http://www.graffitiTV.net The Mystery Spot About 1 year ago I was lurking around the East End of London searching for walls to paint where I wouldn’t get arrested by policemen and I went past a warehouse with boarded up windows.. one of the windows was open and I saw a large ‘Caliper Boy’ piece of graff. I turned the corner into the buildings loading bay and made a discovery : bombed out walls, missing ceilings, shit, condoms, syringes, sodden mattresses, children’s toys (?), grubby lingerie, suitcases, Christmas trees, posters torn out of National Geographic magazine, slabs of concrete, strange pipes made from soft drinks bottles and tin foil, telephone booth prostitute calling cards, old newspapers.. This was not a very desirable residence , it was probably ten years from getting flattened to make place for live/work lofts, but it had a certain rugged charm, so this became my new hangout. I got my paints and started decorating, careful not to jab my foot on one of the used needles. Although I first thought this place was abandoned I became aware that it had in fact many tenants who checked in for a while and then left, and there were other semi-permanent residents. In one pitch black passageway there were 2 mattresses, a calor gas stove and touchingly, posters of pandas and elephants duct taped to the wall. A bit of paint, a few throw pillows and this would have made a cozy pied a terre in an area of prime rent. I felt touched by the posters and the attempt to make this a cheerful place. I was puzzled by the spectacle of children’s toys abandoned on the ground floor and I tried to work out their meaning. They looked totally bizarre in that environment – so brightly coloured and surrounded by shit. There is nothing sadder than a ‘my little pony’ when it is grubby and abandoned mid play.. Who’s little pony had it been? ‘The Mystery Spot’ threw up a lot of questions but I wasn’t getting any answers. I started spending more time there painting and the more characters / fragments I uncovered there gave me more of an idea about the meaning of the place. Motorcycle John : I saw this bloke in wearing full motorcycle leathers hanging out in the loading bay as I was leaving the spot with ‘Nylon’ another visitor to the spot. We ducked back into the building nervously, thinking he was a motorcycle security guard or something. As we finally left we bumped into him again, going into the building with a lady who had the unmistakeable look of a Commercial Street hooker.Not a very glamorous look- If you’ve seen it on the street you know it… I’ve been offered a quick shag for £10 before by one of them, with a cheery ‘you look clean, I could do with a warm up’. Johns motorcycle was parked outside , I imagine he had picked her up around the corner and then rode her into the mystery spot for a quickie. She looked a if she had had mile of cock in her career.She didn’t look embarrassed about being caught out at all.. not like he did.He gave us a slight knowing nod, we all knew we were up to no good. I became really hooked on going into the place and I started bringing in more and more people to see the place, almost like the Victorians who would visit the ‘Bedlam’ asylum to se the spectacle of the insane. When we visited however , we left our art. One week I took in ‘Other’ and ‘Labrona’ two Canadian artists inspired by Kerouac and Guthrie who illustrate ageing boxcars that ride the length and breadth of the Americas. They worked in oil pastels and created sad, twisted figures that seemed to inhabit the doorways and windows they were framed in. As we left the place we bumped into a middle aged man, shambling around the building on his own “I just like to watch’ he said. How odd. Next time I was there with Blek le Rat , one of the originators of stencil graffiti art. He is a legend in Paris for his full length stencil figures. We went in with DV cameras this time, a couple from Taiwan and China were producing a book about street art.. Blek pasted up a huge stencil image of himself carrying two implausibly large old suitcases. It looked like he had just arrived and was moving into the space (or just leaving) and was situated on a wall surrounded by the abandoned suitcases and general human detrius. It looked like it had been created specifically for that space. As we left we passed a body in a corner in a rancid sleeping bag . Somebody ? A body ? When I went there next week he had gone. I did a little painting and explored higher and deeper into the place, and one day took a four foot high polystyrene ‘gimp’ up onto the top of the building and walked around the perimeter wall of the buildings shell and lowered the figure onto a lower rooftop with a cable. I was terrified. There was a hundred foot drop down onto rubble and needles and there was only a rusty wobbling metal rail between me and the fall to my death. Still, it’s a nice way to spend a Sunday afternoon. Installing gimps and dodging death doing a high – rise balancing act. Next visit I took Swoon one of NY’s finest artists into the spot… we’d been on a Friday morning paste-up mission around the east-end and this was the last stop. She installed 3 figures of children she’d seen in Havana Cuba, playing with a ball in a smashed out hole 3 stories up , framed by straggly trees and defunct pillars, holding up the sky. Swoon has an aversion to the white space of galleries and that’s why she chooses to put up her work in ‘third spaces’ that are abandoned and decaying. She told me that she’d been invited to show her work in a gallery but because it was such a negative space she chose to put up her pieces in the alleyway next to the gallery instead. One morning an old man told her he had spent the night in the alleyway whispering to the figures and telling them his story. He thanked her for the experience. Surely he would have been ejected from the gallery if he had tried doing something so ‘weird’. I was struck by this story and by the poetry that all of the artworks brought to this ‘third space’.The strong character of all of the artists work had soul, it seemed to inhabit the environment and give it life. I think the last time I went in there with a friend of Blek’s who wanted to film some of the pieces we saw a guy I recognised at the bottom of a stairwell- I’ve seen him on the street trying to sell a dirty crushed up year old copy of ‘The Big Issue’ magazine and trying to hold himself together. When we saw him he had his trousers halfway down and he was calmly injecting smack into his cock. As we descended the stairway and passed him he continued calmly with no shame “you’re the graffiti guy” he said “don’t kick over my works”… we left. I couldn’t go back there for a while, I just couldn’t face it. “you’re the graffiti guy” you are the junkie. Given a choice, I know which option I’d choose. I am struck by the thought of how many empty spaces there must be in London and in towns all over the world, and about the spirit of these places that are thought abandoned and yet give shelter to so many people whose lives are filled with such infinite suffering. It would be foolish to think that by adding art to these places we make an enormous difference to anybody’s lives there, but creating art in the mystery spot has had a profound effect on me and on the many people who have visited ‘The Mystery Spot’ or ‘The Crack House’ as it is also known. It has given an insight into peoples lives we rarely encountered and it has given us a free space to make art on walls that have been abandoned. Hopefully we’ve brought a bit of poetry to those walls. (first published in MODART magazine) Web links Pure evil http://www.pureevilclothing.com http://www.fotolog.net/pureevil Other http://www.fotolog.net/nothinginside Labrona http://www.fotolog.net/labrona Blek le Rat http://blekmyvibe.free.fr/ Swoon http://www.wearechangeagent.com/swoon/ Less