The Art of Reconnecting

Aberdeen, situated in the northeast of Scotland, is known as the “Granite City,” and if you dive deeper into the mine of colloquial nicknames, you will also hear it referred to as the “Silver City with the Golden Sands.” But what is immediately striking is the wall-to-wall omnipresence of gray, an accordion of Victorian, Edwardian, and Brutalist architecture butting up and stacked right next to each other. Although centuries apart, the commonality of concrete and granite unite them as perfect peers. Brutalism is, indeed, brutal, eponymous by definition, harkening back to the UK’s postwar redevelopment, whereas the centuries-old structures, impervious to time, proudly represent what was known as a glorious era of British world power. Where Brutalism is by its nature practical and future-forward, the Edwardian and Victorian aesthetics holds reverence to the past. Yet here, they exist in harmonious dichotomy, representing the essence of granite, its solid, infinite permanence. These structures of Aberdeen, no matter their intent or architectural era, seem to turn time inside out; they head back and forward, their existence ever-lasting in their firm foundation. They are both rigid in form and aura. Ironically, if not the perfect metaphor, a law in Aberdeen means that painting on the granite is forbidden, destined to remain unmarked, unchanged, and unresponsive to changes surrounding the city.
To consider granite as representative of the power that history holds upon our psyche, as a symbol of law and order, an unrelenting form that the citizenry cannot or is not allowed to change, weighs heavily in Aberdeen. To an extent, this encumbers how we look at power in cities around the world. Who owns the space? Who dictates the way we can change such foundations? How can we loosen the screws of formality and form?
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Martyn Reed, a founder of the renowned Nuart Festival, is keenly aware of the rules of a city, how certain surfaces being off-limits is a metaphor for the rules that govern our daily lives but also govern the power structures of contemporary art. Nuart has always been about that essence: finding the gaps in the system where street art, graffiti, contemporary muralism, and a little bit of creative vandalism can exist and flourish and create their own narratives. When Reed first came to Aberdeen in 2017—2019, with a few additional curations during the “in-between” years and now returning for a full program in 2022, that granite surface was unavailable for painting, so he was forced to find the proverbial cracks in the system that might open up for the existence of muralism and street art. “In Aberdeen, if the state stuck a chunk of granite down, anywhere, it's staying forever,” Reed told me recently. “There’s an authority there that I felt could be challenged. That granite is a representative of the church and state power. Us commoners take the car parks and back streets.”
This idea resonated with me until I realized that this year’s Nuart Festival received a metaphorical gift for its 2022 edition. In the middle of town lies a stunning old structure, home of the Aberdeen Art Gallery, with the open court and granite columns and a construction date of the late 1800s. In previous visits, the museum was under renovation and closed to the public. What a shame that, in the midst of Aberdeen hosting one of the world’s great street art festivals, the museum itself was unavailable. Yet its location, in the pulsing heart of Aberdeen, seems quite remarkable within the city of formal and imposingly constructed buildings. The museum is now open seven days a week, free but for a suggested donation, boasting a gift shop and cafe that open to an expansive layout and public access. Art and ideas are ideally the means for enlarging the way we look at the world, where societal rules and granite that seem permanent house creative thinking that encourages education, communication, and understanding. Where there is rigidity outside, there is fluidity and flexibility inside. I couldn’t help but think how vital it is to have a museum so centrally located, to be the heartbeat and lifeblood of a city. This is not lost on anyone who uses the space.
Art has an interesting if not vital role in our new paradigm of present and post-Covid life. Art exists between structures, both in their essence and true, unyielding physicality. Buildings and the laws that govern us are rigid, but art represents change and possibility. Where buildings in both Brutalist and Edwardian or Victorian construction seemingly exist forever in their very form, art is permeable, susceptible to weather, and open to evolution. Art allows for new ideas to flow through place and space, unrestrained by nostalgia, but strengthened in its resolve that the future can be inclusively fulsome and flowering.
Here is where the people who inhabit a city come into play because for what has seemed like an eternity and has really been less than 1,000 days, we have been pulled back in time, desperate to divine an uncertain future. These two architectural developments had me thinking about how cities evolve, and how the people who inhabit them depend on f...