Francis Bookwood: March 2026

This essay is based on my documentary film "The Art of the Artist Known as @Athirty4" which is on show at the Cornerstone Arts Centre in Didcot as part of "Bite!", an exhibition by the artist @Athirty4.

Acknowledging the acceptance of my documentary as an independent work of journalism by the gallery, it will be embedded for viewing at the end of the essay.

PREFACE

As we head towards the middle of the second decade of the 21st century, with more media and more means of communication than ever before, anything resembling a cohesive avant-garde seems to be absent.

In the last century's world wars, it was the avant-garde who fed upon the absurdities of their masters.

But with decades of peace, prejudice and hatred are blowing in on an ill wind the likes of which most adults today only heard their grandparents talking about.

In 2026, over a hundred years on, and more closely tied than ever before to our friends, neighbours, but also enemies. One has to ask "Whither goeth the avant-garde?"

I'm a writer and a critic, yet I'm not certain I can answer my own opening gambit.

And so, in this essay, I aim instead to present to you "The Art of the Artist Known as @Athirty4".

THE ARTIST

Named after the most memorable part of the Oxford ring road, until now, their artworks have never appeared in a gallery, instead, being scattered around urban locations least expecting an installation of the avant-garde.

Each of these installations, events, or incidents appears simultaneously to be ignored, celebrated and lampooned on social media with the artefacts either taken by passers by out of curiosity and annoyance, destroyed in official clean-up campaigns or simply left ignored in-situ to decay.

Being out on public display, many people will presumably see these artworks just by experiencing their everyday lives and may not even understand how both they themselves and the artworks therein are linked, related, and yet disconnected from what we think we know about art.

THE ROAD

Just as the art of @Athirty4 appears with no apparent meaning, the road after which the artist names themselves appears to the viewer to have no apparent destination.

There are signs which can tell you where it leads. But to understand it, you must travel on it and make your own mind up.

You might be impressed by the speed with which you travel. You might be bored by its monotony.

The experience is non-deterministic. There is no fixed meaning. A map is only a representation of the reader's intent, just as any description of art is only an opinion of the viewer.

BOTLEY

When you live in Botley, as I used to, you're surrounded by the A34. You have to go over it to get home or you have to come under it to get out, and you never quite escape it. All those cars, all those lorries taking everything that we want from life up and down between temples to capitalism creating a constant strident, relentless scratching sound.

When I was living there trying to sleep at night, it came through the double glazing. It was a sound of what the young people today call FOMO, and I resented it.

It was the sound of things happening somewhere else, the sound of people going somewhere else. And in fact, I hated it.

And so it was when I heard about an artist calling themselves @Athirty4, it hit a nerve.

But instead of hearing the sound of FOMO, I saw it. I saw evidence of something else happening beyond the art world that I knew.

Like most people, I was first made aware of their work from the media coverage generated from their most audacious stunts.

As a critic most familiar with making expeditions to see exhibitions, where the interior of the gallery to look at curated collections and the museum frame the notion of art as much as the artworks themselves, this artist of the exterior, exhibiting amongst the elements, day and night, and sometimes only streets away from me, seemed both beguiling and belligerent.

This was real art for the streets with none of the hubris of the graffiti tagger. There appeared to be a feral intellectualism happening, playing with signs and symbols subverting both everyday life in favour of art while subverting the art world in favour of everyday life.

No plinths, no catalogues, no bookshop or cafe. No "Do Not Touch" signs and no private view.

And so I set out to find the meaning of @Athirty4 amongst the dreaming spires of Oxford.

OXFORD AND THE ART OF THE EXTERIOR

Picturesque though they are, the streets of Oxford can scarcely be considered to be the Courtauld, the National Gallery, even the Tate Gallery.

And yet there's a richness here, a place of meanings intersecting... life intertwining, which is a fertile place for a discourse about meaning, discussion, emphasis, and de-emphasis.

As soon as it leaves the artist's grasp, whether it leaves the studio or simply in a cloud of molecules from a spray can, art by itself is always non-deterministic; its meaning cannot be guaranteed to be consistent between any two or multiple viewers.

In choosing to disturb the established syntax between the viewer and the exhibitor in the context of the museum, we can see how the work of @Athirty4, being chosen to be exhibited externally in the street, sometimes not being certain whether it's litter or genius...there is a new relationship between the viewer who is made more aware of emblems of transience, of contrapuntal temporality between that which is displayed, that which is understood, that which is conceptually and that which is formally discussed, agreed and exhibited.

The art of the exterior, art exhibited outside the gallery takes on its own dialogue with the viewer, and without the setting, the formal setting of the gallery, the plinth, the placard, it's possible for us to interact with almost anything and consider it to be art.

How many visitors to the city of dreaming spires have passed by the latest exhibition of @Athirty4 without realizing they were witnessing a scene from an art exhibition?

One thinks of Christo, the artist known for wrapping islets in pink polypropylene.

Is a building that is under renovation, swathed in protective fabric for both the building and the passers by some kind of "Christo-cover-version"?

And yet even so, if we look closely at Blackwell's Art and Poster shop in Broad Street hides a public artwork by Anthony Gormley, a figure standing out looking at the crowds who don't know that they may be looking at art.

The irony is the artist doesn't appear to care. They don't seem to know who's watching. They only seem to be interested in the idea that somebody might be watching.

This in itself is an act which challenges the traditional relationship between the viewer and the viewed.

IN SEARCH OF @Athirty4

Although I became familiar through the media and by rumour of the artistic activity of @Athirty4, and was familiar with some of the places they had exhibited, I nevertheless walked the streets of Oxford for months, weeks, and hours, hoping to come face to face with the art of @Athirty4 "en plein air".

This didn't happen and perhaps overly ambitiously I never witnessed the artist in the act of installing an art exhibition or incident despite trying.

I visited a particular bus stop in St. Aldate's outside Christchurch College regularly for two and a half years regularly searching for examples to no avail. Getting to see the art in person is remarkably difficult. Remains of everything are everywhere, but @Athirty4 remained elusive.

And yet, by being part of a private guild of storytellers, that of the collectors, the critics, the curators, I was fortunate enough to obtain a small number of what I believe to be genuine @Athirty4 artworks.

In captivity, they cannot have the same resonance as they do when placed, primed, and ready for attention by the artist.

But in order to examine where theories about the gallery, the exterior, the viewed, and the view intersect, I decided to simulate an @Athirty4 installation using these artworks above the recycling bins outside my flat.

EXAMINING THE ART

A Small Painting

A small painting, apparently part of the "Black Thursday" exhibition, appears at first to conform closely to conventional artistic practice.

We see a canvas mounted like a painting in a gallery. Although it appears out of context outside of the gallery, the canvas is nevertheless recognized universally as an object of art, elevating whatever is on its surface above the everyday and into the realm of cultural deference that is art.

Although the canvas is small and cheap looking, it serves its purpose as a base and a sign to pay attention. On its own, the plastic lettering tape would not draw in the viewer if it were just stuck to the fence.

The message self-refers to the object as an artwork, but also somewhat recursively comments on the effort required to create art and ambiguously declares that this incomplete artwork may not be as much of an artwork as it appears to be.

Despite the lack of aesthetic effort and the self-conscious nature of the materials, there appears to be some skill and attention to detail in the making of the piece.

If we investigate the installation, it is revealed to be mounted not by the mirror plates, but by magnets on the back.

The illusion of permanence breaks down as soon as it is questioned by the viewer. Be they a resident angry at its intrusion in a domestic space or a curious passer-by who may want to start a street art collection.

Sculptures

Below the Black Thursday painting, and perhaps somewhat fittingly at the base of the recycling bins are two examples from a multi-piece artwork from 2022 called "Product Placement", dealing with the concept of litter, waste, and detritus.

Objects that by themselves have distinctive physical forms appear to be cast in plaster of Paris and then painstakingly painted to resemble their original form.

Both came to my possession somewhat worse for wear, but I understand they had been pristine when originally on display.

If Linnean taxonomy had manufactured objects within its domain, then these two examples would be separate genera, perhaps even different species. Yet many viewers might simply recognize them both as just examples of rubbish.

The Wine Bottle

In the case of the object based on a wine bottle, it appears to have undergone some sort of deliberate defamation during its creation that you cannot ignore.

A real wine bottle is a hard, solid thing made of glass. Obviously, if you drop it, the glass breaks and the wine spills out. And in such a situation, we are presented with danger in the form of broken glass and sorrow in lost wine.

But @Athirty4 takes the visual language of the wine bottle and distorts it within its own dimension under its own weight. It's cast in plaster of Paris and is then given enough makeup for you to recognize it as such. And yet it says to you, "I am not. I am not a wine bottle."

"Or am I?"

I expect the damage to the sculpture was a result of a passer-by testing its authenticity as both a bottle and perhaps as an artwork. In the gallery, we are expected to behave. "Please Do Not Touch" signs warn us not to risk damaging and perhaps more importantly spoiling something revered and precious.

Yet who has not wished they could challenge that convention every once in a while and smash up some art?

In this case, as a casualty of being art of the street, and defying the visual language of the bottle that inspired it, the broken artwork spills nothing except the revelation that it is made of plaster. Yet instead of being disposed of as broken, it was brought to me as an object to be revered.

The Can Of Fish

The object purporting to be a can of some sort of fish, meanwhile, has fared better and bears less scars. Yet, as a pure form, it seems naked without a label.

A food canister, unopened, but unlabelled, signifies both surprise and danger. What might be in it if we opened it? And would it be safe to eat, or even pleasant to experience it without any information as to its age?

As a rendering of such a thing, the shiny metallic paint camouflages the plaster beneath very convincingly. Even the deliberate defamation during casting, as with the wine bottle, is not so clearly an artistic gesture at first glance. On the shelves of even the swankiest supermarkets, for example, tinned goods often bear the scars of being handled roughly, and yet are priced as standard despite their imperfection.

As an example of an artwork representing litter, the object itself almost has too much promise being cast in its own unopened form.

To cast a tin can in its opened form in plaster would present too much of a manufacturing challenge, I'm sure, but it ranks this nevertheless as an oddity. An example of an artistic failure by @Athirty4 in as much as in its naked form, there is no irony present in the form of a flinty linguistic challenge. There is nothing to accompany it to render encountering the object as an absurd interaction. There is nothing to challenge the viewer's perception of it as anything other than a painted plaster casting.

And yet by virtue of not being what it purports to be, it retains something enigmatic in its appearance. If we cannot know why it exists, we can at least wonder, "how did it get here?" "What can I do with it?", and even "What on earth do you want with that thing?"

A CONCLUSION OF SORTS

Even in the presence of actual works by the artist, a conclusion is not easy to see, just as the destination of the road after which they are named is hard to imagine by merely being in its presence.

The question remains above all else with the art of the artist known as @Athirty4 is perhaps why do they go to such immense effort to create such provocative artworks destined for destruction either by being cleared up officially, being vandalized, being stolen, or being left to decay?

Why, even if you engage with them, do they create cultural interventions that provoke the absurdity of spending time interacting with them?

Could @Athirty4's presence as an artist in Oxford be as omnipresent culturally as the noise of the A34 is to its nearby residents? The road is an asphalted concrete ribbon with a steel spine in the middle that separates all of these people going somewhere else like a weird zipper.

And yet nothing that we realise about it would be the same if we didn't have it. We can't not have it. And in some ways, having examined the work of @Athirty4 the artist, and the exterior place they choose to exhibit, it is the same, a constant dichotomy between something that is and something that isn't.
Like the objects themselves or the end of the road, there comes a point when we must leave it. The artist and their art are destined to be enigmatic and unknown. And as the sign I found whilst filming right next to the road says, there is "no access to @Athirty4".