Igor Clark

A small crowd gathered ’round these two guys having a good ol’ bash underneath the railway bridge over Old Street. It sounded quite fresh, but the sax (is that a soprano sax I saw before me?) was a bit annoying on its own; what it really wanted was some propa ruff bass — or even some evil, thunderous ghetto death bass — to go with the really quite shit-hot d’n’b drumming the guy with the hair was doing. Still, all very impromptu and street and basically yeah. I particularly liked the guy stood at the side of the sax player just looking involved and generally caring a lot about it all.

I’ve loved graffiti since I can remember; even scribbles, scrawls, meaningless adornments seem somehow to transport me. As a teenager something about the brazenness of a bomber’s tag both appalled and appealed to me, the declamatory cries of an invisible human mass shouting its assortment of assumed names into the sky prompting many an æsthetic contretemps with one or other of my parents, a generational gap ensuring that purportedly lofty issues of expressive authorial intention in the face of ruthless establishment oppression were raised against the condemnation of apparently mindless vandalism.

Even now the simple and the pointed often grabs me more than the elaborate, but if you’ve cast even a casual glance at my Graffiti set on Flickr, you’ll have seen the visual landscape I inhabit and enjoy becoming gradually more and more heavily populated by stencil pieces of increasing complexity. Banksy obviously took an early lead in this approach but the last few years have seen a proliferation of ever–more stylized and, to me, often stylistically more interesting artists springing up, some of whom joined Banksy himself in decorating a tunnel under the railway lines at Waterloo last weekend.

Scorning Saturday afternoon’s milling crowds, I returned on Monday evening and found a reduced but nonetheless muscular corps of enthusiastic attendants, the air pulsing with a slightly desperate euphoria arising perhaps not only from the attentions of graffiti– or photo–nerds such as myself, but also from the last gasp of bank–holiday activity combined with the inevitable intrigue generated by the festival’s early–day PR.

Much of the work itself seemed derivative, a farrago of paler or bolder homages to Banksy’s own juxtapositional mannerism, implemented with a varying degree of technical facility. This school interests me less and less as it spills into the mainstream, not by dint of that popularity but simply by the associated upward spiral of cliché. Relentless “ironic” combinations such as Pope Marilyn often raise a smile but, despite the scale and ambition, seem in practice, no matter how weighty or otherwise their intent, somewhat hollow. Banksy’s street–cleaner destroying cave–paintings seemed, even while hinting at a more well–formed insight into the means and meaning of artistic expression in an apparently incomprehensible world, somehow to scrub itself out through the brashness of the contradiction, the Buddha in a neck-brace effecting much the same self-defeat. For me Banksy comes into his own when he keeps it simple, as powerful images such as his hurt hoodie speak volumes for themselves.

There were nevertheless a few stand–out pieces, notably TEK 13’s bandana–clad bomber self–portrait, whose defiantly antagonistic stance, expressed with bold simplicity, was one of the starkest, most suggestive and simply strongest images present by far. A pair of movingly engaging chiselled faces made a foray into the world beyond the spraycan; C215’s neo–craquelured faces were plentiful and, while summoning the image of a fine artist riding an opportunistic pillion on a sometimes less considered and elegant, but often bolder and manifestly more “real”, street–art vague, demonstrate an unusually easily accepted overlap of “cultural” milieux.

On that note, the Manga–styled piece by Hush pictured above neatly demonstrates some of the qualities which contribute not only to good graffiti, but to making this current strain of graffiti good: artistry, ingenuity, intelligence, empathy, and receptiveness.