SITE OF EXPLORATION

By Peter Bengtsen

In recent years, street art has increasingly become part of mainstream culture. In 2006, the press began reporting on celebrities buying up the work first of Banksy and then other street artists, some of which in turn eventually became a sort of celebrities themselves. Since then, a steady flow of articles and news reports on the topic of street art and the inclusion of studio work from artists who were known for their work in the street in high-end auctions and museum shows have served to further fuel public interest and debate.

With this popularisation have come great opportunities for a number of artists who were previously creating unsanctioned works in the street to work on big, sanctioned projects that are often realised as part of so-called street art festivals. Such festivals have become abundant, in part due to the increasingly acceptable profile of certain types of street art which by all accounts has made getting funding and permissions for festivals easier. Among street art enthusiasts, this development has generally been received well. People seem to be happy to attend festivals and discuss large murals as street art, thereby perhaps gradually changing the way the term street art is being used. 

I have no problem with street art festivals and the – often wonderful – large-scale artworks they facilitate the production of. For me, however, a big part of enjoying street art has always been the way that unsanctioned artworks on the street encourage me to pay attention to my surroundings. In my academic writing I discuss this in terms of street art’s potential to open up public space and turn it into a site of exploration.

Unlike art in a gallery or a museum, where artworks are usually served up for a set amount of time (the duration of the exhibition) for the audience to more or less effortlessly take in, discovering unsanctioned street art entails actually being on the ground, physically walking around and exploring a constantly changing cityscape. The uncertainty about how long an artwork will last also adds a sense of urgency to the experience if you happen to find it. The effort (or luck) involved in discovering unsanctioned art in the street comes with great rewards as it puts into focus the here-and-now existence of the individual in a particular space. As with public art, the experience of exploration created by unsanctioned street art is much harder to achieve with large-scale, semi-permanent murals, even if they are being described and discussed as street art.

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