Kritika Verma
This long-read-research article about Street Art- Graffiti in the Indian context brings multi-layer ideas about social life and street art as a context itself. Read the first part of this research article here: Street Art and Graffiti In Indian Public Spaces. Read the Second article: Historical Background of Graffiti and Street Art in India. The third article: The Rise of Street Art
PESTEL Analysis
A PESTEL analysis is an acronym for a tool used to identify the macro (external) forces facing an organisation. The letters are Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental and Legal. This blog will look at what a PESTEL analysis is used for and its advantages and disadvantages in a business setting.
A complete situational analysis is fundamental before implementing any marketing strategy or tactical plan. This analysis should be repeated every six months to identify any changes in the macro-environment. Organisations that successfully monitor and respond to changes in the macro-environment can differentiate from the competition and thus have a competitive advantage over others.
The framework is also used to identify potential threats and weaknesses, which are used in a SWOT Analysis when identifying any business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
Political Factors
These determine how much government and government policy may impact an organisation or a specific industry. This would include political policy and stability and trade, fiscal and taxation policies.
Economic Factors
An economic factor directly impacts the economy and its performance, affecting the organisation and its profitability. Factors include interest rates, employment or unemployment rates, raw material costs and foreign exchange rates.
Social Factors
The focus here is on the social environment and identifying emerging trends. This helps a marketer understand consumer needs and wants in a social setting. Factors include changing family demographics, education levels, cultural trends, attitudes, and lifestyle changes.
Technological Factors
Technological factors consider the technological innovation and development rate that could affect a market or industry. Elements could include digital or mobile technology changes, automation, research and development. There is often a tendency to focus on developments only in digital technology, but consideration must also be given to new distribution, manufacturing and logistics methods.
Environmental Factors
The surrounding environment and the impact of environmental aspects influence environmental factors. With the rise in importance of CSR (Corporate Sustainability Responsibility) and sustainability, this element is central to how organisations conduct their business. Factors include climate, recycling procedures, carbon footprint, waste disposal and sustainability.
This long-read-research article about Street Art- Graffiti in the Indian context brings multi-layer ideas about social life and street art as a context itself. Read the first part of this research article here: Street Art and Graffiti In Indian Public Spaces. Read the Second article: Historical Background of Graffiti and Street Art in India. The third article: The Rise of Street Art
Legal Factors
An organisation must understand what is legal and allowed within its territories. They also must be aware of any legislation change and its impact on business operations. Factors include employment legislation, consumer law, health and safety, and international and trade regulations and restrictions.
Political factors do cross over with legal aspects; however, the critical difference is that political factors are led by government policy, whereas legal elements must be complied with.
How to do a PESTEL Analysis?
There are several steps involved when undertaking a PESTEL analysis. At first, it is essential to get a group of people together from different areas of the business and brainstorm ideas.
Next, you will want to consult and seek the opinions of experts from outside your business. These could be your customers, distributors, suppliers or consultants who know your business well.
The third stage will involve researching and gathering evidence for each insight in your analysis. Then you will want to evaluate and score each item for ‘likelihood’; how likely it is to happen, and ‘impact’; how significance it could have on your business.
The final stage involves refining your ideas and repeating the proofs until you have a manageable number of points in each category.
Advantages and Disadvantages of a PESTEL Analysis
It is an essential analysis tool for any strategist’s toolkit but has some benefits and challenges.
Advantages of a PESTEL Analysis:
- It can provide a warning of potential threats and opportunities.
- It encourages businesses to consider the external environment in which they operate. The analysis can help organisations understand external trends.
Disadvantages of a PESTEL Analysis:
- Many researchers argued that the model’s simplicity is that it is a simple list which is not sufficient and comprehensive.
- The most significant disadvantage of the model is it is only based on an external environment assessment.
Final Thoughts
A PESTEL analysis helps an organisation identify the external forces that could impact their market and analyse how they could directly impact their business. When undertaking such an analysis, the factors affecting the organisation must be identified and assessed – for example, what impact might they have on the organisation? The outcomes can then populate the opportunities and threats in a SWOT analysis.
SWOT analysis
SWOT is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. By definition, Strengths (S) and Weaknesses (W) are considered internal factors over which you have some control. Also, by definition, Opportunities (O) and Threats (T) are external factors you have no control over.
SWOT Analysis is the most renowned tool for audit and analysis of the overall strategic position of the business and its environment. Its essential purpose is to identify the strategies that will create a firm-specific business model that will best align an organisation’s resources and capabilities to the requirements of the environment in which the firm operates.
In other words, it is the foundation for evaluating the internal potential and limitations and the possible/likely opportunities and threats from the external environment. It views all positive and negative factors that affect the success inside and outside the firm. A consistent study of the environment in which the firm operates helps in forecasting/predicting changing trends and also helps in including them in the organisation’s decision-making process.
An overview of the four factors (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) is given below-
1. Strengths – Strengths are the qualities that enable us to accomplish the organisation’s mission. These are the basis on which continued success can be made and continued/sustained.
Strengths can be either tangible or intangible. These are what you are well-versed in or have expertise in, the traits and qualities your employees possess (individually and as a team) and the distinct features that give your organisation its consistency.
Strengths are the beneficial aspects of the organisation or the capabilities of an organisation, which include human competencies, process capabilities, financial resources, products and services, customer goodwill and brand loyalty. Examples of organisational strengths are enormous financial resources, a broad product line, no debt, committed employees, etc.
2. Weaknesses – Weaknesses are the qualities that prevent us from accomplishing our mission and achieving our full potential. These weaknesses deteriorate influences on the organisational success and growth. Weaknesses are the factors which do not meet the standards we feel they should meet.
Weaknesses in an organisation may be depreciating machinery, insufficient research and development facilities, narrow product range, poor decision-making, etc. Weaknesses are controllable. They must be minimised and eliminated. For instance – to overcome obsolete machinery, new machinery can be purchased. Other organisational weaknesses are huge debts, high employee turnover, complex decision-making processes, narrow product range, considerable wastage of raw materials, etc.
3. Opportunities – Opportunities are presented by the environment within which our organisation operates. These arise when an organisation can benefit from environmental conditions to plan and execute strategies that make it more profitable. Organisations can gain a competitive advantage by making use of opportunities.
Organisations should be careful and recognise the opportunities and grasp them whenever they arise—selecting the targets that will best serve the clients. At the same time, getting desired results is a difficult task. Opportunities may arise from market, competition, industry/government and technology. Increasing demand for telecommunications, accompanied by deregulation, is an excellent opportunity for new firms to enter the telecom sector and compete with existing firms for revenue.
4. Threats – Threats arise when conditions in the external environment jeopardise the reliability and profitability of the organisation’s business. They compound the vulnerability when they relate to the weaknesses. Threats are uncontrollable. When a threat comes, stability and survival can be at stake. Examples of threats are – unrest among employees; ever-changing technology; increasing competition leading to excess capacity, price wars and reducing industry profits; etc.
Advantages of SWOT Analysis
SWOT Analysis is instrumental in strategy formulation and selection. It is a vital tool, but it involves a significant subjective element. It is best when used as a guide and not as a prescription. Successful businesses build on their strengths, correct weaknesses, and protect against internal weaknesses and external threats. They also monitor their overall business environment and recognise and exploit new opportunities faster than their competitors.
This long-read-research article about Street Art- Graffiti in the Indian context brings multi-layer ideas about social life and street art as a context itself. Read the first part of this research article here: Street Art and Graffiti In Indian Public Spaces. Read the Second article: Historical Background of Graffiti and Street Art in India. The third article: The Rise of Street Art
SWOT Analysis helps in strategic planning in the following manner-
a. It is a source of information for strategic planning.
b. Builds organisation’s strengths.
c. Reverse its weaknesses.
d. Maximise its response to opportunities.
e. Overcome organisation’s threats.
f. It helps in identifying the core competencies of the firm.
g. It helps in setting objectives for strategic planning.
h. It helps in knowing past, present and future so that by using past and current data, plans can be chalked out.
SWOT Analysis provides information that helps synchronise the firm’s resources and capabilities with the competitive environment in which the firm operates.
SWOT ANALYSIS FRAMEWORK
Limitations of SWOT Analysis
SWOT Analysis is not free from its limitations. It may cause organisations to view circumstances as very simple because of which the organisations might overlook specific key strategic contact which may occur. Moreover, categorising aspects as strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats might be subjective as the market is uncertain. SWOT Analysis stresses the significance of these four aspects, but it does not tell how an organisation can identify these aspects for itself.
Certain limitations of SWOT Analysis are not in management control. These include-
a. Price increase;
b. Inputs/raw materials;
c. Government legislation;
d. Economic environment;
e. Searching for a new market for the product which does not have an overseas market due to import restrictions, etc.
Internal limitations may include the following-
a. Insufficient research and development facilities;
b. Faulty products due to poor quality control;
c. Poor industrial relations;
d. Lack of skilled and efficient labour; etc118
Cities across India are witnessing a thriving graffiti and street art trend that grows daily. From Gender Equality and Climate change and social-political scenarios to human and LGBTQ rights, street art in India straddles themes. It explores subjects that elevate it above, making it more than merely colourful artwork.
Exponential Growth
Public art can be such an intrinsic part of urban life. It can invoke emotions and capture the essence of a city with a few colours and an engaging theme. A token interaction that people from all walks of life can experience; it is about making art accessible to all. A few years ago, street art was more of a novelty, but now, it is having its moment with increasing exposure and numerous pieces cropping up frequently across the country. Graffiti in India, over the last decade, has grown exponentially through large corporations and government funding of intelligent cities. “Being able to paint a unifying image, which strikes a common chord in people, is tough and yet when you do so, it becomes gratifying,” says Delhi-based artist AnpuVarkey. “It is when artists tell their stories on the walls that the power of the streets becomes energising. It is not about going and absurdly painting. You become aware of your surroundings and the people living around you first. It is through their eye that you see your work.”
This long-read-research article about Street Art- Graffiti in the Indian context brings multi-layer ideas about social life and street art as a context itself. Read the first part of this research article here: Street Art and Graffiti In Indian Public Spaces. Read the Second article: Historical Background of Graffiti and Street Art in India. The third article: The Rise of Street Art
Themes Galore
Street art explores various themes and allows the artist to interpret them in their way. It gives a sense of ownership to those residing in the neighbourhood. Recently, in Bengaluru’s Malleshwaram, the ‘Bengaluru Moving’ project curated MalleshwaramHogona! (a series of 12 murals spread across conservancy lanes) in collaboration with GeechuGalu, a collective of artists. A team of 13 artists with the neighbourhood community used this opportunity to create murals uplifting the suburb’s footpaths and streets, ultimately making them safer for women and the local community.
Social Artistry
“Street art is a visual manifestation of the mindset. And considering how it is a form of social commentary, it can act as a catalyst for social changes. But other than that, it is also a way of reclaiming spaces for the people,” says street artist Kiran Mahajan aka H. Her work stands at Block of Lodhi Art District in New Delhi as a mural that comments on our environmental impact. The main topic of the mural was the introduction of non-native fish that have decimated the local fish population of the Yamuna River. It highlights how a simple act like owning and dumping a goldfish can impact the ecosystem.
Making a Mark
As part of its Art X digital series during the first lockdown, Delhi-based Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) sharpened its focus on digital engagement. Its ‘Art Meets Street’ series explored the realm of public art. As an increasingly popular art form often overlooked, it is slowly finding its footing in India. “We were able to engage with some of the leading street artists in India, such as Shilo Shiv Suleman, Hanif Qureshi, AnpuVarkey, Do &Khatra and Kiran Mahajan. By crafting conversations around their creative process and sharing their life experiences, we can learn and familiarise ourselves and our audiences with this art form,” says Kiran Nadar, Chairperson, KNMA. Street art is triggering conversations and impacting public art laws and policies. It is becoming a sustainable profession with more full-time, contemporary artists entering it. “We at St+art India believe in infusing positivity into the community through the spaces we work on. The primary cause St+art India works for is ‘Art for All.’ We aim to improve art education by transcending the constraints of high art kept in gallery and museum spaces. The artists bring the local community together, involving them in the process. After all, we are painting in their communities, and their collective voice is our topmost priority,” says Arjun Bahl, Co-Founder of St+art India Foundation.
The Inclusivity Angle
Most people often miss out on exciting art pieces since these are usually housed in museums and galleries. Street art presents them to the world and is probably the best introduction to the art landscape for anyone from any strata of society. “Art makes you think about something differently or inspires you to create something yourself. It changes how you think and feel about things and could influence your worldview,” says Sahil Arora, founder of Method, a Mumbai-based contemporary art space. Lodhi Colony in Central Delhi always had great potential to become an art district. “We worked with the CPWD and the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, and it took almost one year to secure the required permissions. It has now been renamed Lodhi Art District. We started working there in early 2015, and now there are 60+ walls adorned with the work of artists from around the world. This colony exemplifies how art can be democratic through such initiatives,” says street artist Hanif Qureshi.
The power of urban street art in re-naturing urban imaginations and experiences
Urban street art is a powerful tool for reflecting the urban experience, provoking an engagement of urbanites with their environment, and re-socialising public spaces. Encounters with urban street art within the every day create social interstices, opening up ways of seeing and feeling the world differently, allowing for a creative feedback loop between artist, individual spectator and society. Through the lens of environmentally engaged urban street art, this chapter explores how this artistic and social movement reconnects the natural and social worlds within an increasingly urban existence. By disconnecting from the world around us, we have forgotten the natural and social entanglements that make up the fabric of the urban context, and in doing so, we continue to create irreparable damage to the environment. With environmentally engaged urban street art disrupting the mainstream experience of the urban, the spectator is provided with an alternative vision of the world at play within the everyday setting. As a result, it is proposed that at the crossroads between urban street art and everyday life, the spectator evolves from a passive to an active participant in the contemporary makeup of metropolitan cities. By awakening new understandings and raising consciousness, environmentally engaged urban street art provokes a re-engagement of urbanites with the environment, acting as a catalyst for transformative social change.
This chapter presents an argument in defence of urban street art as an artistic and social movement, exploring its power in repurposing space through experimental interventions. For this chapter, the definition of urban street art has been borrowed from Nicholas Riggle, “an artwork is street art if, and only if, its material use of the street is internal to its meaning”. It involves creativity, anonymity, illegality, longevity and ephemerality, but also elements of performance, gentrification, social activism and placemaking. It is a multifaceted practice of art that engages the spectator, weaving itself into the everyday. The particular focus of this chapter is to explore how environmentally engaged urban street art (ERM- Environmental Resource Management) provokes a re-engagement of urbanites with their environment or, in other words, re-naturing the imagination and experience of the urban. ERM is defined as street art that carries either an environmental message or uses natural mediums to disrupt the mainstream experience of the urban. It is imperative to note that while it is recognised that urban street art is a global phenomenon, this chapter primarily speaks from the narrative of the scenes in India. The ‘spectator’ within this chapter is defined as the individual man or woman moving within the everyday public spaces and structures governing public life. Though sometimes interchangeably used with ‘viewer’, ‘spectator’ is borrowed from Jacques Rancières’ argument of emancipating the spectator from the spectacle.
This long-read-research article about Street Art- Graffiti in the Indian context brings multi-layer ideas about social life and street art as a context itself. Read the first part of this research article here: Street Art and Graffiti In Indian Public Spaces. Read the Second article: Historical Background of Graffiti and Street Art in India. The third article: The Rise of Street Art
This subculture is as rich in the variety of pieces created as in different artists, “indeed there are as many different motivations, styles and approaches within this artistic arena as there are practitioners themselves”. Today, urban street art is a multidimensional hybrid of street art, graffiti and fine art, adapting methods of graffiti and the street in which it is exposed, framed within conceptual ideas. Sculpture, yarn-bombing, stickers, mosaic tiling, chalk, wheat-pasting, wood blocking, and stencils, well as the ever-present spray can, are some of the wide-ranging mediums used to leave messages across some of the world’s most vibrant cities. While this chapter does not have the scope to delve into a historical account of urban street art, it is impossible to address it without acknowledging graffiti. The emergence of urban street art as a cultural practice originates in graffiti from the late 1960s in New York, developing throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s as a form of ‘tagging’. However, while they share similar elements, there are differences in ideology and form. Graffiti is identified as an aesthetic occupation of spaces, whereas urban street art repurposes them. As subcultures challenging the dominant visual culture (an unending stream of advertising, commodity, industrialisation, consumption and alienation), graffiti and street art provide alternatives to this vision. However, they occupy a confusing paradigm, lacking any middle ground between reverence and persecution; street artists were “arrested, fined, subjected to community-based orders, blamed for encouraging social decline, and defined variously as thrill seekers, rebellious youth, or dissatisfied trouble makers”. In almost a schizophrenic frenzy, pieces are either “immediately destroyed or reverently protected; practitioners are either fined and imprisoned or idolised and adored”. Many artists, such as Tyler or Daku, originating from the street scene, have transitioned into the more formal institutionalised art world of galleries and exhibitions. Whether urban street art is condemned or idolised, it has undeniably opened new ways of envisioning and experiencing everyday life’s urban fabric. The visual encounter is changing, considering the multidisciplinary nature of urban street art and the economic, political, and social climates of the urban landscape of the cities where they are. Adopting varied mediums and techniques manipulates the urban space, awakening unconscious repetition. Through this awakening process, if for a brief ephemeral moment, the spectator becomes an active participant, “its relationship to the public via interactivity and the questioning of the spectator remains an essential springboard for the creation of urban street art”.
Since the 1960s, environmental issues have been increasingly exposed, resulting in an urgency to change the level of human impact on the natural environment. However, it could be argued that this urgency has not been communicated successfully enough to provoke the drastic change needed. The resistance to cultural change is difficult to understand when negative human impacts affect the natural environment, threatening it with an uncertain physical, social and economic future. There is a value-action gap between people’s attitudes and behaviours. Environmental movements have been credited with changing people’s attitudes over concern for environmental issues but have failed to alter people’s behaviours in terms of more permanent lifestyle modifications, “despite growing numbers of members in environmental organisations, and despite the considerable fundraising successes of many of these organisations, the natural environment has sustained and continues to sustain significant damage”. For this chapter, transformative social change is defined as raising social consciousness and awareness through environmentally based urban street art on issues encompassed in environmentalism. As a result, I depart from the assumption that people will be more aware of their attitudes and change their current unsustainable lifestyle patterns every day.
This long-read-research article about Street Art- Graffiti in the Indian context brings multi-layer ideas about social life and street art as a context itself. Read the first part of this research article here: Street Art and Graffiti In Indian Public Spaces. Read the Second article: Historical Background of Graffiti and Street Art in India. The third article: The Rise of Street Art
It is complex and naïve to consider environmental issues in isolation to social, political or even economic layers, and it is even more so to consider the urban context utterly separate from the rural. Since 2008, most of India’s population has lived in urban cities (Population Foundation of India); resources to run these are produced in the rural and redistributed within the urban, both locally and globally. Life can change irrevocably amid these complexities, and to observe only a segment of these linkages is to ignore their evolving role. As India continues to urbanise, cities become more complex. Urban street art plays a vital role in exploring the cultural, societal and behavioural shifts, deconstructing and reconstructing urban society’s relationships, power dynamics and social makeup. Social, political, economic, environmental, cultural and art connections are revealed as it gains more recognition locally and globally. To view contemporary urban cities as homogenous ignores these human and nonhuman connections. An essential aspect of urban street art is that it is not selective, exclusive or discriminatory. For the everyday man or woman, it is a social interstice situating itself firmly within the socio-natural entanglement of daily routine. It is not necessarily new information but new ways of revealing it. In this way, urban street art becomes a feedback loop into mainstream culture, closing the connections between artist and viewer, between producer and consumer, and between the individual and society. Through the appropriation and re-appropriation of dominant images, products, messages, spaces, economy, and hierarchical distribution of space experienced in urban environments, urban street art transcends the conventional, controlled use of space.
Further, a thorough theoretical analysis creates the backdrop for understanding everyday life and art’s role in reawakening awareness. What is perceived as art is defined by individual opinion; its message is interpreted differently depending on the artist and the spectator – based on who they are, their life experiences, and so on. Due to the fluidity of interpretation, this working paper must be framed within an in-depth cross-disciplinary analysis, encompassing; environmentalism, Urbanisation & spatial distribution, the philosophy of praxis & everyday life, the role of the spectator as a result of the encounter, as well as theories on art. The third part of this chapter will observe the fundamental role of urban street art in urban societies. To do so, this paper will argue against the idea that this social movement leads to increased dereliction and disorder but acts as a catalyst for transformative social change. Serving as a social interstice within the everyday, there is a new awareness of peoples’ attitudes and behaviours in their urban environment, bringing the unconscious to the conscious. This chapter will address the potential role of ERM. Through examples, this chapter will recognise how changing the points of encounter with environmental issues can potentially change current social norms, cultures and ideologies. This potential will be explored by building on street art as a tool for urban discovery, challenging how cities are shaped, experienced and lived. This paper is a compilation of secondary information, including; theoretical and street art books, papers, websites, and documentary short films. One of the difficulties encountered was to qualify and quantify the impact of urban street art on everyday life at both the individual and collective levels.
For this reason, it primarily observes these impacts theoretically. This chapter is an ‘art ethnography’, the artist exploring and documenting their interpretation of contemporary culture, politics and society; Through analysing street art and ERM, I will further expand on the artist’s role as an ethnographer, applying theories to street art. Later, art’s impact on sustainability cultures is observed to elaborate on the environmental dimension. While some data exist on the qualitative impact of urban street art, more is needed for ERM, with further research needed to enrich the dialogue between politics, environment, culture and art.
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Their diverse team of world-class experts supports clients across the breadth of their organisations to operationalise sustainability, underpinned by our deep technical expertise in addressing their environmental, health, safety, risk and social issues. They call this capability our “boots to boardroom” approach for its comprehensive service model that allows ERM to develop strategic and technical solutions that advance objectives on the ground or at the executive level.
This long-read-research article about Street Art- Graffiti in the Indian context brings multi-layer ideas about social life and street art as a context itself. Read the first part of this research article here: Street Art and Graffiti In Indian Public Spaces. Read the Second article: Historical Background of Graffiti and Street Art in India. The third article: The Rise of Street Art
Environmentalism and the Urbanisation of Nature
The world is going through an urbanisation overhaul. Between 2009 and 2050, the world population is expected to go from 6.8 to 9.1 billion, with the majority of growth in the Global South. With an increasingly urban population due to decreasing mortality rates and rural-to-urban migration, people are becoming disconnected literally and culturally from nature. While the urban-rural linkages become increasingly obscured, vital food, water and energy bonds remain. The increasing demand for food will ‘necessitate’ the domestication of nature. What is left will be due to its difficult exploitation and for conservation or leisure uses; “96% of the Earth’s surface not in cities will increasingly be shaped by the wants of urban dwellers, many of whom may know little about it”. However, as the world rapidly urbanises, what will happen once it reaches its carrying capacity? It is important to remember that nature and Society do not exist in isolation. Everyday Life in the urban setting comprises social and natural entanglements. To ignore their relation to one another is to ignore the very fabric of today’s urban Society, maintaining the invisible barriers between the two. Urban political ecology, the study of human and nonhuman interaction, creates an understanding of how urban environments are produced and socially constructed, acting as an entry point for investigating urban metabolism. By revealing these dynamics, a more profound understanding of our environment emerges. For this chapter, I have defined ERM as urban street art that carries either an environmental message or uses natural mediums, which jolt the routine of every day Life of its predictable path into a new awareness of the urban landscape. Karl Marx argued that ignoring the mutual co-evolution of nature and SocietySociety was neglecting an essential element of analysis and critique in our modern urban societies.
Therefore, not only does this chapter argue for environmentalism to occur every day, but it also acknowledges the socio-natural dimensions of Society. We need to rethink our understanding of the fabric of everyday life to capture the interaction between the natural and the social, revealing the relationships between “Where we live, how we live, what we consider natural, and decisions which have been and are being made (or not being made) by people operating in government and the corporate state”. We need to disentangle the individual from mass consumerism. Henri Lefebvre envisaged a radical reorganisation of the everyday through the encouragement of creative impulse, “a critique of everyday Life encompasses a critique of art by the every day and a critique of the everyday by art. It encompasses a critique of the political realms by everyday social practice and vice versa”. Alex Loftus saw that if a piece of art reached universal appeal (which is often not the case), it is due to “how it captures what appears latent and unnoticed in the world”. Art and its practice can be extended to the socio-natural complexities of the urban setting, seeing through the routine of everyday life regulated by consumerism.
Everyday Life and street art: rewriting the Urban Environment
In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau describes how citizens place themselves within the power structures that establish the spatial organisation of cities. Our relation to the Society we live in is shaped by decisions and actions that we do not necessarily participate in and possibly are unaware of. De Certeau argued that by breaking away from the preconceived notion that those dominated by power are passive consumers, daily Life was made through creative production. This can arise from-employments’ constant appropriation and re-appropriation of products, messages, spaces and territories, most typically of others. He compared this activity to the intellectual bricolage defined by Claude Lévi-Strauss in The Savage Mind; lévi-Strauss stated that the bricoleur must make do with materials at hand, choosing from a finite set of tools and materials, constructing in the physical and literal sense with materials at hand works which can be tactically employed in situations, where there are limited resources and a limited room for manoeuvre. De Certeau saw the practice of reading as consciously or unconsciously combining fragments and creating a personal interpretation from “the indefinite plurality of meanings”. This idea of an unconscious, repetitive routine of the everyday can also be found within Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life, “Everyday life is a crust of earth over the tunnels and caves of the unconscious”. Lefebvre see’s ‘moments’, defined as “the attempt to achieve the total realisation of a possibility”, as opportunities for triggering new understandings and awareness; “among moments, we may include love, play, rest, knowledge, etc. We cannot draw up a complete list of them because there is nothing to prevent the invention of new moments. How and why should we classify any particular activity or ‘state’ as a moment? What should our indexes and criteria be? a) The moment is constituted by a choice which singles it out and separates it from a muddle or a confusion, i.e., from an initial ambiguity. Natural and spontaneous (animal or human) life offers nothing but ambiguity. The same is true for the amorphous muddle we know as the every day in all its triviality, where analysis discerns the detritus and the seeds of possibility. Moments are embryonic, making them out difficult”. Within the urbanised Society, Lefebvre recognised these as moments emerging within the public spaces, denoting, “Society has been completely urbanised…the street is a place to play and learn. The street is disorder… This disorder is alive. It informs. It surprises… The urban space of the street is a place for talk, given over as much to the exchange of words and a sign as it is to the exchange of things. A place where speech becomes writing. A place where speech can become ‘savage’ and inscribe itself on the walls by escaping the rules and institutions”. In Lawrence Lessig’s book Remix, the author promotes the concept of a ‘remix culture’. Primarily concerned with music or movies, it refers to and observes how people absorb cultural products into their lives, combining or editing existing materials to produce something new; it is up to personal interpretation and translation, appropriating and re-appropriating, “the dominant image economy and hierarchical distribution of space experienced in metropolitan environments”. The public is free to add, change, and interact with their Culture; it is flat and shared from person to person. Similarly, art does not occur in a vacuum; it requires conscious or unconscious reflection of both the artist’s and viewer’s past, present and future experiences and hopes. Lessig outlines two cultures; a Read Only Culture and the Read/Write Culture. In a Read Only Culture, consumption is more or less passive. The information or product is provided by a small ‘professional’ source, promoting a Read Only business model of production and distribution, limiting the role of the individual to the consumer or audience. The public absorbs but does not interact with this Culture and lives “a culture experienced through the act of consumption”.
This long-read-research article about Street Art- Graffiti in the Indian context brings multi-layer ideas about social life and street art as a context itself. Read the first part of this research article here: Street Art and Graffiti In Indian Public Spaces. Read the Second article: Historical Background of Graffiti and Street Art in India. The third article: The Rise of Street Art
However, more than a Read Only Culture is required. Read/Write Culture has a reciprocal relationship between the producer and the consumer, nurturing individual creativity to produce and influence their Culture, continually remixing and producing new material, and in this way, the Culture becomes more prosperous and more inclusive. The fear is that the Read/Write Culture could disappear, displaced by an increasingly Read Only one, one “more comfortable with simple consumption”.
The emancipated spectre
As Lessig argued the disconnection between producer and consumer, Jacques Rancière makes a similar argument between art and spectator. In The Emancipated Spectator, Rancièreidentified the need to reconstruct the “network of presuppositions that place the question of the spectator at the heart of the relations between politics and art” to bring about a meaningful relationship. While he predominantly discussed this emancipation about theatre1, some of his ideas can be applied to ERM. Emancipation is “the blurring of boundaries between those who act and those who look; between individuals and members of a collective body”. Rancière coined the ‘Paradox of the Spectator’, seeing spectators as active interpreters, developing their translation to appropriate it. He identified theatre as an assembly in which ordinary people become aware of their situation and discuss their interests, arguing that there is no theatre without the spectator.
Similarly, there is no art without the spectator; ERM acts as the catalyst for revealing current realities in everyday Life. In doing so, the public is drawn out of passiveness and transformed into active participants to “Shift the focus away from those who are easily perceived as creators to give some space, some room, to those who absorb cultural products…Moreover, to think a bit about what happens once [it] has been distributed: how it may get absorbed into the lives, into the very being, of people”. Viewing is an action that confirms or transforms our position, and emancipation begins when the barrier between spectator and actor is challenged, “When we understand that the self-evident facts that structure the relations between saying, seeing and doing themselves belong to the structure of domination and subjection”. Therefore, a spectator may also take on the actor role, interpreting what is visible about other elements, seeing, feeling and understanding things as much as the artist. Thus, the passive spectator is not in a perpetual passive condition. In Rancière’s view, like Lessig’s remix culture, participation occurs when the spectator interprets the visual, “Being a spectator is not some passive condition that we should transform into activity. It is our normal situation. We also learn and teach, act and know, as spectators whom all the time link what we see to what we have seen and said, done and dreamed”. If we look at the fabric of everyday life in modern Society, there are starting points everywhere. These are doors to new understanding and learning, creating a dual relationship; every spectator is already an actor, and every actor is a spectator in their everyday Life. This realisation allows the movement away from a ‘spectacle of boredom’, “one which has produced a generation incapable of grasping the idea that there might be life outside of it”.
Tightening the relational space
Therefore, an alienating urbanisation experience could be challenged by exploring and exposing the links of Society, Culture, and environment through ERM. The activity and product of art can create and open up lines of communication, connections that are otherwise “levels of reality kept apart from one another”. In Nicolas Bourriaud’s book Relational Aesthetics, he views Society as reduced to the role of the mass consumer, where human relations are no longer directly experienced but lived through a blurred generalisation. Similarly, for de Certeau, the term consumer reduced the complexities of everyday life into uselessness, arguing that in reality, they are users and re-producers, “everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others”. As a result, “The relationship between [society and mass consumer] has to take on extreme and clandestine forms if it is to dodge the empire of predictability”. As an artistic activity, ERM allows clearing this generalisation through social experimentation, enabling a state of encounter within everyday Life. We can refer to this as a social interstice, an interval of time and space where new lines of communication can be made. Bourriaud saw art as being relational, to varying degrees, a foundation for dialogue, particularly suitable “when it comes to expressing this hands-on civilisation because it tightens the space for relations”. Bourriaud, like Rancière, identified that art allows the viewer to perceive, comment and take away from the experience. While not confined to the private space, ERM can have a similar effect, “Street artists are distinguished by a reactive stance vis-à-vis their spatial, political and social environment. Their great attention to traditions and certain types of popular knowledge, the bridges they build between various disciplines, [broaden] populations’ access to culture”. Today’s street artists attain global notoriety, appropriating and remixing imagery, politics and ideas in digital form over the Internet, “Powerful cultural ideas have obscured the interdependence of our creativity. Still, technology is now exposing this connectedness”. ERM is unique as it combines the private, public and digital realms, increasing its demographic impact. Within a Read/Write Culture, ERM lives at an intersection between the producer and the public, interacting with the surroundings and the environment. Many urban street artists are nomadic, doing work in multiple cities, and we are documenting them online. They re-imagine the global city, using its surface to mark and inscribe visual interpretations that function locally and globally. Through appropriating the public visual space and using the Internet, reading and rewriting the city has resulted in this inter-mural global phenomenon.
Unitary urbanism
Guy Debord was a founding member of Situationist International (1957-1972), an international group of revolutionaries that advocated experiencing an alternative everyday life to the one promoted by capitalism. Rooted in Marxism and 20th Century European artistic avant-gardism, Debord’s book The Society of the Spectacle argued that the spectacle is a fake reality that masks the capitalist degradation of human Life and that the modern city is designed to channel people into a dual capitalist trajectory: work and consumption. However, Debord saw contemporary cities as centres for possibility. Seeking to transform everyday Life, the Situationists explored the possibility of new meaning; how these lines of communication could be opened up, all the while understanding that these were “channelled, circumscribed, or even denied by powerful social and political forces whose dominance was dependent upon such suppression”. Experimenting with situations, the idea was to construct environments favourable towards fulfilling desires. Using methods adopted from the arts, a series of experimental fields of study were developed, including psychogeography and unitary urbanism. Psychogeography is a diverse and creative way of taking the everyday pedestrian off their predictable routes and, as a result, jolting them into a new, more profound awareness of their urban landscape. Unitary urbanism became central to the Situationist’s efforts to transform public space. Debord defined it as “the use of the ensemble of arts and techniques as means contributing to an integral component of milieu”. This meant revealing the complex process of constructing urban spaces and architecture rather than the result. Debord referred to this as the ‘architectural complex’, if we focus on this as “the basic unit of construction through diverse means and events – among them sound, art, cinema, poetry – [this] could be brought together and used to condition ambiences and produce effects at the level of the situation”. Therefore, architecture becomes not about forms but situations, visualising urban space as a crucial part of unitary urbanism, taking its cues from the possibilities in cities and everyday life that are yet unrealised, “wanting it to function as a hypothesis for using the means available to humanity today to construct its life, beginning with the urban environment freely”.
Applying the theory
For an irreversible change in everyday life, there is a need to critique the practices undertaken in making the world. This entails a realisation and, in part, a revolution by the everyday man or woman. Marx stated, “The greatest world-changing ideas emerged from the acts of everyday people, whose practical acts make the world”. This chapter argues that one such act could be urban street art. Furthermore, it argues that ERM has the potential to change current lifestyles so that they are more conscious, aware and sustainable of our environmental damages. By looking at such modes of art, we can see how deep they extend into the fabric of the modern city and their potential for widening discussion and transformation. It is necessary to frame what urban street art and everyday life mean within this working paper. Urban street art has flourished into both a viral form of online art and a physical movement of marking urban space on a global scale. It has no definition; it is an amorphous art form found in and inspired by the urban environment, with the city becoming the canvas. With anti-capitalist and rebellious undertones, it is a form of art best understood in the situation. Urban street art becomes a tool for communicating nonconformist views, asking difficult questions and expressing political, social and environmental concerns. The every day is a consequence of social and natural entanglements, referring to routine and habit. It comprises daily reoccurrences, “gestures of labour and leisure, mechanical movements both human and properly mechanic, hours, days, weeks, months, years, linear and cyclical repetitions, natural and rational time, etc.”.
The period between production and disappearance marks the longevity of a piece of urban street art. This moment acts as a social interstice, a moment in which the artist’s function is to evoke a reaction, where its pieces are “left to an audience to be liked or loved, hated or loathed, judged or simply ignored. Their audience, everyday passersby in the street, become spectators. Lefebvre and de Certeau are two pillars of this framework, allowing for the exploration of how individuals place themselves within the power structures that establish the spatial organisation of cities. Looking at the works of The Situationists, Debord, Bourriaud and Rancière, an argument for the role of the spectator as an active participant in the urban culture is introduced. It is essential to define the ‘street’ as public areas found within our urban landscape, both active (spaces used by the public) and inactive (abandoned corners of the city), “where the street is taken in a comprehensive sense to denote, roughly, any urban public space”. This chapter is not antagonistic towards urban cities; instead, the theoretical framework seeks to explore the possibilities for emancipation from the mainstream within everyday life and, in turn, apply it to the practical, contemporary encounters of urban street art with individuals. Through the dualistic role of the individual and the artist within society, certain relationships within the existing world are revealed, depicting concealed and passive facets of everyday life. Critical approaches to cities and everyday life are worth raising in an era of increasing urban spatial growth, particularly in development and urbanisation. Urban street art opens an artistic interest within the every day, and through this interest, we can begin to see an alternative way of living. While Lefebvre was interested in representing space about knowledge and power structures, de Certeau focuses on the practices within that structure. Both saw creative retorts as a means of counteracting dominant ways of life, with de Certeau championing the need to appropriate and re-appropriate dominant products, messages, spaces and territories. In Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life, he envisaged a radical reorganisation of the every day through the encouragement of creative impulse, and this particularly holds in today’s alienating experience of urbanisation. This working paper explores how to close the relational gaps between individuals and society. Throughout the process of alienation from society and others, it is essential to remember the make-up of public spaces. Lefebvre said, “…What you say about the diversity of everyday life is less and less true. Technology or industrial civilisation tends to narrow the gaps between lifestyles […] in the world as a whole”.
What does this say about how we relate to others in public spaces? Building on Debord’s argument that the ‘spectacle’ is a fake reality channelling people into a one-way conversation between work and consumption. Modern modes of production are accumulations of spectacles, “all that was once directly lived has become mere representation”; life, as we know it, is just for appearance. Debord saw contemporary cities as sites for new possibilities. However, the spectacle cannot be easily split from social activity, in turn erupting from one another and reinforcing the sense of alienation, “the spectacle, though it turns reality on its head, is itself a product of real activity”. This separateness upholds the spectacle as both representational and superior, “spectators are linked only by a one-way relationship to the very centre that maintains their isolation from one another”. In seeking to transform everyday life, perhaps the entry point is to attempt to alter this activity for it to be ingested into the spectacle or vice versa. However, the spectacle remains out of reach and beyond dispute, acting as the means and the ends. This is due to the economy’s domination of society, transforming everyday life from being into having into appearing. The world is no longer directly lived but appears through many spectacles and images. The lines of communication between a lived reality and the spectacle need to move away from, firstly, one-way communication and, secondly, the passive acceptance of an alienating everyday reality, recognising that commodities lie “at the core of this pseudo-response to a communication to which no response is possible”.
As images replace reality and necessitate both the passivity and isolation of the individual in society, banalisation has installed itself, “we are bored in the city, we have to strain to discover still mysteries on the sidewalk billboards, the latest state of humour and poetry”. However, Debord envisioned alternative urban visions; the Situationists explored these possibilities for emancipation, and “we do not intend to prolong the mechanistic civilisations and frigid architecture that ultimately lead to boring leisure. We propose to invent new, changeable decors”. The construction of situations was linked to the fundamental desire for total creation and the need to play with architecture, time and space. Art, in whatever guise it takes, allows for sociability, “Art is the place that produces a specific sociability”, fostering an encounter that allows the spectator to perceive, go through an internal reaction and allow for response. Urban street art responds similarly: “Street artists are distinguished by a reactive stance vis-à-vis their spatial, political and social environment. Their great attention to traditions and certain types of popular knowledge, the bridges they build between various disciplines, [broaden] populations’ access to culture”. In the context of the Situationist arguments, the creativity at play in urban street art reveals the complex process of constructing urban spaces and architecture. Much like unitary urbanism, it visualises urban space, taking its cues from the possibility in cities and everyday life. Urban street art can shake the every day from its reverie and ask critical questions about the alienated separateness of the spectacle and actual activity. The two alienating experiences of actual activity and the spectacle exist in isolation but erupt from each other. Urban street art readdresses this imbalance through the creation of the social interest. In questioning the role of the spectator within these interstices, urban street art opens up a dialogue between actual activity and the spectacle taking place within the street, making its accessibility both immediate and indiscriminate.
Street art does not exist in a designated Artscape. Instead, it is art outside the art world, of museums and galleries, and in the everyday. It is ephemeral, free to experience, and at the same time, overseen by no one and everyone. Within the street, artists must make pieces call for attention by entering streams of consciousness, “one is jolted out of whatever hazy cloud of practical thought one was in; one is forced to consider one’s purely practical and rather indifferent relationship to the street, and a curiosity to explore the work develops”. Therefore, who is the spectator of street art? The simple answer is; everyone. This may seem pretty obvious, that everyone who uses the street is a spectator of street art; however, if we continue to build on Debord’s argument, the spectator is simply part of the production of the spectacle, and therefore this role becomes somewhat redundant.
What must be considered is the spectator’s role as an emancipated active participant. In this way, borrowing from Rancière, a meaningful relationship can be established, placing “the question of the Spectator at the heart of the discussion of the relations between art and politics”. While Debord defined the spectacle as alienating, Bourriaud saw the arts as the tool to create and reignite relational spaces, “Art has always been relational in varying degrees, i.e. a factor of sociability and a founding principle of dialogue”. In a society of the spectacle, separateness keeps these lines of communication alienated from one another, “the present-day social contexts restricts the possibilities of inter-human relations all the more because it creates spaces to this end”. As a result, the spectacle, the social mechanisms of society, reduces the relational space for connection. Bourriaud proposes relational art, which uses human interaction and social context as inspiration. The art is relational to the everyday context, tightening the relational space.
In contrast to Bourriaud’s belief that art was a space in which “I see and Perceive, I comment and evolve in a unique space and time”, Rancière notes that critiques of being a spectator reveal two faults; viewing can be both ignorant and inactive, separated from the capacity to know and the power to act, “the malady of the spectating man can be summed in a brief formula: the more he contemplates, the less he lives”. He saw society shaped in the image of theatre, where the spectator is a passive voyeur instead of an active participant. He proposes that to change this; the viewer must be able to empathise or use his reasoning. The role of the artist is to draw the spectator out of passivity and transform them into active participants, in doing so, shifting “the focus away from those people who are easily perceived as creators to give some space, some room, to those people who absorb cultural products…Moreover, to think a little about what happens once [it] has been distributed: how it may get absorbed into the lives, into the very being, of people”.
An example is the artist who brought his A-game to the walls of Eden Gardens. The wall is his canvas, and illustrator Sayan Mukherjee makes Kolkata a beautiful street by street. Since 2017, he has created graffiti at many local venues, such as Wykiki cafe at Swissotel and a dilapidated clubhouse in his Kankurgachhineighbourhood. However, his murals at Eden Gardens have brought him the most attention. With international cricket set to return to the stadium after a hiatus of two years this winter, his work is likely to find new admirers across borders.
