Helga Henry: Brimingham street artists are so uplifting
Jun 7 2009 by Helga Henry
Ever since 1998, the month of May has found me on the sunny streets of Birmingham, sampling the weird and wonderful delights of the annual Fierce! Festival.
And although there was no festival this year, the Friday before last was no exception.
As part of the 2009 “for one year only” programme, Fierce! and our partners at Ikon Gallery presented the iconoclastic performer, Reverend Billy.
Self-styled anti-capitalist preacher (he exorcises the tills at Tesco containing “Wall Street funny money”) he gave a blistering free performance in Oozells Square with his funky backing singers, the Gospel Choir of Life After Shopping.
Opposite the headquarters of the RBS, his giant quiff quivered to the message that what we spend our money on has an effect on the climate, our jobs and homes, in fact on the whole world.
Hundreds of people gathered to hear the word of the Reverend.
Still more happened upon him by chance. From the clapping, cheering, whooping and dancing of the crowd, everyone had a good time.
Art in the streets is uplifting and democratic.
There’s the chance that people will stumble upon something to make them laugh, cry or gasp.
As an audience gathers, they share reactions, jokes and vantage points. They connect.
The critic Lyn Gardner said of The Sultan’s Elephant that this work “turns a million strangers into a community”.
Same in Liverpool, capital of culture, where grandmothers, toddlers and all ages in between waited for half a day for a good view of La Machine’s giant mechanical Spider as it paraded the streets with its live orchestra perched atop cherry-picker cranes.
Grand artistic gestures funded by public money may seem unnecessarily splashy in the current climate. But everything is relative.
Given the community cohesion this work promotes (it’s been proven that crime reduces during events rather than proliferates) and the city-promoting media attention it generates, they constitute good value for money. Some previous Fierce! highlights such as the Great Swallow (Benjamin Verdonck’s giant nest on the side of the Rotunda) or the much acclaimed Street pianos (15 pianos in community settings emblazoned with Play Me, I’m Yours) were produced for the public money equivalent of two duck houses, a moat and some manure.
Or a fraction of one per cent of what we’ve spent to bail out a bank.
Play Me I’m Yours has, from its Birmingham beginning, taken place in Sydney, Australia, Sao Paolo, Brazil and is now in London.
But the city, and Fierce!, had it first.
* Helga Henry is general manager of Fierce Earth and chair of Creative Republic
