DISCOVERING STREET ART

Saturday 11 January 2020, was one of those Sydney days, full of life for me, southerly breeze, slightly overcast blue sky, merciful respite from the smoke engulfing the Sydney Basin from Australia’s mega bushfires – making breathing and smiling the essential and simple pleasures they should always be.

A birthday gift voucher from my son and daughter-in-law redeemed me with a wonderful Culture Scouts street art tour of Newtown by the inimitable Melinda Vassallo, long time Newtown resident and author of Perfect Match – Street Art of the Inner West.

Kicking off at 10.30am from Newtown Railway Station, the perfect time and place to start, Melinda quickly formed our group of nine into a band of brothers and sisters on a unique excursion into her Newtown. It was all new to me, and exciting!

Melinda is articulate and charismatic with a delightful quirkiness, a true educator who knows what she is talking about and wants to share. Her real time feet on the street curating is far ahead of any gallery guided tour. She is part and parcel of the art.

Talking over the traffic without shouting, her stream of consciousness, annotations to her own experiences, and explanations of the lines of laws framing street art and graffiti, and how they are often blurred by local council and community interventions and the codes of the exponents themselves, were paradoxical and fascinating.

ABOVE: EDGE Art on the Streets is Sydney’s Inner West Council’s ‘Perfect Match’ public art program “matching artists with residents and community”.

Street art in Newtown is multilayered in form, style and intentions. Graffiti artists strike where and when they can, outside the law and occupational health and safety regulations. Marking territory with their work and tags to claim it according to opportunity and an unwritten code amongst graffiti artists and street artists sanctioned by Inner West Council.

The shysters / slysters – sticker bombers, are a self-contained graffiti / street art category all on their ownsome defining and pointing to the line between life and art in a minimalist way, provocatively.

Melinda explained the code as a spectrum of attitudes ranging from respect to contempt and anger, communicated precisely and visually in the way the artists leave, overlay and tag the art of others.

Edge Street Art in public places is a public art program of Inner West Council’s Perfect Match “matching artists with residents and community to collaboratively produce specific artworks” and commissioning them. It began as an initiative to manage the spread of graffiti.

Newtown ArtSeat funded by NSW Government’s Communities Arts New, City of Sydney and Inner West Council is is another public art program in Newtown Square combining “public seating, artwork display and lighting” in a highly visible site with thousands of passers-by.

Much of the artwork we saw was ephemeral, some had endured for decades while the lives of the artists themselves are being shortened by respiratory disease from prolonged exposure to aerosol fumes in confined spaces such as railway carriages. In one lane with particularly vivid graffiti the smell of fresh paint intensified the immediacy and sensory qualities of street art. Aerosol cans, now available in an extensive array of colours and without toxic propellants, are the tools of these artists. But one innovative technique to speed up larger works is to fill fire extinguishers with paint.

Melinda told us graffiti artists in fear of police and sanctioned street artists juggling multiple projects and deadlines, can start and complete huge works in a few hours. Apart from stylised signature dicks and sacs, and occasionally bare breasts, nakedness does not feature in this vast visual presentation of a diverse community interacting with its artists in practical yet profound ways, especially when you consider the status and price of property in Sydney.

Newtown’s tight knit community has resisted forays by McDonalds and Starbucks but the shadows of developers are an ever present and growing threat to prime and historic canvases such as the walls of the Ausscrap scrap metal yard in Gladstone Street where the area’s original graffiti gangs battled for space and territory, often with physical violence.

The wars for walls are now more in tune with the rest of Sydney’s legal and political stoushes. ‘The Housing Bubble’ by Fintan Magee, a commissioned work three storeys high on a wall of the former RSL Club, was threatened with destruction by an outdoor advertiser’s approach to the new owner, to capitalise on the prominence of the site.

A swarm of people from the community, including our guide Melinda Vassallo, made urgent phone calls to Inner West Council which immediately put a permanent protection order on ‘The Housing Bubble’ by asserting its copyright as the commissioner of the work. Outdoor advertisers prey upon sites identified as popular by graffiti and sanctioned street artists. A reason why some graffiti artists ask people not to geo tag reposts of their work on social media.

Australian suburbs were once characterised by red brick veneer houses designed for the great outdoors on quarter acre blocks. Inner city living in terraces was seen as backward, almost Dickensian in its connection with the days of coal-fired industrialisation on Sydney Harbour’s shores which facilitated shipping.

Ironically grey paint is the undercoat of choice for street artists because whatever is under it does not show through. So these kerbside canvases begin in neutral but accelerate rapidly, exploding in colour. This shadowless day was a godsend for photographing street art. Our tour was fantastic but I could only photograph a small random sample of the art we saw - doesn’t go anywhere near doing justice to the many talented and dedicated artists.

Graffiti artists are existentialists on the edge, busy bees flitting from place to place, hovering, unloading, their work is never done because it is constantly being undone – painted over. Street artists commissioned by Inner West Council and the community have more rights, security, income and opportunities. Their work is flagged with Newtown Art Seat or edge Street Art in public places plaques and given an anti-graffiti coating (high enough to be beyond a would-be graffitist’s reach but producing a join line in some cases).

But the lines between graffiti and street art can still be blurred even for sanctioned street artists. Scott Marsh whose Bob Hawke adorns Newtown’s Carlisle Castle pub was, as sanguine as only a graffiti artist could be, when his #ScottyfromMarketing Merry Crisis comment on the prime minister’s Hawaii getaway was painted over, “That’s a bit shit”, understatement of the year.

Will Coles’ public sculptures are stolen frequently by fans. A ‘Will Coles was here’ brass plaque on a wall of Newtown’s Young Henry’s pub marks the end of the tour.