On a summer night in 1995, Fred Gamberg drowned in Flatrock, Newfoundland. Because I was away at school, I did not hear the news. I did not know Fred well; when I worked at Sam the Record Man in the Avalon Mall, he was a frequent patron, looking -– as anyone who knew him at all will attest -– for Dead Kennedys imports and encouraging us to give punk CDs their own section. When I moved back to St. John’s after graduation, I was confronted by this mural while walking downtown.
Now, obviously, had Gamberg been a friend, I suspect that I might have known about his death. As it was, it was quite a shock to see an old acquaintance thus depicted on a retaining wall next to the LSPU Hall. Peter Evans painted this commemoration quite spontaneously. It was graffiti, strictly speaking, but I always thought that it fit well with the surroundings. It also generated a lot of debate, I have heard, as Gamberg was far from a public figure in the city. Those of us of a certain age were aware of him, and his short life underlined for me the fragility of our existence: he died at a time that few of us were even thinking about death.
Part of the debate about the mural had to do with the city’s tolerance of it. It was not removed; it was, unquestionably, a work of public art, in the way that some graffiti clearly is not. I observe, for example, that much of the highway across Newfoundland runs through small bluffs where one teen’s love for another is spray painted for all drivers to see. Some of these proclamations, passed frequently, fill me with nostalgia, but they cannot be called public art in terms of their composition and execution. Whether you think that a young man with a small circle of close friends deserves a public memorial in a Canadian city, you cannot question the efficacy of what Peter Evans created.
Over time, however, the mural began to disintegrate. To my mind, as the next generation of downtown youth painted over Gamberg, they added to the mural, even though the face of the original subject was eventually obliterated.
As the paint began to peel, the work became an eyesore to some. It had never been commissioned by the city, of course, and so did the city have any role in maintaining it? Eventually, St. John’s stepped in and made a great decision, to my mind, in having it “renewed.”
I can imagine that the old work was beyond restoration, but -– by repainting Fred Gamberg -– the city's committee on murals has affirmed the contribution of the original piece. I will miss the old one, certainly. Had it been my decision to make, I would have liked to have had it redone from old photographs. But this new mural is a work of art in its own right, the interpretation of yet more people embodying the spirit of downtown St. John's.
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