In Britain in the sixties and seventies, youth subcultures sprung up spontaneously from a grass roots level flourished and burnt out with a rapidity and enthusiasm totally absent in the contrived and stylistically homogeneous music 'market' and youth cultural trends of today. In 1976 the first wave of British punk (spearheaded by bands such as The Clash, The Damned, The Sex Pistols etc.) was a ferocious, explosive reaction to conservative British society and the bland cultural tendencies of the mid-70s. But already by 1978, a stylistic territory had been defined and many critics - believing that punk's purpose was to break down walls, not build new ones - declared punk to have served its purpose and to be over.

This was unfortunate, however, for young people who wanted to adopt a punk 'style'. Edinburgh band The Exploited recorded a live concert in 1980 (which I attended - for £1 entry) and used some tracks for their first album: "Punk's Not Dead," released in 1981, with a cover image of that same slogan spray painted onto a wall. Musically inspired by punk's simplicity, but creatively lacking the pioneering sense of their influences, bands like the Exploited (and there were many) used the once contentious and provocative elements of a now established vocabulary only to reinforce a caricature.

The pathos and defiance in the title's declaration: "Punk's Not Dead" was clearly a desperate attempt to justify their own existence, but at the same time exposed their futile efforts to prop up a corpse.

Seeing this same statement - 20 years later in Budapest (spray painted on a wall, like the original record cover) - being disputed in a rather childish graffiti dialogue gave it a heightened absurdity. I wanted to find a way of participating in and extending the dialogue, and in considering whether that would then be 'art', or whether it already was, decided to change the word "punk" to "art", so creating the assertion: "Art's Not Dead." This opened a number of lines of thought to me: one being that punk, as the end point in a stylistic development, may be dead, but that its art, when considered as a creative critique of stagnant established patterns, is not; or another might be that (following the logic of the Exploited's title) the corresponding implication is that art - in its established forms - may indeed already be dead.