About

Why Sticker Sculpture is Wonderful

• Anybody can do it, whoever or whatever. All participants enjoy. Many more people just stand and watch – watching others work is endlessly fascinating.
• Families do it together, naturally.
• It recycles packaging waste and gives insight into the wider implications of consumerism and the contemporary cult of the commercial logo. Waste packaging is the most visible cause of litter and environmental degradation, but is only the tip of the monstrous climate-changing iceberg we’ve created that is changing the world.
• Strangers communicate and cooperate. Community is strengthened.
• People are free to create their own standards, and art and craft emerge, at many levels. Real and personal souvenirs are made with lasting value. The culture speaks through the resultant exhibition. It is mostly destroyed, so only survives as forms of memory and photography, ending up incinerated or in landfill.
• The consumer becomes the maker.

About Festival Sticker Art and Concrete Opera

Concrete Opera (literally “real work”) is the pretentious name I invented in 1970 for this kind of  interactive multimedia workshop / performance / play / event / happening / environmental / social / therapeutic art work. Festival Sticker Art was invented at the Fairport’s Cropredy Festival in 2003.

Concrete Opera is interactive, soluble in a wide range of social spaces, and chameleon-like. It is an anarchistic philosophy built on faith in the self organising powers of matter, the power of the pleasure principle and the robustness and limitless potential of the human being. We don’t improve on nature, society or the human soul, as enlightenment artists attempted; we work with it to allow it to improve itself and us.

“Community” means everybody of all ages and stations in life, and is the style from which concrete opera emerges in a spontaneous process that may superficially resemble the “monster from the lagoon” scenario, but can lead to scenes of joy, beauty and pathos. It is art form in itself, and like an opera (or a good art lesson), it is made of and spawns and art works quite capable of standing on their own. Gilbert and George make their own beings the focus of their art, concrete opera turns the spotlight on the audience and their own creative processes and products – and it isn’t boring! It can compete with TV – it feeds on advertising and turns it on itself! People of all ages can recreate the state of child-like innocence as they peel and stick, and experience the joy of making new things with personal meaning, and seeing it take its place in a world of other art-creatures.

If you are interested in a more in depth look at the history of Concrete Opera then please follow this link.