. 9 - Pavillon Suisse exterior

Together with his partner, Pierre Jeanneret, he composed a mural comprised of 44 ‘new means’ images of nature. The photographs came from Parisian scientists and naturalists and were generally of three kinds: x-ray, microscopic, and aerial views of nature.

There were exceptions, these being centrally located in the photomural and essential to Le Corbusier’s polemic. They showed mass-produced building materials and the Pavillon Suisse itself under construction.

The photomural was a visual polemic, promoting Le Corbusier’s well-honed new vision.

Fig. 10 - Pavillon Suisse mural

Throughout the 1920’s, when objectivity, materialism and machine technology dominated his writings on art and architecture, Le Corbusier was intrigued and delighted with ‘seeing things’ not visible to the unaided eye.

This fascination did not contradict his firm belief in science and rational thinking though. On the contrary, making visible that which could not be seen was both the task and procedure of science then, and the 1920’s and 1930’s were decades in which ‘seeing through things’ and thus unveiling layers of life not visible to the human eye, was a much-celebrated, popular activity.

Le Corbusier was a friend of Jean Badovici and visited the house several times after Badovici and Gray had parted.

While staying as a guest in the house in 1938 and 1939, Le Corbusier painted bright murals on its plain white walls, and sometimes painted in the nude. This intrusion onto her design infuriated Gray, who considered the murals outright vandalism. Whether he painted these murals out of admiration for her work or jealousy of her accomplishment, Le Corbusier became intricately tied with the future of the house. Failing to purchase it himself, he eventually bought a piece of property just east of E-1027, where he built a small, rustic cabin, his Cabanon de vacances. The architecture critic Rowan Moore said of the painting of the murals that ‘As an act of naked phallocracy, Corbusier’s actions are hard to top...’, adding that Le Corbusier was ‘seemingly affronted that a woman could create such a fine work of modernism’ so he ‘asserted his dominion, like a urinating dog, over the territory’. Here he would go for work and quiet contemplation, taking daily swims on the beach outside the house.

After he died in those very waters, the whole area was declared a “Site Moderne,” or “Modern Site,” and deemed an area of cultural and historical importance and international interest. Today, E-1027 is recognized as the founding element of this site. Furthermore, Eileen Gray was so slow at putting her name forward as being the architect of the house that for many years it was assumed by many historians and journalists that Le Corbusier was in fact its designer.

The painting of nine murals on the walls of the Roquebrune house is considered to be nothing more than Le Corbusier’s initial territory marking. Since it was executed without Eileen Gray’s permission, the murals that ‘cover her clear and consciously low-key house with overtly sexual, garish paintings’ represent in her eyes an act of vandalism.

Le Corbusier described his intervention provocatively in L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, May 1948: ‘The walls chosen to receive nine large paintings were the most colorless and insignificant walls.’ Although he observed that the house ‘was very pretty, and it could well have existed without my talents’, Eileen Gray was not mentioned in either the text or captions of the illustrations.

Fig. 11 - E.1027 view from the sea

Fig. 12 - Mural in E.1027

Beatriz Colomina, following Peter Adam’s initial work, has documented the appropriation of Gray’s work by misattribution.

She has written that ‘in subsequent publications the house is described as ‘Maison Badovici’ or credited directly to Badovici’.

For example, the house and its furnishings were credited to Le Corbusier in Interiors, 1948, while assigned to Eileen Gray and Le Corbusier in the Milenese periodical, Casa Vogue, 1981, which also cited a sofa designed by Eileen to Le Corbusier.

For Eileen Gray, who, like Le Corbusier, believed that painting dissolved walls, his was a double refiguration of architecture and authorship and an unforgivable desecration. Lack of respect for another architects’ work and, more fundamentally, ‘the effacement of Gray as an architect’, which the murals represented and constituted, have become a focal point for broader feminist critiques of masculine modernism.

Beatriz Colomina has identified another level of effacement inflicted by Le Corbusier’s murals as told by the woman who bought E.1027 from Badovici’s estate - according to her, Le Corbusier was explaining his friends that Eileen, Badovici and himself were the three characters in one of the murals, while the piece in the middle was the ‘desired child, which was never born.’ This extraordinary scene, a defacement of Gray’s architecture, was perhaps even an effacement of her sexuality, for Gray was openly bisexual, her relationship with Badovici notwithstanding. And in so far as Badovici is here represented as one of three women, the mural may reveal as much as it conceals.

Fig. 13 - E.1027 close-up

Fig. 14 - E.1027 interior

Conclusion

In following the evolution and intertwining between mu architecture, in what is at best a provocative and absorbing ex of what constitutes art, the creative process and the power o triumph over talent, one can rediscover the power of art and arc in everyday life. While Blu and Banksy may be affecting the ma of the buildings they paint on or the neighboring properties, having no apparent authority or direct influence towards this protected by anonymity, a prominent architect on the other become a vandal when painting over another architect’s wor begs the question - when encountering a piece of art, do we r for clues from the crowd for how to feel about it?

The above examples prove that we do. Otherwise Banksy wou for so much and Le Corbusier wouldn’t still get away with an arrogant and disrespectful gesture towards another profess even bigger question might then be - when the interpretation such an intimate and personal act, why is it so easily shadow peers’ interpretation and subsequently by our need of accepta

urals and xploration of hype to chitecture arket price , although s, or even side, can rk. Which really wait

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Fig. 15 - The joy of not being sold anything

Reference List

Bruno, G. (2002). Atlas of emotion. London: Verso.

Benjamin, W. and Underwood, J. (2008). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. London: Penguin.

Read, A. (2000). Architecturally speaking. London: Routledge.

Practices of Art, Architecture and the Everyday, p 150 Schacter, R. and Fekner, J. (n.d.). The world atlas of street art and graffiti.

Pestcontroloffice.com. (2016). Pest Control. [online] Available at: http://www.pestcontroloffice.com/ [Accessed 20 May 2016].

Reed, C. (2005). [Rezension von:] McKellar, Susie; Sparke, Penny: Interior design and identity. - Manchester University Press, 2004 // Martin, Brenda; Sparke, Penny: Women’s places : architecture and design 1860 - 1960. - Routledge, 2003.

Arts University Bournemouth 2016