The Street Art Walking Tour

TATE MODERN, LONDON
23.05.2008 - 25.08.2008

3TTMAN / ELTONO / NANO4814 / NURIA MORA / SPOK

Tate Modern presents an urban tour of site-specific art from a group of five Madrid based street artists. The works all aim to engage the local community and visitors to the Tate in aspects of the urban environment that are often overlooked or ignored.

Curated by Rafael Schacter

Part of the Tate Modern’s groundbreaking exhibition “Street Art”, The Walking Tour engaged five Madrid based artists to produce a series of site-specific works within the wider environment of the museum.

The first key pre-requisite of the project was the work’s publicness, its space within the dirt and noise of the city, within the dense medium of the urban realm. Street art and graffiti’s status as ornament, as something which by its very nature was attached to a surface, affixed to the city, was here pivotal. Its status as something which was not produced on a neutral surface but which lived and breathed within an already extant concrete materiality, that was steered, activated by its surrounding environment, was hence the starting point.

Rather than simply presenting the artists with a series of objects or spaces to work upon then, the project begun with the artists’ direct input themselves: Going on a series of walks with the group within the wider Southwark area (during both day and night), exploring the streets in a manner to which they were accustomed, the sites were hence chosen in the same manner that these artists would select spaces when conducting work independently. The prime curatorial task was thus turning a wish-list of spaces into a practical reality, to use the institutional power of the Tate brand to convince the local council, local businesses, local galleries, schools, NGOs, and (the dreaded) Transport for London, that we could legitimately (and more importantly legally) produce work on these properties. The sites of production hence remained entirely authentic to these artists quotidian practice. They were the sites they would experiment upon with or without sanction, with or without the accredited documentation that I kept close to hand. They were sites in which their work could be conducted in a truly site-specific manner, in which the reality of the city was never separate from the nature of the work itself.

The installations and murals dotted around the Tate hence remained impervious to the institutional authority that they were connected to. They aimed to engage the local community and visitors with aspects of the urban environment that would otherwise by ignored or disregarded – to push people to look and experience the city, to engage with their environment in a more heightened, embodied, playful manner – irrespective of their official status. It was this potential, this belief in the beauty in the everyday that the artists wanted to activate – to force people to question whether other, more mundane aspect of the environment, were in fact art or not.

Eltono & Nuria

Since 1999, the French artist El Tono and the Spanish artist Nuria have often worked in partnership, though both are also well-known for their solo work. El Tono’s name (which means ‘The Tone’) relates to his personal signature, an image of a tuning fork. Although he started making conventional street art, he now creates geometric shapes that, he feels, contribute positively to the urban landscape: ‘The whole point is to intrigue people, to make people reflect in some distinctive way, to produce something for people to wonder at.’ Nuria’s street art combines forms reminiscent of hard-edged modernist abstraction with softer colours. Her signature image is a key. The two artists usually collaborate for gallery commissions. Their joint work plays with undermining ideas of what is inside and what is outside the traditional gallery space, and often invites visitor participation. For Tate, they have made a number of street signs, which have been posted around the surrounding area. A note on the back of each sign invites you to bring the placard back to the gallery. In exchange, they will be signed by the artists and given back to you at the end of the exhibition.

Eltono

Nuria

3TTMan

3TTMan’s spontaneous, painterly style has affinities with both Pop Art and cartoons like Tom and Jerry or Bugs Bunny, combining bold compositions and often garish colours with sometimes brutal imagery. Originally from Lille, he started painting on canvas, and only later began working on the street. His name derives from the French trois tête man, or three headed man – a recurring figure in his work, which reflects a divided, often directly contradictory spirit. He talks about this three-way consciousness as ‘three ways of expressing something in the same process, three ways of thinking in the same body’. In Madrid, he often targets billposters as a surface for his work, cutting away and painting over the original advertisement to transform commercial imagery into art. ‘We’re playing with the city, playing with what we’ve got around us,’ he says. ‘We’re playing with advertising for advertising something else, a thought, an idea.’

Spok

Spok is closely associated with the New York tradition of Subway art, and, from his teens, was travelling around Europe and the United States with a spraycan. Already a renowned street-writer throughout Spain, he developed a remarkable photorealist style while studying for a fine-arts degree in his hometown of Madrid. Since then, his skills have been much in demand for decorating shopfront grilles across the city, or for commissions from advertising agencies and companies as diverse as Nike and L’Oreal. ‘The work that we do just for ourselves… we’re going to go and paint no matter what’ he says. ‘People don’t understand, they say it’s vandalism or you’re wasting your time or whatever. But for me, it’s the only true art form’.

Nano4814

Born in Vigo, Nano 4814 has been living in Madrid for about four years. He originally came to street art from a skateboarding background, which gave him a strong relationship with the streets. ‘Being there at the precise moment, being able to display on the wall what’s in my head, that’s why I do it’, he has said of his work. Among his most striking projects are his City-Lights, made from disused light boxes in rundown neighbourhoods or by abandoned buildings. He transforms the boxes, originally used for advertising, to carry poetic messages, such as ‘It shines and disappears’ – a line that captures the ephemeral and transient nature of street art itself. His street images include a series of recurring icons, most notably El Choquito, a little squid squirting ink, that he sees as ‘a perfect metaphor for the writer in the street’.