Christy Edwall on sticker art in Brighton
Looked at sideways, the city is full of miniature galleries. Every surface offers its opportunities, from the feeder pillar box with FREE IRAN spray-painted on the side, to the hieroglyphs of gas repairmen signalling where they will start to drill. Posters iterating on the windows of empty storefronts and under train overpasses – or the appearance of VOTE FOR BINFACE on a wall on Brighton’s Pelham Street – bring Pop Art into the public square.Looked at sideways, the city is full of miniature galleries. Every surface offers its opportunities, from the feeder pillar box with FREE IRAN spray-painted on the side, to the hieroglyphs of gas repairmen signalling where they will start to drill. Posters iterating on the windows of empty storefronts and under train overpasses – or the appearance of VOTE FOR BINFACE on a wall on Brighton’s Pelham Street – bring Pop Art into the public square.
These impromptu galleries appear largely on surfaces with enough space to stretch sideways. But the cost of renting a space in city centres is expensive. Businesses come and go. Lampposts, on the other hand, are infrastructure. So are traffic lights and stop signs. They settle into the city’s texture, like the cigarettes in the corners of bus shelters. It’s easy to walk by. Seen up close, each site deserves a close read.
Take the lamppost outside Kindly, an organic refill shop, on the London Road in Brighton. Over nearly legible strips of paper advertising The Brighton Ska Train, over the tattered scraps and ancestral gum of posters long torn down, there’s a sticker of a fat, pink, fanged caterpillar on its back that says VAMPIRE SLUMBER PARTY. There’s also a sticker of a cartoon coffee press; a sticker that reads TOGETHER AGAINST THE FAR RIGHT; a skull and crossbones advertising tattoos by Angelica; an advertisement for last month’s International Conference in London Against War, with a QR code; a sticker against Digital ID (now a defunct Labour policy); and, at its peak, an image of a record that reads LIQUID LUNCH, with a knife and fork on either side.
It’s a collection in miniature. And this one gives you a pretty good index of the city as a punkish, icon-loving, left-leaning community of people. Taken on their own, each image works in a web of its own culture. The references I miss I interpret as pure image. Like skipping over the French bits of Jane Eyre, it can be admired as aesthetic noise. But like a tone-deaf person listening to the Goldberg Variations, I’m missing the stickers’ overtones. Where I see the fanged caterpillar on the Vampire Slumber Party sticker as a visual homage to Japanese graphic culture, Google informs me that Vampire Slumber Party is a pop punk band.
Stickers, or ‘slaps’, are a low-key street art. Minor acts of vandalism, they heckle the images in the windows of KFC and Aldi, the banners on buses, the bombardment of images that comes from your phone. Stickers are the ephemeral offspring of underground movements, of skater culture and band merchandise. Their roots are found in assertions of identity and in provocation.
Sharing graffiti’s interest in building visual texture, stickers are quicker to put up, and more covert. Mass-produced and mobile, stickers lack the originality (and risk) of in-situ street art. But if graffiti works as a kind of trompe l’oeil, lending the illusion of layers, stickers are the real deal. Putting up a sticker requires less gear than graffiti: there’s no need for a backpack of tell-tale spray cans or stencils. Stickers are hands-on: visible signs of fleeting physical contact. Every contact leaves a trace.
Taken together – seized by the eye in one sweep – they become public collages. Such collaborative exhibitions are more than just ‘visual tinnitus’, as the playwright Hannie Rayson once described them. They are the tone poems of the present: embracing the passing of time. The flea market next Sunday, the march against fascists next month. At some point Sunday passes, the march ends, and all they leave behind are these tattered tattoos, public mementos that something happened.
You’d expect them to cluster wherever public footfall intensifies. In Brighton, you’ll find them on the lampposts on Kensington Gardens, and the downpipes on Sydney Street. I found very few between Second and Fourth Avenue in Hove. In up-and-coming Shoreham, the lampposts and street signs of the Brighton Road are bare, mustering only a show of fealty to the West Sussex County Council. As you approach the centre of town, pragmatic stickers crop up, advertising the England Coast Path or Community Cluedo, Get Fit or Fathers 4 Justice. Anything else has been quickly torn off, evidence of a robust council or a local with a sharp eye on house prices. Still, there are signs of small experiments. The lamppost outside Wolf on East on Shoreham’s East Street shows aspirations to something bolder.1
On my rounds of the city’s stickered posts – street crawls that have drawn looks of curiosity and pity from fellow walkers – I’ve noticed that stickers have a particular attraction to street signs. This seems natural, given how loudly street signs insist on their work in the realm of representation. On Jubilee Street, near the library, a street sign is covered with stickers by SNUB TWENTY THREE, a street artist/ graphic designer based in Brighton; a sticker reading ‘always flow’ in white against blue; a black sticker advertising the exploits of whodat, a DJ with 282 followers on Instagram; an advertisement for the London-based ceramics seller Me Old China in old printers’ typeface; and a sign calling for the monarchy to be abolished. On the other side – these are 360-degree galleries – there’s a skull and crossbones, a unicorn sticker which reads I WANT TO BE A MERMAID, and an anti-Israel sticker.
In short: each collage offers a patchwork of statements, values, assertions, soundbites, mantras, and self-promotion.
My favourites tend to have what Walter Benjamin called the ‘aura’ or uniqueness of original art. There’s the Alison Bechdel-y sticker of a short-haired chic woman in glasses and a tweed blazer cradling a dog. LESBIANS, reads her speech bubble. There’s the image of Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada which reads: AN ALL CIS MALE DJ LINE-UP? GROUNDBREAKING. There’s the
picture of Gary Oldman as the aged spook Jackson Lamb from Apple TV’s Slow Horses which has the tag: Bringing you up to speed is like trying to explain Norway to a dog. Disdain succeeds in semaphore.
Other original contributions crop up: visitor feedback from street traffic. DON’T KNOW YOU, reads one. I DIDN’T LOVE YOU, says another. I GUESS I’LL SEE YOU NEXT LIFETIME.
These are the cubicle confessions: an extension of pub toilets onto the streets. The fury in whoever scrawled Fowzia Islam You Will Perish has been around since the Romans scratched curses into the columns of their baths, since a young Viking woman carved her rune into the inside of Maes Howe in Orkney. Each a version of ‘I was here’.
In the language of childhood, stickers denote possession. They cluster on the frontoffolders or laptops. Possession and identity. Stickers as name badge. They say: this city is ours.
Once you start looking at the stickers, the further your environment expands. Stickers propose an approach to art that is less intention than it is sediment: less as apprenticeship than impulse. As in music, the composition relies on the interplay of its elements. And while selection and omission are clearly central to the act of creation, the art of the public post leans towards inclusion and repetition. I see more VAMPIRE SLUMBER PARTY stickers. More Angelica’s tattoos. Lots about Digital ID. Thanks to The Family Grave, a Brighton singer-songwriter, toddlers in sunglasses at the beach proliferate across the city’s centre. Big Papas Barbershop has a monopoly on the Ditchling Road.
Waiting to cross at the intersection of Cheapside Street and the London Road, I notice the half-erased nude portrait stuck next to the red figure that warns us not to walk. Is this a comment on the kinship here between one image (highly regulated, symbolically simple) and the other? Are we all just bodies?
Given the phone in your hand, street art asserts a utopian claim. These lampposts and street signs are lightning rods of attention. After all, what else are you going to do waiting for the lights to change?
Time will play its part. Someone will paint over the graffiti. The stickers will be picked off or plastered over. If it ever rains, some wet winter will lay waste to our best intentions. The street artists will start again.
1 By contrast, while stickers swarm London’s South Bank, they are conspicuously missing in Harlesden, in the London Borough of Brent. Is the proliferation of stickers in public places a perverse sign of cultural privilege? Can areas like Brighton, which can afford to seem a bit grungy, show off their countercultures without losing face? This is not to say that sticker-free zones have no street art. In Harlesden – an area which is 67% non-white – wild style graffiti blooms profusely. This raises questions about street art and race: are stickers, unlike graffiti, a white-coded form of street art? The pristine lampposts of the predominantly white Kew Gardens might suggest I’m reading too much into this, but in a neighbourhood where the average income of residents is £84,900, there are likely to be other socio-economic forces at work.