A Stencil for your thoughts
August 4, 2003
By James Norman
D’Lux is one of Australia’s most prolific stencil artists. Not many people may recognize him by name, but most Melbournians would have surely seen his work. Poking its way surreptitiously around the corners of subterranean city blocks, etched onto advertising billboards, or sprayed with deliberate candour beside prominent thoroughfares – the work of stencil artists like D’Lux is penetrating the psyche of a rapidly urbanising city becoming famous for its bohemian laneways and youthful populous.
With its meshing of cultural, political and commercial allusions - stencil art seeks to interact with and comment on transitory aspects of our everyday lives. Whether you call it graffiti or art, stencil designs have become a ubiquitous part of aesthetics of Melbourne and many other global urban centres - characterised by its quickly consumable, reference laden and infinitely repeatable nature. The medium seeks to hijack the one-way information flow of advertising, corporate branding and mass media monopoly - while providing biting, satirical commentary on the danger of an unchecked consumer society.
And its popularity is penetrating unexpected circles. Stencil art is making its ascendancy from the status of illegal city graffiti, and beginning to grace the catalogues of cutting edge art galleries all over the world, as well as drawing the curiosity of corporate boardrooms and highly prestigious publishing houses. Australia’s National gallery is currently looking to assemble a collection of Melbourne stencil art, and Nike have reportedly offered big bucks to prolific European stencil artists in exchange for designing company logos.
Melbourne stenciler D’Lux, 25, wearing a black hoody and tracksuit pants and formidable no-brand runners, takes me to the stencil artist’s studio. His brown, darting eyes bespeak a cerebral and unashamedly rebellious nature. The North Melbourne warehouse that houses the core of Melbourne’s burgeoning stencil arts movement is a grotty, rambling former office space with partitioned studios. D’Lux tells me that eight artists lease the space – most of them concentrating on stencil art, some producing crossover work that combines stencils with traditional two dimensional portraiture and landscape pieces. “There are many different takes on stencil art. It’s not so easy to pin down,” he says.
The warehouse studio is almost clichéd in its compliance with the expectations of a struggling artist’s workspace. A few empty cans of Scotch and Coke lie among the clutter of cardboard and plastic cutout stencils designs, there’s bubble wrapped canvasses against a wall and a shabby ping-pong table in the foyer. A pile of spent aerosol cans lie discarded around the studio’s periphery.
Where spray-can tagging traditionally raises the venom of even the most fair-minded members of the community, D’Lux claims stencil art engenders a radically different response. “It’s about providing an alternative to what is otherwise an advertising dominated world,” says D’Lux, perched on a stool beside his worktable, with a well-organised folio of plastic stencils in a folder in front of him. “People definitely have a different attitude to stenciling than to tagging. Tags distance themselves more than images do. A lot of people that make stencil art are against tags as well. There is a fair bit of animosity between stencilers and taggers – they are different types of people with very different agendas. Stenciling is graffiti in the legal sense of the word, but its not graffiti in the cultural sense of the word.”
That is no doubt a moot point. There are surely many people, particularly inner city property investors, who may consider even the most intricate and insightful stencil art designs to be little more than wanton damage of private property. But it seems the art world is taking a somewhat different approach. Several Melbourne galleries including the George White gallery in St Kilda, Revolver in Prahran and the Lounge in Swanston Street city are embracing stencil art exhibitions as cutting edge (and lucrative) propositions.
Internationally, stencil art also seem to be the flavour of the month. An upcoming exhibition called Stencils: The Art of Negative Spaces at San Francisco’s Crucible Steel gallery describes itself as ‘the first art show to document the vitality, creativity, and diversity of the emerging world-wide stencil community and the dialogue that its art creates.’ The shows summary describes stencil art as a ‘repetitive method for human expression. A stencils potential to be placed anywhere opens up a dialog within its found habitat - from the sidewalk under your feet to a gallery wall - and creates new conversations with whatever else is around it.’
Stencil Art has also attracted the interest of some of the world’s major publishing houses. London art publishers Thames and Hudson recently released the book Stencil Graffiti by Tristan Manco. “I think graffiti has always interested the visual arts movement and publishing communities. Stencil graffiti is just an extension of that. It’s the extension of graffiti which has particular interest to both the arts and corporate world,” said Peter Shaw, general manager of Thames and Hudson Australia.
Stencil Graffiti author Tristan Manco describes Street art as ‘both an expression of our culture and a counterculture in itself.’
“Communication has become a modern mantra: the city streets shout with billboards, fly posters and corporate advertising, all vying for our attention,” says Manco. “They almost invite a subversive response. As high-tech communications have increased, a low-tech reaction has been the recent explosion in street art. The street is a unique and powerful platform; a frontline on which artists can express themselves, transmitting their personal visions directly to the public at the same level as official messages. No other art form interacts in this way with our daily lives, our urban space as its surface,” said Manco.
Andrew Mac, curator of the City Lights gallery in Hosier Lane, has recently been contacted by the National Gallery in Canberra to scout for a possible Melbourne stencil art collection. The National Gallery will be staging the Australian Print Symposium in Canberra next year, Mac has been asked to address the conference on Melbourne stencil art. “Stenciling is quite closely connected to print making,” he says.
“The National Gallery is aware that there is an incredible amount of activity going on, and I guess their job is to be representative of what’s happening in Australian art. The gallery recognizes that people are selling this work now, despite the fact that most of the work is on city walls. There are a lot of US graffiti artists who were active in the 80’s like Futura, who now sell canvases for thousands of dollars. I think it’s perfectly cool, because otherwise you’re doomed to be a bike courier or bar tender for the rest of your life. It allows people to be full time artists if they choose,” said Mac.
Anne Mc Donald, curator, Australian Prints and Drawings, National Gallery of Australia says she sees stencil art as a legitimate print medium. “It’s the equivalent of the political posters of the 70’s and 80’s that dealt with a whole range of topical issues at the time. We’ve had exhibitions of poster art in the past, it seems a natural thing to represent what is happening in the current scene – it seems to be a very vibrant movement.”
McDonald says the gallery is becoming increasingly aware of the collectable nature of stencil art. “There are exhibitions popping up all over the country. Many artists are now appropriating stencil imagery into more traditional art. It’s a similar process to what happened to political posters in the 70’s or even revolutionary posters in China and Russia. While the gallery would never condone graffiti, we are interested to reflect what is happening in the contemporary public art scene,” said McDonald.
Gallery scouts could do worse than scanning the collection strewn around D’Lux’s studio. On the wall behind his workspace hangs his latest work – a timber framed cutout stencil of a bicycle with a blue background and the words ‘Dub Cycle, Regurgitate.’ I Flick through the other work stacked against the wall. Osama Bin Laden extends his right middle finger from one. The Queen has a disturbingly evil sneer in the next. A forlorn looking William S. Burroughs straddles the words ‘Virtue is a relative’. A bikini-clad woman with a machine gun sprawls above the words ‘Clone Me’. Beside her a black robot punches the air beside the words ‘Why do you feel so sad?’
D’Lux says he was first drawn to street art at the age of 14, well before it became trendy. “I was always interested in it at High School, reading whatever magazines I could get my hands on that talked about street art. But I didn’t grow up in an urban environment, so it was always an abstract thing. When I moved to Adelaide I started seeing work around by this guy called ‘Syn (c)’, mainly stickers placed in startling locations. I saw his stuff everywhere and was really excited by it – I wanted to compete with him and be a part of it.” After High School, D’Lux says he went to art school, and now “this is the art that I choose to make. It’s how I feel happy contributing to my environment.”
“It’s a backlash against boring surroundings – wanting to go against advertising, to provide an aesthetic alternative that is not just about selling things,” he says. “To present something that is abstract, the phenomenology of things appearing in places for no apparent reason. To create images which will last and be looked at over and over.”
D’Lux says he often composes his images on computer – scanning newspapers and magazines or scouring the internet. He then uses image manipulation software such as Photoshop, blasting up the contrast to make sharp black and white representations. The images are then printed out, modified with grey and black pencils, and transferred onto cardboard or plastic cutouts. The cutout is then used as a template to spray with aerosol paints. “The higher the quality of aerosole paint the better,” he says. Once the template is made, transferring the images onto a wall or canvass can take just seconds, and is infinitely repeatable.
“What we experience as new world order and the power structures within it, that’s what interests me. I like to use those figureheads as triggers to keep people talking about world affairs rather than brushing those things aside,” he says.
I am curious to know then, is D’Lux well versed in contemporary political dialogues? There is a definite left leaning in his choices of images and text, which seems to be consistent with the majority of stencil art. Has he read Naomi Kleins ‘No Logo’, or perused Chomsky on US international relations post September 11? “ I’d like to say I have read them, but I haven’t,” he says. “I know about them and the thrust of what they’re saying. I figure I don’t need to study to feel the same things.”
Does he see a connection between corporate logos and stencil art? “Corporate logos are the way we understand the world now. They are images that are filled with information. That also goes for stencils – it’s how stencils work on the same levels as advertising in order to actively subvert it – squeezing lots of information into one recognizable, repeatable image.”
Perhaps that’s why some multinational corporations such as Nike have been chasing famous stencil artists such as British artist Banksy to design their latest advertising logos. Banksy is perhaps the world’s most famous stenciler, D’Lux lists him as a personal hero. Banksy has designed New York hotel rooms, he recently designed an album cover for British pop band Blur for their most recent release ‘Think Tank’ - a picture of two astronauts embracing through space suits. At a recent London solo exhibition called ‘Turf War’, Banksy stenciled two cows from top to bottom with pictures of arrows and anglo-saxon faces. The words, ‘the average African receives less in subsidies per head than an E.U cow’ was the artist’s only explanatory note.
Original Banksy designs are now commanding thousands of pounds in leading London galleries, but the artist seem to have ambivalent feelings about how to take the notoriety. “You could stick all my shit in Tate Modern and have an opening with Tony Blair and Kate Moss on roller blades handing out vol-au-vents and it wouldn't be as exciting as it is when you go out and you paint something big where you shouldn't do. The feeling you get when you sit home on the sofa at the end of that, having a fag and thinking there's no way they're going to rumble me, it's amazing... better than sex, better than drugs, the buzz," Banksy recently told London’s Guardian newspaper.
Banksy was in Melbourne recently and left behind mementoes of his work – his trademark stenciled rat - around the CBD and Fitzroy in particular. Although Banksy says he has been approached four times and offered “mad money” by Nike to design logos for the company – he refused. “"I don't need the money and I don't like children working their fingers to the bone for nothing,” he said.
D’Lux seems to be of a similar mindset. “I don’t think I would take corporate jobs, no.” If McDonalds or 7-Eleven offered him $50000 to design a stencil? “It wouldn’t happen. I’m not as good an artist as Banksy anyway. As much as it’s hard to consider those possibilities, I’d like to think that I wouldn’t get involved – you’d lose all street credibility. I think it’s OK to make artwork and sell that to survive, but if you become involved in making your artwork to promote a corporation – you’ve just cut your own legs off.”
Andrew Mac says Banksy should be given ‘full marks’ for refusing to design for Nike. “Corporations are interested in stencils for the same reasons they are interested in hip hop or other street based subcultures – they want to sell a product. Marketing is such a tight circle now, and trying to sell stuff to people is such a tight edge, that they are quickly trying to co-opt whatever is happening. Corporations have been ripping off street art for years – it’s pretty easy for a graphic designer to whip up something that superficially looks like street art.”
D’Lux claims there is an ethic within stencilers’ circles about which sites constitute ‘fair game’ – avoid heritage buildings and, for the most part, residential properties. He also says that racist or sexist stencils generally won’t last long on the wall. “People react much more negatively to sexist or racist graffiti. They get covered over much more quickly. People will add their own messages to offensive stencils. I’m not sure that the police would be so discerning.”
But not getting caught is not a concern when stencil art makes its ways into the ‘high art’ world of commercial galleries – which is where it seems to be heading at present. Among stenciling circles internationally, Melbourne is often pointed to as a global hotspot.
“It is generational as far as Melbourne goes now – it suits the kind of people that are here now,” says D’Lux. “If you think of the area within a five kilometre radius of the city, and the number of people aged between 20 and 35 condensed into that small area – its been totally embraced by those people – they love it.”
D’Lux says he has no problem with acquiescence to the gallery context, where the designs are generally sold on scraps of recycled timber, for prices ranging from fifty to five hundred dollars. “I enjoy high-end art for what it stands for and what it is, but I generally don’t like hanging out with those people,” he says. “I prefer to be with people who are actually making art. But I am constantly pushing to see the work recognized in that art world too. The art is pushing boundaries, and as a movement it is making a niche in art history.”
“I think people do appreciate the amount of spontaneity involved and the immediacy of the process. The fact that it has a real energy – a painting that is labored over for hours and hours can feel quite dead compared to a stencil which has its own energy and punch.”
I ask D’Lux if his parents know about his alter ego as an emerging Australian stencil art enigma. “No, my parents don’t really know what I do. They’ve seen some of it. But they live interstate. They generally accept what I do, but they worry about me.” His long term ambitions? “I aim to be able to make a living from my artwork. I will always be involved in trying to promote what stencils are, and get the right messages out there. Its what I believe in,” he says.