How to Recognize Street Art

1. Street art is public as opposed to being enshrined in a museum. It is “out there” and “in your face” rather than being cloistered in an art gallery. In the words of Nicholas Riggle (2010): “Street art is largely ephemeral art that is usually cheap to make, free to experience, and owned and overseen by no one (or, rather, everyone). Museums often contain art that is extremely expensive (to make and own), costly to experience, and overseen by an elite few – namely, curators (art experts), donors, board of trustees.”

2. Street art transgresses the bounds of private property, or municipal or state property, but is not illicit per se. Some nuance is required here. Graffiti writing is widely considered to be a simple act of vandalism, and typically provokes the ire of residents and authorities at once. Street art is different, since it may be by agreement with the owner of the building. It may even be funded by a municipality as part of a city beautification scheme. Thus, graffiti defaces and is strictly illegal, whereas street art enhances, at least potentially, and its legal status is indeterminate. For example, does a mural remain the intellectual property of the artist, or does it become part of the real property of the entity that owns the building by destination? This is a tricky question.

   3.     Street art is temporary or ephemeral rather than lasting – it is at the mercy of the elements, and continuously at risk of being painted over. Consider this mural of a renegade Granny with aerosol cans (Figure 1). Its paint is peeling and it has been overwritten with graffiti.

4. Street art’s message is legible to others (“the public”) unlike graffiti writing, which is commonly seen as consisting of meaningless scribbles.

5. Street art is AWESOME, or sensational, due to its scale (e.g., many stories high), its lurid colours, and the grotesqueness of its figures, which are typically larger-than-life, as in this mural of a boy unwrapping toys (Figure 2) or the monstrous two-horned creature depicted in Figure 3. It is also awesome due to the way it is positioned in hard to reach places (which makes its production a risky business), and the way it is apprehended by the viewer (rarely square on, but more often in passing, out of the corner of one’s eye);

6. Street art is priceless, for it abjures commodification, in principle. As Andrea Baldini (2016) in her reply to Riggle observes:

street art primarily opposes commercial advertising's dominion of urban visible surfaces and monopoly on visual communication in the city. Since the 1980s, things like commercial billboards, posters, and neon signs have been occupying an increasingly larger percentage of the urban space, transforming our cities into brandscapes …. By turning walls, fences, and other urban spaces into showcases of free artworks, street art essentially opposes that transformation, reclaiming a right for individuals to express themselves visually in public space [2].

The thing about street art is that it has no frame. It is not a moveable (recalling the distinction between meuble and immeuble in civil law). It cannot be detached, it is more a mode of attachment in that communities coalesce around it, and may even take pride in it. You can take a painting off an art gallery wall and sell it, but you cannot take street art off the street. It is embedded in the architecture, as in Figure 4, where the entrance to a building on boulevard Saint-Laurent has been transformed into a gaping mouth.

Let us take a closer look at how street art differs from graffiti writing. According to Sondra Bacharach (2015)

Graffiti writers differ from street artists in many respects: (a) the audience to which their work is directed (graffiti artists’ audiences are fellow graffiti writers, while street artists’ audiences are the public at large); (b) the message they want to convey (ownership or presence in a given location, rather than a social or political message); (c) the means used to communicate (calligraphically designed words as opposed to a variety of artistic media); and (d) the reasons for art-making (establishing notoriety rather than raising awareness of some socio-political issue).

Now, let us take a closer look at how street art differs from public art. Consider this monument to Sir John A. Macdonald (1815-1891), the Father of Confederation, the first Prime Minister of Canada (Figure 5). This is public art. Macdonald was a public man. Sorry, wait a moment, I see that the statue of Sir John A. is missing from atop the plinth. Here you go (Figure 6). This is a picture of the integral monument. And here is another picture taken in October 2018 (Figure 7). You can see how the statue has been doused in red paint, which is to say red blood, which is to say Indian blood. A group called No Borders Media (without itself claiming responsibility for the action) reported that the defacement had been carried out by “a group of anonymous local anti-colonial, anti-racist, anti-capitalist activists” in sympathy with First Nations organizations such as Idle No More (Montreal Gazette 2018). Here is a photograph of the monument from August 2020 (Figure 8). You can see that it has been toppled, and decapitated. This happened following a peaceful demonstration calling for defunding the police that took place in Montreal that Summer. (It was the Summer of the brutal murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.) A leaflet was distributed at the protest describing Prime Minister Macdonald as “a white supremacist who orchestrated the genocide of Indigenous peoples with the creation of the brutal residential school system,” among other misdeeds (BBC News 2020; Stevenson 2022). No arrests have been made in the wake of either of these incidents. And two years on, the plinth where Macdonald’s statue formerly stood remains empty. Question: Should the statue of Macdonald be restored?

Figure 1

Figure 2 and Figure 3

Figure 4

Figure 5 (top left), Figure 6 (top right), Figure 7 (bottom left), Figure 8 (bottom right)

Theoretical interlude

I said earlier that I want to approach the study of street art from the standpoint of sensorial urbanism, in keeping with the theme of this conference. Let me therefore take you on a brief tour of this field, which actually has its roots in the sociology of the senses (see Brill 2018).

The first intimations of a sociology of the senses can be found in the work of one of sociology’s founders, Georg Simmel. In a pair of essays which date from the first decade of the twentieth century, Simmel drew attention to how the senses and sense experience impact social attitudes and interaction: “That we get involved in interactions at all depends on the fact that we have a sensory effect upon one another,” he wrote (quoted in Howes 2022: 52). 

In “The Metropolis and Mental Life” ([1903] 1976) Simmel attributed the “blasé outlook” of the modern city dweller to the need to develop a “protective organ” in the form of intellectual distance so as not to be overly affected by the constant barrage of sensations that is characteristic of life in the metropolis. In “Sociology of the Senses” ([1907] 1997), he related the confusion and loneliness of the modern urban subject to the “great[er] preponderance of occasions to see rather than to hear people.” Contrary to the country village, where people typically exchange glances and greet each other when out walking, in the city people are forced to spend long periods staring absently (so as to avoid eye-contact) and keeping silent while riding on a streetcar or other public transport. 

Simmel’s insights lay fallow for much of the twentieth century, and were finally retrieved by sociologists working in the area of the sociology of the body in the 1990s.  For example, taking his cue from Simmel, my colleague Anthony Synnott explored the “sociological function” of touch and smell as well as sight in The Body Social: Symbolism, Self and Society (1993). In Flesh and Stone (1994), the sociologist Richard Sennett proposed an alternative etiology for the blasé attitude of the city dweller to that of Simmel. This attitude was prompted, Sennett argued, by the “tactile sterility” of the modern urban environment. According to Sennett, urban sprawl disperses the population – thus increasing interpersonal distance – while the various modern “technologies of motion,” such as cars, elevators, and movie theatres, provide “freedom from resistance” by insulating bodies from their surroundings and whisking them from point to point. This “freedom from resistance” increases passivity, diminishes empathy, and undermines meaningful engagement in public life (the domain of alterity) by dulling touch. Meanwhile, the terrain of the eye is expanded. Sennett cites the example of towering skyscrapers entirely encased in glass, like so many reflecting mirrors. There is a proliferation and fragmentation of sight, while touch is further diminished by the fact that the glass (unlike stone) has no texture: it is perfectly smooth, and therefore impossible to get a grip on.

It is interesting that Simmel and Sennett should both blame the ills of civilization on an excess of visuality and imbalance of the senses. This is actually a pretty consistent refrain in much of the critical literature on architecture and urbanism. As Constance Classen (2009-2010) observes in “Green Pleasures: Sustainable Cities and the Senses”:

A recurrent theme in studies of the sensory profile of modern cities is an emphasis on the visual. With few exceptions, sonic, tactile, and olfactory qualities are ignored in contemporary urban and architectural designs, while visual effects such as monumental height or striking appearance are celebrated. This is in keeping with the general rise in cultural importance of sight in modernity. Through long-standing cultural associations, sight has functioned as the sense of domination, detachment, display, and cleanliness (in contrast to the more ‘impure’ sense of touch). These are all values highly esteemed in modernity and emphasized in the urban experience: the surveillance of well-lit city streets, the dominating and detached view from skyscrapers, the visual spectacle of the cityscape, the clean lines of modern buildings and paved streets.

As has become obvious, however, these predominantly visual values have not served us well, as individuals, societies, or inhabitants of Earth. Domination leads to exploitation, detachment to disengagement, and conspicuous display to copious waste.

 Classen also contributed an essay to the Sense of the City catalogue edited by Mirko Zardini (2005a). Its focus was on the deodorization of the modern metropolis (Classen 2005). Other trends highlighted by Zardini in his introductory essay, “Toward a Sensorial Urbanism” (200b5), include: street lighting, hygienization, air conditioning, noise abatement, and paving, whereby asphalt has become “the second skin” of the earth. All of these drives contribute to the transformation of the city from variegated sensescape into an impersonal “blandscape” (Edensor 2014), and the diminution of public space. “Street corner society” has been absorbed into the shopping mall and sanitized or depersonalized in the process.

But, Zardini underscores, the Modernist project remains unfinished for non-visual stimuli have proved “resistant” and continue to intrude on the planified urban sensorium: each city has its own smellscape and soundscape and touchscape or “fractured stream of everyday life” (Riggle 2010), and this is what gives it its “character” or “atmosphere,” its genius loci or “sense of place,” according to Zardini (2005b: 23-25). Critically- and socially-minded urban planners and architects are attuned to these eruptions and seek to cultivate instead of banish them. Zardini (2005: 20) quotes Zygmunt Bauman, who holds that “urban space ought to be shaped by the concept of ‘mixophilia,’ to favour and encourage the possibility ‘of living peacefully and happily with difference, and taking advantage of the variety of stimuli.’” That is the essence of sensorial urbanism.

Even street art, considered as a hybrid material and visual medium (see below), has a role to play in this renaissance of multisensoriality and “sociality of sensation” (Howes 2022) – as opposed to the privatization of the senses, and gating of communities and commercialization of the landscape that accompany the creep of modernization, gentrification and other such exclusive capitalist interventions. As Sondra Bacharach (2015) observes regarding the contribution of street artists to the rehabilitation of the public realm: “Rather than a purely utilitarian space through which one is forced to trudge to get from one activity to another, a bleak and impersonal environment devoid of meaning that is completely unrelated to one’s own world, these artists re-conceive the public realm as one that is itself worthy of inhabiting, experiencing and enjoying.”

The End of Art

The next question I would like to address is how street art fits within the history of art. This question is motivated by the fact that street art and/or the related art form (if it can be called that) of graffiti writing is sometimes referred to as “post-historical art,” “guerilla art,” “outlaw art,” or simply “anti-art.” In “Street Art: The transfiguration of the commonplaces,” Nicholas Alden Riggle (2010) makes some useful observations concerning this point. He writes: “The very thing whose use contributes essentially to the meaning of street art, the street, itself has meaning … The doorways, windows, alley walls, dumpsters, sidewalks, signs, polls, crosswalks, subway cars, tunnels, overpasses —all have their own significance as public, everyday objects. “

“To make sense of street art,” Riggle continues, “the critic is forced to discuss the significance of a work's use of these inflected spaces. This violates the formalist [i.e. Modernist] principle, derived from the principle of aesthetic autonomy [or, art for art’s sake], that to appreciate a work of art the critic must attend to its aesthetic features alone.” Thus, street art is a poke in the eye of Modernism, which separated art from life. But it was not the first art movement to do so. For example, Pop artists, like Andy Warhol, brought the everyday within the gallery (e.g., his Brillo boxes and Campbell’s soup tins). The effect of Warhol’s interventions was to put an end to art. He collapsed it with the every day. This made him the last avant garde artist there was or could ever be. In his wake, art could only be post-historical.

How so? Riggle suggests that as a result of the eruption of Pop Art, “we lost the ability to recognize art by its visual properties; to grasp an object's art status, the [Modernist] story goes, one is forced to consider its possible relations to the artworld.” However, and here’s the rub: “This is not the case for an art practice that rebuts modernism by incorporating art into the everyday. Not only can such art retain artistically distinguishing visual properties, but it should—if it does not call on the viewer to appreciate it as such, it risks blending into the undifferentiated scene, of visual culture.” It is helpful to think of the entranceway on boulevard Saint-Laurent that doubles as a mouth (Figure 4). It is part of the physical culture of the street, and only secondarily its visual culture. This mural participates in the physiognomy of the city. And, when you pass through that doorway, should you have business in the building, then you subject it (as it subjects you) to “tactile appropriation.”[4]  This shift in registers from the optical to the tactile and kinaesthetic hints at a deeper sense in which street art is material, and not just another form of visual culture. If “Pop Art challenges modernism by allowing everyday objects in the museum. Street art, on its part, does it by taking art out of the museum and “into the fractured stream of everyday life” (Riggle, 243 quoted in Burnham).[5]

Perhaps you are having as much difficulty as I am getting your head around all these ruptures and shifts in register. The following extended quotation taken from Burnham’s very insightful exegesis of Riggle may help:

Riggle argues that the relationship with the city streets is the definitional aspect of street art and proposes the following real definition: “An artwork is street art if, and only if, its material use of the street is internal to its meaning” (2010, 246). To say that the use of the street is internal to a street artwork's meaning is to admit that it contributes essentially to the artwork's significance and that removing the artwork from its original location would cause its destruction. Riggle claims that it is a virtue of this definition that it has positive implications both at the art‐critical and at the art‐historical level.

When considering street art's criticism, Riggle believes that his definition correctly forces critics to go beyond aesthetic formalism [i.e. it abjures Modernism]. In effect, by confining appreciation to aesthetic features alone, formalists must ignore street art's essential nonaesthetic feature, that is, the artist's use of the street. Overlooking such a feature has two fatal consequences. First, it makes it impossible to grasp those nonaesthetic (moral, religious, and so on) values that street art can acquire by incorporating “shared spaces, ignored spaces, practical spaces, conflicted spaces, political spaces” (Riggle , 249). Second, it obscures street art's challenge to the modern separation of art and life: the use of the street as an artistic material is what allows street artists to integrate “art into the everyday” (Riggle, 251).

Street art, then, is art for goodness sake. Of course, some art historians persist in trying to reclaim street art for art’s sake. As a case in point, consider Christophe Genin’s brilliant intervention at the congress entitled “Le point indivisible: entre punctum proximum et punctum remotum.” But all such efforts are doomed to fail, because street art is not of the art world, it is not “autonomous” – indeed, “art” is over, after Warhol, and doubly so with the arrival of the painter of everyday streets.

This all sounds terribly bombastic and iconoclastic, and must seem especially apocalytpic to the art historians amongst us. Please accept my sympathies: this has come as a shock to me, too. In any event, we must move on. 

The Physiognomy of Street Art in Montreal

With the above considerations in mind, let us now turn to consider some examples of both graffiti writing and street art in Montreal. A word about my methodology. I went out driving to hunt down the images I shall be showing you, alighting from my car at spots that I remembered from previous drives about town as being of potential interest, and snapping pictures. It took me all of about three hours.

The first spot was across the railway tracks and under an overpass from Westmount, where I live, in the neighbourhood of Saint-Henri, southwestern Montreal. Figure 9 is a photo of the somewhat derelict façade of the Fattal Building at 617 rue Saint-Rémi. Note how the door stands ajar, and there is an abundance of graffiti writing. Around the corner, heading east on chemin de la Côte-St.-Paul, there is an entrance to the rear courtyard of the Fattal Building, which serves as a parking lot. The far wall of the alleyway is covered in conventional graffiti designs (Figure 10) as are the rear walls of the Fattal Building (Figure 11). On the latter walls, you can see prototypical street art: a dove, an octopus, a trio of crowned ladies interspersed with graffiti. These images have been appearing sporadically on different surfaces across the city for many years now. It is as if this spot were the ur-point for graffiti writing and street art (the two forms are indistinguishable in this space) for all of Montreal. Significantly, it is not connected to any festival.

Figure 9 (top), Figure 10 (left), Figure 11 (right)

Figure 12

Exiting the alleyway and continuing east along chemin de la Côte-St.-Paul you come across this depiction of a “rubbie” next to some geometric designs (Figure 12). The fellow in this mural was likely one of the denizens of the Welcome Hall Mission, a shelter for homeless men, located at no. 606.

At the opposite pole from the portrait of the rubbie of Saint Henri is this majestic image of Leonard Cohen (Figure 13a) on the side of a building on Crescent Street, one of the trendier districts of Montreal, known for its night life. Leonard Cohen is Montreal’s favourite son, a veritable icon. Indeed, Cohen is so iconic that his image (the same image) also decorates Canada Post mailboxes (Figure 13b). Here we have an official image or portrait that is also a popular image. It could be called “official street art” were not such a designation such an oxymoron.

Figure 13 and Figure 13a

It is time to turn our attention to a consideration of street art proper, where it is clearly distinguishable from graffiti writing but also such officious representations as the one of Leonard Cohen. For an opener, consider this photograph of a mural that could be called “Flowering Heads” (Figure 14) on rue Prince Arthur close to the junction with boulevard Saint-Laurent. It carries a vaguely ecological message, perhaps inspired by the James Cameron film Avatar. Note the skin tones Note also how the persona are in flower even as they look out over a parking lot paved in asphalt. This mural reintroduces nature back into the concrete jungle of the city. [3]  And look at how well the vine is doing (Figure 15)! Question: Should the vine be torn down so it does not obscure the mural?

Figure 14 and Figure 15

This next mural is called “She Smiles 100 Suns” (Figure 16). It depicts a little Black girl from the ghetto (disadvantaged, underprivileged) whose smile nevertheless radiates hope, and is very heartwarming. This mural is not actually from Montreal, but rather from Washington DC, one of the most racially divided cities in all of North America. It is by Cita Sadeli who goes by the name of Miss Chelove (Prisco 2022).

Figure 16

Not all manifestations of street art are pleasing to the eye, or aspirational, like these two, though. Street art can also be critical, highly critical. Consider the backdrop to this statue at the intersection of rue de Courcelle and rue Saint-Jacques in Saint Henri, a few blocks east of rue Saint-Rémi (Figure 17). It is a statue commemorating Louis Cyr, the world-famous strongman (1863-1912) who was born in this very neighbourhood. It is difficult to see it through the trees, but behind the statue and just beyond the line of trees, there is a backdrop, which consists of a mural depicting an Indigenous woman with the inscription: “White supremacy is killing me” (Figure 18). This is a very poignant juxtaposition: strong man/Indigenous woman.

Figure 17 and Figure 18

The vulnerability of Indigenous women to the scourge of white supremacists and the indifference of the dominant society to their plight is also the focus of this mural, just off the boulevard Saint-Laurent. It is entitled “Justice pour les femmes autochthones disparues et assassinés” (Figure 19). This mural is a memorial to the 1,181 indigenous women who were (officially) murdered or went missing between 1980 and 2012 according to a report of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (Bilefsky 2019). It is also a call to action.

Figure 19

One of the most haunting murals in all of Canada dedicated to commemorating the lives of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (or MMIWG – the acronym even sounds like it comes from an Indigenous language) is Nibaa (Figure 20) It was painted by Mike Valcourt on the side of the Public Safety Building Parkade in downtown Winnipeg, Manitoba, during the Wall-to-Wall Mural and Culture Festival in 2017. Here is a description of the elements of this mural from the Wall-to-Wall website:

Nibaa is Ojibwe for sleep, which also implies that a journey is taking place. We travel as our body rests and our spirit crosses over to the spirit world. The Indigenous woman here wears a wreath upon her head and the juxtaposition of the skull just below, on her neckline, indicates a balance between life and death. She is in limbo, so to speak. There is a ghosted hand covering her mouth, representing the attempt to silence, whether self-inflicted or externally imposed, there is the desire to remain silent. The work also has a controversial message, suggesting that doing nothing also causes harm, both from government and from the lack of programs, protocols and standards our nation fails to exercise. The band of three colours represents the separation of the physical and spiritual worlds. The parade of women marching across the mural represent the missing and murdered women, walking along a highway, much like the Highway of Tears. As they disappear across the bands and over to the spirit world, they are transformed into buffalo. They are free. (Wall-to-Wall 2017/2021).

Figure 20 and Figure 21

On January 21, 2020, the Public Safety Parkade Building was demolished, and the mural destroyed along with it (Figure 21). The poignancy of the fact that the mural graced a “public safety” building (when no space was safe for the women depicted in it) was compounded by the demolition of the building itself. This recalls to mind Nicholas Riggle’s dictum: “An artwork is street art if, and only if, its material use of the street is internal to its meaning.” Juxtaposition means everything when it comes to street art. Street art is integral to the physiognomy of the city.

But to recognize this point is at once to plunge the data-gathering exercise behind this presentation into a deep and irresoluble crisis. There was I driving around the city snapping pictures (or culling images from the internet). Here am I at this congress showing you these same images. Have I not denatured this art by the very act of photographing (i.e., disembedding) it and sharing it with you (projected on a screen)? Should I not have refrained from photographing any of it and just talked about it instead – or better, simply handed you a map with Xs on it and told you to go and experience the art for yourself in situ?  Of course, that’s what I should have done, for as Martin Irvine (2017) observes: 

The pandigital media platforms that we experience daily on computer and TV screens and on every conceivable device create the illusion of a disembodied, abstract, transmedia and dematerialized visual environment where images, videos, graphics and text converge and co-exist in the field of the flat-panel frame.

Much to my horror, as I realize now (three quarters of the way through this paper) I have flattened the art and silenced all the cries that it echoes. I have been complicit in propping up the “hegemony of vision” in late modernism (Levin 1993). How irresponsible! Let me therefore retract this entire presentation. Please erase all the images I have shown you from your memory. The first rule of studying street art should be: Do not digitize! If you want to study street art then leave your camera or cell phone at home.

 In place of photography, what I should have done is resort to ethnography (which is my specialty as an anthropologist, after all). As François Laplantine (2015) defines it in The Life of the Senses: “The experience of [ethnographic] fieldwork is an experience of sharing in the sensible [le partage du sensible]. We observe, we listen, we speak with others, we partake of their cuisine, we try to feel along with them what they experience.” I had the opportunity to do some ethnography. For example, there was a group of leather-clad 20-somethings milling about in the parking lot behind the Fattal Building. I could have approached them, and smoked whatever it was they were smoking along with them, but I was remiss. We eyed each other, but that was all. I jumped back in my car and rode of to snap some more pictures instead of engaging in the practice of “deep hanging out” that is so vital to the proper practice of ethnography.[6]  

Of course, it would not be very stimulating were I too just stand before you and talk. This is an art history conference after all. What is an art historian without their slides? A talking head is what. So let me take a different tack by way of closing, by asking: What would an embodied, multisensory approach to the experience and analysis of street art entail? The first thing it would entail is getting outside of my own head, and you of yours, and immersing ourselves in an ambiance, like the rear courtyard of the Fattal Building. Unfortunately, I cannot reproduce that ambiance here, nor can I offer you much by way of an immersive experience based on any of the other archival material I assembled for this paper. But there is one example I know of intimately that I think may fit the bill. It is true that the example I have in mind is more in the nature of a street performance (dynamic and multisensorial) than street art (still and two-dimensional) – but why not (in the name of “sensorial urbanism”)?

The example I wish to share comes from the archives of the “Sensory Entanglements” research project (2015-2022). This project, directed by Chris Salter,[7] is grounded in the collaboration of Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists and scholars from Canada (Cheryl L’Hirondelle, David Garneau, myself) and Australia (Brenda Cross, r e a Saunders, Jennifer Biddle). As Salter (2018) writes,

the team is attempting to explore the productive tension in how the ‘newness’ of emerging technologies (despite their colonial origins and structures) might enable an ‘Indigenizing’ of sensorial artistic experiences that disrupts historical boundaries, challenges entrenched borders, creates potential forms of culturally specific empathy, and potentially may de-colonize the representation of otherness.

 Cheryl L’Hirondelle is an interdisciplinary artist of mixed Cree/Métis, German/Polish ancestry, and one of the original members of the “Sensory Entanglements” research team. In December 2016, in collaboration with Plains/Woodland Cree elder Joseph Naytowhow, her artistic partner, she staged Yahkâskwan Mîkiwahp/Light Tipi/Tipi de lumière (Figure 22). The materials for this performance piece consisted of bundles of Prairie sage and high-powered handheld flashlights. Participants were invited to convene at an open space near downtown Toronto in the falling dark. There they took up positions in a large circle, clutching their smouldering sage bundles, and were instructed to hold their flashlights up in the air in the form of the poles of a tipi. The ghostly image of a tipi took shape against the backdrop of the Toronto skyline with the CN Tower. The non-Indigenous participants in this smudging ceremony were enveloped in the clouds of smoke and interpellated in an Indigenous architectural form (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZmcbEA1Q9Y) . This created a rupture both in the conventional ordering of the senses and of space in the dominant society, and set the stage for a sharing circle, in which Cheryl engaged the audience by beating her drum, singing songs and sharing Indigenous stories and teachings in a bid to connect the participants with the earth and waters, and open their hearts and minds.

Figure 22

This performance, then, used the media of sound, light, smoke and scent as well as proprioception (positioning of bodies) to “fit” the audience for contemplation of a more inclusive society. It implicated them in the pressing work of conciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples (see Garneau 2016; Howes 2023: ch. 8). L’Hirondelle’s multisensory performance piece belongs to the emergent genre of what Stó:lō scholar Dylan Robinson calls “arts of engagement” (Robinson and Martin 2016) – the engagement of the senses and the engagement of diverse people to build a new “consensus” (lit., “with the senses”) for Canadian society going forward.

Notes:

1.I am particularly grateful to Cristóbal Barria Bignotti for suggesting my name to the conference organizers. He and I enjoyed many long and deeply stimulating conversations during his tenure as a postdoctoral fellow/visiting scholar at the Centre for Sensory Studies before he left Montreal to take up his current post at the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgechichte in Paris. I should note that this paper is partly based on research carried out under the auspices of the “Explorations in Sensory Design” project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (no. 435-2020-1279)

2. Of course, there are many exceptions to this typology: street art may be corporately-sponsored (so the corporation can capitalize on its caché) or the work of a celebrity street artist (in which case it comes to circulate transnationally and loses its connection to the local) or it may be performative instead of static and mix in other senses than the visual. The finest example of the latter variation is the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, brilliantly interpreted in the exhibition Seeing Loud: Basquiat and Music currently on at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts  We shall have occasion to consider another example of this variation towards the end of this chapter.

3. You will remember the lines of the Joni Mitchell song Big Yellow Taxi: “they pave paradise to put up a parking lot.” Here the trees and flowers are making a come back (from the “tree museum” of Mitchell’s song): the flowering people push up through the asphalt, and the flowers sprout from their split-open heads, releasing their inner botanist.

4. On this concept of tactile appropriation and its relationship to an aesthetics of distraction (in contradistinction to the formalist emphasis on abstraction and “disinterested contemplation”) see Michael Taussig’s take on the politico-aesthetic theory of Walter Benjamin in “Tactility and Distraction” (2009). See further Brill 2018. 

5. Molnár Virág (2017) argues that digital media have created a “new ecology” for the documentation and global dissemination of “ephemeral” street art. I could not disagree more, particularly with the use of the term “ecology.” 

6. I did have a chance to hang out with the street artists Lek and Sowat at the Cocktail de clôture. Our conversation was profoundly illuminating. And, of course I will go back to the rear courtyard of the Fattal Building and strike up a conversation with those who loiter there, as soon as the Summer rolls round again. Indeed, I very much look forward to writing up my fieldnotes when it comes time to pen “The Urban Sensorium and Street Art, Part II.”

7. Chris Salter held the Concordia University Research Chair on New Media, Technology and the Senses down to 2022, when he left Montreal to take up the position of Professor and Director of Immersive Arts Space at the Zurich University of the Arts.