Peckham Peace Wall

Peckham was one of the few regions in London to be affected by the horrific riots that followed the death of Mark Duggan at the hands of the police in August 2011. After the chaos passed over, the people of Peckham picked themselves up instead to share more feelings of love than hate. The Peckham Peace wall project started out on a small board used to cover a broken window, and with more and more people coming to write their personal messages, grew to become a symbol of the peace and love that the public worked towards every day. To commemorate the anniversary of this wall, the exhibit was made permanent and can now be seen openly in Peckham Square today.

Visiting the Peckham Peace Wall, I found it to be a place that was seemingly easy to get to: it was a place that was quite central to Peckham, right off the High Street.

From far away at first glance it seemed just like a really colourful plaque, with no real significance to it; coming close though (and having known about the piece itself) you can tell that there is writing on each coloured square: a mix of printed and hand-written messages by the people and for the people of Peckham, talking against violence, brutality and harsh conditions in Peckham and promoting messages of peace and love. “Thousands of local people added their positive comments on the board, encouraging people to talk, to write, to be inspired and to remember the positive. The wall became a popular meeting place that week, where the people of Peckham came together to talk about the recent violence, to discuss solutions and to remember why they love Peckham.” (Begum, 2012)

Amongst the messages of peace, there were random messages that held no context to the idea of the ‘Peace Wall’, and people seemed to take it as an opportunity to write anything they desired, even if it was vulgar.

When I saw the Peckham Peace Wall, I did notice how people did glance at it as they walked by, but it doesn’t seem like the type of place tourists would go out of their way to see. If I were to hold interviews and ask random passers-by on the street what they think about the public art piece, the number of people who live in Peckham especially through the riots would probably respond with more personal positivity as compared to those who would be visiting, and Tom Jones says that the permanency of the wall was “to create a piece of public art which no-one can accuse of lacking meaning.” (Jones, 2013)

Since the project became a permanent public exhibit, the “hand tracing” done by commissioned artists decreased the authenticity of the piece, and the raw written notes became lost in a sea of digital printing. The original post-it notes are now preserved behind glass and displayed in the library just by Peckham Square, also for anyone to come and see. In an interview with Emily Druiff, the director of Peckham space, when asked what her favourite part about the piece was, she replied saying that she loves “the fact that this is a project that has grown out of people’s passion for the area and the need to keep the streets a safe place to be” (Morris, Dazed, 2012) With a platform on which the people of Peckham could have their words heard, the tension of the riots slowly turned to a calm and made more room for the rebuilding of the area. When the time came to remove the original board on which people wrote, by popular public vote, became a permanent part of Peckham. It could even be called community art.

That said, I was more than slightly shocked to find out that a print of the original notes are on sale, and can be bought for the mere price of around £68!! To me, seeing a piece of public art go on sale to the public itself makes me question what public art is exactly, and who has the ultimate say in it, if not the public?

Skoghall Konsthall

I was really intrigued by Alfredo Jaar’s one day exhibition in Skoghall (Sweden). Shocked by the lack of ‘any visible or cultural exhibition space’ in the span of thirty years, Jaar depicted this absence perfectly in the short-lived existence of his public art piece.

“Skoghall Konsthall” (Nicholas Jaar, 2000)

The museum was constructed out of paper and it’s presence was the first cultural institution that the citizens had seen. Jaar invited many artists from neighbouring cities who also worked with paper and along with the towns-people who came to see the exhibit, gathered quite a large crowd.

24 hours after the opening night, the museum was set ablaze and burnt to the ground. This act of creating and destroying was meant to show residents of Skoghall what ‘could have been’ and to push them to constructing a more permanent exhibit in their town.

As someone who has not only always been influenced and attracted to the visual but has also been surrounded by artistic influence, whether it be in the form of museums or television shows, the idea of an entire city having no visual conception or development seemed pretty far-fetched and empty. What I like about this public art show is how Nicholas Jaar appealed to an entire town all at the same time because of his message, and how strongly he put it out there.

The museum itself had its paper doors open to the public, and gave the people something they were not used to; their visual senses were captivated and they realised that this was somewhat a rarity for their home town. And it is this sense exactly that Jaar appealed to in his work.

Elena Shtromberg is  a professor in the department of Art and Art History in the University of Utah, and she had a chance to sit and talk to Jaar about his work. In her post she wrote, “The act of creation and destruction was meant to provoke Skoghall’s residents, showing them what having such an institution could have been and prompting them to instigate a more permanent construction.” (Shtromberg, 2013)

This is not the only piece of ‘prompting’ work that Jaar has produced. In Requiem for Leipzig (2005) which he discussed as a “failed project” (Shtromberg, 2013) he used a chandelier in a church to illuminate and dim according to the sound rising and dropping in Bach’s symphonies; he did this in order to show the poor state of culture in Liepzig. While it was meant to push people to start discussions about the lack of culture in the area, the audience was quite silent instead and so he considered it to have failed.