The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

I was a street artist. If you prefer, I was a vandal. I started out, as most artists do, humbly. A can of russet Rustoleum with a couple of friends, scrawling vague leftist slogans on the abandoned railroad factory buildings in my hometown. Alleyway dumpsters and streetlit governmental properties were my first canvases. Then came small stencils: a tiny smokestack to spray on the outside of the asbestos-stuffed empty shells of our small town's industrial past. They were just little gestures, not even aesthetically pleasing, but to us it was the start of something incredibly thrilling. We were honor students, very straight-laced for the most part, and no one would have suspected that we were living double lives, our backpacks and car trunks filled with neon ordnance. We learned the lore of the street here and there and on the internet. Don't breath in the paint. Carry the paint and stencils in an empty pizza box. Use spray-adhesive to attach the stencils to the surface. Spray carefully to avoid overspray. From the small stencils, the tiny disobediences, we moved on to bigger, more ambitious projects.

But as we matured we grew to realize that street art is much more than scribbling your name on an alt-weekly dispenser box or sticking your priority mail sticker in a bathroom stall. After working on the street for some time, I became convinced of the legitimacy of the medium. Because just what is the role of the artist? Is it purely aesthetic? To politicize? To inform? To provoke, to offend, to educate? Just what makes someone an artist, anyway? When do they become an artist? Certainly, there are very many varied reasons and motivations that drive each individual. But something every artist has in common is their primary responsibility to follow their vision, wherever it may lead them, even if that is into alleys and train yards. And at that time in my life, that's where my vision was leading me. I had never considered myself an "artist" before, didn't take any classes in school, but I saw a way that I could help make the world more beautiful (or at least more interesting) and relieve the monotony of my small-town life at the same time.

For a year or two, I worked exclusively in stencil graffiti and wheatpaste media. I have since moved on to new media, but it was an exciting and informative time in my life. I vandalized dozens of public places and broke many laws; yet I feel that the gifts I and my associates gave the public outweigh whatever laws we broke. But I won't claim that the desire to give beautiful art to the public is every street artist's motive. Of course there will always be those people who just want to scrawl obscenities in alleys and on storefronts. Just remember, everyone has to start somewhere, and often people graduate from crudities to more expressive works.

Working on the street has many virtues. If you choose your place wisely, many more people will see it than in one of the many small galleries that the average artist can reasonably expect to be exhibited in. Think of some of the busy intersections in downtown Minneapolis: if an artist was enterprising and determined enough, he could have more people see his work every day than do pass through the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa. The street is an unintended refutation of the insular art world; most street artists do not have the advantage of an expensive art education and contacts within the industry. An abundance of good art often does not get exhibited, for whatever reason. Many artists do not want to spend time applying to galleries, making friends in the industry, and waiting months or years for a show. They want people to see their art right now, as soon as possible.

Think of the high cost of starting to paint- you have to buy oils, thinner, brushes, canvas, etc. Then you have to learn to paint, which is typically requires an expensive art education if you want to learn with any proficiency. All the street artist needs is a cheap can of Krylon from the local hardware store. And who's going to teach them? The only way the street artist learns is through practice and self-motivation. There is no street artist's college (although the Minneapolis College of Art and Design does teach a class on street art, and as artists such as Banksy and Shepard Fairey gain prominence in the art world, perhaps it will become an accepted BFA program somewhere). This need to figure out everything for themselves leads to innovation, technical prowess, and self-sufficiency. Street art is the most egalitarian of art movements. One cannot go to art school for it, the production costs are much more affordable, and the artist can choose to exhibit wherever he or she pleases.

And what interest they create on bland surfaces! Last year I lived in Marcy-Holmes, one of the most "graffitied" neighborhoods in Minneapolis. Walking through the neighborhood was a constant fascination, viewing the struggle between the area taggers and the maintenance men. The back and forth between the whitewashes, paint pens, spray cans, and stickers was like a hyperaccelerated archeology, in which eras of art could be seen day to day. It's the logical continuation of the cave paintings at Lascaux. Each side tries to evade the common tautology; the cycle of life on the street. The artist seeks to innovate by creating new visual forms of expression in new places (up telephone poles, underground, skywriting), and the street-cleaner seeks to establish more effective modes of repression (increasing the police force, new paint removers, neighborhood watches). The street artist has an almost unlimited opportunity for exhibition, scrawling a sociology on the walls of our caves.

All other justifications aside, I think the real reason most street artists work off-canvas is the sheer joy of it. Working outside and in opposition to authority is incredibly thrilling. Art should be fun and life-affirming! Working on the street filled me with the sublime. I was working at my own peril to thwart those who would destroy aesthetic beauty in order to enforce arbitrary rules. One time two associates and I devised a plan to paste a giant poster of Death personified from Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal on top of a dilapidated grain elevator. The project would be both a tribute to a girl who had fallen to her death at the site of the poster and a memento mori to the people of the area, reinforced by the gigantic corpse of the blighted building.

First, we had to figure out a way to enter the building, which had all the exits welded shut ever since the girl, walking through the building late at night, fell through a hole in the floor. We ended up digging a tunnel underneath one of the walls. We disguised the entrance with steel debris. Tenderly, we carried our gear up a dozen flights of stairs, dodging holes in the floors on each landing. Falling through any of them would have been fatal. At the top of the grain elevator we gingerly made our way to the site, and checked our gear one last time: a specially-made twelve foot brush, buckets and Tupperware filled with wheatpaste (a home-cooked flour-based adhesive that is extremely hard to scrape off), three rolled-up sections of the poster, and a camera. We took a deep breath, looked out over the park the grain elevator faced, and began to work. Our attempt failed, miserably. We didn't cook the wheatpaste correctly and our brush couldn't reach the top of the poster, which was almost three times as tall as us. Dejected, we packed up our gear and headed back down. Days of work amounted to nothing.

The next morning we tried again. There were other environmental dangers: it was the middle of winter, we were exposed to people playing a soccer game in the park below, and we were mere feet away from stumbling past space to a quiet end. By having one of us stand on the others' shoulders we managed to get the thing to stick. A half hour later, frozen and covered in sticky wheatpaste, we triumphantly took some pictures and climbed down. We were no longer just artists but also engineers, adventurers, and criminals. The adventure, the challenge, the breaking of property taboos was very exciting. The entire process combined with the actual image in an incredible act of creation. My childhood fantasies of laying siege to the castle, doing battle within, raising my flag, were fulfilled and I couldn't help but grin all day long after.

Of course, it was gone within three months. But it was okay- who could feel bad about the abolition of Death? It's the transience of street art that makes it so beautiful and special. Knowing that your art won't endure, that it will be gone in hours, weeks, days, months, is a very empowering feeling. Street artists toil not for money or recognition but for the pure moment where creativity and danger intersect. By following their impulses, they are creating the purest sort of art, untainted by motivation for money or personal recognition. In our increasingly homogenized world, where critics scream that the medium is the message, what do the media of spray paint and Sharpie markers say about us as a people? We're very far removed from the era of Titian and da Vinci painstakingly mixing their own special paints. We live in the petrochemical age, and although many, many disasters have been born from our laboratories, at least we can proudly boast this: the materials for making art are no further than the nearest Wal-Mart, Home Depot, or Target, and anyone can participate. Even you.