Banksy: taking art to the streets in Soho Square.
Graffiti has a bad reputation. In the media, graffiti artists are represented as teen hoodies with Asbos, vandalising otherwise pristine cities with cans of stolen paint. The reality, however, is far more unsettling. Graffiti isn't just created by rebellious, disaffected youths from bad homes. These artists range from 15 to 45. They have jobs, careers and families. They just have the added compulsion to put art in public spaces and scrawl their names on the walls around them.
Sure, vandalism is a part of their motivation. It is one reason the artwork is often so effective and creates such strong reactions. Graffiti makes the tension between the individual and the city visible. As urban spaces become ubiquitously commodified and surveillance rises to Orwellian standards, humans sacrifice their identity. The self is secondary to the social whole. Street interventions reflect the human desire to assert individual existence in a world where power often goes hand in hand with pay packets.
There is also a violent edge to graffiti's visual approach. Sometimes the illegibility of graffiti text is part of what makes it feel threatening. The scene has always played with the language of war and conflict: painting is called bombing, while writing your name is a tag, echoing soldiers' dog tags. The friction between writers and the authorities - which in the UK has become increasingly heated as government legislation becomes increasingly strict - is a form of war. The artists become guerrillas and spies fighting to create art; as a result, graffiti often takes over the non-spaces of the city - train yards, backlots and odd hidden walls. It is only here that individualism and identity is allowed to exist.
The harder-to-reach spots often come with the most kudos, but can be treacherous. Two young graffiti writers were killed by a train last weekend; it seems they were not deterred by the dangers involved. Indeed the scale of a train is what makes it so attractive to writers: it is the medium's classic canvas. Painting trains has its roots in 1970s New York, when the train cars would cross the city proclaiming writers' names and creating an underground sense of fame.
It's comical to think of graffiti as a fad or a craze - it has lasted 30 years and is constantly developing. Contemporary art, in contrast, is finding it increasingly hard to relate to the public. Conceptualist and postmodern work is often too obscure. The art world is elitist - and the art market wants to stay that way. Buyers want to feel they have one up on hoi polloi, after all. A spray can piece by Cept on a wall near Brick Lane puts it well: "Art is Dead, long live graffiti."
At the same time, a new wave of artists is moving to the streets from the fine art scene. People such as London's CutUp collective tear down billboard ads and rebuild them into pixellated collage images, while Paris's Invader places concrete mosaics of Atari computer game characters on buildings. Even Banksy's sculptural interventions point to a new direction, such as the phone box hit by an axe that turned up near Soho Square earlier this year. This is egalitarian art that interacts directly with the society. This is art that doesn't want to be banished to the gallery. The street is the only real, physical place where people see each other outside the bubble of our screen-based existence. Surely an ideal place for art?
