Insidious Lassitude

I’ve been searching long and hard for a true definition of ‘folk music’. Does a folk song need to be old and played on traditional instruments? Is it required to be of humble or unselfconscious origins, authored by an unschooled, isolated or in some way native person? Is it possible to find a communal identity in the textures, rhythms and poetry of certain songs? What is the music that defines us?

I’ve begun to believe that a song that is universally loved and understood will endure the test of time and become folk music because it has made itself useful to so many of us . . . Some are well-weathered and others relatively new . . . What they all share in common is that they remind us of our humanity, of what we share.

Sadly these are the songs that have been gradually slipping away from us. Since the abandonment of agrarian for urban life, the swift death of regionalism and the advent of recorded music, we have left many of these songs behind as relics in printed anthologies and the field recordings of musicologists.

     Natalie Merchant, sleeve notes from The House Carpenter’s Daughter

 *****

 

Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.

     Banksy, from an ADbusters interview

Here’s a mystery for you. Renegade urban graffiti artist Banksy is clearly a guffhead of massive proportions, yet he’s often feted as a genius straddling the bleeding edge of now. Why? Because his work looks dazzlingly clever to idiots. And apparently that’ll do.

     Charlie Brooker, the Guardian, September 2006 

The other day the BBC used some footage of this graffiti to end a report about another calamitous day for Gordon Brown. It’s a very BBC sort of image I thought. The kind of glib graphic they routinely knock up and shove into the six o’clock news (or The BBC News at Six, as it’s now rebranded) for George Alagiah to stand in front of and deliver Third World disaster with his customary profound inanity. It’s the visual equivalent of the puns that BBC correspondent gowks like Robert Hall are unable to help themselves tossing into reports where they are inappropriate - like, say, those about poverty or environmental catastrophe - or reports where they add nothing to our understanding or experience of the story - like, say, all the other reports. Or perhaps it’s also bit like the facile way any report about the internet is nothing to the BBC but an irresistible opportunity to frame interviews in a YouTube screen or quotes in an email template.    

But the image wasn’t made by the monkeys in the BBC graphics basement; it’s actual art, lest you hadn’t noticed. I know this because it was in an exhibition: last week’s ‘Cans Festival’ of ‘Street Art’ in a tunnel in London. They called it ‘Cans’ because street art is (almost always) done with spray cans, and it ran concurrent to the Cannes Film Festival. In fact it might not’ve been concurrent to Cannes, but it was a bit like the same time and, God, it was probably just too much of an opportunity to be witty or clever or whatever it is that it is. The show was oragnised by stencil/graffiti artist and street prefect Banksy, whose publications have included - wait for it - ‘Existencilism’ and ‘Wall and Piece’. Crikey! Strangely these works haven’t been received with a groan, but with the critical intelligentsia collectively smirking and reading sententious Alagiahistic proclamations of genius from the autocue. Perhaps Cans was a joke on the perceived importance and Cristal-soaked prestige of Cannes; a sort of good ol’ fashioned kickin’ against elitism. There’s the haves in Cannes and the have nots in Cans - those who are downtrodden, gritty, and ‘4 real’. The joke is a bit like those puns the BBC use on their graphics - prima facie it perhaps connotes a wry cleverness and sparkling perceptive wit; do more than glance at it though and it turns out to be a load of bosh.

That’s possibly reasonably denotive of the weakness of street art. The premise of the movement (I suppose they’d consider ‘school’ a bit elitist; “we’re edgy self-taught mavericks from outside The System, man” they’d harp) is that it’s the voice of the people - that it is art that speaks cogently for those marginalised by society or not represented by other, less inclusive, art. By the people; for the people. It’s an ‘outsider art’ movement high on rhetoric and propaganda keen to promote its politically-engaged agenda and anti-establishment ethos as the key tenets of its drive for social change. It’s therefore a particularly debilitating problem that the art itself is so impoverished of anything politically cogent, sapient, vital or interesting. When D*Face paints a sticking-out tongue onto the queen and scribbles guff on No Entry signs it is the kind of anti-establishment drivel that adolescent boys sometimes absently-mindedly piddle on their pencil cases when they’re bored in a GCSE history lesson. If this is the voice of the people then it’s no wonder Gordon Brown thought he could steal a few grand off them by rescinding the 10p tax rate. He probably took a peek at Nick Walker’s ‘Moona Lisa’ and saw that the proles were too busy mirthfully snickering at hopeless pictures of bums to care about anything. And even if they did care then they’d not have an articulate voice for their dissent; they’d probably just do some puerile doodles in a tunnel and then get back down the factories where they belong.

Its proponents see street art as a sort of folk art for the ‘urban generation’. Not just folk art that provides a light and momentary aesthetic relief from the drudgery of life, but a folk art that aspires to profoundly engage with our times, express current universal human truths and emotions, and embolden a politicised counter-culture uprising. “Look at the hope it gives the oppressed” they weasel. “Our art can be vehicle for social change, man. We’re gonna rise up and transform this fucking country!” they holler. But although it could conceivably be a powerful medium for expression, and even be a voice which contributes to political change, the art - even with the lofty rhetoric - has no substance. The rebellion is not propulsive, dynamic, witty or coherent. Calling it a rebellion is probably already overstretching it. The annunciation is callow and dumb. It doesn’t lock rigorously into anything vital or expansive, and it doesn’t even meekly suggest transformatism in a meek cowardly disembodied voice cloaked in seductive clothing. It’s a movement characterised by dilettantes basking in a perceived image of themselves as subversive sods scourging London with stenciled rats. It’s a bit teenage, like an emo kid cocking a snook from behind a sofa in Starbucks by sticking a finger up at a policeman outside while all his friends guffaw into their espressos and feel naughty and eye up the some girls wearing Topshop the Clash T-shirts.  

Street art don Banksy and his mob of simpering coat-tailers would probably chunter something about art affecting social change from within - that they are using The System to break The System. Leaving aside for a second the question of whether the art is any good, there is first the question of whether it’s feasible to be part of the system - by which I suppose we basically mean capitalism, and it’s attendant asperities - and also stand apart from it and oppose it. Today everything is co-opted by commerce - the radicalism of the 60s was a packaged product in the 70s, and so on. Everything which has appreciated value - artistic value, emotional value, intellectual value, whatever value - quickly accrues economical value. If a street artist is valued on an artistic scale then it follows that they’ll also be valued on an economic one. (Or it can even work the other way round.) That’s problematic for all art, but particularly art which is founded on an antithetical ideology. Opposition is now virtually untenable or unsustainable. Whatever opposition there is quickly becomes co-opted and assimilated and ceases to be opposition. The market economy society doesn’t accommodate opposition; it eats it up and regurgitates it as another product of The System.

Oppositional politics have been chewed up and digested into single issue politics. Politics doesn’t offer alternative structures or ideologies, just ways to manage the one we have. Campaign to have some windfarms, if you like; or campaign not to have them. Lobby for a congestion charge; or be against it. Protest at the fuel price rises or don’t. But whatever issues are politicked it’s all within a system. This system accommodates simple art on single issues. The innocuous anti-capitalist cartoons of Banksy and his crew are accommodated by capitalism. In fact capitalism finds them rather useful. They’re not threatening; they won’t undermine society’s fabric, and they can be alchemised into something which has all manner of economic malleability. They’re not seversive or dangerous, but they appropriate the look of it effectively. The government are unlikely to be coerced into giving Banksy a tunnel to fill with propaganda if it was threatening to the Western order. They wouldn’t, for instance, let al Qaeda have the tunnel for a festival. Or even the BNP.         

It’s not that an art that has the qualities and role of what we term folk art couldn’t exist today in urban Westernisation. It needn’t even necessarily be characterised by its oppositionality, though it’d perhaps be difficult for it not to encompass it. There is no reason too why it couldn’t use media that reflect the times. Technology like mobile communications and the internet have fundamentally altered our relationships to each other and to the world, and changed society and culture. Folk art reflects day-to-day life. It’s not that graffiti and internet-circulated stencils, digital tools and propaganda couldn’t be used in a meaningfully progressive, genuinely witty or artistic way. But it seems a bit like graffiti has suffered in some of the ways that other forms of art and expression have. It feels less cogent; more superficial, inconsequential and diluted. Perhaps there is a correlation between the development of a commercial art market for graffiti and the general dissipation of its content. Maybe this is just nostalgia. There’s always been vacuous infantile nonsense daubed on walls. But I think a reasonable argument could be made that the stuff that has now become seen as art - the marketable and the stuff that copies it, most of which it’s indistinguishable from - represents less diversity of ideas and aesthetics than it did in even in the 80s.

This is perhaps indicative of a loss regionalism, or the flattening out of culture. People who consider themselves graffiti artists or street artists are now more likely to stencil a symbol they found on the internet than mural a locality from their day-to-day lives. Dialects are abandoned and a broader idiom - often American - is used. Likewise there is less visual vernacular - a stencilled Banksy rat in Waterloo can look just like a rat stencilled by a kid in Sunderland. It was quite possibly even made by the same stencil - reproduced and held by another pair of hands and sprayed in the same way on the side of a different Starbucks in a different city. It’s not a wry comment on the homogenisation of culture, it is the homogenisation of culture.  

‘The stencil [is] fast, it’s the speed of now, it’s the speed of music and TV channel hopping’ says Paul Jones, owner of Street Art gallery Elms Lester. Perhaps Street Art is just a consequence of its time, but - unlike a true folk art - it doesn’t engage with the vicissitudes of this time. It may well be a product of the time - in two senses of the word - but it isn’t necessarily an art. It doesn’t have a dialectical or didactic relationship to people, society or culture; it doesn’t aid the construction of individual or communal identities. The identities of the individual and the community are the same - far from militating against this, Street Art is just another facet of it; just another gable end to the same building reproduced throughout the urbanised West.

These ‘guerrilla’ stencils on gable ends increasingly look not like the propaganda of a militant bunch of agit-artist government-botherers, but like adverts for the canvassed versions on sale for a few grand in Bonhams or Sotherby’s. Banksy and his peeps are driving around - possibly literally - in capitalism’s signifiers wittering about their radical movement in the same way that the BBC pries through Amy Winehouse’s curtains and squeals about drugs, before scurrying away making a ‘Wino’ pun and retiring of an evening to get smashed at a cocaine party round George Alagiah’s gaff. Any sense of art is inconsequential when there’s money to be made in reductionist tittle-tattling about what goes on behind artist’s curtains and pictures of bums to be sprayed on walls.

The Cans Festival wasn’t much like the counter-culture festival or exhibition of folk art that it proclaimed itself; it was more like a theme park. A little local goverment bank holiday charade where refreshments were sold and people milled around thinking about investments in a brightly coloured tunnel while their kids ran around excitedly. Or a zoo: where wild animals are domesticated, penned up and captivated and trinkets or images of them are sold in the gift shop. The artists themselves insisted on anonymity. They truculently faced away from the camera for TV interviews, repeating the street art anti-establishment manifesto in a collective lip synch with hooded heads bowed. Banksy has always been anonymous, and since he became famous other street artists began replicating this paradoxical quirk. Identity was lost already though. Their work is reproduced by stencils. Their slogans are appropriated. Their signatures are stencilled brand names.

What does stencilling a ten pence piece with Brown’s chops on it say? What does doing it in a council-approved place say? What does using it in a BBC political report say? Perhaps it’s really a problem with context. Had I noticed the graffiti on a bridge as I was walking through town then I probably would’ve smiled as I glanced at it while continuing with my life. It would’ve elicited a response consistent with its qualities, and I would’ve forgotten it as instantly as I forgot the billboard advertising a new mineral water. But the roles that it has been given - of art, of social voice and conscience, of political agitator, of serious critically-engaged work - are ones that it is doesn’t have the substance to support. That it is being used in such roles, and that it is seen as commensurate with folk arts of the past, is perhaps indicative of the problem. It may be the way in which it is mediated - by the BBC, by galleries, by Sunday supplements. These contexts ask it to support all sorts of meanings and ask us to apprehend it entirely differently than if we had spotted it on an underpass while were stuck in a traffic jam on our way to work.

It’s not that Banksy’s work is bad. I shrug my shoulders aphateically a bit if you call it art, but it’s ok; and his aims seem reasonably laudable. But even he himself has become representative a creative and critical malaise which inflects art now. His hangers on and copyists have stymied the movement, and its patrons have held it up as radicalism and inflated its significance in line not with its quality or content but with its ubiquity. When it is posited as the principal form of expression and visual language of Western urbanisation then it looks as depressingly vapid and apathetic as the society that it targets. The voice of the people is only represented by the odd glib pun or cheap visual snark and the issues it seeks to raise and communicate - like the change to the ten pence tax rate - are quickly forgotten or whitewashed over. There’ll be no lasting artistic legacy, even to issues with far wider-reaching humanitarian implications than that. If there’s any art to engage us with ourselves and the complex interweave of society, culture and humanity, than it probably isn’t street art. If there’s an art which accurately stands for - represents, or is indicative of - the homogenisation and the subjugation of expression by capitalist artifice then street art is probably significantly more eloquent.  

*****

‘Bold Jamie’ sounds like a traditional song, but was in fact written a couple of years ago by young Irish folk singer Cara Dillon. It tells the story of a young girl who elopes with a mysterious man. Her rich father catches up to them, brings his daughter home and wants the man killed for stealing his daughter and the family’s riches. It’s a typical folk tale of misunderstood identity and class suspicion replete with an ‘individual fancy vs. the judge and jailer of societal establishment’ motif. A complex and more intangible or immeasurable value - in this case love - is subjugated by economic value, or conflated with it. The girl finds emotional wealth but this is taken away from her by father. He wants her be happy and human and fulfilled but those expressions must be within his bejewelled estate of avarice.

The studio version Dillon did for the record is slightly less convincing than this rather brilliant and lucent live version. On record she sounds a bit too like some other people. Yes, that’s not necessarily a problem in folk music. But it probably is if those other people are the ones heard on the Starbucks stereo. When Starbucks goes kerching for the final time, the internet goes caput, the online repository of ‘live’ singing goes kapow, and humanity dies out in a technology-induced global warming meltdown, it’ll be the CD version that earth’s new life-forms will find. That’ll be a shame. But the record - imposition of the apparatus of commercial expedience upon human expression that it is - will at least allow the new colonisers of the planet to get to grips with the complex interweave of nature, culture, and society that humanity was subject to. They can conveniently pass the record around and burn new copies. Obviously all this presupposes that the new life-forms speak English, have CD players and copiers, and indeed that they can hear or hear in the same way as us and have a societal structure that they can relate ours to.

It may be a blessing if they only have the CD and not this internet film, because they then won’t have an opportunity to snigger and snark at humanity’s inability to correctly reproduce the aspect ratio or synch the singer’s precisely to the audio while copying a video onto YouTube, even though it’s a medium and operating system that humanity itself invented.