THROUGH WALLS TO THE GREAT LANDSCAPE

Submitted by Editor on Mon, 16/01/2012 - 16:31

Journeying east along the cycle track from St Mark's Park, one soon encounters a recent and rather wonderful flourishing of street-art.

Starting at Steadfastgate (by Gosford Place, Bonnington), there appears the cheerful and unexplained robot figure pictured right. It adorns an otherwise non-descript and inexplicable piece of apparatus suggestive of nuclear bunkers but probably more concerned with the monitoring of flow through sewerage below. I liked its chirpy optimism literally in the face of expressionless technology.

A little further along, one encounters this ghostly young woman. Pockmarked, scarred, emerging from but still part of the stonework, 'she' is startlingly realistic in poor light. Her expression is both vulnerable and defiantly hostile. There is a disquietling smear about her mouth suggesting injury, forced silence, or deleted expletives.

By the tottering steps up to Newhaven Road, on both sides of the former station, is a cluster of gang-related tags and four variations on a theme by YAZ. His or her hatted figure – possibly inspired by Kubrick's 1971 film Clockwork Orange – is in one instance titled 'thug life!' and mostly appears next to the Young Leith Team logo. 'Thug Life' was the name of a hip-hop band formed in 1993 by the late rapper Tupac Shakur. His gangland 'Code of Thug Life' can be read here.

Keep going, and the messages in the tunnel below South Fort Street suddenly become explicitly political.

Although not drawn, the variously sized, pithily phrased slogans – the arrangement of their words, and the mixture of stencilled and handpainted letters used in their design – are consistently arresting with an artistry of their own.

Most issue from the skull-decorated mouth of a chimney and are contained within the huge, roughly aerosoled outline of a noxious cloud.

This one switches from black to white paint to make its point against the sooty evidence of 19th-century locomotive pollution.

Street-artists are rarely backward about presenting themselves as urban heroes, authentic voices struggling against the powerful forces of authority and injustice. Some depict the artist as a swaggering action figure; but here, the spray-painter/activist is a more plausible figure dressed in a hoody, eyes avoiding contact, an expression of troubled seriousness on his face. As a sign of virtue, the halo floating overhead appears at first a little over the top until one notices its ambiguous link to a similar halo over the adjacent caption or artist's signature: DEBT. Is debt virtuous? Is the accumulation and manipulation of debt the last weapon of the exploited?

Some artworks here are reminiscent of the perpetually perplexing/endlessly decipherable symbolism found in prehistoric cave-paintings; this one perhaps shows a smartly suited capitalist with large carbon footprints and the gears of industry where his brain and conscience ought to be ...

... whilst this one alludes to important contemporary questions about extra-terrestrial observation of Earth and dried potato products. Was this what was meant earlier by 'SMASH LEITH BIOMASS'?

Such mural mysteries – created in secret and left to amuse, bemuse, assert or stimulate – are fascinating additions to Edinburgh's lost corners. They certainly merit thought, be they playful, political or – as in this final example below – disarmingly philosophic. AM