Ben Wilson
Ben Wilson paints little acrylic paintings on discarded chewing gum that has been stamped into the pavement. His pictures are emblems of contemporary social life – some are declarations of love, some commemorate the absent or dead, some celebrate a gang or the bonds of friendship, others record memories or tokens of identity.
Over a number of days or weeks, passers-by, from alcoholics to housewives to community police officers, are held up for a while, in order to involve themselves in discussions and affective relations with the artist, who appears as a mad drunk, prostrate on the ground for hours on end, painting his miniatures, as city life rumbles around him. Passers-by propose their own images, or have their images’ contours drawn out of them through long processes of conversation and enquiry. They contribute sketches, suggest colours, tussle with the artist over what could and should appear. They give their consent to be photographed, which produces, alongside the colourful micro-paintings, an archive of the London public in the first years of the 21st Century.
Through this activity, which he has done for over three years, nearly every day, along the roads from Barnet to Central London, Wilson has challenged the seemingly exclusive rights of the commercial image-scape to decorate our environment. The images and their commissioning generate in micro-form a redistribution of the ability to participate in the system of patronage. Wilson has also contributed to a mapping of urban relations as they exist on the ground, has brought people and their affections to expression. And he has stepped over lines of property and perceived property. He has been assaulted once by young men, arrested twice and beaten seriously by City of London police as they forcibly extracted DNA from him, though he had, in painting a discarded item raised a few millimetres from the ground, not committed the crime of which he was accused: criminal damage. His is politics already instituted and already probed by an art practice that tests its own possibility of being in the most exposed way. Ben is currently involved in a court case brought by the Crown Prosecution Service. He is charged with obstruction, for he dallied in handing over his camera, when asked by a policeman. His argument was that he had not completed and documented his commission and would be breaking the terms of the relationship with his patron. The case continues, as the City of London magistrates’ court is treated to expositions on environmental art and the socially curative powers of public acts of creativity!
This little incident is part of a shift of power relations on London streets. It is significant that it happened in the City of London, where paranoia about terrorism is at its highest. But it is also a reflection of an attitude, reinforced by the police, that unlicensed - or unprofitable - activities in socially shared space are illegitimate or ‘mad’. What might be the possibilities of reclaiming public space as a place of non-commodified expression? Do you have to become like a ’street person’ or ‘marginal’ to exist as a human in the streets?
Esther Leslie
Professor of Political Aesthetics
I didn’t realise he was still doing it! I read about this years ago and who thought’d it last?
To recap: On Thursday 23rd December 2004, just one month after Ben Wilson had started his chewing gum painting mission, at the top end of High Street, Barnet with the aim of working his way through chewing gum all the way to central London, it was reported on the ‘thisislocallondon’ website that “he has progressed less than a quarter-of-a-mile southwards, despite working more or less five days a week”. That’s a lot of chewing gum.
The man who wrote the original piece, Peter Stebbings, asked Wilson: “So does he really think he can make it all the way into the centre of London?” His reply: “We’ll see,” he said. “I’m just going to keep drawing and see where the momentum takes me.” Into, court it seems, although it took all of three years which is perhaps the surprise.
Looking at it now, the scope of this project was already envisioned in Wilson’s humble words ’see where the momentum takes me’ which wasn’t just talking about a literal unfolding of the map. There is something striking in the deliberate choice of smallness in scale, quietness of manner and slowness of progression in this project. - Not only an obvious inversion of the big, brash, fast-changing commercial image scape, but operating in inverse proportion to the amount of controversy it has caused at the level of those who regulate the streets. On the other hand, it’s precisely this small-scale, locally-oriented act with its sense of purpose measured not by profit but accrued through longevity and ritual (not spectacle). This is what those who use the streets, rather than lord it over them, recognise as giving meaning to what it means to be human.
/Rob Best 12/10/2007