Reclaim our streets
Josie Appleton
Anew Arts Council-funded book suggests that members of the public should urinate on national monuments all in the name of ‘corporate subversion’, of course. DiY Survival, a collection produced by the art group C6, is packed with ideas on how to undermine capitalism in your spare time.
Collect Starbucks Coffee paper cups from bins and change the lettering with a green liner pen (cross out the ‘star’, change ‘b’ to an ‘f’, cross out the ‘s’; and keep the ‘off’ from ‘coffee’). Place modified cups in a branch of Starbucks, preferably somewhere where there are lots of City types. Or how about blocking mobilephone conversations? Buy one of those recordable greetings cards and record a message such as ‘Your conversation is very annoying.’ Rig it up to a gadget that detects mobile phones and it will play whenever one is in earshot.
This is performance art meets anti-capitalist protest meets schoolboy prank. Contributors to the C6 collection include individuals and groups from Italy to Hungary, Mexico to Brazil. There is a growing network of tech-savvy artistactivists who network over the internet. Our city streets are starting to bear the imprints of their interventions. An ‘anarchitects’ group, the Space Hijackers, has held impromptu parties on the Tube, and sent suit-clad representatives to snooze on benches in the City of London, taking the siesta to office slaves. The graffiti artist Banksy has plastered London with his jokey, anti-authority images — he put up a sign for ‘designated riot area’ on the base of Nelson’s column and marked ‘designated graffiti area’ on the side of establishment buildings. (In a similar spirit, C6 stencilled a urinal on the wall of an alley in Poysner Street, Bethnal Green, which it dubbed ‘La Pissoir’.) In America the ‘Freeway Blogger’ has peppered motorway bridges with one-liners such as ‘Rumsfailed’ and ‘War president? My pet goat’. The flashmob craze kicked off in May 2003 in New York, with strangers following email instructions to meet at strange places and do strange things. Today the website www.flashmob.com documents global mobbing efforts. On 16 December, people dressed up as ‘Zombie-Claus’ Santas will meet in Michigan and ‘march amongst Christmas shoppers with signs and banners’. A Boston artist designed posters commenting on ‘[technology’s] use as a distraction from the real world’; flashmobbers were asked to meet in front of these posters, talking on a mobile phone.
The impulse to reclaim public space is a good one. Many of our urban spaces are bland and devoid of life, inspired by bureaucrats and corporates rather than people themselves. Rarely do we feel that we own the streets — often they are just spaces to get through on the way to somewhere else. Notices tell us to ‘mind the gap’ or to wear Gap, to ‘report any unidentified luggage’ or to buy a Gucci bag.
But art-activists’ attempts to ‘block’ corporate transmission do little to breathe new life back into city streets. How exactly is it humanising to have your mobilephone conversation blocked? These antics could easily become just another urban irritant, especially since many radical artists seem to hold members of the public in contempt: we’re seen as mindless, Starbucks-swilling zombies who follow corporate orders. These artists strike a smug pose, as if they were the only ones who could see the vacuity of cities. Marching among Christmas shoppers, they are saying, ‘Look at you lot, you dumb slaves to commercialism.’ Another tactic is to form spontaneous networks with members of the public, but this can be just as soulless. Flashmobs proper are deliberately pointless, and their futility makes a mockery of those taking part. One C6 project called ‘F**k you’ aimed to ‘connect different peoples from different countries and walks of life’. People were asked to phone a number and ‘leave the message f**k you’, which would be incorporated into the C6 exhibition; or to email in some relevant graphics. Here the public is connected with on the basest level, provoked into giving a guttural reaction. Another artist featuring in DiY Survival, ‘Anna Banana’, drops banana items in the street and gets passers-by to help her pick them up.
Artist-activists set themselves up against the ‘art establishment’. Leon, deputy editor of DiY Survival, tells me that he didn’t want to produce ‘another boring fine-art bollocks book’. But this idea of the ‘art establishment’ is largely a myth. There is no cabal of people who spend all day sketching Greek statues and talking about proportion; ‘questioning art’ has become thoroughly mainstream. Which is why Banksy has a publicist, has just held an exhibition in Notting Hill, and has sold many of his works to Damien Hirst. And it’s also why C6 received Arts Council funding. DiY Survival includes the project’s Arts Council application form, which pledges to create a ‘treasure trail of corporate subversion’ through ‘challenging, innovative interactive art’ and ‘street-level artistic communications’. The blurb on the back trumpets ‘redefining, through the engagement with the community, what we have considered to be “art” ’. Imagine the scene around the funding table: ‘ “Questioning art?” Tick. “Street culture?” Tick.’ C6’s best joke is had on the anti-art establishment.
Today’s radical art groups are a paler version of their forebears, such as the Dadaists and Situationists. The Dadaists may have been juvenile and nihilistic, but they had punch. They were working under the shadow of the first world war at a time when it seemed that Western civilisation was collapsing; the ‘poems’ that reduced language to mere noise were a shock to the cultural system. Meanwhile, Situationists of 1950s and 60s Paris may have been hairbrained and depressive, but they had big plans for revolutionising city experience. ‘Everyone will live in their own cathedral. There will be rooms awakening more vivid fantasies than any drug,’ one author proclaimed in the 1958 ‘Formula for a new city’.
Mobile-phone blocking is bland in comparison. If today’s artists have got something to say to the public, they should say it. Public art and art events could add a splash of colour to grey streets. There are some positive signs. Bands such as the Others have tried out guerrilla gigs on the Tube, for example, and the BBC Concert Orchestra held a flash opera at Paddington train station. Leon makes a good point with his suggestion: ‘Why don’t they give the Tube over to a really good designer?’ Why not, indeed. But let’s reclaim our streets from all this urinating and bananadropping.
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