Nerve 24 - Theatre of The Streets

Theatre of The Streets

The theatre of the streets is Streetart. It stimulates and provokes us, teases and annoys us. It has the courage to stand in our way and wag its finger, to dare to be different or pretty - or ugly even. It makes us think! It makes us feel! Streetart is a way of adjusting public spaces, of personalising the brutal and decorating the plain. It's an indivdualising act in a world which treats us like units sometimes. My name is HOBO and I'm a Streetartist.

I've taken to the streets with my art for all sorts of reasons, but mostly because I love the idea that we have the opportunity to shape the way people move through public space. In streets we are generally shaped by negative thoughts - the glare and blare of shopping, the dull boredom of wet concrete, the threat of personal contact - these make us move faster in cities. We think darker or maybe just blanker thoughts, blanking out the potential irritations or urban longueurs that interrupt our A to B. We escape into a digital world gladly, swapping titbits and scraps of intimacy with strangers we don't have to make eye contact with. And so we abandon the concept of urban space for a digital one. Streetartists want to seize back the streets for the human experience, they want to fix you with their welkin eye, they want to grab you and cry 'look at me!' but most of us are like everyone - shy - and so we express ourselves in our art and on our walls.

To make one person laugh or think melancholy thoughts is our goal, to make them stand in wonder or awe. These are the aims of artists everywhere whatever our canvas. But unlike traditional artists we do not put our works in Galleries and wait for posh people to drift into view with the cash to buy and the taste to want. Ever looked in a gallery? They inspire me like posh clothes shops do - not at all. Galleries are for us artists to indulge fantasies of a patron rocking up (this is just like Pretty Woman) and taking us off to love and cherish and KEEP. Naaah, get real and get out there.

This year the City is hosting the IFB (International Festival of Business). They have given us support to host an intense weekend of Streetart. So we want to do two months, and in the process show the city that instead of prosecuting and crushing Streetart they should be supporting it, and by the way show the world the real culture of Liverpool. Name me a city you like to visit, and unless it's in North Korea, it will have a vibrant and exciting Streetart scene. People travel across the world to see the great Streetart. I've had the mortifying experience recently of two travel bloggers wanting to be guided round the kind of quality Streetart they assumed a city like Liverpool would have. I had to let them down.

Still, after only three hours and many coffees and tons of Liverpool stories - they were happy, and I was rattling. This must change. Our city is famous for its agitprop Streetlife. It should also reflect our internal narratives. Our desire to talk, to tell the world - ANYTHING! Increasingly it resembles an anonymous anytown, anywhere. So, got an idea? Then come to us. MARKIT is the name, email and Facebook below! We already have some great ideas and artists, old, new and famous coming to the city. We are going to turn the Baltic area into a place of great wonder and excitement. We will erect billboards for graffiti, mend the walls with lego, and create woolly corridors, flocks of bikes and more. This is gonna be inspiring but not precious - Streetart cannot be precious. You can spend an age on a piece of work and next day it's gone - ripped from the wall or painted over. They're delightfully brief, these moments of triumph and wonder but my, they're grand!

For more info: trisbj[at]gmail.com
Facebook: tinyurl.com/markit-liverpool

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