Outpost on Cockatoo Island

This one comes in right at the wire. Outpost, the street art festival that has filled Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour since 4 November, closes today, 11 December, and a last-weekend visit turned up more than can fairly be squeezed into one post.

The setting does a lot of the work. Cockatoo Island was a convict prison in the nineteenth century and then a shipyard until 1991, and it now sits on the World Heritage list as one of Australia’s convict sites. The Sydney Harbour Federation Trust, which looks after the island, has handed its sheds, workshops and tunnels to around 150 artists and collectives for five weeks, free to visit, and billed the result as the biggest street art event Australia has seen. On the evidence of the final weekend, that is not much of an exaggeration.

The home side

Most of the wall space belongs to Australian painters, and the roll call reads like a guide to the country’s scene at the end of 2011. Beastman, Numskull and Yok all have work up, as do Kid Zoom, Lister and Shannon Crees, with Deb, Prizm and ManMan alongside them. The industrial surfaces suit them. Rust, raw concrete and huge doors that have not moved in decades make a better frame for a big character piece than any gallery wall.

Melbourne sent a strong contingent. The Everfresh studio crew have taken over one of the island’s tunnels and lined it end to end, with Meggs, Mr Sprinkles, Phibs and Rone among the painters. Walking the length of it is one of the best experiences on the island: a single enclosed run of work by painters who have shared a studio for years and whose styles have grown up alongside each other.

Pastemodernism and the visitors

Indoors, Pastemodernism 3 carries on the paste-up and print strand of the scene. The show has been curated by Ben Frost, the Sydney painter whose pop-culture collisions are well known, and it brings in names from further afield, including Eine from London, alongside Reka, Pterodactylman and Deb.

Two international painters stand out on the walls. The Belgian artist Roa has left one of his enormous monochrome animals, drawn with the skeletal detail that has made his work recognisable from east London to New York. Ethos, from São Paulo, has painted a large piece that holds its own in the same space, which is no small thing next to a Roa.

Skating and screen printing

The festival reaches beyond painting. Westsyde, the Sydney skate shop, has supplied a skating area and a crew of local riders who have been putting on a proper display, with some of the labels it stocks on hand.

Secret Wars AU brings the live battle format to the island. The event is run in Australia by Shannon McKinnon, head of the Aisle6ix screen-printing company, and pits artists against each other in black and white on facing boards against the clock, with the crowd deciding the winner. The Outpost card matched Houl against Scale, Mike Watt against Shannon Crees, Deb against Teem, and Ben Bigeni against Ken Taylor.

That last battle was the one to catch. The two went at it head to head until the end, and the audience vote went to Bigeni, who had the home crowd behind him. Both are worth following up at more length.

A thousand T-shirts

The final strand is NEXT, a T-shirt exhibition assembled by Eddie Zammit, the man behind the T-World project and its book. More than a thousand shirts from over two hundred labels around the world hang in the show. It sounds like a side attraction, and it turns out to be one of the more thoughtful rooms on the island. Graphic T-shirts have long been one of the ways street artists reach people who would never walk into a gallery, and Zammit’s selection makes that case without labouring it.

After Outpost

The festival leaves an argument behind it. Outpost has shown that a public body can hand over an important heritage site to painters, draw very large crowds over five weeks and come out with the site intact. For an Australian scene that has spent years dealing with zero-tolerance councils, especially in Melbourne, that is a useful precedent to have on the record. Whether the Trust repeats it is another question, but the sheds and tunnels have made the case for themselves.