BigShinyThing

For the past few months, the river-facing façade of Tate Modern on Bankside has featured ’street art’ works by Blu from Bologna, Italy; the artist collective Faile from New York, USA; JR from Paris, France; Nunca and Os Gêmeos, both from São Paulo, Brazil and Sixeart from Barcelona, Spain.

But what goes up, must come down, and today was the day for cleaning specialists Grafitti Busters to bring in their cherry pickers and hoses to strip it all away. Strangely, Tate hadn’t worked up the same frenzy of PR around this event as they did for the launch, but we were there to record the moment anyways. First to go was JR’s signature blow-up of a black guy wielding a weapon video camera. We arrived a bit later, to catch them tentatively starting to strip down Faile’s comic-book Native American superhero (above): give it a couple of days and all will be pre-post-modern business as usual at the Tate.

Get down there early tomorrow if you want to catch that familiar London street-scene — high-pressure art removal — on the grandest scale.

More pix on Flickr.

[Photo ©2008 Darrell Berry]