Fractured Self (2014)

Fractured Self is a fly-poster campaign using wheat paste, which was part of ‘the temps’ guerrilla street art show focusing on women and mental health: “A group of artists, writers and mental health professionals creating a live project reflecting issues surrounding mental health/disorders [sic] and how art and creativity can be harnessed as a transformative medium for healing. Creating impermanent artworks, installations and happenings around town on streets/pathways, using drawing, photography, performance art, installations etc.” – from the Coastal Currents Arts Festival guide.

Angelic Upstar written by an unnamed man

I’ve started seeing angels, or rather, the same angel, over and over. The first sighting was on the south coast of England, a sequence of economy prints that suddenly appeared in the alleys and promenade of St Leonards on Sea (a town named after the patron saint of lunatics, thieves, gamblers and midwives): an identical image in the centre of a heavy black frame, across which float seismic fault-lines of shattered glass. The Angel has arms outstretched, crucifixed at a tilt—a female figure roped in shiny pvc: bin-liner angelology. Its gimp-head too is masked in this S&M onesie.

Such is iconoclasm through a shattered glass, darkly: a whiff of 70s BBC licentiousness, a nailed femme in bondage, tightly undone with meat-string—though more reminiscent of a punk Sunday roast than Sacher-Masoch & Sade. The plastic is torn at breasts and hairless groin; the figure depicted could be a mannequin or a live model, it’s impossible to be sure. I clocked four sightings in all, each twenty-four inches square, which can be itemized thus:

1. Banksy Angel, facing south on the concrete seafront (Angel since ascended), so called due to its proximity to an exercise in subversion by the celebrity stenciller, protected by a perspex shield reverently donated by the local council. By contrast, while it remained the Angel was rubbed and torn, irretrievably ripped and weathered, facing down the waves; above, a numbered fourteen-liner by an anonymous poet: Sonnet XVIC. Beneath, a further stencil, signed ‘JW’, of an infant crawling with a pick-up truck, so completing an unholy trinity that could not hold back the tide.
2. Brando Angel, facing east, positioned alongside a much earlier détourned and faded image of Marlon circa On The Waterfront (Angel extant at time of writing).
3. Equus Angel (since ascended), vying for space amid a graffiti cluster in a narrow passageway leading down to the sea from a street of antique caves and arriviste galleries. This plot features an imposing white horse (whose cock, added by some wag immediately after the beast’s appearance, has, in the interests of health and safety, since been painted over). The Angel lies beside the horse-head. Also present are a Laurel and a Hardy; an anorexic man holding a popped art balloon; and a one-liner by Scrabbleman, who constructs street sculpture made of the eponymous game pieces embedded in cement. In equus alley he shrieks ‘I’M MAD AS HELL’.
4. Scary-Alley Angel: ditto, ascended, by hostile removal, scrapeage: it looks as though the paper has been chewed from the wall of this vertiginous film-noir thoroughfare that spills the walker out nearby Warrior Square railway station. I shuffled through the shreds at my feet.

During the same weeks I chanced upon the Angel lawfully exhibited, at an auction to raise money for a local independent newspaper (fly-posting is illegal in England, bringing down the charge of criminal damage). It was hidden away, alongside a hanged man sporting hood and erection, in a backroom of The Crown, Hastings, a local public house that has recently reopened after having its interior Shoreditched. Here, under shelter, I could appreciate the alluring samizdat quality of the unframed print, which sold for £33 (it’s rumoured this version of the Angel was collected by a local photographer of some renown). Alone of all the manifestations of the image I had seen, this bore at its base numbers which are surely of arcane significance—hinting at a limited edition reference, but with an impossible numerator and denominator: 5156/4171.

The creator of the Angels remains as elusive as Banksy, only less predictable and compromised (viz no protection from a recycled riot-shield donated by the local authority), and it’s unlikely the image will be reproduced any time soon in a weekend colour supplement, for the dialectical analysis of Sunday lie-in revolutionaries bunkered down in Islington. Nearby one Angel I discovered, pinned to the pavement by a storm, a scrap of paper bearing a handwritten message:

FOUND

I FOUND A

TALENT FOR

SHUTTING YOU

UP

Carried by longshore drift along the Channel littoral, I later encountered the Angel further west. It may be a coincidence, but the 2014 Brighton Photo Biennial and Photo Fringe were underway when I made the sightings, rendering these Angels actors in a streetwise Salon de Refusés. Several appeared on a blockboard cubicle planted by the Photo Fringe on The Stein, a village green choked by incessant traffic about its circumference and populated by drifters and the unhomed. The flanks of this structure corresponded precisely to the cardinal points; its function was to provide a temporary ad site for the publicizing of Fringe events. The cuboid had been positioned with magical prescience between an obelisk and St Peter’s church, a Gothic building trapped on an island between two roads where (architecturally at least) it dominates its surroundings. Cut and pasted at the frontier of the fringe, the Angel occulted a ley line of Obelisk—Crucifixer—High Anglican worship.

The print first appeared pinned, not pasted, to this marginalized-snapper Tardis. The following day the hoarding was felled, having been kicked over by fundamentalist drinkers, as one permanent inhabitant of the church environs assured me (‘And I’ve got three broken ribs . . .’). The Angel survived this fall but soon after vanished, leaving behind only map pins and scraps. Later incarnations involved two replicant Angels, this time pasted to separate sides of the re-erected Fringe changing-room, one facing the spire of St Peter’s to the north, the other a local sexual health clinic (the oddly acronymed CASH) to the east.

A little later I chanced upon yet another version in Trafalgar Lane, vying for attention amid the stencilled, sprayed and scratched artwork that covers just about every available surface of this pedestrian street; it’s as if by passing through this thoroughfare without leaving some kind of graffiti one were breaking an ancient by-law. Sources inform me of further sightings across the south-east of England and the capital, yet their author remains elusive, granting no glimpse of identity; by writing here, angelizer, I’m just figuring out how to manifest you. This is street art that solicits no response, yet our silence is viral. This morning I spotted a revenant white horse, hitched to a wall of the Waggon in Brighton, beneath it the stencilmonger’s seal and a punter’s graphite hoof-tag: STALLION SAY GRRR.