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A colourful revolution

JamieSW — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 18:15:03 +0000

In Stokes Croft, once dubbed ‘Bristol’s forgotten half mile’, a quiet but colourful revolution is taking place. A loose coalition, the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft (PRSC), is using public art to transform an area that used to be emblematic of urban decline.

For Chris Chalkley, the one-man dynamo behind the scheme, art has the power to give the district a greater sense of community, and turn it into Bristol’s ‘cultural quarter’. ‘It’s possible that groups of people could come together to form an alternative vision for the area,’ Chris enthuses, as he takes us on a whistle-stop tour of a few of the ‘street galleries’ that have sprung up across Stokes Croft.

Shop fronts, walls and even an electricity sub-station have been adorned with striking images by local artists. Almost anything can be turned into a feature of the area, Chris says. Even mundane objects like drainpipes and litter bins can impart a feeling of identity, safety and vibrancy when they have been decorated with eye-catching, unique designs.

The PSRC is funded and organised almost entirely by Chris himself. Having run a china shop for 25 years, he does not think of himself as either an activist or artist, and relies on local artists to donate their time. In April, around 20-30 volunteers painted the inside of a railway tunnel just outside Stokes Croft. In a single weekend, it became a canvas for myriad different designs. There is no doubting the potential of Bristol’s artists, which is only beginning to be harnessed.

Dissatisfaction and blight

The PRSC has grown out of a need to change the face of the area, and dissatisfaction with the council’s response to its problems. Connecting the shopping centre of the city with more affluent areas to the north, Stokes Croft is a mixture of residential buildings and shops that line the main road. While a number of its buildings are listed, about 30 are derelict, such as a three-storey carriage works from the area’s Victorian heyday, which has stood empty since 1979. A further blight on the district’s image in many people’s eyes is the large number of homeless people, many of them suffering from drug problems, who congregate in what is known locally as the ‘bear pit’: a largely tarmac-covered, sunken roundabout at the end of Stokes Croft, connected to the surrounding streets by forbidding, grimy underpasses. The main road also boasts two less-than-subtle brothels.

Chris is adamant that image problems cannot be fixed simply by moving homeless people on or shutting down the massage parlours. You have to ‘work with what you’ve got’, he says. In their effort to discourage rough sleeping and graffiti by providing only single person seats and covering surfaces in anti-graffiti paint, the council has inadvertently made the area unwelcoming for everyone, says Chris. ‘If the policy is to make public space inhospitable to the homeless, then it will become scary to the public.’

While the PRSC has no formal links with any political organisations, it explicitly challenges what it believes has been the council’s approach to urban development. The focus, the group claims, has been exclusively on attracting private investment and big brands, exemplified by the ongoing £500-million Cabot Circus project to rejuvenate Bristol’s retail heart just a few hundred metres away from Stokes Croft. Instead, the PRSC argues, the aim of regeneration should be to create welcoming public spaces and to promote creativity in the face of creeping corporate homogenisation, with public art a cheap way of doing so that can involve the local community.

‘This is the front line of the battle against the encroachment of Cabot Circus,’ Chris warns, ‘so it needs to have a strong identity.’ However, others think that the new shopping hub, currently festooned with cranes, might be beneficial. ‘Cabot Circus has had a good impact,’ says Lisa Blackwood, who works at the nearby Kuumba Arts and Community Centre. ‘Stokes Croft is too close to Cabot Circus not to be developed.’ Yet commercial enterprise is welcomed by the PRSC, so long as it fits with the area’s independent and eclectic feel. ‘If we change the perception of the area, then businesses will come,’ Chris says. Indeed, cafes, grocers, bookshops and t-shirt printers have sprung up, attracted by relatively low rents.

Character appraisal

Bristol council says that it is working with residents and groups such as the PRSC to improve Stokes Croft. In October 2007 it published a detailed ‘character appraisal’ of the area, assessing its aesthetic and social problems, and also acknowledging that the murals that now dot the area are part of its distinctive character.

They have recently undertaken a £1-million renovation of a hostel for homeless people, and a street-drinking ban in 2003 was largely successful in moving on drinkers from a central grassy patch known as ‘Turbo Island’ on the main road (though critics claim that this has done little more than displace them a few hundred metres down the street). But private investment is still central to renewing urban areas, the council argues: ‘The improvements to the image of the area effected by the work of PRSC are one part of the process, but not sustainable on their own – there needs to be commercial investment to back it up.’

One of the council’s biggest problems is getting private owners to preserve the historic character of their buildings and shop fronts. Some property holders simply hang on to derelict buildings, hoping that a lucrative development offer will come along. The council is currently battling to reclaim the towering Westmoreland House building from the developers Comer Homes, who have left it derelict for more than two decades. Seven people have died since the building was damaged by fire and abandoned in 1969.

As our tour of the Republic comes to an end, Chris is keen to stress that he doesn’t think he has all the answers to Stokes Croft’s problems. Most of the works done so far are temporary. ‘The project is constantly evolving. A year ago I was thinking differently, and next year it will have changed again.’

There may be a risk that street art, while visually exciting, will turn the area into an artistic ghetto, and be exclusive of those who are not a part of the graffiti community. Or, if businesses and affluent residents are drawn in, the resulting rent hikes may push out the very artists who are attempting to accelerate urban renewal. The next step planned for the PRSC is to set up as a social business, where donations are exchanged for a say in the future of the project. Whatever direction the PRSC takes next, there can be no doubt that public art created and funded by local artists can be a cost effective way of putting colour and life back into the inner city.

Big Art and Perspex Panels

Alex Doherty — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 11:19:26 +0000

Now this is getting silly. A series of emails released to the Camden New Journal under the Freedom of Information Act has revealed that the local council has been trying to obtain insurance cover for some of street artist Banksy’s work on its property. One of the works in question is an early Banksy stencil of a rat carrying a placard with an exclamation mark on it. It’s on the side of the council headquarters in King’s Cross, north London, and is currently protected by a scratched and grubby Perspex panel. When council workers repainted the wall last year they didn’t dare replace the panel because they were afraid that removing it would damage the original graffiti.

The rat used to be a bit of fun, at once at home in and livening up the grimy streetscape. Now it’s ‘art’ and, like the Banksy-adorned wall in Portobello Road that attracted a winning bid of £208,100 in an online auction in January, it’s become a commodity that has lost any connection with the ethos that originally inspired it.

What Banksy should do now to preserve his artistic integrity is to flood the market with stencilled street art, playing capitalism at its own game by using the laws of supply and demand to prick the absurdist bubble. It’s the only way to take back control from the folk who think that every act of creative energy has its price.

Spray it loud

I had a brief career as a graffiti artist myself. Jill Posener wrote me up as a ‘graffitist’ (she made up the description, although she put the word into my mouth) in her 1982 book Spray it Loud, which featured some of my efforts. I got picked up by the Special Patrol Group for my troubles, paint pot and dripping brush in hand; and I think I’m the only person alive who ever got prosecuted for ‘putting up posters without permission on the market buildings’ in Widnes. (Actually it was a hand-painted eight-verse poem but the magistrate ruled that was the same thing legally.) A couple of us even redecorated Aldwych tube station, which closed in 1994, in some long-forgotten protest over democracy in Greece.

But no one ever thought of preserving my efforts behind Perspex. I got fined a few times but never got paid for anything, and eventually moved on to other artistic outlets. Now I complain with the rest of them about scratched graffiti tags on bus windows and in communal stairwells. (Since this is the only criminal act that comes with a signed confession as a matter of course, why do the police find it so very difficult to deal with?) And instead of doing it myself I write copy for Channel 4’s Big Art Project website and the accompanying Big Art Mob, which has won Royal Television Society and Guardian New Media awards for an innovative set-up whereby people can post photos of ‘public art’ from around the country via their mobile phones.

The Big Art Project is based on the notion that public art can transform a space into a place. When a community participates in that transformation, it can change how people feel about living in or visiting that place. So, in October 2005, Channel 4 invited nominations for sites – and communities – where they wanted new works of public art. More than 1,400 members of the public across the UK responded, and seven sites were selected where the local communities have been involved in choosing the kind of public art they want to create and which artists they want to commission to do it.

It’s a ‘bottom-up’ approach that has produced very different outcomes in different places. In Burnley, the first of the seven commissions to be unveiled in March, the Greyworld arts collective has worked with 15 local teenagers to produce Invisible, a series of paintings that can only be seen when lit from an ultraviolet source. The paintings include a series of ‘local heroes’, who range from the Burnley FC mascot to a Big Issue seller, a community worker, a head teacher and a local actor and dramatist.

In St Helens, a group of ex-miners and other local people has commissioned Dream, a 20-metre-high sculpture of a child’s head, from the internationally renowned artist Jaume Plensa for the former Sutton Manor colliery site. In east London, the arts and architecture collective, Muf, is working on a community engagement project to transform the ‘Beckton Alp’, a former spoil heap alongside the A13 that enjoyed a second incarnation as an artificial ski-slope but is now derelict. Other projects are taking place in Mull, Belfast, Sheffield and Cardigan, where the local community is discussing a proposal with Canadian multimedia artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, best known for his huge hi-tech, interactive works using lights and shadows.

Sheffield has been the most controversial site, with Big Art Project supporters pitted against the E On energy giant in defence of the Tinsley cooling towers, which E On has insisted on demolishing. The iconic 76-metre high towers, just 17 metres from the M1 and the first things that most people see on entering Sheffield, have been described as ‘the Stonehenge of the carbon age’ by Antony Gormley, the artist whose Angel of the North has probably done most to demonstrate the potential of mega-public art. Their selection as one of the seven Big Art Project sites was a victory for local campaigners battling for their preservation. When E On refused to back down on demolition and instead offered £500,000 towards the cost of a new regional artwork, the campaigners pulled out of the planning group.

When it comes to a clash between public art (or the preservation of our industrial heritage) and profit, it’s obvious which way big business will turn – and, as in the case of the Tinsley cooling towers, which were getting in the way of a new £60-million biomass power station, the local planning authorities are generally only too eager to march to the profit-makers’ drum. Increasingly, though, business is also alert to the potential of public art in marking out its own profit-making space.

Angel of the South

So it’s no surprise, for instance, that the Thames Gateway development at Ebbsfleet in north Kent includes plans for a £2-million landmark mega-sculpture to put itself on the map (literally, since there’s nothing there at the moment). The ‘Angel of the South’, as it’s inevitably been dubbed, although its official title is the Ebbsfleet Landmark Project, is going to be twice as big as its northern cousin, about the size of the Statue of Liberty. It’s being funded to the tune of £1 million by Land Securities, which is building a new residential development on the site; the rest is being raised by the project manager, Futurecity Arts. The ‘UK’s leading cultural agency’, as Futurecity bills itself, specialises in ‘kick-starting the regeneration of run down, brownfield and post-industrial areas in towns and cities across the UK’. To this list, presumably, it must now add greenfield sites and hills in Kent.

The shortlist of five entries to the competition to design the Ebbsfleet landmark is currently on display, appropriately enough perhaps, at the Bluewater shopping centre. A decision is expected in the autumn between a huge white horse (Mark Wallinger, of State Britain fame); a giant Meccano construction (Richard Deacon); a modernist mausoleum (Daniel Buren); a winged white-concrete disc (Christopher Le Brun); and an artificial mini-mountain with the cast of a house on top (Rachel Whiteread).

The project is being accompanied by ‘one of the largest ever public engagement programmes’ to ‘involve and inform’ the local community and ‘to create a legacy of community ownership of the landmark’. I am not one of those who sneers at the significance of such initiatives, however they are devised and funded, and I have no doubt that the Ebbsfleet Landmark will come to be as highly regarded and locally loved, if that’s not too strong a word, as the Angel of the North, the concrete cows of Milton Keynes, the Tinsley cooling towers, the Millennium Dome or any number of other monuments over which the local community had little or no say in their construction. But it is impossible to resist the conclusion that what is happening here is that the public engagement programme has more in common with a massive, modern advertising campaign to induce brand loyalty than a public participation exercise to find out what people want in the first place.

What the public wants

Of course, what people want when it comes to public art isn’t easy to discern – and it often varies from one person to the next. There are those who can’t wait to say goodbye to the Tinsley cooling towers. There are those who fought for years to stop a statue of Nelson Mandela finding a site in central London (and there are those who felt that a statue of Winston Churchill required improving with red paint and a grass mohican). There are those who believe that the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square should be reserved for yet another statue of a traditional British war hero rather than its current showcasing of different sculptures – living sculptures, 2,400 of them standing on it for an hour apiece, when Antony Gormley gets his go shortly.

I like Gormley’s work, by the way, but I do wish he wouldn’t open his mouth. He may be good at public art but like many artists his ideas about the effect it has on the public seems intended to turn them off. ‘Through elevation onto the plinth and removal from common ground, the body becomes a metaphor, a symbol and allows us to reflect on … the individual in contemporary society,’ he said on winning the chance to put his proposal on the fourth plinth.

No doubt there are readers who think Gormley’s words make perfect sense, and that is as it should be with art and artists. They are meant to challenge; we are meant to disagree. But the fact that the public rarely agrees over what constitutes ‘good’ public art can militate against anything truly imaginative. Seeking to please (or at any rate not offend) the public can too often lead to the corporate and the bland, a kind of lowest common artistic denominator, taking the place of real creativity.

Perhaps the most interesting things about Channel 4’s Big Art Project is what people have chosen to post to the website as examples of ‘public art’ in their localities. Banksy and Banksy-wannabes proliferate, and street art and graffiti makes up the biggest single category. But there are also people’s photos of performance art and installations, alongside architecture, statues and sculptures, by well-known artists and unknowns, temporary and more permanent, from the UK and worldwide. Some of them are good, some are bad, some indifferent (make up your own