Established 2005 Registered Charity No. 1110656

Scottish Charity Register No. SC043760

current issue

June – July 2026 : Labels READ ONLINE

RECENT TWEETS

What is art?

June 01 2026

Art as hope, art as expression and art as a catalyst for change. Thoughts by André Rostant

During May, I had the good fortune to take part in various art workshops open to, one expressly for, homeless people in London. Our editor, Jake, invited me along to a session at The Museum of Homelessness in Finsbury Park. We painted t-shirts and would have made cyanotype prints, but for the overcast day.

On the back of several projects the two of us had attended, Jake and I wrote a piece in Big Issue about the general collapse of arts funding, and the disproportionate knock-on effects for the socially disadvantaged, especially homeless people. I co-wrote the article, but should like to expand on it here with a particular emphasis on the visual arts, like painting and sculpting.

I noted that for many people experiencing homelessness, worklessness or social isolation, art sessions provided by councils and charities are a lifeline: one participant told me outright that art like this had saved his life. These are precious opportunities for self-expression.

In the Big Issue article, we listed the various styles of workshop – some supervised, some do-as-you-will, some even offering film-making. One I visited at St Mellitus Church, Islington, was part of a broader event, with mobile chest-screening, health advice, council services advisors, a barber, a hand-cleaning and manicure specialist and a singing workshop.

This way of fostering, of cultivating artists, challenges perceptions – we don’t stop being creative just because circumstance piles up on us; art is a primordial urge. Even before the so-called dawn of civilisation, people painted cave walls, carved ivory, danced, sang, made instruments. Nor can we escape the fact that much ancient primitive art arises from attempts to understand the nature of our world. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is far from humanity’s first attempt to express our cosmic interconnectedness.

Art has often been a vehicle of resistance: Picasso’s work, for example, threw a daring mirror up to Francisco Franco’s Spain. Zuloaga, on the other hand, painted flattering portraits of the dictator for propaganda, which was no less art. Dali’s work and relationship with el Caudillo (Franco) was more ambiguous… Was there an irony, a mocking element to his apparent enthusiasm for Franco’s vicious fascism?

In 1962, American artist Andy Warhol exhibited faithfully painted reproductions of Campbell’s Soup labels, bringing into question the whole accepted societal understanding of what constitutes art. Over 60 years later, nobody has yet fully explored what those labels tell us.

Which brings me to ask, what does all the art made by poor people in all these carefully curated spaces say? Themes emerge: seeking, fostering self-expression, challenging perceptions of social exclusion, of homelessness. One organisation works “to bring positive change to people, projects and policy in the homelessness community through arts and creativity.” One charity, to “educate on homelessness.” Another claims it is “empowering people through arts and recovery.” It being implicit that the therapeutic value of art is a given. The broad motif is a petition for inclusion, rather than an assertion of equality.

Amid these slogans about empowerment and delight at revealing the vision and cleverness of the poor to some imagined, unaware mainstream society, there are shades of “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?”, a patronised, subdued embodiment of impotence. What right-thinking person in this world does not fully understand that art can come from anybody anywhere? Nor is this solely a theatre of do-gooders – we ourselves are trained to plead for what we should claim as a right. Art in this context seems to me to be a sublimation, a taming of Banksy proportions. Perceptions are merely massaged.

Art can loom from gable ends in Northern Ireland, blur by on graffiti-smattered trains, fester on toilet walls. Art is rows of empty shoes on cobbled streets, and it stops there. The arbitrary boundaries of art are to be found everywhere expression spills over into overt challenge. Nothing too challenging is art until it can be framed as non-threatening representation. Serrano’s Piss Christ would have had him burned at the stake 300 years ago. Now, since it no longer appeals to disorder, it wins prizes. Ditto, Hurst’s dismembered cow.

“Pigs” scrawled on a wall, depictions of people as rats or as rapists, beheading videos, snuff movies are painful, horrific, damaging and emphatically disqualified as art. Yet, albeit grotesque, they are clearly expressions of self. Fear it as we may, nasty people make art too.

Given that half the world’s population lives in poverty, and a huge number of the remainder in comparative poverty, our art is, anyway, the real mainstream. The projects I visited are invaluable, but only in the context of broader, more kinetic resistance can they hope to truly bring about change.

< The no future The Watchtower part III >
June – July 2026 : Labels

CONTENTS

BACK ISSUES
BACK TO PAGE TOP