On the street where you live: stencil art and the poetics of ephemera

The convergence of Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept of relational aesthetics with the advent of a culture of digital connectivity, with its interactive arts and immersive conditions, has meant that a new or at least revived art of contingency is becoming more conspicuous as the signature culture of the early twenty-first century. Such art posits a very different way of thinking about what an audience is in a nodal culture; a culture contoured by a manifold ensemble of distributed and distributable communications media and the potential cultures made possible by them (such as Flash Mobbing).

But relational aesthetics also modifies our notions of what a work of art is. In this paper I want to examine stencil art as and instance of the art of contingency. The practice of stencil art, like graffiti, is public, highly visible, organised and sublimely ephemeral. It is here today, gone tomorrow. In relation to the concept of relational and distributed aesthetics, stencil art is an interesting case in point, since it shifts the meaning of a work of art from being spatial to predominantly temporal. The nature of its consumption is highly contingent upon who sees the work before it is either removed or superseded. In this sense, stencil art, as public art, dramatically alters the nature of what it means to experience art and the contexts of that experience. An art of the ephemeral, stencil art heightens the contingencies implicit in distributed, nodal and relational cultures.

Darren Tofts, Association Professor, Media Studies, Swinburne University