“Maybe one day graffiti art will hang in lots of museums and be viewed in the same way as other modern art, although personally I hope it never sinks that low,” – Banksy.

I admit that when I went to check out Outpost, I was a little hesitant. An exhibition of streetart was precicely what I believed streetart was not about. Streetart is a statement which invokes the entire context of the environment around it: the culture, the history, the memories associated with place. It’s probably only music which draws as much on place as streetart does. So, in taking the art from it original location and putting it an exhibition, it’s robbing it of the very statement it’s making.

So I wanted to see just what they did with it.

Cockatoo Island for those who don’t know, is an island in the middle of Sydney Harbour. It is a former imperial prison, industrial school, reformatory and gaol. The first of its two dry docks was built by convicts and was completed in 1857. It feels like it’s a haunted house at the best of times. But, I discovered, it’s also the perfect place for streetart – quiet and desolate, and the entire island is a canvas.

The exhibition itself was actually really brilliantly done. It had a really interesting balance between streetart as ‘place’ and streetart in a gallery. There were entire buildings which had been painted, or covered in pasteups. And there were rooms dedicated as galleries, with art behind glass. There were exhibitions of cuprocking, of tshirt designers, a graffiti covered bus, video art, and one of the tunnels became an exhibition space. There was chalk littered at the entrance, and a free drawing space for you to add your own creation.

One of the things I really liked the most was the very cheeky play on place, especially in the pasteup exhibition, which toyed very much with the exhibition space, with pasteups proclaiming: Coming Soon To This Location Charming Ruins.

But, in the end, these lines really are blurred. In 2009, Banky himself held an exhibition in Bristol City Museum. “This is the first show I have ever done where taxpayers’ money is being used to hang my pictures up rather than scrape them off.” Banksy said. Tim Adams, from the Guardian writes that “Confined to a gallery, this energy looks very flat indeed.”

Maybe in hindsight, Bristol Museum will consider in the future taking a leaf out of the Outpost exhibition’s book. Outpost didn’t rob the artwork of it’s original statements, but it turned Cockatoo Island into a living artwork itself.

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My photos which I took on my phone from the exhibition are below. A full list of the artists involved is on the Outpost website.

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