Pulling them in off the street

In another life

Calling all homeless art lovers: there is hope. Roger Powell was a denizen of cardboard city until advertising maverick Tony Kaye put him in the Saatchi Gallery as a "pounds 1,000 work of art". Life was never the same again, and now he's on show at the Tate. Photograph by David Rose

We're sitting in the small garden on Millbank by the Tate Gallery, taking in sunshine, traffic fumes and canned drinks. Loads of people have had the same idea: every available place is filled with gaggles of picnickers: office workers in suits, students with urban rucksacks, flat-heeled, natural- fibred, middle-aged couples. Roger wears an Oxford University T-shirt and totes a black PVC shopping bag of notebooks and art dictionaries. "Sometimes," he says, "I sit on the bench outside here and watch the coach parties come in and out. And I think, well, there are all these tours showing the good side of London but there are no coach tours of cardboard city."

Cardboard city, the huddle of makeshift lean-tos and sleeping bags in a subway near Waterloo Station known as the Bullring, is close to Roger Powell's heart: until just over a year ago, he was living there, sustaining himself on hand-outs and begging for change to buy the odd packet of Benson and Hedges. He had come there through a confluence of misfortune. "Hard luck story" is one of those glib phrases frequently used to justify ignoring suffering. It's easy to forget that one person's hard luck story is another person's bad luck.

Roger's luck, it seems, has turned. In July last year, down in the Bullring, he met Darren Statman. And now he's a walking work of art. You can see Roger every week day at the Tate, touring the exhibits, studying the finer points of painting and talking to anyone who approaches him about homelessness. The art world heaves with people of somewhat eccentric personal appearance, so he's not always immediately obvious, but he's easy to spot. With his bushy beard and gentle demeanour, he's a dead ringer for Father Christmas.

What happened was this. Tony Kaye, artist and adman extraordinaire - whose work includes the recent Nike "Olympic" shorts, the conference of babies discussing the merits of the Vauxhall Astra and the storm-chasing Volvo driver who knocks anything you'll see in Twister into a cocked hat - was speaking at the Design and Art Directors' Awards at the Saatchi Gallery in north London.

Kaye, who had first-hand experience of homelessness a decade or so ago, decided to produce something harder-hitting than the usual corporate guff: what he termed a pounds 1,000 work of art in the form of a homeless person, who would become an exhibit at the gallery.

Statman, Kaye's assistant, had been dispatched to recruit a street-dweller. "I was in the Bullring talking to people," he says, "and getting a certain amount of verbal abuse. Plenty of people were suspicious, and you can't blame them, really. Anyway, this guy came up to ask for some money for cigarettes. We had a long talk, and he offered to help me: show me some of the likely places and try to find someone. So we spent the day together, but didn't have a lot of luck. And late in the day, we were sitting on a wall having a drink and I asked him if he'd like to have a go. And he said, 'OK, then, I'll try it.'"

"What the pounds 1,000 buys," says Roger, "is a roof over the head of a homeless person: the initial deposit on a room, a few clothes and maybe getting some food in. It's the cost of getting someone in off the street and into society again."

He lasted two days at the Saatchi, and never went on public display. After an outcry (the homeless charity, Centrepoint, described the idea as "Humiliating ... almost like putting homeless people in a zoo"), the gallery lost its nerve. The Tate stepped in and he has been there since, with forays to the National Gallery, British Museum and spaces in San Francisco, Washington and Los Angeles. Nothing advertises his presence to Tate visitors - although word has spread and many now seek him out. He wanders around the gallery, and may strike up conversations, where welcome, about the art on show and his role as an exhibit.

He has a salary from Kaye's organisation, has moved into a bedsit in Maida Vale and has applied to do a part-time BA in History of Art at Birkbeck College. "They sent me a form which asks me what I do now. I put 'a piece of art'. And they asked me what I've done in the art world and I put down: 'Since July 1995 I've been a work of Art in the Tate Gallery'. I don't know what they'll think of that. Maybe they'll just put me on the course to be studied."

This use of human being as metaphor is a contentious issue: Kaye has been accused of exploitation and self-aggrandisement. His accusers seem to have a point, at least until you meet Roger and find an intelligent man who definitely doesn't feel exploited. He feels he's helping his former companions. "Out on the street you're in a catch- 22 situation. If you haven't got an address you can't get a job, and landlords want a minimum of a month's rent. The idea is to make people think. It's a good thing that we have these works of art here for the people and belonging to them, but we spend millions on paintings. There's this huge list of people who want to sponsor the art world. Maybe some day there'll be someone who wants to sponsor the human being."

Roger, 47, hails from Porthcawl in South Wales, where he worked in garages and on building sites, eventually setting himself up with a taxi business. The 1990s hit, and "the business fell through. I had to sell everything to clear my debts. Work was tight in South Wales and I thought I'd stand a better chance in London. I came up in March 1993 with just a few weeks' rent money, moved into a bedsit and started looking for work."

He did an NVQ in business administration that year, then got work in a garage in north London. Roger says the manager was having financial problems and kept borrowing cash from the till, and the owners docked his pay to make up for it. "I was caught in the middle. I could see no way out. I was trapped every way I turned. At the beginning of May I was four weeks behind in my rent and I couldn't see any way out of the situation. So I just left everything in my bedsit and went out on to the streets." He lived there for three months. "Luckily I found a good bunch of people there. They showed me how to get food and a shower and generally helped me. People who live on the street are like that. They do what they can to help each other."

How does he cope with his new role? "In the first couple of months, I was very aware of people looking at me, but I got used to it. Now I just carry on learning. If anyone wants to come up and talk to me I'm there to talk to them." Aside from the whole homeless thing, he now knows a heck of a lot about art, and approaches it with the irreverence of the auto-didact.

A stroll round the gallery with Roger is enormous fun. Everyone who works there exchanges friendly greetings as he passes through the rooms, while others glance at him and look shy. His favourite work is by Gainsborough and Reynolds, with the light values of the Impressionists and the starchy detail of 16th-century portraiture coming up hard behind. He doesn't have a lot of time for the Abstract Expressionists or conceptualists, despite being a bit of a conceptual work himself. He is also well up on the details of artists' lives - and their deaths. I've always been under the impression that Jackson Pollock did himself in and mention it as we stare at one of his enormous Rorschach tests. "No," says Roger. "He went in a car crash. The one who did hara-kiri was Rothko".

Has he any ambitions himself to paint? He laughs. Roger laughs quite easily and it's a sweet, infectious sound, occasionally marred by the cough from the Bennies he still smokes. "I'm happy to have a go, yeah. But I think Picasso can rest in peace at the moment. I think I'm more of a Pollock, you know; put things on the floor and throw things at it. Probably the Americans would appreciate it. They think the sun shines out of his ears."

So: from homeless and hopeless to a man with a future. Darren is a devoted admirer. "I look at the change from when we first met him. He was very shy. A lot of that came from living on the streets. At that stage it's hard to see any way upwards and it's possible to spiral downwards even more. And Roger hasn't. He's very proud of himself, and he should be. We were out on my birthday recently, my friends and people from work, and we all went to this pub. There were some people in the corner who shouted out to him: "Oi! You're that art piece at the Tate, aren't you?" And he went, 'I'm a super-celebrity'. I think I'll soon be acting as a bodyguard."