Art on the streets

Let’s say this for the record: the Wel­ling­tonista hates tag­ging. It’s just an inane and ter­rit­ori­al fury of poodle-piss­ings scrawled around the town sig­ni­fy­ing noth­ing but a ter­ri­fy­ing lack of ima­gin­a­tion on the part of the tag­ger.

That said, there’s more to the world of graf­fiti than tags. And at some point graf­fiti changes from mind­less and wan­ton prop­erty dam­age into ART, some­where across bound­ar­ies as ragged and ill-defined and debat­able as any cul­tur­al war­zone. Around cent­ral Wel­ling­ton, it’s all there to be dis­covered and mapped, tucked away in the alleys and byways of Te Aro mainly, but also scattered around the wider inner city.

Paint­ings:

There are not too many places in town where graf­fit­ists get to work undis­turbed. One such is the Left Bank Gal­lery, an alley­way on the north­ern side of Ghuznee Street oppos­ite Glover park lead­ing to the Left Bank. After it was painted over for a film shoot sev­er­al months ago reg­u­lar observ­ers of the space have been wait­ing for some new art to appear. And it has, in par­tic­u­lar over this last week­end where some spec­tac­u­lar new pieces have been painted.

…stencils:

Sten­cils are a favour­ite around Wel­ling­ton, and can range from amus­ing and bril­liant (such as the above) to merely ama­teur­ish. The zom­bie queen was com­mon about 12 months ago, but has slowly become harder to find: street art has a half-life of its own.

…pasteups:

This writer likes paste-ups espe­cially for their imper­man­ence – paper and wheat-paste don’t last forever; and of course if the prop­erty-own­er objects they’re easi­er to get rid of than paint or pen. But aside from such middle-class con­cerns, the form allows the artist to pro­duce quite detailed work before­hand, redu­cing the time needed to apply the work. And so we can find pas­teups like this even in the suity and well-lit parts of the city, with this example being on Lamb­ton Quay until recently (its place is now taken by this).

…and yes, just to contradict ourselves, even some marker pen drawings that could really be called tags, especially if it’s your wall that’s been drawn on:

Luck­ily, not all loc­al tag­gers use the hip-hop style – many have derived their own char­ac­ter-driv­en styles. There are a good hand­ful of these more inter­est­ing tag­gers about town.

All these are an eph­em­er­al part of the city’s secret art life, and worthy of dis­cus­sion and doc­u­ment­a­tion. So keep your eyes open, become famil­i­ar with names about town like Neonate, Dryp­NZ, Mephisto Jones and Yel­lar, and report your find­ings to the Wel­ling­ton Streetart Flickr Pool.