StickerNation :: International Sticker Network

Feature by Dom Murphy :: Thursday, July 31, 2003

This feature has kindly been donated to StickerNation by Grafik Magazine.

Streets are the galleries of the new millennium and paint and canvas have been replaced by spray can, stencil and sticker. Rob Hinchcliffe reports on street art.

During the formative years of the Nineteenth Century, in the town of Biedermeier, Vienna, there lived a registrar named Josef Kyselak. One day, for reasons lost to history’s ether, the Austrian agreed to a bet that required him to write his name all over the town.

We can only assume that Kyselak collected on his wager, because soon there was no wall or surface in the whole of Biedermeier that did not carry his moniker. Kyselak’s handiwork made him an instant celebrity throughout the monarchy and a scribal pandemic ensued, with his name being replicated and reinterpreted throughout the country, much to his annoyance.

The cultural impact of Kyselak’s work was the genesis of an artistic tradition which continued and grew through the Mexican mural movement of the 1930s, the political scrawlings of the Hunagarian revolution in 1956, and the Situationist-influenced student uprisings in Paris, right up tol the advent of turf graffiti in New York and Los Angeles in the 1970s.

For years, graffiti has maintained its place in the cultural canon, spawning a myriad of stylistic sub-schools and spin-offs; maintaining itself through the kinetic energies of is deep-rooted lores and traditions. But recently things have changed. The modes of reproduction have shifted to such an extent that the terminology is no longer sufficient. Now we have ‘street art’, an all-encompassing definition of a medium which incorporates stencilling, stickers, throw-ups and poster paintings. Street art is graffiti’s naughty teenage cousin - outgrowing its traditions and embracing the osmotic influences of a post-modern culture.

“Street art is constantly redefining itself,” states Dom Murphy, curator of the web’s most prominent advocator of sticker art: StickerNation.net. “What used to be just graffiti has now been joined with stencilling, pasting and stickering. They, in turn, are mutating and feeding back on themselves. What used to be a heavily typographic art form has suddenly gone abstract.” StickerNation began in 2000, the idea was to promote artists through downloadable sticker artwork allowing the artist to get to places they themselves would never reach.

Stickernation has just gone through a major overhaul a step necessitated by the growing interest in the medium. The archive is maintained by a global team of stickerheads uploading photos of stickers and street art that they’ve spotted and photographed. The site concept goes full circle: Stickernation distributes artwork to an audience who in return send photos back to us.”

Murphy believes this surge of interest is, in part, thanks to the increasing affordability of the means of production. “The cost of computers, printers and scanners means more than ever people are able to practice home publishing,” he surmises, “and the expanding street art scene is one outlet for this.”

One of the main exponents of this new wave is the Amsterdam-based collective known as The London Police. A three-strong crew of street artists, Chaz (originally from London), Garrett and Bob have been working together for the past three-and-a-half years.

“The three of us all draw the same characters called ‘Lads’,” explains Garrett. “The left-over white-papered advertising spaces created by a local fly-postering company are unique to Amsterdam. We approach these spaces as blank canvases upon which to hand-draw our art. This democratic and free art gallery is open to anyone willing to look.”

Street art is unique in that it is defined by its geographical context as opposed to its form, “If someone creates something and then chooses to show it to the public using the street as their exhibit-space, then we would say that person is a street artist,” says Garrett. But the form still has an undeniable connection to traditional forms of graffiti that preceded it and The London Police are keen to expound this.

“Our characters’ connections and various permutations derive from wildstyle letterforms and we find ourselves putting our art in many of the same places that graffiti is. We see ours as a simultaneous school rather than a new version of street art - growing simultaneously, alongside graffiti.”

Someone who has worked with both The London Police and StickerNation is the London-based artist D*Face. For the past five years his work has been effecting the psycho-geographical space in most of Europe’s major cities through a variety of mediums and techniques.

He too is keen to note street art’s debt to its past. “The term street art seems to have been made up by a marketing executive as an acceptable term for a new generation of graffiti,” he says. “It has the same goals in that it is all about getting your work seen but it employs various different mediums from stickers to stencils. The sticker has proved to be an effective device to create and distribute work in the most central of locations. Possibly a throw back to the Government’s zero tolerance on graffiti. Stickering is seen by most to be a lesser crime than spray painting, making it more acceptable.”

But the way in which D*Face disseminates his work is very particular to this new breed of graffiti artist and is indicative of the transience and playfulness inherent in the form. “Like a snail leaving its trail. I leave my work, always on the look out for that ultimate spot. The city is the gallery; my drawings, the canvases being exhibited. I see every smooth surface as my exhibition space, hanging my visuals at every opportunity; the higher and cleaner the spot, the better the gallery, the longer the show...”

This sense of playfulness is also visible in the work of Kenn Sakurai. Better known as ESM, Sakurai’s street activities are deliberately designed to extract a wry smile from his audience and are based heavily on subverted images gleaned from popular culture. “I love pop-culture and derive a lot of my energy and thought from it,” says Sakurai. “I tend to use that sort of imagery and re-mix it to make it easily digestible when seen on the street by the public. I don’t have any political agenda to convey, just a sense of humour and possibly the warmth of nostalgia.”

As for the future of the medium, Sakurai is confident that creative-Darwinism will ensure a healthy progression. “The really good stuff takes some thought and creativeness that will outshine and be seen more than some of the others and create a possible dialogue instead of being passed by as a weathered piece of paper hanging on the back of a signpost. I guess there are levels of street art as there are for anything. There are the junior ranks and there are the pros.”

Big thanks to Caroline Roberts for donating the article to StickerNation.