Grenoble: Street art — A living landscape, perceptions & motivations

When I first arrived in Grenoble, graffiti was a big part of my first impression. Tagging seemed to show little discrimination between occupied and shuttered buildings, busy respectable street corners, and dim alleys. My main association with graffiti was, at the time, neglect and decay. I admit that its ubiquity in Grenoble made me a little dismayed, even uneasy, about where I would be living.

Discovering the street murals

But rising up the walls above the tagging were the fresques, the street murals. Fantastical and colorful fresques turned up every few streets, many stretching the whole height of an apartment complex or municipal building.

• By the library, a floating fox in a patched and wrinkled suit, glass-bead eyes clustered like a spider’s.
• Above my bike parking, a towering woman in sunshine yellow, a rose where her mouth should be, wearing the currencies of many countries on her fingers.
• On the way to church, a giant’s bookshelf was stashed behind a gash in the wall.

These whimsical pieces, clearly sanctioned, lit up a different part of my brain. When I saw the murals, I saw civic creativity, a celebration of a space that included me. They spoke openly to my art-love, eliciting the same response as a museum or gallery piece, with the added delight of being unexpected and integrated into the wilds of the built world. I began collecting Grenoble’s street art, Easter egg style.

Shifting perceptions of graffiti

A side effect of my attention to colors on walls was to keep noticing the graffiti. The most noticeable pieces on my commutes and in my neighborhood started to become landmarks just like the murals. The anthropologist on my shoulder was beginning to wonder,

What am I really looking at? Who was really here and why?

One day in June, my friend and I took an indirect hiking route to La Bastille and stumbled on the abandoned university building crouched halfway up the hillside. The building is visible from the city below but I had never given it much thought; it was derelict background noise. Up close, the outer walls were shouting with color. Inside, we saw a veritable gallery of graffiti, wall to wall, ceiling to floor, stairs and columns a chaotic collage of tagging and art pieces. On the ground, an archaeological litter of empty cans and chipped plaster. It was mesmerizing, and clearly a thing of collective pride.

Tensions in street art

Around the same time, I learned that the bounty of murals in Grenoble is thanks to an annual Street Art Fest, during which urban artists from the region and around the world can apply to leave their mark on Grenoble. I was sure to catch one of the summer’s guided tours. On this tour, an important reality of street art was quite literally spelled out for me: tension between the commissioned and the illicit.

Among the first pieces we visited, a neon figure on a garden wall had been hastily sprayed over with the words, “STREET ART = VENDUES.” Sellouts. Another commissioned piece was meant to cover an existing illicit piece by a well-known local graffiti crew. They managed to negotiate with the festival to preserve their names in the background of the new piece, itself a tribute to a graffiti icon. Nearby, a half-submerged face painted by a local graffeur blends perfectly into a space left by a festival mural, leaving it untouched. Others, however, were not deterred from scrawling the self-designation “vandales” over the mural’s finned cars.

The lines are blurred in the artists themselves. Many of the artists and collectives who participate in the festival, who have looked for pay and recognition from the mainstream, started as graffiti writers and may even still do illegal graffiti in their spare time.

A spectrum of motivations

Meanwhile, this spectrum of motivations is clamoring from the walls, like radio waves all crowded onto one channel. Basic tagging and indecipherable bubble lettering call out to peers in the competition to claim space and glory and to the authorities and their cat-and-mouse game of daring. Crude slogans of protest and political frustration (a French subculture of its own); defacing and subversion for its own sake: the only voice to be found in a power structure the graffeurs see as working against them.

Elaborate pieces meant to catch the eye of the broader public: a display of talent and ambition on their own terms, exuberant participation in a subculture that goes far beyond the graffiti. Even sanctioned art has its own huge spectrum of sensibility and purpose, from political to artistic innovation to commercial.

And across all these genres, the audience—as diverse as the city itself—decides whether they’re looking at pure vandalism, true art, gentrification, commodification, celebration, or something else.

A living landscape

I’m now much more open to the nuance of these spectrums as I peruse Grenoble’s street art. But I’m still not entirely sure what to make of the conflicting values of territory markers, community advocates, city officials, residents, and real estate agents. In Grenoble, the city sends out a small, fatalistic team to clean tags that reappear within 48 hours.

The founder of Grenoble’s Street Art Fest, Jerome Catz, tries to bridge the expressive potential of street art and the approval of the public eye, walking the line of authenticity that graffeurs prize.

Vendus or vandales?

It’s not a story with answers—just voices made visible.

What kind of relationship does your city have with street art? What cool street art have you spotted? What reaction does graffiti elicit from you?

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