Street scene
August 1, 2005
The boom in stencil art has left inner-city Melbourne plastered in images. Where did they come from? What do they mean? Bill Craske investigates in a guide to the best of Melbourne's street art.
Standing on a wheelie bin, an agile figure furiously works a glue‑smeared broom onto a stencil poster of a vampire that must be more than two metres high. Within five minutes he has several separate panels pasted onto the wall, seamlessly joined together: not easy in such a hurry, at such a height.
"You have to get that second sheet bang‑up tight or the whole image will be ruined," says the 28‑year‑old street artist, who calls himself "Xinx". Dressed in checked shirt, baggy jeans and beanie, he is one of three street artists out in the laneways tonight, adding to an impermanent collection of thousands of images that have blossomed on inner‑city walls during the recent boom in stencil art.
This particular piece ‑ a stencil work on paper - started life in a studio in Collingwood, where Xinx applied aerosol paint to a large sheet of paper through a giant cut‑out he made from a flattened‑out cardboard box. He found the image of a snarling Dracula face while leafing through an old issue of Fangoria magazine. Earlier on this chilly winter evening, Rone, another artist, made up a batch of glue for the crew on a portable stove using the most basic ingredients: flour and water. Carried around in a plastic bucket, the paste, unlike many popular wallpaper adhesives, is long‑lasting and cheap and enables the artists to stick their posters onto nearly any surface.
As Xinx finishes his pasting in an aggressive flurry of broom strokes. a small crowd of people gathers in this bluestone laneway to take in his image. "What he just did is quite tough to do." says "Wonderlust", another prolific street artist who is playing the role of tour guide tonight. "II you notice, he 'buttered' the paper as well," he says. "That makes it water-resistant."
Working in tandem, Rone and Xinx could pass for cleaners as they trudge through town with their brooms and bucket. "We generally get left alone since it's rare that someone thinks to absorb what you're doing," says Wonderlust. Most of the passers‑by are coming or going from nearby bars, after all. "They look at us like we're wasting our time. We look at them and think the same thing."
Recently all three artists contributed to a huge fresco in the city's Hosier Lane, a sloped stone passage linking Flinders Street to Flinders Lane. It was here that the surrounding walls, most of which already crawl with hieroglyphics, stencils and characters, were used as a location for the Hollywood film Ghost Rider. The featured work, a sprawling Tex‑Mex inspired mural, to front a hideout in the movie, was commissioned through Andy Mac. whose arts organisation, City Lights, has been hosting laneway exhibitions since 1996. "Stencilling is the latest in the long line of attempts to reach people in the street," says Mac. "The stencil spreads a message. It's easier to understand. Much of graffiti is closed to those who do it."
Stencil art as a 20th‑century phenomenon has been traced back to the Russian Revolution. when artists such as lvan Malyutin used stencil ‑inspired poster art to reach large sections of the illiterate population. In Nicaragua, prolific stencil images played a role in the campaign to overthrow the Somoza dictatorship in the mid‑1970s.
According to Mac, Melbourne's stencil scene sprouted in the final years of the Kennett government and then blossomed after the events of September 11, with George W, Bush and Osama Bin Laden common figures for stencil reproduction.
CBD laneways became a useful canvas, helped by the growing number of city bars, whose owners have encouraged and even helped to present exhibitions of street art. Melbourne's stencil scene hit a peak last year, partly influenced by the popularity of overseas artists Giant, from San Francisco, and Banksy, from Britain.
Stencils appear in several forms: directly sprayed onto walls through cut‑outs; sprayed onto poster paper first, then pasted onto walls: or miniaturised on stickers. Artists may reproduce an image (such as a movie still), or an existing typeface (called a "tech" style), or they might create their own lettering (called "hand" styles). Some artists will also cross over into "traditional" freehand graffiti (which is where Xinx and Rone started out).
The legacy is an enormous number of works adorning city walls. The transitory nature of the art, though, means the images are constantly being pasted over, rubbed out, or altered, though works live on in cyberspace, through web sites such as stencil revolution.com, which is both a gallery and a forum for stencil art debates and practical advice.
Stencil art has also gained mainstream recognition through several recent exhibitions, such as the controversial "Crime Walls" piece still on display at City Lights in the CBD. A crop of legally commissioned works, most notably the transformation of the St Kilda Junction underpass into a "subterranean street art precinct" organised by the City of Port Phillip, complements the Melbourne Stencil Festival, which was held earlier in the year.
Melbourne street art has also featured in books including Josh McPhee's Stencil Pirates (Soft Skull Press), an ambitious celebration of stencil art from around the world, with many images taken from Melbourne, and Conform by Saskia Folk, a study primarily devoted to local stencil artists (through Macmillan). Also set for release by year's end is Stencil Graffiti Capital: Melbourne, by Swedish artist and former Melbourne resident Sixten, in collaboration with Meek.
A Melbourne City Council proposal currently under consideration may lead to the zoning of graffiti‑tolerant areas in the CBD. There are also plans to preserve exceptional works of graffiti. Some, though, believe these plans miss the point. "it's as much about vibrancy and how it appears and changes a few weeks later," says Kelly Gellatly, curator of contemporary art at the National Gallery of Victoria, who acknowledges that protecting street art can be detrimental to its immediacy and impact.
Bringing it into conventional galleries can be problematic, too. "It's an interesting conundrum, this type of practice. In terms of bringing it into the galleries you have to be conscious you don't want to kill that," though she believes an exhibition by San Francisco artist Barry McGee last year. which incorporated monitors, digital projections, found objects. concrete slabs and a display truck, was an important breakthrough. "He drew a very young crowd. a target audience the galleries traditionally find it difficult to attract ‑ teenage boys."
Andy Mac believes that McGee's exhibition has opened up the possibilities for street artists. "I see more local artists moving into multi‑media and installations. That's not to say they'll abandon their origins, it's a natural progression."
For Rone, the future of a particular piece is more about the weather than anything else. "The paper fades, so if you use the right type of paint it only improves over time," he says. It is also influenced by its immediate surroundings. "A good stencil should always look to incorporate everything surrounding it," he says. "Aesthetically, they evolve." Xinx points to a stencil he plastered on a wall in Canada Lane, a striking still of Janet Leigh's terrified expression from the shower scene in Psycho. The stencil has weathered over time to shred the paper, as if anticipating the character's fate. Somebody else has sprayed the words "how does it feel?" in blue paint across a busy collage of carefully applied stencils, effectively ruining them, but the artists don't seem too fussed. "The longer you've been in the game, the more you realise nothing is permanent." says Xinx. (m)