Just slap a coat of paint on it

Written by

Ophelia Benson

in

What a strange thing to do.

When soccer fans converge on Dallas this month for World Cup games, the aesthetically inclined ones will encounter a city home to art museums, galleries, and public art. And yet, the city will be missing a major and longstanding public artwork, after a conservationist artist’s beloved mural was painted over in May.

Florida-based artist Robert Wyland has filed a $25 million federal lawsuit against FIFA and the owners of the building where his mural had appeared for a quarter-century, who, he says, painted over Ocean Life (1999), one of a hundred murals he painted around the world to raise consciousness about marine pollution and conservation efforts. The eight-story-high, 17,000-square-foot mural showed endangered humpback whales and dolphins and other marine life. 

Why would you do that?

It’s all the more appalling given the ugliness of everything else in that photo. I count at least nine nasty-ugly buildings plus a nasty-ugly parking lot full of boring cars. The mural is the only pleasing thing to look at in that entire swath of urban landscape. Why destroy it to promote a temporary football contest?

Comments

7 responses to “Just slap a coat of paint on it”

  1. Holms Avatar
    Holms

    I doubt the lawsuit will do well, as the building owners can call the shots outside of there being heritage listing considerations or similar. But my god, even if you have the legal right to destroy that art, don’t do it!

  2. GW Avatar
    GW

    Is it salvageable by scraping off the outer paint? I wonder. Probably would require some restoration.

  3. iknklast Avatar
    iknklast

    That mural is beautiful. I spent quite a bit of time in Dallas during my college years at UNT, and enjoyed those areas that were so beautiful. It is a disgrace.

  4. Ophelia Benson Avatar
    Ophelia Benson

    Holms – yes that was my meaning. I get that it’s not illegal but why in hell would anyone sane do it?

  5. Artymorty Avatar
    Artymorty

    And it wasn’t just a lovely mural — it was a Whaling Wall. They are like the Banksys of murals: you can find them in cities all over the world, and each one is special, a new member of some global, ocean-minded club.

    Toronto got its Whaling Wall in the late ’90s, and I remember its unveiling. It was a sensation. We were so proud to be part of the series. It was also a very Toronto moment: here we were, slightly provincial, slightly world-class, very conscious of the spotlight as it swiveled toward us.

    No, actually, it isn’t like a Banksy. I take that back.

    I mean any of the Whaling Walls, really. But the Dallas one especially, now that I’ve seen what it looked like. My God. It was better. They are better. Not because they are cooler, or sharper, or more subversive, but because they are plain beautiful public art, and because their message is bigger and deeper. Banksy deals in the language of the city: advertising, policing, consumer culture, the art world, and the supposedly subversive manipulation of all that. His message, insofar as there really is one — colour me skeptical; much of it strikes me as rather sophomoric — lives in its natural habitat: the urban environment.

    But a building-sized seascape, with whales suddenly thrown into view in the concrete jungle, does something else. It interrupts the city rather than commenting on it. You do not have to decode it. You only have to look at it. The message it conveys — the underlying cause or moral — requires no cynicism at all to decipher. The marine world is beautiful. Nature is strange, majestic, grand, and vulnerable. There it is, right there on the side of a building. It pretty much speaks for itself.

    And the Dallas one in particular was clearly extraordinary: a comically oversized aquarium, or a portal to the undersea world in the middle of the city. I wish I could have seen it in person. Such a shame.

  6. Ophelia Benson Avatar
    Ophelia Benson

    Oh I didn’t know this! I ran to google all ready to fly into a rage because Seattle doesn’t have one but oh oops, it does, it’s number 5 on the list.

  7. Artymorty Avatar
    Artymorty

    Oh my goodness. After a bit of googling around, a new layer of poignancy has emerged around this magnificent series of murals: their vulnerability. The destroyed ones are marked EXTINCT by the foundation that catalogues them. That word says it all. A project devoted to endangered life in nature has itself become subject to disappearance in the urban environment. That’s not the same thing, but maybe it communicates the idea of environmental loss to urban people through a form of loss they recognize more readily: a mural gets painted over; the building it was on comes down; one day a familiar piece of the city is just gone. Calling them EXTINCT could almost sound like a gimmick, but it isn’t. It draws a parallel that really does resonate. The message deepens…

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