In times of trouble take to the streets?

As 2010Lab takes a closer look at ‘Street Art’ across Europe, Duncan White asks "what is street art?" now and "can we learn anything from street arts of the past?"

Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark: Pioneers of the Down-Town Scene, New York 1970s (Barbican Art Gallery, London, 3 March-22 May).

With this current blockbuster show on at the Barbican Centre in London, that celebrates the ingenuity and interventionist creativity of three ‘pioneering’ American artists who helped define the ‘street art’ of a generation, this may be a good opportunity to review current understandings of street art.

The work of Anderson, Brown and Matta-Clark feels current.  It was born out of hard times. It was interventionist.  It turned on the physical interpretation of urban space.

The most exciting aspect of the show is the performance programme.  Pieces such as Matta-Clark’s, Open House (1972) and Brown’s Walking on the Wall (1971) – combined with documentation of pieces such as Roof Piece (1973) – enact a kind of non-purposive display that is compelling and uncanny. 



In ‘Open House’ performers in colourful clothing jostle for space and breakdown habitual ‘domestic’ behaviour that is usually, in more ‘normal circumstances’, directed in some way – oriented toward an object, toward meaning. 

With limited means these artists re-appropriated city space through its performance.  The street was used for the re-interpretation of spaces either redundant and vacant or determined by habit and routine.

Unsurprisingly, in this show, at this time, it is the economics of the work that takes centre stage. 

The exhibition’s curator, Lydia Yee, likes to compare recessions. Yee suggests, the current global recession is not as deep or as crippling as that of the 1970s. This may well be true of cultural institutions. In the current funding round the Barbican Centre’s Arts Council allocation was doubled to half-a-million pounds each year for the next three years – great news for the Barbican. 

But the impact of the current recession in the UK on urban centres is perhaps more comparable to that of Down Town New York in the 1970s.  As councils cut back on housing subsidies poorer tenants are forced to move out of central urban areas.

For artists there is a growing sense of confinement, and of claustrophobia, there is less room to breathe in the cities as high rents push people away – note Callum Lee’s lovely post for 2010lab on Margate as the new ‘Shoreditch-by-the-Sea’.

Street media space?

Has this led to an upsurge in ‘street art’ in Britain’s cities?  I don’t think so – nothing comparable to the New York scene of a generation ago or, say, today’s Berlin where rents have remained relatively low and vacant space is more readily available to artists. Although both cities, London and Berlin, now cater to street art’s growing popularity with tourists.

What is more noticeable is the way that the street continues to develop as a mediatised space – especially in London.

As new shopping centres go up equipped with increasingly complex AV systems the performance of street culture alters radically. Branding and media messaging determines the identity of new urban space while the streets beyond are increasingly policed by cameras of a different kind.

Observation, behaviour and control are clearly linked: we are observed as we observe ourselves.

On Camera

But there are glimmers of hope, even if of an unexpected kind.



A wonderful moment of contemporary ‘street art’ – though not intended as such – came via the BBCs coverage of the anti-government protests in London last month. I was immediately reminded of the non-purposive, ‘task-oriented’ playfulness of Matta-Clark and Brown as seemingly ‘performed’ behaviours confounded those observing them.

Protestors were filmed changing their dress from black clothing through which ‘anarchism’ is performed to more familiar colourful clothing through which ‘peaceful protest’ is acted out. The activity was both ‘strange’ and ‘suspicious’ for those observing it – in this case the police and the media – neither sure exactly of what this behaviour might mean.

So perhaps the street can still be used as a site of questioning and non-directed display; perhaps it remains a space of re-interpretation and questioning. But how to tap it?

“We want to go beyond"

While the work of artists such as Brown, Anderson and Matta-Clark looked for direct encounter, and physical intervention, in today’s situation, the policing of street space combined with its commodification, has forced artists to consider more closely the increasingly mediated condition of the ‘street’ itself.



Erica Scourti’s recent film Manifesto Piece, which was screened at The Public in London earlier this year – itself a great space for current performance work – is a film/performance that seeks to redirect the mediatised ‘readings’ of urban space by appropriating the voice and the systems of address that determine so much of how we observe, behave and read ourselves.

In Scourti’s film the ‘permanent ephemerality’ of street space and the ownership of designated ‘frames’ for media messages becomes a kind of framing, or reframing of imaginary and lived space.

Compare this perhaps to the street art of Barcelona reported on by 2010lab here, which is equally concerned with the ephemeral permanence of posting street messages.

The ‘street’ is now in many ways an altered concept from the street of previous generations.  It is utterly policed and ‘messaged’, the boundaries dividing private and public space have become imperceptible – the same space often interpreted by law enforcers and users in very different and yet very similar ways.

Can we seek out new interpretations, new concepts of the street as action and form?