Thousands of people across the country are involved in the vibrant street art scene yet it rarely garners the column inches of more established artforms. Caterina Loriggio gives a personal view of the state of this neglected artform.
Undoubtedly, street art is overlooked and not just by the media. Funding bodies, institutions, theatres, cultural theorists, academics etc. have almost all, unilaterally, given it the go-by. How, when or why street art was moved off of the agenda remains unclear, but it has been and there are a number of factors that may have influenced this.
A grown-up artform
For a start it is hard to define what street art is. The term encompasses a range of exciting and spectacular genres: circus, clowning, spectacle, pyrotechnics, Mela, carnival, mime, music, visual installations and animatronics. Good examples include the collaboration between pyrotechnics company World Famous and theatre company Improbable on 2003s Sticky which involved hundreds of miles of sellotape, trapeze artists and fireworks; Mimbres highly skilled acrobatic Trip-tic; or Metro Boulot Dodos sound and visual installation Spring. However, more often than not, when you say street art, the first thing that comes into someones mind is a juggler and not a very innovative one at that. It is this perception, held by a large number of informed people, that is, to some extent, holding back the whole sector.
This cliché of the juggling jester cheeky chappie is clearly understood and sustained by many journalists who insist on placing street arts solely in kids listings. In 2005, there were at least 15 large-scale independent festivals across the UK and many more local authority-led initiatives; additionally, around 25 companies developed and toured new shows in what is essentially a six-month year. How many articles, features or reviews on all of this reached the arts pages of the national press? Four.
Personally, I do not feel the need for endless amounts of newspaper coverage; I do not work in street arts to be part of the institution. However, this is a something many practitioners do feel strongly about. Media coverage is seen as a tool to increase value and profile, as a way to match straight theatre plus, positive column inches can help to broker funding and sponsorship opportunities as well as gain further bookings.
Challenging populism
In the 1970s the sector was strong, with companies like Footsbarn and Welfare State International leading the way with radical and spectacular pieces. However, come the 1980s, the arts and social policies of Margaret Thatcher did little to encourage a form that challenged the establishment and led to large groups of jubilant people coming together on the streets.
Today, some 20 years on and with a less radical approach to the practice, relationships with Arts Council England (ACE) and other establishments are still difficult. Many ACE offices are struggling to implement the first ever Street Arts strategy created in 2002. With notable exceptions (including the sterling work of David Micklem in its national office) ACE employs very few street art advocates, which makes it difficult for both artists and producers to achieve success in funding applications. Good work only comes from sound investment. And here is another reason for getting left behind: a great deal of the work is not quite good enough.
I also think, somewhat controversially, that street art is just too popular (in the true sense of the word) to be taken seriously. We live in the age of accessibility, inclusivity, participation, new audiences street art has always been all these things. It is an amazing model for audience development and retention, with hundreds of thousands of people coming to see and take part in it each year. Last summer some 50,000 people visited the National Theatres Watch This Space, 25,000 people in three days attended the Winchester Hat Fair, and 15,000 people turned out for the finale of the Stockton International Riverside Festival. However, the arts in this country are still embedded in a class system that considers anything with mass appeal to be substandard.
Local investment
So, street art is forgotten but not gone. Moreover, it is on the cusp of some exciting developments, with fantastic opportunities such as London 2012 just around the corner. I am not naïvely ignoring the fact that this is a pretty perilous cusp, but I have seen significant positive change in the sector post-Millennium and feel that this can only get better over the coming years.
But whats going to ensure that this happens? More festivals and events is the immediate answer. ACE, rather promisingly, is renewing its commitment to the sector by making it a priority artform: it is beginning to fund more artists to create and develop work. Yet the opportunities to perform the end result are too few. Venue-based organisations could produce some such opportunities but, more crucially, local authorities need to take the lead.
The expansion of civil events has contributed greatly to the development of the sector in the past five or so years. However, many festivals are now caught-up in a dangerous stalemate between ACE and their local authority, with each claiming that it is the others responsibility to fund local events.
Local authorities have the power to make or break an event. This can be seen with the terrific expansion of Hat Fair since Winchester City Council decided in 1999 to invest in it rather than close it down. And support extends beyond cash. If you think you have problems with insurance, health and safety, risk assessments, licensing etc., just wait until you start throwing fire or water at a crowd or suspend 12 stilted performers in swivel harnesses from a trapeze! The support of a well-informed and imaginative environmental health team is invaluable in this litigious age, and where it works well there are some truly ambitious and astounding events.
European relationships
We need more funded showcase opportunities. With the demise of x.trax 2006 we have lost the UKs premiere showcase event (350 bookers attended the last one). We are now left solely with the Streets of Brighton, which does not pay the majority of its performers and, consequently, cannot guarantee quality. Without good showcases, artists struggle to get new shows booked in the UK and find it near impossible to get booked in Europe.
Our relationship with Europe also needs to be addressed; there is a popular belief that work there is better than ours and often this is true. But there is a reason for this. Take France, where street art has had 30 years of serious investment: there are creation centres for artists to make their work and there is a festival in practically every town every week of the summer, giving artists numerous opportunities to perform. Moreover, European artists get a lot of work in the UK, often at the expense of our home-grown talent. The sector and its funders need to look to Europe to see what is possible, to learn from their example and offer our artists and festivals similar levels of support.
We also need to find ways for our artists to break into the European market. For me, this is not through trying to replicate the European style and grand scale because there are just too few opportunities to perform this scale of work in the UK. Besides, UK artists have not yet been given the opportunity to manage shows or budgets on this level and, consequently, are not very good at it. Our particular strength is our unique quirky style which serves us well with many other artistic exports and this is what we should be promoting abroad. However, the British Council has not traditionally engaged in outdoor work, and we have not been strategic as a sector in our approaches across the water.
Building infrastructure
We need to embrace and develop our strengths. Without the support of ACE the sector has learnt to find funding elsewhere: from corporate gigs to regeneration bodies, from youth participation projects to social-inclusion strategies. The nature of the work enables it to mould itself to a variety of public agendas without compromising content and it has drawn money from a myriad of funders. Consequently, a great number of companies have survived without any kind of subsidy for 25 years or more.
We need to be honest about our weaknesses. Producers need to find ways to support artistic advancement beyond commissioning. They need to be patient with British artists and give them time and space to develop. The constant search for new work (an outcome of ACE funding priorities as much as programming style) goes against such development, culminating in companies with a range of mediocre work rather than a small but strong repertoire.
Producers around the UK should come together more frequently to share resources, divide up touring costs, co-commission, and share good practice. And artists and producers need to find a forum that is not about buying and selling in which to communicate.
It has taken a long time for us to come together the lack of infrastructure does not make this the easiest sector to organise. But now we have ISAN (Independent Street Arts Network) for the producers, and for the performers, NASA (not rocket science but the National Association of Street Artists) and they are working together, for the first time, on joint strategies for the future
I am confident that these things can and will come about. Being given this opportunity to spotlight the sector, together with the support that I have received from colleagues whilst collating it has, further fuelled this confidence.
Caterina Loriggio is a freelance street arts programmer currently working on Watch This Space at the National Theatre and Arts Fresco, Market Harborough
e: caterina.loriggio@btinternet.com