Caliper Boy
Someone is leaving potatoes around the city. Painted root vegetables stuck with colourful toothpicks are sitting on top of bus shelters that lead into East London. No one knows who puts them there or what statement they are making. Instead they create a silent trajectory across the city, that only observant people sitting on the top of double-decker buses see. There's an art element to the work of Mr Potato - to give the artist a fictional name. The colours of the pieces vary in their fluorescent painted combinations. These little anonymous interventions are not profit based. Nor do they appear to be publicising the artist. Instead, they merely change the way people experience city life.
In the period leading up to the millennium, there was an explosion of graphic two-dimensional street art. International cities were brimming with stencils, stickers and wheat paste posters influenced by graffiti's focus on identity and the ubiquity of commercialism. Street art became a counterbalance to commercial advertising and its assault on consumers. Yet it became increasingly hard to stand out from this flood of art imagery, which was moving even faster thanks to the internet. The work began to feel stale and hollow. Its methods were too quickly absorbed and well used by the mechanics of branding. They had a crisis of authenticity. Many of the artists creating two-dimensional work wanted to push things in different directions. In a way these wall pieces did not go far enough to disrupt urban experience, to force people's attention away from the normal experience.
Adam Neate
A new wave of artists has developed that are reinventing art on city streets. Some are coming out of the street art and graffiti scenes; others have a fine art background, but want to experiment with public space. Most of the artists in this book are exhibiting in galleries as well as creating illegal street pieces. What makes their work so interesting how it intersects between 'fine' art and 'street' art - to form something else. They use the space and methods of street art, but focus on the importance of the idea in creating work. These are renegades, deserting both the frustrations and commodification of the art world, and the aesthetics and rigidity of graffiti.
This new wave of work is fresh, partly because it uses different techniques and materials - including children's toys, chalk, vinyl, perspex and mosaic tiles. Much of this new work is sculpture and three-dimensional. Often the work is literally manipulating urban architecture and interacting with the street furniture itself. Sometimes the work is about adding something to the streetscape, rather than defacing or destroying it. The definition of vandalism blurs. Other artists, using traditional techniques like paint and posters, are pushing things into more innovative territory in their imagery and approach. Narrative and myth is built around the work, as it widens out to transform the aesthetics of the streetscape in different ways.
Mark Jenkins
Many of the artists, no matter what their background, are reflecting the influence of The Situationists and Guy Debord. Much of the work directly responds to Debord's ideas of the spectacle. Defining 'the spectacle' is no easy task. The spectacle is society itself, is part of society and the instrument to dominate society. Mass media is only one aspect of it. It is about the success of economy and the law about all other facets of life, including human life. It's first prerequisite is passivity and it aims to isolate the individual. Reality itself becomes replaced by images of it. As Debord wrote, "There can be no freedom apart from activity, and within the spectacle all is banned." Most art itself is, therefore, just part of the spectacle. The Situationists called for the creation of situations that unified art and life outside this framework. They fought to move beyond art as it was - governed by the spectacle.
One of the methods they suggested to reinvent art was 'detournement'. This process was inspired by Dadaist collage and involved a technique where elements of an original were reassembled into a new creation. Such as taking ads or mass media symbols and modifying or reinforcing the meaning of the original image or objects. It's a theory that defines the current post-millennial wave of street interruptions. Many artists are taking advertising and pop culture imagery and literally cutting it up, reassembling it and reforming it in different ways. If the spectacle is summed up by non-intervention, then this art consciously intervenes. It is active not passive.
The reason why this work is so important culturally is because it forces the public to become aware of and interact with the world around them. In a culture dominated by a glut of sensationalist, vacuous, throwaway media and virtual culture the 'real' physical world has to reassert its presence in our lives. People have to reconnect with the awareness of other people in our fragmented societies. The only place where individuals literally come into contact with each other is outside the bubble of their homes, screens, commodities. The street is the only place where we know something is real - not exaggerated or interpreted. Free public interventions rebel against submissive consumption. They are by definition, forms of subversive protest.
Pigeonholing this work as a 'youth' movement is redundant - especially as most of the artists are well into their thirties. It is a way of trivialising the spark within the art. Although some of the work is political with a capital P, it is impossible to create pieces that are illegal without some sense of politics. As the artist, Influenza, explains, "Anything we do to express our own individual opinions, ideals and findings are political by definition." It is part of the reason that so much of the language of war has been used in connection with graffiti over the years - bombing, guerrilla art, tagging. In a world where everyone is transformed into a passive consumer, creation can be a potentially revolutionary alternative. As the artist Joseph Beuys said, "To make people free is the aim of art, therefore art for me is the science of freedom."
Francesca Gavin
Francesca Gavin's book Street Renegades: New Underground Art is published by Laurence King at £12.95.
Francesca Gavin is a freelance features writer, critic and editor. She is currently art editor at Dazed & Confused, associate editor at Marmalade and guest editor of Into the Storm.
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