The Issues With State-Sponsored Street Art

As India’s cities groan and roads struggle to accommodate increasing users and their needs, state-sponsored public art initiatives along the streets merit interrogation.

Significance of the Streets

• Promoting government values: Streets have served as sites for promoting government values by hosting parades. 
  • Revolutions, too, have been fought on roads, and non-violent masses been mobilised on them. 
  • The street fights of the Revolt of 1857 and the Quit India Movement’s marches come to mind.
• Stages for groups to perform their identities and assume new guises: Roads are used by Ramlila actors in Varanasi, devotees bringing Durga to her autumnal home in Kolkata’s neighborhoods, families escorting Ganapati to the Mumbai seaside, and Tazia processions commemorating Muharram in Hyderabad.
• Spaces and surfaces at the edge of roads: It has habitually functioned as their extensions. 
  • For example: Mughal-era brick and lime-plaster facades attest to the creation of small towns and their populace’s aspirations. 
• Over the 20th century:  Vertical surfaces along India’s streets came to be sporadically marked with posters, stencils, spray paintings, tile murals, and compositions infected with the sensibilities of calendar art and cinema. 
  • These assemblages caught their desired audiences’ attention and made passers-by look at them, ultimately creating publics around them. 

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Issues with State-Sponsored Street Art 

• Undermining the Diversity of India: By replacing these vivid scenes of desire and dissent with bland motifs, state-sponsored urban street art macerates diversity. 
• Reduces space for the performance of argumentative politics: Rapid and expansive coverage of surfaces makes it difficult for individual artists to find spaces for their own forms of expression and for marginalised communities to make concrete their own stories and ideas of beauty. 
• Environmental Damage: Even as state-sponsored wall texts and images proclaim the virtues of conserving nature and nurturing public health, agencies are steadily diluting forest laws and de-notifying protected areas. 
  • The gallons of industrial paints needed to decorate these surfaces are leading to the creation of wastewater. 
  • Industrial paints disintegrate once applied to surfaces exposed to cycles of heat and humidity.
  • Pigment disintegration is accompanied with the release of nano-chemicals into the soil and water bodies. These toxins are bound to travel up food chains.

What are the alternatives?

• Environment Concern: Drystone walls are best left alone. These are made of locally quarried boulders and combat erosion. 
  • As herbs sprout in their crevices, these walls help ameliorate heat build-up in cities. Plants on these living walls temper urban noise by absorbing sound. 
  • Drystone walls also share an aesthetic sensibility with buildings in their proximity.
  • Authorities should help pigment discolouration of the surface by enforcing stricter zoning and traffic rules. 
  • Industrial and vehicular pollutants contain gases which react with water and oxygen to create acids that cause the crackling of old frescoes.
• In cities such as Dehradun and Guwahati where traditions of wall painting do not exist, municipalities, cantonment boards, and highway authorities might use funds to establish sidewalks and clean sewers and preserve monuments lining streets, and create spaces for performing artists. 
  • Such efforts can help citizens understand their heritage by providing context.
• Berlin Wall Example:  Government agencies seeking to nurture pride in India as a museum without walls might learn lessons from the Berlin Wall’s surviving sections. 
  • Built during the Cold War, this wall served as a sign of Germany’s division. 
  • Seeking to ameliorate this condition, authorities on the West Berlin side allowed artists to paint the wall. 
  • Artists from all over the world rendered scenes of hope and offered critique. 
  • Ultimately, they creatively advanced the task of democracy.

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