Last month the U.K. street newspaper ‘The Big Issue’ published a special edition that was edited by graffiti artist 10Foot, which got me thinking about the role of street art in contemporary political protest. We live in a time when we need to political protest more than ever; to march, to sing songs, to communicate through our clothing, to boycott and to make street art. But before I discuss the creative practice of street art, it might be useful to define exactly what I mean. The term ‘street art' tends to bring to mind graffiti to many people, but although all graffiti is street art, not all street art is graffiti.Street art is made up of many expressions of creativity in public spaces that is created mostly without permission. Yarn bombing, stickering, stencil art, tagging, graffiti, flash mobs, and projection mapping are all forms of street art. I have a particular liking for the miniature street art of Slinkachu (see below), or Stuart Pantoll to his friends.
The first known examples of art on walls are in the cave El Castillo (Cave of the Castle) near the coast in northern Spain. The art is made up of a panel of abstract hand stencils called the ‘Gallery of the Hands’, although I doubt very much it was called this by Palaeolithic man. In art historian Saloman Reinach’s paper from 1904 ‘L’art et la Magie’ (Art and Magic), he discusses the painting of animals in the Lascaux caves in France from the same period. He suggests that cave art may well have been created for more functional (rather than creative) reasons 
and that the images may have been part of ritualistic magic that led to successful hunting. The images "show us mankind’s first steps on the road that leads to worship of animals (as in Egypt), then of idols in the form of humans (as in Greece) and finally to divinity conceived as a spirit" (Reinach 1904).
So, perhaps today there is more to painting on walls than just simple acts of civil disobedience. In a world where it is very difficult to literally ‘make our mark’, street art is definitely an act of identity, an act of saying ‘I was here’ or ‘I am here’ by those who do not have access to mainstream publishing or established galleries. Whatever the street art is visually displaying, it is a political act, an act of communication by those without a voice. There are many examples of medieval ‘tagging’ (writing your signature or mark) carved into the walls of churches and cathedrals by workers and parishioners. An image of the name ‘Kaynfford’, scratched upside down as a curse in Norwich cathedral, implies further links between wall art and magic.
Leaping forward a few hundred years, the Situationist movement ran from 1957 to 1972 (ish) and was heavily influential to the punk movement. In the U.K. designers such as Jamie Reid were studying and creating work such as the ‘Suburban Press’, the Croydon independent newspaper that followed similar political views such as agitation and anti-capitalism. The Situationists used wonderfully evocative painted slogans such as ‘Be Realistic, demand the impossible’, ‘It is forbidden to forbid’ The barricade blocks the street but opens the way’, ‘No replastering, the structure is rotten’, ‘How can one think freely in the shadow of a chapel’, ‘In a society that has abolished adventures, the only adventure left is to abolish society’, ‘Let’s ban all applause, the spectacle is everywhere’ and my favourite, ‘Beneath the pavement, the beach’.
The seminal text for the situationist movement was the 1967 book ‘The Society of the Spectacle’ by Guy Debord. The book suggests ‘authentic life’ has been replaced by representation and commodity fetishism, (we are what we consume). Debord’s text is prophetic and becomes more relevant as each day passes. Jamie Reid spoke about the Situationist philosophy often in his later years and discussed the consumerist imbalance of capital over community in our cities and towns and the planetary destruction caused by agricultural industries.
Today the Situationist philosophy lives on in Extinction Rebellion, Led By Donkeys and the recently disbanded Just Stop Oil movement, but the left is still disappointingly quiet in a time of far-right onslaught in the culture war. In 1987 U.K. prime minister Margaret Thatcher famously (or infamously) said ‘They are casting their problems at society, and, you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves…’ (Thatcher 1987) and this focus on the individual has sadly been a prominent way of societal thinking through most of my adult life. Not what we can do for others but what we can do for ourselves.
It’s been 4 years since Banksy’s ‘Spraycation’ of the East Anglian coastline and 4 years since I went out on a Banksy safari to find the pieces. Sadly, much of it has either weathered away or been removed and sold. I did not find them all but still have my photos of the ones I did. However, even Banksy has become less political and much of his work is focused on wit rather than anger. Perhaps this is because Banksy has ceased to be a single person and is now more of a franchise, a brand, a disparate collective with different motives (who knows?).
Maybe the answer is to focus on a creative rather than destructive message, to engage passers-by with something they want to stop and look at and might spend more time thinking about, rather than the act of tagging (spray-painting your name, logo or tag in as many places as you can) but how many of those who applaud the work of Banksy, follow and /or act on his political message or do his followers just consider the work in the same way they consider any other gallery based artistic expression? What I do know is much street art makes me smile and I’m often happy to see it. London’s Brick Lane is covered in many forms of street art and is almost a piece of art in itself. As I said earlier, maybe it is just the act itself, rather than the content that is at the heart of street art’s rebelliousness.
There was a trend in Norwich for a while where somebody was spraying the name ‘Les Dennis’ and who the hell is ‘Beardy Elton Spoons’? The ex-Canadian prime minister Jean Chrétien recently wrote in an open letter to all media, ‘Every time that Mr Trump opens his mouth, he creates new allies for all of us. So, let’s get organized! To fight back against a big, powerful bully, you need strength in numbers.’, Street art makes a continual statement that art belongs to us all. It is not just a commodity- not just something to be worshipped in galleries. It is something that has been used to persecute but also to inspire, provoke, make us feel, make us think and even make us rebel.
