Check out this brilliant collection of the Cans Festival and other street art on flickr.
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=cans+festival
http://www.flickr.com/photos/romanywg/sets/72157604852764513/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/romanywg/
Could anyone call this vandalism?
Street artists such as Banksy - and as street artist Vhils says ‘It’s not all about Banksy’ - have been moving graffiti into an art form of its own over the past couple of decades.
Ever wondered what Pure Evil looks like? …Well, kind of mild-mannered and genteel as it turns out. Here’s Pure Evil talking to the Guardian:
(Short video clip) http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/video/2008/may/02/cansfestival
The Cans Festival took place in a tunnel in Leake Street, underneath Waterloo Station, London. The tunnel is officially a public road but owned by Eurostar who gave permission for the site to be used as a gallery for the festival. The location was kept secret until the last minute. According to the Cans Website, 28, 544 people visited, with 623 of them adding their own piece of art to the walls, including Peter Chappell whom Banksy cites as a hero.
One of the most innovative parts of this exhibition is that a wall was designated as an open wall for any visitor to add their piece. The organisers kept to strict rules to keep the offerings up to standard, it all had to be stencil art and participants must register to be alloted a place to paint, and no painting over someone else’s work. The results look fantastic. Every art exhibition should offer a similar wall, talk about audience participation!
The invited artists moved stencil art on to another level. Don’t think Changing Rooms with Carol Smiley….
Think chipping your stencil out on a wall, like Vhils does:
I’m not pretending that these artisits have produced something equal in artistic ability to Matisse or Picasso or (insert your hero here) but there certainly is something Dali-esque about the style.
Dali at his Anthromorphic Desk, 1936
The real genius in the street art of the calibre you find at the Cans Festival, the bit that elevates it above others, is location – can you imagine the sterility of any of these pieces were they hung reverently in the National Gallery?
Banksy painting on the wall separating Israel from Palestine…
…and on a wall in Bethnal Green, London,
Banksy painting!
Could this be the elusive Scarlet Pimpernel Banksy? A spokesman for Banksy confirmed the artwork is genuine but refused to admit that the man captured by a passer-by on a mobile camera phone is the artist.
Street Festivals like the Cans Festival, and temporary installations in general, are not just something fun for the participants and spectators, but they are the future of art – immediately accessible, thought provoking, and perhaps prompting people to examine their own connection with art, be it visiting a gallery or doodling on the pad beside the phone.
As the public support for some of Banksy’s work attests, it is also the most democratic form of public art. Councillors commission works of art all the time, and pay high prices using tax-payers money, sometimes these pieces become beloved by the locals, sometimes they irritate, and predictable choruses of ’should have spent the money on something useful like hospitals..’ ring out. But here you are given, for free, a piece of art, to be removed, left to fade, or maintained, as is public will.
Appreciate the gift.
A quick caveat for the infantile street taggers, though: give it up, mate, you’ve been out-classed.
