Photography’s ever-expanding uses due to the advent of digital photography with computer photo editing increased once again last week as Vista, California unveiled a train with a mural on the body.

Because digital photography is well suited to photo enlargement and output technologies are growing, new ways of visualizing images are being developed. Photographs can now be applied as wall murals to bathroom or kitchen tiles using dye sublimation, cars and trucks using vehicle wrap techniques, and now trains and buses. What’s next, jumbo airplanes and entire buildings?

We’ve recently noticed two new directions that large image or mural communications have gone recently, both very focused on “realism.” One form is writing about “nothing” or the perceived need to give people a “break” in billboard communications and the other is taking the ability to create realistic art to the extreme of actually tricking the eye by painting what might be perceived not as art but as disaster. The former type of minimalist communication is intended to turn billboard works around, to communicate by not communicating. It reflects the very real “message overload” world we living — in the United States and other capitalist countries how people in those cultures have subconsciously trained their minds to not look at obvious attempts to advertise and the recognition that breaking through this new subconscious pre-occupation is possible simply by reversing what is expected to a minimalist result.

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No where in possibly the world do murals make more of a statement than the Berlin wall. One side of the Berlin Wall is an almost mile long row of 106 murals painted by 118 artists back in 1990. The images were created to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall, and many images are relevant to that event and The Wall’s impact in Europe for decades prior.

These murals were decayed with many are barely recognizable.

This week artists started repainting the decaying faded Berlin Wall murals and apparently they’re almost finished. The support of the German government is to be commended, having spent over EU3M to fund the renovation. Having considered demolition, the German government recognized the legacy of not only the Wall, but of the famous murals and their place in art and culture. Throughout history, murals have symbolized and at times caused political unrest, both pre-conflict and to celebrate conflict resolution between fighting cultures. The Berlin Wall murals now restored carries on this tradition.

I’m continuously amazed how murals and stories about murals either point to a project or source of inspiration or the complete opposite — “tagging” and graffiti writing landing perpetrators behind bars. I even read one story that confused the two — it made the “muralist” sound like an artist but police charged him as a “serial tagger” caught while painting “mural” (ref.: Cops: Serial Tagger Nabbed Painting Mural and Man Arrested For Painting On Bridge Wall). That muddies the semantic waters regarding the true meaning of what murals are even further — are they art or illegal graffiti? Even beautiful artistic murals I suppose are considered illegal if the artist has no regard for what is a legal and appropriate canvas, right? (more…)

I’ve increasingly noticed a trend of creating murals where ugly, defacing graffiti used to be. Here in San Diego where I live this trend has been growing for some time, and it seems to be growing elsewhere as this story from Canada states – see “Police turn to artists to stop writing on the wall.”

Graffiti is the “sleazy side of murals” and I’ve always wondered why anyone would do it. I was on a recent trip by train from Atlantic City to Philadelphia, PA and noticed all the graffiti covering railway underpasses. Who does this? And with barely any of it understandable, what are they trying to convey? My only understanding up to this point is that it is to “mark territory” for gangs and the like, but it seems so creepy.

As I struggle to understand how the mind of someone that does this type of thing works, I also find it curious that the one thing that has been found to curb and even stop repeated graffiti tagging is to replace it with actual mural art — and that this works consistently and with most taggers. Is this a statement that even the criminal mind as a social group has a collective boundary to not destroy art?