Treating the city as a blank canvas

Asbestos is a street artist whose work leers out at you from niches in walls or flyers stuck on lampposts, and he works in the…

Asbestos is a street artist whose work leers out at you from niches in walls or flyers stuck on lampposts, and he works in the streets because he 'loves the city', he tells Cathy Dillon

EVEN IF YOU have never been inside an art gallery, the chances are you have encountered the art of Asbestos. The Dublin street artist has been enlivening the city's thoroughfares and laneways for nearly eight years with his thought-provoking, funny and often beautiful works.

Take his endearingly silly series of posters and stickers entitled Lost. Drawn in a deliberately amateurish style - as though done in marker in a panic - they entreated passers-by for help in finding objects from a slice of toast to the Celtic Tiger (that one, done two years ago, had a line drawing of the beast's head and the tagline: "Last seen worrying about house prices somewhere on the M50").

"I did about 70 different posters and stickers for that series," says the artist. "It was really just a way of commenting on the fact that we are all concerned about possessions and what we have and what we are supposed to have and to buy. And I'm as guilty of that as anyone else, but I just wanted to question that and to wonder about what's important.

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"There's a lot of stuff we think we need but we can really afford to lose. So the subjects ranged from the slightly political to the obtuse to the ridiculous."

Anyone who happened to find the artist's "bottle", for example, or indeed his "kettle of fish" ("It's not mine but a friend's and he wants it back") could e-mail him to let him know it was safe and sound. He still gets e-mails from people who have seen one of the posters and had their day brightened. And he recently did some in Paris under the title Perdu.

More serious were his two series of paintings of dolls' heads. These were traditional, old-fashioned heads with the eyes blacked out as though they were blindfolded, disidentified, or even maimed. "The original idea was that they represented an open mind," he explains, "because one of the reasons I work on the street is that a lot of people feel intimidated by art and I like to keep things open. And they also represented a kind of innocence of the evils of the world. But there's a kind of duality to the image - on the one hand, there is that child-like innocence about dolls but on the other, they can also look quite sinister." The first doll series was done on paper but for the second, the artist used discarded wood and plasterboard he found on the street and decorated it with gold leaf. The results were arresting - strange gems set high in the arches of doorways or low in the nooks of stone bridges in Dublin, Paris or Barcelona.

"I love working on stuff like discarded wood or plasterboard. It's amazing what you can find in skips at three in the morning - probably me with my legs in the air looking for stuff - especially if a new building is going up and they are tearing down an old building or part of an old building and the stuff that's discarded just has a kind of character because of its age. I wanted those doll paintings to have that aged quality, almost like something from Pompeii."

Decorating pieces with gold leaf, though, seems like an expensive option for something the artist is putting on the street and will never be paid for. "Well, the only expensive thing is the gold leaf, and that's not as expensive as you'd think. Everything else is pretty much free. And I just like that idea of making them almost like little jewels on the street."

His most recent work consists of larger portraits of real people, mainly friends and other street artists, focusing on their faces or their hands. These are based on photographs and done in mixed-media on wood and metal found on the streets and in skips. "Again, it's the idea of taking a piece of something that's been discarded, putting a painting on it and returning it to the street. It's a kind of recycling. And there's a kind of depth and integrity with found materials that you don't get with new stuff. There's layers of life on it and it's very difficult to fake that - and there's so much beautiful wood out there, it's fantastic."

There is, of course, the small matter of this all being illegal. What is the attitude of the authorities to Asbestos's guerrilla art? "I don't really know what their attitude is," he says, and even though this is a phone interview, I can definitely hear a smile. "I'm just happy doing what I'm doing. If people don't like it then that's their opinion and I respect it. The thing is that graffiti and street art is sometimes seen as destructive and people spend a lot of money painting over it but if you go somewhere where there is no street art it feels as though something is missing. Like in Singapore, for example, there is none and it feels really strange and you get this niggling feeling as though something just isn't right."

He's right, of course. There is something very unsettling about a city without any graffiti. But, its democratic quality is at once its blessing and its curse. For every example of thought-provoking, beautiful, or original street art, there are walls and walls of banal obscenities spray-painted in a bad imitation of hip-hop bubble writing or skate graphics. Why should bad art be inflicted on people without their permission? "Yeah, there is that argument but then again we are constantly bombarded with all kinds of images, mainly advertising images made by people trying to sell us stuff. They don't ask our personal permission to put up 75ft hoardings telling us to buy their product. And most street artists aren't painting to be destructive, they are doing it because they love the city, and are engaging with it.

"Even if it isn't perceived as good, in a way that's the point. The first street art I remember was these drawings in Biro of airplanes that this guy used to do. I was intrigued by them. Some of the most important stuff is just writing. In my opinion, perfection is the most horrific thing, it's the antithesis of art. In reality, broken things tell us more about the world than perfect things. It's like people who are very beautiful - they really only find out about life when their beauty fades.

"Having said that I do think street artists, like everybody else, have to take some responsibility. Personally I try to put things in places where they add to the environment and I don't deface people's property. I love the city and don't want to destroy it."

WHILE HIS WELL-CHOSEN pseudonym and well-guarded anonymity may have initially been a way of avoiding the forces of law, it has other advantages.

"I really like it because it separates that cult of personality thing from the work. Most of the people who see my stuff will never know who I am. And lots of people won't go into an art gallery but they can enjoy work by an anonymous artist on the street." In the case of some street artists, this eschewing of celebrity has created a mystique around them, paradoxically adding to their fame. British street artist Banksy may still be anonymous but his work is now put behind glass and into galleries.

Which brings us to the fact that street art is now in the process of being co-opted by commercial interests and as a result must be in danger of being robbed of the DIY, anti-establishment edge that made it interesting and relevant.

"It's very difficult to be 100 per cent ethical," Asbestos concedes. "Street artists are always accused of selling out. It's difficult because many of them are trying to make a living. Personally, I've shied away from doing commercial stuff and if I do it, it will be for the right reasons. Most artists do sell out in one way or another but you have to take it on a case by case basis. Every scene, whether it's dance music or rap or politics or literature, it's going to be pulled into the mainstream in some way. And the purity of it will die. And the purity of street art has started to die, but it will never die completely . . . Ninety-nine per cent of street artists aren't making money, they are doing it because they love it. And because the technology is so good now and so cheap, it's getting easier to do video art or installations. It's a really exciting time. In five or 10 years, I think street art will be really amazing."

To be fair, he seems committed to the egalitarian ethos. "That's what I love about it - the fact that anyone can do it," he enthuses. "You could do something, or your mother or your child. All you need is an idea." While we may not have the strong tradition of street art that exists in Brazilian cities, for example, or in New York or LA (Asbestos's work featured last month in a group exhibition in a gallery in west Hollywood), it seems we are catching up.

"The scene in Ireland has become so much stronger in the past few years," he says. "A lot more people are doing stuff and there is lots more going on."

Which brings us back to Eurocultured. What will he be doing at the festival? Will he be in disguise? "Eh, I'm not sure." I hear another smile. "I'm still thinking about that."

www.theartofasbestos.com