BAM - Manchester's response to Banksy

Writing is about scratching and imprint. Making dents on medium in the hope that they'll be preserved for an age.
What comes out of our mouths evaporates, dissipates and moves away from us. Writing is our way of pinning down our thoughts and giving them shape.

Art, that other medium of immortality in a world very much mortal, is all about manipulation, chipping, hacking, swishing and stroking - see the way a sculptor chips away at a block of stone to reveal the form within or a painter slides his brush across the acrylic.

All mightily impressive. I remember a child at our school who was good at drawing and like a shaman in our midst, we'd cower round him, staring at the blank sheet of paper before him as he ran his pencil across it and an image would appear.

We loved watching him...CREATE: Something came out of nothing.

And similarly, something is exactly what BAM, Manchester's street artist, creates out of the familiarity of our environment. Taking what is there and changing it's meaning, altering it's makeup and making us double-take.

I wouldn't call him shocking, or necessarily provoking, nor politically motivated. Perhaps the best way to describe him is as a bloke who's good at taking things apart and showing us the components of the structure and we take from it whatever we want, if anything at all.


The thing about BAM's art is that, unlike a politician, it can say whatever it wants and in as many ways it wants, without sounding ridiculous. He's poking a finger in the eye, rearranging furniture, prank calling us in the middle of a busy meeting.

BAM is worth checking out, he's certainly interesting enough, whether you have time for art or not .
If you like the tongue-in-cheek, cool Britannia rhetoric of Banksy then you'll feel at home with BAM.

Some would call it graffiti, others vandalism, others art, and others won't care. And that's that the point I think.

Edgy, raw and unpolished - if the bloke on the street learned how to Picasso he'd do it like this.