CULTURE BOOK “ John Part of its appeal now, as then, is that it’s simple and can be done quickly – it’s like that return to three-chord songs you get after music gets overly complicated Fekner, street art pioneer OUTDOOR SCENES DOT DOT DOT’s Handgun on Sunset Boulevard, LA Facing page: Wheels over Indian Trails, in New York City, by John Fekner “Given how economically disadvantaged [fledgling] artists so often are, the stencil has long been the ultimate low-cost tool for some kind of protest messaging, from the Berlin Wall to Ukraine today,” explains Cassius Colman, founder of Nelly Duff, in London’s East End, one of the first galleries to exhibit international street artists. “And the best of it is incredibly skilled – the minimum amount of mark making for the maximum impact.” That, technically, stencil art is illegal in most places has only added to its underground edginess, affording it the cool of controversy too. Or, perhaps, that used to be the case. “I heard that ‘street art’ was being called ‘urban contemporary art’ now, and that’s when you know the institutions have started to accept it as a genre, instead of fighting it,” laughs DOT DOT DOT, the Norwegian stencil-turned-conceptual artist whose street works are characterised by their large scale and often dark wit. COURTESY DOT DOT DOT 58 NetJets
“The movement for the last 10 to 15 years has scaled up the interest in art for people in general, and maybe it has been important in terms of changing people’s perspective of everyday life,” he adds. “But certainly ‘street art’ is not only of interest to a certain type of person anymore. It’s for everyone.” But, warns Colman, that doesn’t mean it’s all any good. Beware the mimics. “Invariably, as with many successful art forms, its exponents have been imitated. And street art is easy to imitate,” he suggests. “The best of it requires a strong artistic statement and comes from artists who push their own style. They have a track record of progressive, independent thinking. I don’t think anyone needs to see another ‘Mickey Mouse with a machine gun’ type of image. There’s a lineage to stencil art now that brings some sober analysis [to the market].” Indeed, for all that Banksy may have become a household name – at least in neighbourhoods where, arguably, street art is least likely to be found on the actual streets – and commands record prices (his Love is in the Bin sold in 2021 for .5m) he was preceded by many lesser-known but genredefining stencil artists. Among them are the likes of the École des Beaux- Arts-trained Parisian street artist Blek le Rat – his work recognised by his signature rat motif – and Nick Walker, whose ironic, humorous images helped shape the influential graffiti scene that emerged out of Bristol, UK, both artists starting out inspired by stencilling’s early 1980s explosion. And before them was the poetry-loving John Fekner, often cited as the artistic pioneer of the medium, whose 300 or more conceptual works comprising official-looking symbols, dates and words, addressing the environmental hazards of living in New York, were at the core of the city’s creative energy from the late 1960s. “The phrase ‘street art’ didn’t really happen until later and was really about people from the community painting for the community, but stencilling came out of the ‘No Nukes’ protest era, as a means of making a quick, striking message about something,” says Fekner, who explains that stencilling originated during World War Two, with the US forces employing it to catalogue equipment or create makeshift signs to direct troop movements. “Part of its appeal now, as then, is that it’s simple and can be done quickly – it’s like that return to three-chord songs you get after music gets overly complicated. It also represents a kind of ‘artisan connection’ to old printing techniques, cutby-hand, woodcutting, typesetting, sign painting, and so on. Sometimes you can make new art with old tools,” says Fekner. “But I think it also appeals because it’s still ‘de-labelled’ – that you don’t know who made the work – which forces consideration of the message,” he adds. “That said, I do question how street art has become so commodified. Remember too that neighbourhoods have to live with these pieces and [unlike the art world] they don’t always like them.” COURTESY JOHN FEKNER NetJets 59
