I felt I was looking at a piece of street art work on skin. If you travel around London, you will find plenty of street artists. Some are good, some are bad and some are great. But this was different from the street art we find on walls, doors or shop shutters. It was a performance.
The woman left the shop with an armful of flowers and her skin carefully covered by a black headscarf and gloves. She hid the artwork from passers-by because she hoped to sell it later that day for about $4,500, as part of an exhibition in New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
The art piece is called “The Artist Is Present”, by the Serbian artist Marina Abramovic. In March 2010 she sat quietly in MoMA’s atrium for three months while visitors were invited to sit opposite her for as long as they wished. Some 715,000 people took their place opposite the silent artist during her 736 hours and 30 minutes – without moving – in what has been described as one of the most unforgettable performance art pieces by a living artist.
“I wanted to create something that had absolutely no form,” Marina Abramovic told BBC World Service’s The Strand programme. “It was my
The Covent Garden area has always been a place where artists and performers of different kinds congregate. At one time the public houses were full of musicians, actors and dancers, but in recent years these people have been driven out by high rents, and the area has become more commercialised. The street artists are the last remaining performers to be found there, and their numbers are small.
Street art is described in its early days as a kind of circus-type performance. The artist sets up his or her pitch on the pavement, perhaps with a chair for the customer to sit on, and then gets to work on the skin of their arm or leg. If it is possible, the artist will involve passers-by in some kind of skit or routine to attract an audience. The skill of all street artists lies in their ability to produce work quickly and efficiently.
The work is usually done freehand, with a pen or brush dipped in ink. It can take only a few minutes if it is something simple like two interlocking hearts pierced by an arrow; but if it is more complicated it can take half an hour or more. Some customers bring along designs of their own that they want copied onto their skin; others ask the artist to draw something original.
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I want to tell you about the Street Artist, because I think he’s the best thing in Covent Garden.
He is one of those people who work on the ground; he is not a market trader or a shopkeeper or a busker. He has been there for years, but I have never seen him talk to anyone. He just sits behind his little table, with his tools laid out neatly in front of him and an open book of designs. If you stop to look, he will nod to you politely and maybe mutter something, but he never approaches anyone.
He takes out his pen and draws quickly and carefully on the page. The pen moves in sharp little movements, as if it were cutting into the paper. When he is finished there is a design for a tattoo. It looks like a woodcut, black lines on white paper: bold, stylised images of snakes or flowers or dragons or birds.
There are more pages in the book; turn them over and there are more designs: hundreds of them, thousands perhaps; I don’t know how many there are because I have only ever looked at one page at a time. How long has it taken him to draw all these? And how long does he sit there every day before someone
In the late seventies and early eighties, a young artist by the name of David Hockney began to experiment with photocopiers. In 1976, he produced “divisions and subdivisions of time and space”, a series of photographs that were taken and reproduced in a photo-booth. Then a year later, he began to assemble these photos into huge collages, creating very large images. The tradition in art was always to paint small pictures on large canvases. But now, suddenly it was possible to create large images by assembling many small ones.
Hockney’s work set off an explosion in street art. People started making huge paintings out of thousands of photocopied posters. It wasn’t long before they began to do more than just paint pictures on walls; they started building three dimensional sculptures out of them as well.
By the mid-eighties, a wave of street artists had emerged who used photocopiers not just for recreation but for survival. They would set up shop at parties and distribute flyers advertising their services: “I will draw your portrait for five dollars”. At first, most people were reluctant to have their portraits drawn. But then someone did it once and was happy with the result; word spread, and
The first thing that struck me was that they were all young, between 17 and 25 years old. But the biggest surprise was that nearly a quarter of them were women. I had always assumed it was almost exclusively a male profession – mainly because of the very physical nature of carrying around heavy equipment and materials, and working in all weathers.
The second big surprise was their willingness to share information about their income. Nearly all of them told me how much they made in a day or week. The highest figure I heard was £500 for a day’s work, which is not bad for any artist. But some said they earned as little as £50 for a whole week’s work.
The most common complaint from the artists is that they are not being taken seriously as artists by galleries and critics. With the exception of Anthony Gormley, Anish Kapoor and Damien Hirst, most street artists believe there is no respect for them within the art establishment. They say this is partly because many people see what they do as vandalism or graffiti – although some artists embrace this negative label with pride.
Covent Garden’s street artists have been working it since the 1840s, when the flower sellers moved out and the businesses moved in. But their numbers were dwindling.
When the Royal Ballet left for a new home in 1997, the street performers in Covent Garden Piazza were left with a giant empty space to fill. It is a space that remains empty today, although not for want of trying.
In a bid to reinvigorate the scene, Westminster Council recently conducted a survey among residents and businesses in the area to see if they would support proposals for dedicated performance spaces. The response was overwhelming: 90 per cent of respondents said yes.
But there are concerns that any new rules might be too restrictive and exclude some acts from performing there at all.
For example, “juggling with fire” or “the use of animals” could be banned unless performers hold public liability insurance worth £5m. The cost of such insurance would be prohibitive for many performers – so much so that it could put them off performing altogether.
The council says that it is just trying to protect the public, but some performers believe other motives are at play: they say they are being gradually squeezed out of central London and into
