Last Thursday we chided the muddle-headed message of an anonymous street artist outside Shrubhill House (Breaking news, 2.6.11). Today we are happy to report more successful thought-play at the other extreme of Broughton.
Spurtle first reported REMOTE's 'bombing' of Dundas Street last February (Breaking news, 9.2.11) when an image – some thought it was John Lennon – began appearing on empty shops, a phone box, and beside the otherwise corporate blandness of Centrum House's front door.
That enigmatically bleached-out figure seems to have been the artist himself, as it now recurs dressed in a police uniform with the words: 'This is a REMOTE CONTROLLED Area'.
We like the work's neat combination of wordplay, authorial pride and anonymity, its inversion of standard notions concerning technological and state authority, the passing swipe at bourgeois family life and the nod to an inexhaustible popular appetite for zombies.
All this conveyed in a glance at a sheet of A1. No mean feat!
Spurtle understands that not all readers appreciate such contributions to the World Heritage Site, but when they are rendered as here with thought, humour, verbal and graphic economy, and a measure of old-fashioned cheek – others will continue to find them a positive addition to the evolving streetscape.
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