Martyn Reed, founder of Nuart, on Stavanger and the mural circuit

Nuart, held each September in the Norwegian oil town of Stavanger, was by 2014 one of Europe’s longest-running street art festivals. That year’s edition opened in the first week of September with walls by Borondo, Etam Cru, John Fekner, Strøk, Icy and Sot and Maismenos, among others, plus a programme of talks. Afterwards its founder, Martyn Reed, spoke to the UK street-art quarterly Very Nearly Almost about his history, the festival’s origins and his unease about where festivals were heading.

From the North to Shoreditch

Reed grew up in the north of England in what he called an underclass household: a mixed-race family of five brothers, two white and three Jamaican, plus a half-Asian sister. His teens were football firms and petty crime, set to Yellowman, Afrika Bambaataa, Street Sounds electro, The Smiths and the Happy Mondays.

Running under all of it was an interest in art that was unusual where he came from. It took him south to study fine art at Middlesex University in Wood Green. In London he began DJing around the Bass Clef in Shoreditch, the club that shortly afterwards became the Blue Note. Drum and bass nights at Metalheadz ran alongside acid jazz; Tracey Emin and Leigh Bowery were part of the scenery, and Joshua Compston’s Factual Nonsense gallery on Charlotte Road, with its street fête, helped launch Brit Art. Reed has carried that energy ever since.

Norway, and a change of subject

A DJ residency took him to Norway, and he settled there permanently in the late 1990s. In 2000 he started a small electronic music festival, and Nuart followed in 2001. At first it concentrated on new media and early digital art, which still felt like lawless territory tied to activism, VJing and club culture. When that field grew comfortable in the early 2000s, the festival switched to street art. Reed had been involved with it privately for some time but had not thought of it as art, a snobbery he put down to his fine art training.

He most enjoys the contrast between the quiet months of curating and the rush of production, when a small crew works nearly round the clock to realise other people’s ideas in days.

Why Stavanger trusts its walls

Public art, he thought, meets the usual scepticism in Norway, turning hostile once taxpayers’ money seems diverted from hospitals. Street art was another matter in Stavanger. The town sat outside the broken windows argument, and outside the decades of Hollywood thrillers, Death Wish among them, that placed graffiti writers alongside violent criminals. For many residents, the first graffiti they knew was a mural by Blu, Faith47 or Dal East. Pieces by Logan Hicks, Swoon and David Choe sat around the centre, and the big walls by Eine and Niels Shoe Meulman had become regional landmarks. Locals, he argued, often trusted the unsanctioned work more than the commissioned kind, which made the city’s zero-tolerance line on graffiti look absurd.

Doubts about the circuit

The 2014 talks were Reed’s response to a trend he disliked. Street art festivals had multiplied, most of them taking the safe mural route, and a touring circuit was forming in which the same big names headlined event after event with a few local painters in support. He saw quantity and size replacing quality and relevance, and in places something close to “morphine for the masses”. He wanted people from the industry and from universities in one room to think about it.

He still regarded graffiti and vandalism as legitimate public speech, a challenge to political and corporate control of shared space, and said that holds even in gentrified Shoreditch and Williamsburg. Street art at its best, especially at a personal scale, does the same job. Big generic murals he doubted. A tag or stencil in the right spot can still hit hard; he was not convinced a hotel wall painted by Shepard Fairey does.

If Nuart has a message, Reed said, it is unannounced. He would count it a success when people notice art that has gone missing from their streets, and he hoped communities would come to make their own public art without waiting for it to arrive from above. For now the plan was a spell of reflection, closer to a comedown, before gathering walls and ideas for the next year. Nuart had always tried to reflect the streets, not define them, and he could picture it in another city one day.