SPACE: Tate Modern, London
SHOW: Street Art
DATES: May 23 – August 25, 2008
REVIEWER: Melissa Matuscak

The mainstream art world has given a stamp of approval to street art as a legitimate art form. Galleries, collectors and auctions have embraced artists previously working anonymously and on the fringes. This is most apparent in the success of the London-based artist Bansky, whose row of spray painted monkeys sold at auction for almost a half-million dollars in February. Appropriately, the monkeys were holding sandwich boards that read, “Laugh now, but one day we’ll be in charge.” Banksy is the posterboy for the commercialization of the street art of the aughts, embodying a particular brand of rebellion that is now being sold back to the masses.

Inside of the info capsul at the Tate. Photo: Melissa Matuscak

With all of the hype these days, how does the UK’s largest modern art institution approach an exhibition about street art? The Tate Modern attempted to do just that with a show simply titled Street Art, which was presented in three parts. Most prominent were six enormous pieces, covering the outside of the enormous Tate Modern building from ground to roof. The artists, commissioned by Tate, are internationally known: Blu from Bolgona, Italy; the collective Faile from New York; JR from Paris; Nunca and Os Gêmeos, both from São Paulo; and Sixeart from Barcelona.

JR’s paste-up, made from paper affixed to the building using a flour-based adhesive, portrayed a black youth holding a video camera as if it were a gun, The enormous and intimidating figured stared down pedestrians crossing the Millennium Bridge over the River Thames. Nunca’s tough-looking cartoon Chicano wears a necklace filled with Brazilian tribal symbolism while daintily sipping a cup of tea in a most proper way. Os Gêmeos’ figure grasps a handful of ripped-out CCTV cameras (prominently placed around London to deter such crime as graffiti).

The mural-like displays were intelligent, well-executed, and dominated the riverfront. They exemplified how street art, usually done quickly and with limited resources, could become Street Art, a display of what happens when these artists are given time and money from a large institution. One could endlessly debate the evils and merits of institutional support of street art, but undoubtedly these pieces were powerful, even if due to sheer scale alone.

The second part was an information center located outside of the museum. Inside it, the walls were covered with paste-ups, stickers, and paint, with signs below asking visitors to not write on the walls. In the center of the room, a twenty-minute informational video made by the Tate looped, playing interviews of artists, curators, and gallerists waxing poetic about the past, present and future of street art.

The information center was also where visitors were encouraged to take a large glossy map of Southwark, the neighborhood around the museum, for a self-guided tour. Tate commissioned five Madrid-based artists, 3TTMan, Spok, Nano 4814, El Tono, and Nuria to create site-specific works at fifteen locations, all conveniently marked by bright pink dots on the map. The woman behind the information desk warned me that some of the pieces had been removed and when I inquired why she shrugged and said, “No one knows. It may have been other artists, or maybe upset residents. The Museum received prior permission and approval, of course, but for some reason they’re gone.”

Not Tate street art. Photo: Melissa Matuscak

I embarked on the tour feeling pessimistic, and that intensified when I reached the location of the first pink dot, a few minutes from the museum. Looking around, I saw nothing resembling Street Art, although I did see a lot of things that looked like street art. I snapped a few photos and continued on. The next hour went much of the same way, and I started playing a game, a treasure hunt of Street Art vs. street art. Ultimately I found (I think) six of the Tate-commissioned pieces of Street Art. The map had no visual clues for what to look for, and some of the commissioned pieces were incredibly simple, although nicely done. But I was confused, and once I started to yearn for labels and titles to show me where the Art was, I knew it was time to quit.

While on my treasure hunt, I stumbled upon a shrine at a bone yard that had been used to dispose of bodies of beggars and prostitutes – as many as 15,000 people. Now an abandoned fenced-off lot, thousands of ribbons and notes memorializing the dead hung off of the large iron gates. This was completely an unexpected surprise and I spent the most time there, reading the messages and looking at the trinkets. In contrast to the structured experience of the Street Art exhibition and tour, I realized a museum could never recreate the true experience of what makes street art so powerful – the unexpected discovery of someone’s art or message. For an institution so good at structuring visitor experience, it seems that street art can still exist outside of that inner circle, at least for now.