MAKING THEIR MARK
How street artists went from criminals to cultural darlings
As a major new exhibition at M Shed looking at the emergence of Bristol’s world-leading street art scene is about to open, Eugene Byrne looks at the extraordinary story of how local artists went from criminals and vandals to the darlings of the city council and the art world alike
THE big summer exhibition at M Shed, which opens this coming Saturday, June 26, looks at the role Bristol played in the development of British street art from the 1980s onwards.
Vanguard Bristol Street Art: The Evolution of a Global Movement, to give it its full title, comes with a great deal of gloss and hype attached, as well as an impressive roster of corporate sponsors. But then, along with the musicians who forged the so-called ‘Bristol Sound’ at the end of the 20th century, street art put Bristol on the global map.
It changed the character of the city fundamentally, and it’s now a key part of Bristol’s image worldwide. Love it or hate it, this image is very useful to the local economy, bringing in tourists and students. It’s also one of the reasons why people with skills and talent want to come and work here.
So then...in its way, street art is as important to the city’s economy now as chocolate or tobacco were 100 years ago? Discuss.
Bristol’s street art scene emerged in the mid-1980s, evolving from something routinely condemned as vandalism by the police, councillors and most of the people who wrote letters to the local press on the subject.
It is a curious history. Just as post-war Britain embraced the new leaders of former colonies which it once condemned as terrorists, Bristol ended up embracing artists it once condemned as vandals.
For many of the artists themselves, the journey was one from the courtrooms to careers that would make some as famous as leading pop stars, DJs or fashion designers.
Much of the early scene originated at the Barton Hill Youth Club in the 1980s, thanks to the efforts of youth leader John Nation, and largely inspired by the street culture of New York in the late 70s and early 80s.
One of the seminal American films from the period, Wild Style, which features a hip hop soundtrack and several New York street artists, came out in 1982 … and would become a regular latenight screening at the run-down old Concorde cinema on Stapleton Road for years afterwards.
As early as 1985, Bristol’s scene was regarded as vibrant enough to feature in an entire exhibition at the Arnolfini, one of Britain’s leading galleries for showcasing new and emerging art.
We all called it ‘graffiti’ back in those days, and the Arnolfini’s imaginatively-titled show, ‘Graffiti Art in Bristol’ featured the work of local artists like 3D, Z Boys and Bombsquad as well as local hip hop crew The Wild Bunch who, along with Mr 3D (real name Robert Del Naja), would become Massive Attack.
Street art and the emerging ‘Bristol Sound’ were intimately linked from the very start. Apparently, one of the most enthusiastic attendees at the Arnolfini show was a teenager called Geoff Barrow, who caught the bus in from Portishead and who may at the time have decided that Portishead would be a great name for a band.
By the late 1980s, the walls of Bristol were so festooned with ‘graffiti’ of such good quality that enterprising locals were photographing them and turning them into postcards.
But despite this, and the Arnolfini show, much of mainstream Bristol wasn’t ready for this sort of thing just yet. And after all, the Arnolfini was patronised by middle-class pseudo-intellectuals, wasn’t it?
The crunch point came in 1989 with what Avon and Somerset Police codenamed Operation Anderson, a massive crackdown which saw the arrest of 72 people, most of them gleaned from the records of the Barton Hill Youth Club.
Houses were searched and anything with spray paint on it (including, apparently in one case, a chest of drawers!) was confiscated.
It was, they say, the biggest-ever graffiti bust in British history.
Among those arrested was Tom Bingle, aka Inkie, who was (correctly) identified as one of the ‘kingpins’ of the scene, and who has an unmistakable style, drawing on Art Nouveau influences. From being in trouble with the law in 1989 he has since gone on to become one of the world’s leading artists, working for video game companies and, until recently, as in-house designer for Jade Jagger.
John Nation himself was also one of those caught in the dragnet and faced charges of inciting the youngsters under his care to commit
❝ It’s about putting your neck on the line and putting the effort in to create something Banksy
criminal damage. This ‘incitement’ was because he gave young artists a legal space (and walls) to work on at the club.
The police were in an impossible situation. The full spectrum of ‘graffiti’ covered moronic tags by barely-literate adolescents spraying their signatures in the same way that a fox marks its territory, through slightly more mature words and slogans in bubble letters, all the way to artworks for which people will nowadays pay millions at auction.
The public, MPs and councillors were demanding action against the worst stuff, while some wanted action against all of it. The rationale was not only that the worst graffiti made neighbourhoods look rundown and crime-ridden (which they often were), but there was the cost of cleaning it up as well.
But who would be the judge? Who was to decide what was vandalism and what was fine art?
The police’s shotgun approach backfired, the more so since instead of going after the little scrotes who tagged their neighbours’ walls, they homed in on what seemed an easy target.
The farce dragged on for a year. The final case, against John Nation himself, collapsed in the spring of 1990 when the prosecution offered no evidence and invited the jury to return a verdict of not guilty. YOUTH LEADER IS CLEARED OVER VANDALISM, went the headline in the Post.
There’s no doubt that Operation Anderson was a setback, though. Despite Nation’s acquittal, six other cases went as far as the crown court. There were no custodial sentences but there were fines, community service orders and threats of prison for further offences.
It had the effect of driving street art underground, and perhaps also of giving it more of a glamorous edge of rebellion which it might not have had if Anderson had never happened. Artists were still being caught, though usually they didn’t
get much further into the criminal justice system than the magistrates’ courts. Gradually, though, it became more and more acceptable. Walls on Fire in 1998 made good use of the derelict part of Canons Marsh behind the Lloyds building for a temporary festival of painting which produced 400 metres’ worth of murals.
By then, some of the older artists had moved on to other things. 3D had packed away his spray cans and found stardom with Massive Attack. In an interview that year, he said he had been disillusioned precisely by all the tagging that upright citizens were complaining about:
“Just writing your name up on a wall was just like an ego thing. Anyone can write their name on a wall. It doesn’t take any patience or talent or risk or any kind of real ambition.”
By the late 1990s, everyone in the know was raving about an up-andcoming star who called himself Banksy, and who claimed to come from Easton.
In an interview with Venue, the local arts and entertainment magazine, he said: “If you want to say something, you have to put your message up where people can see it.
“It’s about putting your neck on the line and putting the effort in to create something; about having the energy and guts to see it through.
“Easton’s an area which is on the way up and my work celebrates that. I paint hard for Easton and if every area had someone painting hard for it, the country would be a far more colourful place.”
By the early noughties Bristol’s street art was almost respectable, but it was in 2006 that a clever provocation forced the issue.
That year, Banksy’s worldfamous naked-bloke-hanging-outof-a-window mural appeared, right opposite the Council House (City Hall). This was a direct challenge to the powers-that-be, and one that the politicians met in the timehonoured way of Bristol politicians – they held a poll.
Bristolians voted overwhelmingly to keep it, and from that day to this, it has to be pouring with rain for there not to be one or two admirers, or whole groups of visiting schoolkids, taking photos of it with their phones.
When it was vandalised a few years later, spattered with blue paint, one of the councillors who had been most vocal in condemning it offered to provide a cherrypicker from his own company to help clean it.
The blue paint incident (which some folk knowingly claim was the work of Mr Banksy himself) was just before the opening of a massive exhibition of his work at the City Museum & Art Gallery.
So Bristol’s street art came of age in 2009. For all its oppositional and anarchic origins, the queues of people, children and pensioners alike snaking around the block to see the show, told everyone that it was now completely mainstream.
The M Shed exhibition will be looking at the key events and artists in the city’s history of street art, as well as “the drive for social change underpinning the work of many of today’s street artists”.
The advance publicity tells us that it won’t just be about painting, though there will be new and original works from various well-known street artists from Bristol and further afield. We’re also promised a feast of photos from Bristol in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as films (including a special five-minute edit of Wild Style and even a bronze sculpture.
There will also be an accompanying book, and an exclusive album featuring some of the music from the period which would go on to produce the ‘Bristol Sound.’ There’ll also be plenty of merchandise to buy.
It promises to be one of the largest collections of original works and memorabilia from the 1980s to the present ever seen in the UK, and will also look at how “a new generation of global creatives are advocating for social and environmental awareness through art on the streets”.
The pre-publicity for the exhibition makes no mention of Banksy, which is as it should be, many might say. While he has become the global megastar of Bristol street art, there were a lot of other individuals involved as well, not least Inkie and John Nation, or Felix (‘FLX’) Braun and Graham (‘Paris’) Dews, all of whom are among the consultants who have helped put the show together.
» Vanguard Bristol Street Art: The Evolution of a Global Movement is at M Shed from June 26 to October 31. Tickets are £8 adult/£7 concessions/half price for ages 16-24 and under 16s free. Tickets need to be booked in advance. See tinyurl. com/tw6v6yh8.