The fighting's on the wall

Street art has seduced the mainstream - but the world's spray can guerrillas are not about to lose their edge, writes Ashraf Jamal

"The thing I hate most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little."

That's street artist Banksy, cutting to the chase, as always. The design, advertising and art worlds are starting to merge, rendering the division between an artwork and an advertorial irrelevant. Andy Warhol paved the way. Whether this means modern art is a "disaster area" remains debatable.

But it has become harder to remain an outsider in a networked system that absorbs every contradiction and every protest.

Nevertheless, Banksy insists that we remain "paranoid," and, because we are all under surveillance - ONE NATION UNDER CCTV - that we learn "to wear a mask".

Which explains why street artists remain clandestine, choosing to hide behind pseudonyms.

Now a global icon of outsider art, Banksy has consolidated the potency of protest. "Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing," he says. "Even if you don't come up with a picture to cure world poverty, you can make someone smile while they're having a piss.

"A wall is a very big weapon. It's one of the nastiest things you can hit someone with."

A vital advocate of paradox and irony, Banksy has always recognised the power of the spoof to unlock our prejudicial ideologies and point out their toxic sources. Recognising, like Michel Foucault, that power is always embattled and therefore always vulnerable, Banksy's job is to wake us up - hence his annoyance with all the smart youngsters who choose the glittering world of advertising, the better to peddle bromides for sleepwalkers.

The adage goes that "if graffiti didn't change anything it would be legal". Just how impactful street art has in fact become remains unclear. But since the '60s, when its modern form exploded in Philadelphia, street art has mutated into one of the hippest tipping points in the art world. The exchange between the gallery and the street is on the rise, reminding us that in today's world, everything is a commodity. If Banksy chooses to decorate your bank-owned suburban wall then, well, hell, get out a grinder, hack it off and sell it.

But at its best, street art still reflects the word on the ground - and retains a talismanic and cultish power worldwide. Most city governments are fairly accommodating of street art, knowing with the great Jesuit thinker Michel de Certeau that cities are not Platonic solids - that town planners are never quite in step with human needs on the ground, and that people - in the giddily democratic sense of the word - invariably prove to be otherwise, quirky, and at odds with pre-ordained systems invented for their supposed benefit.

So walls become places of wailing, wry comment, bitter outrage. In Sao Paulo - a city whose mayor knew a good thing - they are an urban playground for the most vivaciously colourful praise songs to human longing and dreams.

The enticing of artists to engage with the streets and rethink the value of the "white cube" - the art world's sacrosanct hidey-hole - has meant that all those exiled from the elitist time-share of contemporary art have found a free expressive space. And while it has traditionally been about provocation, street art is also becoming something more sublime and rarefied.

In South Africa, Faith47 has made this shift. Having started out by reminding us of the squandered principles of the Freedom Charter in 2010, she has reached out to our mystical sensibility and taps what she calls our "collective unconscious". It is "our vulnerability and uncertainty which need to be embraced . the internal and introspective . mundane yet sacred". She sees her work as "reflections on what we believe in, what we are looking for . the ache of humanity".

By splicing the mundane and the metaphysical, Faith47 has begun a new chapter in the history of street art. It is because we are hyper-connected yet disconnected from ourselves and others that we need, all the more, to recover the vestiges of our humanity. Wary of the opiate of monotheism, but committed to faith all the same - hence her moniker - Faith47 is writing our inchoate needs across the derelict walls of the world. We are not humans on a spiritual path, she suggests, but spirits on a human path. LS