An unusual anniversary passed without much notice this week, not that many would have wanted to celebrate it in the first place. This week marked five years since a large piece of bright yellow graffiti spelling out the name CAZOR appeared on the side of an historic building in the middle of downtown Wichita. The bubble letters, called a throw-up by graffiti writers, are elevated about twenty feet from the sidewalk–the writer would have been standing on the roof of a local jewelry store when they painted it. It’s not a subtle placement, clearly visible from a car driving along the city’s main drag, which makes the fact of its longevity even more surprising given most municipalities’ extreme aversion to graffiti, especially where the bankers can see it.
This is not to suggest that bankers don’t want to see art, in general. One local bank, Emprise Bank, boasts of the art collection it has sequestered away in its vaults: “The Art of Emprise collection includes more than 3,400 works by over 870 artists, almost all of whom have ties to Kansas.” And, Downtown Wichita–a quasi-public economic development cabal–has supported a few public art initiatives with the aim of attracting businesses and customers to the city’s core, including an outdoor installation called “Gallery Alley”, which features sculpture installed in a repurposed alley, and sticking with the theme, “Alley Doors”, which enlists local talent to create artistic vinyl applications that are then adhered to the back or side entrances of downtown businesses.
The Downtown Wichita projects advance the civic development concept of “placemaking”. First coined in the 1970s, the concept has found traction in Wichita just in the last few years, becoming both a container for all manner of projects that don’t have much to do with the loftier aspirations of the term, and a vehicle for implementing otherwise banal development with a promise of place, and all that comes with it.
This can create awkward encounters, specifically in the case of the Alley Door project, where sanctioned art literally runs up against the graffiti art that inhabits the alleys. And, of course the art is also a metaphor for the awkward (and sometimes devastating) encounters that actually happen between ways of life when “placemaking” comes to town. Adherents to the principles of placemaking will highlight the need for development in so-called underutilized spaces, but even that term is not devoid of contention. Behind every wild scrawl on the wall is a person who uses those alleys for travel, security, to avoid surveillance, to do crimes or to avoid people who do crimes, as a shortcut or shady path; a hundred more reasons. Behind every vinyl application is an artist making money on a paid gig, a business owner with a marketing plan, and a municipal economic logic that doesn’t want feral art or nomadic people anywhere in view, alley or not. What particular utilizations of space count or do not is precisely what is at stake.
The artists and businesses in the alley door project have bios and websites listed on the Downtown Wichita page. CAZOR does not. For most people, even if they notice the large piece downtown, they won’t have noticed the calling cards that span the city, the drippy tags on utility boxes and lampposts, or the large, colorful murals that appear under bridges along the drainage canal below the elevated highway bisecting the city. Graffiti writers trade the disclosure of legal work–the gallery card, the website link–for something more visceral, a sensation contained within the act itself, for which the graffiti writer is or becomes the audience. Those of us who see the tags in the light of day are merely bystanders.
For all the participatory rhetoric of the placemaking movement, the public often quickly finds itself again in a bystander role as budgets, deadlines and the priorities of capital take over the actual making of any particular place. We’ve seen this play out in the redevelopment of two parks neighboring CAZOR’s piece, Naftzger Park and Chester I Lewis park. In each case, the aspirational redesigns eventually succumbed to a whittling away of those features that were intended to make these public spaces habitable: mature trees were replaced by saplings, covered bus stops replaced by minimal shelters, grass replaced by astroturf. The promises of place are always subsumed by the “realities” (read: “demands”) of the market.
The question running through all of this is “who has a right to the city?”, or maybe more precisely, “who has a right to interact with and alter the city image, and to what ends?” The two camps described here may seem opposed along obvious lines: the rebellious individualism of the vandal pitted against the collective bureaucratic body of the economic city. We can draw out useful complications, however, when we remember that graffiti–in the form most of us understand it in today–emerged as a community response to the wholesale abandonment of inner cities by municipal governments; writers often formed crews or gangs that represented a community voice, and rivaled executive boardrooms in size if not in influence. Conversely, the eco-dev institutions that fuel the engine for sanctioned development often deploy “community feedback” as a facade that obscures singular, predetermined outcomes that benefit capital first of all–the promise of trickle-down economics has never been sufficiently eradicated from our civic improvement toolbox.
When the CAZOR piece is finally removed, as it inevitably will be, it will likely be without fanfare, leaving the wall as quietly as it arrived. Another piece may take its place. A new crop of surveillance cameras may spring forth, in an effort to dampen the aspirations of future writers. For now, the piece continues to serve as a quiet reminder that there are other imperatives at work within our city; it is a crack in the wall just barely letting light from the outside in, illuminating the street below to the possibilities of new worlds and the capacity within each of us to enact them. The bankers may yet completely make this place. But for now, for CAZOR and the rest of us, it is home.
concept machine 