Due to the phenomenal success of street artists such as London's Banksy, graffiti is losing its negative image and moving into the mainstream where big money can be made. Davin O'Dwyermeets some homegrown daubers and Cathy Dillonlooks at the global picture
IT WAS A TALE OF two art sales that illustrated the current predicament of street art. An auction made headlines because of what it didn't manage to sell - five works by Banksy, the world's most famous street artist, which failed to find any buyers after doubts were raised about their authenticity. The pieces, expected to fetch between £200,000 (€253,955) and £275,000 (€344,188), were done on the street, and the pseudonymous artist is refusing to approve work that has been removed from its original settings, "because Banksy prefers street work to remain in situ and building owners tend to become irate when their doors go missing because of a stencil", said the official Banksy approval committee, Pest Control.
A few days later, a host of work by Irish street artists and celebrities also failed to sell at an event called Art Raid, organised by the well-known "artivist" Will St Leger. Instead, when a security alarm went off, all the guests at the gallery exhibition simply picked up the piece of work nearest them and ran away with their new wall-hanging. This was not, however, an audacious heist, but was in fact the format of the show, held to raise money for Sean Bryan, a young graffiti artist who is facing a very stiff fine and a possible custodial sentence because of his activities.
The two sales that weren't demonstrate the swift rise of street art and the difficulty it faces in adjusting to its newfound status as the Pop Art for the 21st century. While Andy Warhol might have irked the traditionalists, street art has the capacity to truly antagonise. Bryan's situation is a case in point. He's a 21-year-old hairdresser who has been tagging for five years, leaving his Konk or Konker tag all over Dublin. In December 2006, he was arrested after his work drew a few complaints too many.
"I started off tagging around town a few years ago. I got into it through a friend of a friend who was a skateboarder, and got addicted," he says. "I thought of it as just having fun, but I got into a lot of trouble, and am now facing a fine of nearly €14,000 and possible jail time. I'd be the first person to admit that there's different sides to - street art and vandalism really - and if it's in the wrong place, it takes away from it being art."
Bryan's cause was championed by renowned US graffiti artist Steve Powers, aka Espo, who earlier this year was working in Ireland on a Fulbright scholarship - a measure of street art's increasing respectability, particularly considering that just a few years ago, Power's apartment was raided by New York's Transit Authority Vandal Squad. The journey from scourge of the city's walls and trains to respected artist can evidently be a swift one.
Virtually every urban space in the world is filled with graffiti, of course - it is an inescapable corollary of urban living, like waste, or traffic. What we are seeing now is an increasing ambition in those who use the street as their canvas, and the inevitable attribution of financial value to that work. The recent boom in street art, however, has been due to the likes of the clever stencil work of Banksy or the haunting paste-ups by New York's Swoon, rather than the stylised lettering which came out of New York in the 1970s and 1980s. This shift in emphasis from typography to iconography, if you will, has resulted in two broad schools, the graffiti artists and the street artists. There are no firm definitions, and the two can and are used interchangeably, but the result of one form being treated now as "serious" art is that the definition of vandalism blurs - one person's "criminal damage" is another's "masterpiece".
Dublin-based street artist Asbestos, responsible for the quirky Lost series of stickers and paintings created on found materials, explains what he sees as the key difference between the two sides of urban art: "It's very difficult to draw a line between what goes on the street. Everyone who puts something up on the street makes a decision, whether I'm putting up stickers or paintings, or whether it's a tag on the street, everyone puts it up for a reason. Tags are a way of expressing your individuality, getting your name around. It's a form of identity, people have done it for hundreds of years. The recent popularity of street art is often down to the involvement of art students and people who were interested in the scene, but maybe not in the visual identity or graphics of graffiti.
"Traditionally, graffiti was very much about getting the name up, and it's more a community-based thing - they're not really interested in what the public thinks, it's more about what they want to say themselves, and how they identify themselves in their own community. When it comes to street art, on the other hand, the reason I put stuff up is to connect and interact with the city. It's about adding to the city - I don't do it to destroy, I do it to augment and enhance the city."
For Maser, possibly the best-known street artist in Dublin thanks to his "Maser Loves You" slogan, the two types of urban art are complementary. "Graffiti is abstract typography, you're building your letters all the time, establishing a typographic identity," he says. "Street artists have a different objective, more about transmitting a message, but the two have come side by side, they're beginning to merge now. I'm doing street art with my posters and stickers, but I'm still doing my letters. I have catered more to the general public through the use of simpler typefaces and the use of a slogan, Maser Loves You, rather than just the tag, but I studied fine art as well, so I have that interest in more than just lettering."
A piece on Dublin in the New York Timesby David Amsden a few weeks ago used Maser's work as both a metaphor for and a guide to 21st-century Dublin. "The more time I spent here," Amsden wrote, "the more I came to see his work - youthful, exuberant, carefree, optimistic - as an extension of Dublin's most defining sensibilities . . . If a generation ago - half a generation, really - someone with Maser's proclivities had been inclined to see the sides of buildings as potential forums of frustration, today he has every reason to use them to shower the city in affection."
But for every piece of work by Maser, there are countless tags of negligible merit - scrawls rather than abstract typography. To these eyes, comparing the two is akin to comparing The Sopranoswith Supermarket Sweep- they share a medium, but I'm damned if I can see anything else in common. The Garda press office reiterates that graffiti is a criminal offence. "It is important to realise that graffiti is not the work of an 'unknown or aspiring artist' but an act of criminal damage that encourages further criminal acts and has economic and social costs that must be borne by everybody," reads their graffiti policy pamphlet. "There is nothing attractive in this type of behaviour - it shows a complete disregard and contempt for people living in the area, their property and the environment as a whole." The pamphlet illustrates the point with photographs of some particularly wanton scribbles. Champions of street art ultimately can't deny that most of what counts as graffiti is mere visual pollution.
Hugh Coughlan, of Dublin City Council, explains their tactics against graffiti: "The main thing is we will remove graffiti from public places as soon as we can, that's the policy. It's a constant battle - as soon as you take it down, it's going back up," he says. "That has led us to believe that it's an overall approach we need. Recently, the city council is supporting an initiative in Temple Bar, Invoke Street Art, in which a number of utility boxes have been decorated with street art [ including a design by Maser]. The conversation has started - there used to be a reluctance to explore those ideas, but you have to come up with a mixture of responses. But we spend quite a lot of money on clean-up, in excess of €750,000 a year. If it's appearing in a public place, even if there's great skill and care put into the work, we can't set up a quango to decide which is art and which is vandalism - once it's in a public place, we have an obligation to the wider community to remove it. It is a debate that polarises people very quickly."
Where there is little apparent polarity in viewpoints is among the urban art community itself - the degree of solidarity between street artists and taggers is both surprising and admirable. The Art Raid in aid of Sean Bryan is a good example - the threat to Bryan, who started out bombing his tag all over the city, drew work from both Asbestos and Maser, as well as Canvaz, Turtlehead, Jim Fitzpatrick and even actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers. While their work might have different motivations, and elicit very different reactions, they share more than just an urban canvas.
"We're all family," says Art Raid organiser Will St Leger. "I feel that graffiti artists are like cousins - we use the same paint, we just apply it differently. It was the best Art Raid I've ever done, not in terms of the mix between visual art and theatre, but because we had 75 pieces, from every single street artist in Dublin, so it was a solidarity thing, as if to say, 'any one of us could have got this fine'. Politically, it had the right message." Given the skyrocketing commercial value of street art, the event also pointedly undermined the notion of "art as an investment".
"People want physical possession of things," says St Leger, "but all you have to do to own street art is see it - or even take a picture of it and blow it up and put that on your wall, if you need to - there you go, you own it."
"When you don't have an immediate knowledge of it, it just looks like mindless vandalism, " says Asbestos of the graffiti that fills the streets. "But if you kind of try to understand where it comes from, you may not agree with it still, but there is a distinction between it just being destruction - it is somebody trying to express themselves, however badly or well they do that." It is perhaps a requisite quality of street art, then, that it must share a canvas with idle scribbles, the very democracy inherent in the form demands equality between the signature of a bored teenager and the work of art fit for a gallery.
Asbestos and Maser tell two similar stories, which hint at the deeper level of understanding between taggers and street artists. "I was out painting a piece late last Sunday night," says Maser, "and I realised that it's not just the painting of a wall, it's your whole environment. The way it's cold, the way it's dead silent, there's no one around, and you're in this whole space - even the way you're picking up the cans in the quietness. The characters you meet, homeless guys creeping out of the darkness, you see foxes just strolling down the street. It's more than just painting the piece, it's the whole experience."
"I was putting up work last week in Venice at five in the morning," says Asbestos, "with nobody but the street cleaners and people delivering cases of wine to restaurants. It's a wonderful feeling to be out there with the city, and not have hordes of tourists or people - it's a different side of the city, you learn to appreciate it. I don't try to destroy things, I go out to enhance. Obviously, some people don't believe that, and some people will just take my work down, but that's why I do it."
It is, therefore, the act as much as the art that defines the form. In carrying out their work, street artists and graffiti taggers share the risk and the thrill of knowing the city in its sleeping hours, when all is quiet and the streets are empty, where they can interact with the urban landscape and change it on their own terms, in their own way.
Outsider art moving to the inside track
Neither the explosion in popularity of street art over the past decade, nor the establishment's increasingly warm embrace of it, comes as much of a surprise given the current state of the art world. And by world I, of course, mean market. As viewers of veteran art critic Robert Hughes's TV polemic, The Mona Lisa Curse(shown recently on Channel 4), will be aware, art has become increasingly dominated by commerce, with billionaire collectors buying works mainly as financial investments and pushing prices up so much that museums aren't even in the game anymore.
What can a talented young artist do who has no stomach for the political to-ings and fro-ings involved in the established gallery scene? He or she can take it to the streets.
While graffiti and street art go back millenniums - examples have been found in Pompeii and in Newgrange - the practice of ornamental tagging comes from the 1970s and the emerging hip-hop culture in New York and LA.
In more recent times, taggers have been joined on the walls by artists doing more complex work, such as throw-ups, posters and paintings. It may be illegal, but some street art is as good as, or better than, that which you see in many galleries, and it's available to everyone. However, its democracy is a curse and a blessing. Bored young people used to just carve their initials in tree trunks in the park, now they emblazon a "radical" alias in a 10-foot, day-glo bubble on a wall near you.
While some artists revel in their outsider status, street art is not immune to the power of the market. It too, has been co-opted, mainly by mobile phone companies and drinks manufacturers. At the moment it's in a weirdly schizophrenic position. On the one hand it's denounced as a crime, and prosecuted, on the other its exponents are courted by the establishment. Works by Banksy, perhaps the most famous street artist in the world, change hands for six-figure sums. Soon it will be millions. Which brings us back to Damien Hirst and Charles Saatchi.
It's understandable that street artists grab the chance to exhibit in galleries if it's offered. Most, after all, are trying to make a living.
Right now, many combine traditional exhibiting with working on the street. But their first work was born of a desire to express themselves, to say something about the world and their experience of it rather than to merely carve out a career. That may not be true of the next generation, some of whom at least may regard painting on the street as a path to wealth and fame rather than a means of expressing joy or dissent. On the other hand, with new media and ever-more accessible technology, the potential for making street videos, installations and mixed-media art is huge.
There will always be artists - on the street and in galleries - who manage to hold on to their integrity. A golden era of street art may already be passing, but who's to say a new one isn't about to begin?
Cathy Dillon