RE: TheCansFESTIVAL

What is interseting in the reportage of the ostensibly middle class day out is that in every picture you see of it - everyone in the picture is also taking a picture. Obviously this doesn’t happen in major museums, you wouldn’t walk round a Warhol retrospective grabbing a snap of every piece on your cellphone to upload to flickr.. or would you, i hope not.
I took sheone jnr skating at southbank on saturday, and figured we would head
down to the festival in the afternoon, however a few things happened to change my mind.
Firstly, while at the skatespot, some exceptiopnally regular, man-at-topshop type fella arrived with a pile of stencils and a can of black, his girlfriend sat and watched as he put a few up,one of a Gorillaz character head and another of an outline of a spraycan with his name and 100%ART! written under it. Then I guess he trundled back off to suburbia while dreaming about the day after his first opening at LazInc and finally quitting his day job…  100%ART and they say that irony is overated.
Second, on route to the Festival, I past a bunch of out of town girls asking a copper the way to the Banksy exhibition, the copper shrugged, he didn’t know. Every 100 yards were groups of people asking other people the way to the Bansky Show…was this really what they were looking for? I don’t recall the promotional material saying it was a Banksy exhibition. It was a FESTIVAL people, get it right.
Third and final nail was the wait, a bloody huge line that snaked around a few blocks, apparent waiting time, up to  2 hours. Screw that, some idiot will upload the entire show onto flickr anyway………

In a review of the Festival on NOTCOT, it suggested that the image of the cave painting being buffed by a street cleaner was a comment on The War On Sreetart.
Now, I am sure it would have been in the news somewhere if War had actually been declared on streetart, something along the lines of STENCIL JIHAD!
with Banksy taking on the Bin Laden type character and groups of CIA agents in black SUV’s driving through the EastEnd with nightvision aviators.

I think the cave painting represents the prime value of a private culture that communicates message though symbolism on a need to know basis (artists) and the streetcleaner is the MEDIA who blast away any private culture connotation and says we are gonna whitewash that and tell(sell) our own message….The public are there to see the streetcleaner not the cavepaintings.

becuase something is on the street, doesn’t make it ART. Because something is painted with a stencil, doesn’t instantly make it ART. The art of stencilling comes from a politcal base, and it’s practitioners that I have met or are good friends, like Nick Walker and Blek would be the first to stress the important juxtoposition between the message and aethetic context. This is a craft that has a deeply intalectual base and is only executed well when delivered with personality, humour and more importantly an element of truth. All hail Ron English!

Later this month see’s TateModern’s latest attempt to swell the gifts shop numbers by having its first StreetART exhibition and going by the numbers that turned out this weekend, 30,000, it should be a big success. What then of the actual artists. If they/we are indeed reaching the tipping point from SUBculture to Puplic Access Vandalism then some serious reassessment of personal cultural positioning need to be made. Check this graph on Seth’s blog and see where you want to be.

regards S1

ps.
If Richard Long made a mud installation on a wall in Hackney, it would be Art, but
it would still be vandalsim.
also you noticed how a lot of streetart is done on the side of halal all night minimarts - is that cos you know they will never stump up the money to buff it?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 14:36 and is filed under social comment, skateboard, stencil, art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.