Is it art or graffiti? (Urban Art)

[Halx]

There are few acts of vandalism that can actually raise the property value of a building, but if you ever were to get tagged by the infamous Banksy, your place could become a priceless work of art over night. Then there are the signs, stickers, stencils and markings that you encounter on your walk down the block. Some of them whisper little messages to you, in an unobtrusive way, but they are still scrubbed from their surface the moment the city orders a worker to do so. There are street musicians who gather crowds around them as they play, but simply annoy those who have to scurry around their noisy obstruction. The trash on the grass in the park is in fact litter, but its arranged in such a fashion... it appears to be a message. Will you listen or will you throw it away?

There is a place and a time for everything. Some people believe art should be confined to a museum. Nobody wants to live in a world cluttered with noise and garbage, but you also need flavor and contrast. Art provides just that. Sometimes an artist needs to bring the art to you because you're never going to go search for it yourself.

Have you had any experiences with "urban art"? How do you feel about people making artistic statements on public property?

I currently follow a blog that highlights various street art "installations" that make ways on the internet. They run the gamut from really creative ploys to political statements to outright vandalism. One initiative, for instance, encouraged people to deface Hummer vehicles by replacing the H with a D. There is also one that makes use of a shadow that a streetlight gives to a statue, but is also technically graffiti and defacement of public property.

I have to say that I approve the installations that can be easily removed and have inherent creativity (as opposed to some blatant political message). Many old-fashioned "pranksters" may find this to be weak in the guts department, but I feel that destructive subversion is something I grew out of several years ago.

[little_tippler]

I don't think that degree of permanency in a public or semi-private location affects my ability to appreciate a piece of interesting and highly creative graffiti as art.

I understand that it's public or even semi-private property, in any case not belonging to the person who "defaces" it, but I also think that sometimes the work is so striking, of such high conceptual and aesthetic quality, that it's a shame to have it removed. Some places that get work of this kind done to them are probably the better for it.

I don't much care for things that are more a defacing than anything else. Tagging for example, makes no statement other than, I was here and I wrote on your shit so I'm cool. It's not aesthetically interesting nor does it carry a meaningful message.

I totally disagree that art work should be confined to a museum. In fact, that is something I'm particularly interested in, access to art and how art work is presented by the artist to others. Art should not be put on a pedestal if it is to have any relevance to the lives of ordinary people. I believe that it should be a part of everyone's lives, and indeed it is, even though many times in less obvious ways. No-one can say they live without art in their life.

Art can be pleasurable, both visually and physically, and intellectually. It can make us think in new ways about new and old things, about things outside of our own small lives and concerns, about others. It can shock us into action. Some acts of subversion can be good for you. If you always conform, then some of your spirit withers and dies, because you become the same, with no differentiation. Variety is important.

Sure, some people may call art, or even street art, garbage. A nuisance getting in their daily path. But I think these people are definitely missing out.

[Manic_Skafe]

As I said in the culture jamming thread, graffiti to me, is much more so about the act of reclaiming public spaces that'd otherwise be reserved for adverts. It's the act of defacing someone else's property which is inherently wrong and it can even be pretty damned ugly but I can't say I find graffiti any more offensive than the fact that I can't even urinate in an NYC club without an advert over the urinal and another embedded in the urinal cake.

We are in the midst of a media war, anyone with a voice should make themselves heard. Via graffiti, blog or artfully placed speech bubbles.

Originally Posted by Lil' Tip

Tagging for example, makes no statement other than, I was here and I wrote on your shit so I'm cool. It's not aesthetically interesting nor does it carry a meaningful message.

Tags are really just a stop-gap for larger and more intricate pieces that can't be put up in high traffic or highly policed areas. But they can be of substance - it's all about style and placement.

As an aside, I shot this piece from the infamous REVS two days ago in dumbo. That man is transcendent.

[Reese]

I love the idea of "urban art." Do I have to use quotes? Is that the acceptable term? We had a pretty busy railroad track where I live and I remember many days watching the graffiti on the trains. You'd see tons and tons of amateur stuff, single color, crappy font, then every now and then you'd get this fantastic stylized text or character. You just have to wonder about who painted it and how far it had traveled. I don't live in a large city. Hell, I've only been to a single large city and at the time I wasn't allowed off the "tourist path" which meant I missed probably all of the things that the people living there see every day. Personally I find industrial and technological things to be unattractive. The colors are dull, the edges are sharp, It's hard to look at after a while. I think to break the tedium we need surprise art like a 20ft spray painted mural popping up overnight, someone playing their guitar on a street corner and even little things like a clever sticker placed in just the right spot. It's decoration. Sure it fades after a while and becomes unattractive and looks like garbage, but for a few days, it's art. That's what I love about it. You just know it's not going to be around forever. Mona Lisa isn't going anywhere, There's the original, there's prints and pictures and copies. It's boring. The art you see spray painted on a rail car is something you're going to see once in your lifetime.

[murp0434]

Originally Posted by Manic_Skafe

but I can't say I find graffiti any more offensive than the fact that I can't even urinate in an NYC club without an advert over the urinal and another embedded in the urinal cake.

Exactly. I can't see how graffiti is any more offensive than having to pee on a coca-cola ad or being blinded by ginormous tv screens advertising cologne at least some graffiti is cool...most ads are just obnoxious

[little_tippler]

Originally Posted by Manic_Skafe

I can't say I find graffiti any more offensive than the fact that I can't even urinate in an NYC club without an advert over the urinal and another embedded in the urinal cake.

What?! The USA really is on another level. That is unheard of here. Come to Portugal and pee advert free!

[Cynthetiq]

I don't even konw where to begin with this.

I remember the art crimes site from the internet beginning.

Art Crimes / graffiti.org - The Writing on the Wall

I've always appreciated tagging and bombing since I was a kid. I loved the fonts, the colors, the style. I can't believe that some of the pieces can be done quickly and be so intricate.

What I cannot agree with is something like tagging buildings and trains.

None of these train cars look attractive in any shape or form from the 70s-80s. I can't imagine how it would make me feel as a commuter to watch a beat down looking train come into the station and see it assaulted by spray paint and pens from the inside and out.

YouTube - Graffiti Old SKooL Trains

YouTube - Graffiti Old SKooL Trains

YouTube - Elevated Stations NYC 1980 pt1 of 3

YouTube - Elevated Stations NYC 1980 pt1 of 3

But here is this building that I walk past all the time.

190 Bowery
Photographer Jay Maisel bought the building at 190 Bowery 42 years ago for $102,000. Covered by graffiti and assumed by many to have been abandoned for years, it's matured into a single family home with 6 stories, 72 rooms, 35,000 square feet, an estimated value of up to $70 million and three residents.

The 72-Room Bohemian Dream House

“I can’t believe it,” says Corcoran’s Robby Browne, an expert in downtown real estate. “I thought it was vacant.”

This is exactly how I felt about this building each and every time I walk past it. Yet the place is a pearl when you look at the gallery shots. I didn't know it wasn't vacant until I actually looked it up so that I could find photos of it to post here!!!!!

190 Bowery, the Greatest Real-Estate Coup of All Time? - New York Magazine

The building was landmarked. I just wish that they'd de graffitti it.

But as a building owner, and a board of director's member for a 4 building 1600+ family coop, I'm annoyed at graffiti. It costs money, manpower, and time to clean it up.

I recall the first time I saw COST/REVS wheatpastes all of the city when I first moved to NYC. The Andre the Giant, the LES Squid, Neckface...

Urban Decor - A Wall-to-Wall Tour of New York Street Art

Of course last year, there was the infamous Splasher who went around defacing the graffiti and everyone was up in arms. I was interested in the idea that someone who didn't have the right to paint something was pissed off that someone defaced their work. I thought of just how odd and ironic this is. They didn't have permission to paint the wall in the first place in many occassions, and then when someone does to them the same thing, they are all pissed off and up in arms.

Basically I think I can sum it up as, permission walls, I'm good with. That's a no brainer. Open walls that no one has coopted, a bit grey. Walls/things that people use like gate rollups, doors, windows, I get more annoyed with it.

[roachboy]

yeah--i'm more or less the opposite. i basically agree with ms above, particularly regarding the way advertising complicates the matter of public/private space and to my mind invites reappropriations of "private" spaces as public. i suppose there are limits, if i think about what spaces i might see as suitable for some kind of transient art installation--i'm inclined to use the advertising thing as a litmus test--if there are adverts, it's public. if it's abandoned, it's public. if it's in a space of transit, it's public. by which i mean that the exterior walls are elements of a public sphere, a public space, and there's no argument to my mind that can or should stop graffiti--or anything else that generates these little temporary autonomous zones. but i wouldn't do residential spaces which did not invite it by advertising. so there's a line i wouldn't cross myself in general. so i suppose there's a line. there are exceptions i can imagine, but only in the context of specific actions or projects that would contain their own justification within them.

luckily for all, i suppose, pianists tend to be indoor plants.

[kramus]

I ran across this variation on urban graffiti. What is attractive is it's innate artistic merit, the planning and creative effort that it requires, the thoughtful approach to a reverse image in dirt in our urban environment, and lastly the ephemeral nature of the work as dirty city air covers up the scrubbed imagery.





Artist Neil Coppen has pioneered this particular brand of graffiti. Here's a link to an article and a couple of examples, and the article in whole printed below as well.


About | Neil Coppen

Neil Coppen
writings/ plays/ poetry/musings/travel journals and newspaper columns
SCRUBBERS!
March9

A renowned hip-hop poet and Graffiti artist friend of mine and I recently engaged into a drunken dinner-party debate/row over the ubiquitous tagging of public property going down in Durban.

Tagging to my “mother-Grundy” mind, is a creatively hollow pastime appropriated and practised by bored “Banksy-befok” adolescents who like to think of themselves as “urban anarchists”.

The subject of our row was a local Durban tagger who had been recently trialed in court for 850 counts of tagging and now found himself slapped with a hefty prison sentence.

While I would not wish a prison sentence upon anyone, I would imagine that after 850 counts of tagging, one might decide to shift their lacklustre modes of rebellion in favour of a more effective means of urban commentary.

Time it would seem to grow up and move on.

“It’s not considered vandalism” my friend had argued, “if it doesn’t break or defeat the purpose of the object. Spraying something on a wall doesn’t destroy its function, the wall still stands. How can you tell me this is a punishable crime” he ranted, “when murderers and rapists in this country get off from their charges scott free?”

While (sub)urban hip-hoppers may consider it an “innocuous” and even “subversive” act, one must pity the grouchy local residents digging weekly into pensions for the buckets of paint to erase the offending marks from their walls.

Offering a refreshing and very welcome take on the contentious art form, is a group of ex Durban Vega Brand and Communications School students, who were inspired by the work of British street artist Paul Curtis (AKA “Moose”) who began pioneering his form ‘Green’ or ‘reverse Graffiti’ three years ago.

Curtis (legend has it) first hit upon the idea while working as a kitchen porter in a restaurant scrubbing mountains of pots and pans. One dreary evening while trying to erase a grease stain on the sink wall before him, he discovered he had cleaned a large white patch onto the grimy surface.

It didn’t take long before the aspirant street artist began conquering the cityscapes of London, applying his vigorous selective scrubbing to more prominent walls and bridges. (see 2 images below)

“I’m not the world’s biggest environmentalist” Curtis stated in a documentary focusing on his work “, but it’s impossible for me not to toe the environmental line. The whole core of what I do is based around drawing in pollution and writing in nature. Cities are really dirty places and I think my type of art draws attention to that.”

Curtis gradually scrubbed his way to fame using giant stencils and high-pressure water hoses to wash reverse images (mostly of trees and nature) onto soiled city surfaces.

In was an idea that Durbanite Martin Pace borrowed and adapted while rushing to meet a deadline for a final second-year creative project at VEGA.

Sighting a polluted free-way wall in Essex Terrace Westville as an experimental canvas and armed with a metal scrubbing brush (purchased at a local hardware store) Pace proceeded to hand-scrub the defiled 17 m wall with a pictorial time-line of Westville’s architecture.

It’s an impressive cleaning feat that sees higgledy-piggledy kraals and tents subsiding into Cape Dutch style houses and pointed cathedrals.

Encouraged by the success of his efforts and the mostly complimentry responses he recieved (“there will always be the one old hag”, he assures me, “who misinterprets our efforts as vandalism and tries to set the police on us.”), Pace united with fellow Vega students Stathi Kongianos, JP Jordaan and Nick Ferreira and began to tackle more ambitious city canvases.

Over the next few months the Dutch Ink clan had etched a florid set of trees into a Durban North wall, and later a mammoth Sardine Run (featuring a school of stencilled fish) darting across the surface of a city bridge.

It would of course defeat the object in employing such a benign artistic method to scrawl agro-urban city typography across sullied city surfaces, which is why Dutch Ink have wisely eschewed ‘angsty expletives’ in favour of depicting more organic and natural imagery in their murals.



Further encouraging aspects of the technique is that unlike graffiti, such etchings are ephemeral, gradually fading from the effects of time, sunshine and carbon grime.

While this sort of collective flash-mob scrubbing is often referred to as “Green Graffiti”, when I mention the term, Pace and his cronies begin to shift uncomfortably in their chairs.

“It’s more of an etching” He corrects me, “or green tagging, but even tagging comes with its own set of territorial connotations which we’d like to avoid.”

Whatever you may term it, there is nothing, it seems, illegal about the technique. One cant really be accused of vandalism when all they have done is set out to wash (albeit selectively) a mucky city wall!

It’s not hard to imagine the absurd Monty Pythonesque trial that might ensue should the artists ever be brought to book.

The judge suppressing a snigger, as he cranes forward and declares: “We hereby imprison you all for the er…. unlawful selective-cleaning of city property.”

“That’s the beauty of the whole project” says Pace chuckling maniacally at the thought. “We have had council guys in police cars stop us in the middle of the day while we are working and asking us if we have been commissioned to do this and when we answered no, they gave us thumbs up and said keep doing what you are doing.”

“Our work” he adds, “merely highlights how siff (a derivative of the word syphilis and popular Durban colloquialism for ‘disgusting’) these city walls are.”

While law enforcers and municipalities have no legal grounds to stop reverse graffiti they are, it seems, overly eager to eliminate evidence of their neglect by swiftly painting over the murals.

Ironically, such actions makes these walls ideal targets for taggers to leave more permanent stains.

“The art on the walls draws attention to their states of neglect” confirms Pace. “Municipalities don’t recognise the worth of our art and simply end up painting over them. Of course a concrete wall is porous, so the enamel of spray paint doesn’t take so well but white-paint on the other hand just seals it. So really they just shoot themselves in the foot every time they decide to remove of our pain-staking scrubbings.”

©Neil Coppen

[SecretMethod70]

kramus, I too read a recent article about that form of graffiti - if it can even be called that. It's pretty neat.

In general, I'm on the fence regarding graffiti. Who is the graffiti artist to judge that his or her creative output is worthwhile, and so worthwhile that it justifies permanently defacing another person's property? Still, some of it is very appealing.

[SaltPork]

simple tagging is not art, it's straight up vandalism. however, the beautiful multi-colored paintings/murals that some of these graffiti artists produce are stunning. While still illegal, at least it's beautiful. We hired a graffiti artist to do mmurals inside my school in HS for the stairwells. it was incredible. Bottom line is, some graffiti "artists" are just punks with a sharpie, while others truly are artists and should be encouraged in constructive ways to share their talents with the communities.