"Graffiti on Soo Line Bridge" by HOARY HEAD on Flickr
Minnesota is, as a guest lecturer in my design class remarked, pretty drab in the winter months. With its relatively flat landscape, bleak weather and streets-turned-rivers of slush, the winter sucks all color and warmth out of our surroundings. However, as the guest lecturer went on to point out, this bleakness of setting can result in an outbreak of creative talent, compensating and perhaps even overcompensating for our loss of color. Art and design in the Cities attempts to stand out, to stamp into our surroundings that spark that makes us who we are.
The guest lecturer went on to talk about graphic design, but one of the slides that he flashed through near the end was a photo of graffiti. “This is a piece of graffiti,� he said, somewhat redundantly, showing a slide of two fish on the side of a building.
"27" by All Seeing on Flickr (Note: I couldn’t find the exact slide, but it was something like this.)
For the rest of the day I couldn’t stop thinking about graffiti (or street art, if you prefer…) Its disputed place in the art world, for example: I recently ran up across a
story about the Japanese fine artist Takashi Murakami. A billboard for a
recent retrospective show of Murakami’s work at MOCA (The Museum of Contemporary Art, in Los Angeles) was tagged (
Wooster Collective reports that it was the work of Augor and Revok of MSK and the Seventh Letter Crew.)
From Wooster Collective
Murakami, who has been known to challenge the division between “high art� and “low art�, reportedly took down the billboard within 72 hours of its being tagged and had it sent back to his studio in Tokyo.
I’m pretty sure that at some point in all of our lives, we have seen or will see billboards such as this one – tagged, but a good amount of the time almost improved by the tagging. And even outside of billboards – throughout our lives, we will see some form of graffiti almost every day. Much of this graffiti is very diverse; the word “graffiti� encompasses hasty gang tags, political statements in public places, elaborate and decorative versions of the pseudonym of the artist, murals commissioned on the sides of buildings, and pretty much anything permanently or semi-permanently written on buildings or other structures, with any number of media. However, there is one common thread running throughout all graffiti. Each graffiti artist makes the conscious choice to get their work out there, in the world and interacting with the world, rather than hiding it on canvases or resorting to tagging bits of plywood in their backyard or basement. Regardless of content, skill level, style or affiliation, street art is meant to interact with public space in a way that delicate art on paper or canvas never could.
As in any venture into public space, this characteristic leaves graffiti wide open to criticism by a public who may not want to see it in their public space, and who view graffiti as an incursion into their own space. Both
Minneapolis and
St. Paul have harsh rules in place about graffiti removal, charging owners of a property with removal of graffiti on that property within 20 days of it being documented by the city. A quick survey of
an internet messageboard devoted to the Minneapolis graffiti statutes shows that opinions on the issue vary widely, some even supporting “extended incarceration� for those caught tagging.
However, graffiti should not be condemned so easily. The debate engenders questions about the nature of public ownership, the role of the individual in a metropolitan area such as the Twin Cities, and the
extent to which self-expression is allowed in public places.
For a country which so proudly displays its Bill of Rights – with its “freedom of speech� and its “freedom to assemble,� we do very little questioning of the boundaries of these rights. Assembling at a rally is one way to make change. Another method of changing the world might be to communicate through the marks we make on walls. Tagging, graffiti, street art, whatever you want to call it, can be the democratization of the American billboard. It is communication at its most liberated.
Maybe the problem is that people don’t necessarily want to see the products of real democracy. They don’t necessarily want to see slogans they personally disagree with scrawled on a wall on their way to work in the morning. They don’t want to see the layers of grime that cake the city they try so hard to keep clean.
So let’s make this clear: I’m not condemning or promoting graffiti. However, I do believe it’s an issue that has been disproportionally targeted as harmful in two separate cases. First, “art graffiti� has been lumped along with gang tags as “bad� for the community. I would argue, however, that this art graffiti is the community, or at least part of it. To treat it as an incursion upon “public space,� which of course must remain pure and inoffensive, is to misinterpret its meaning and blind ourselves to what community truly is. Secondly, in the case of gang tags and other graffiti which does not include aesthetic s as a priority in its creation, treating tags as the disease and not merely a symptom distorts the real problems of society.
In both cases, I think that graffiti achieves a very positive end, sometimes despite itself. It opens our eyes to both beauty in our surroundings and problems in our societies. What art form could ask for more?
"hank" by Chronbombs on Flickr
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