Reposting 'Graffiti Junction'

I took this article off because it was mean and unfair. But now I've decided, with the help of a friend's advice, that taking posts off blogs just because you don't like them anymore is chicken. So here it is again. I'll get the hang of this blog thing eventually.

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I saw an article the other day about a man whose house had been graffitied. Or, to use the singular form, he discovered a large Graffito on his wall. Of course, he wanted to do what most of us would – i.e. scrub it off – only to find that it had been heritage-listed in the interim. (That’ll teach him for holding fire with the Karcher!) Accompanying the article was a picture of the ‘redecorated’ house. Sure, the graffiti was colourful; it might even be called ‘competent’ if you were feeling generous. But the fact that people were seriously proposing protecting an afternoon’s misadventure with a spraycan seemed a little odd to me.
This isn’t a paranoid argument about all the 'thugs who are threatening our private property', as Andrew Bolt might say. I don’t really care about the man’s house, and anyway, the Graffitied wall looked perfectly OK. But I want to discuss why our expectations are so gutter-level low when it comes to assessing the aesthetic merits of Graffiti, to the point where a marginally competent glittery logo on someone’s house can spark a call for its preservation.
Anyone looking for a rock-solid argument against artistic relativism is invited to visit a place in St. Kilda called ‘Graffiti Junction’. It is a comprehensive refutation of the wishful argument that if we only provided legitimate places for graffiti artists to express themselves, our surroundings would be awash in colour and beauty.
Let’s be blunt. ‘Graffiti Junction’ is a piece of irritating crap. (Go on: admit it to yourself as you’re forced to walk through it. Hating a piece of bad art will make you feel better, I promise.) Despite their lack of talent, its contributors have achieved quite a feat: they have made something significantly uglier than the butt-ugly concrete underpass it conceals.
To figure out why this is, it’s important to remember that Graffiti Junction is actually an ‘artwork’ in two distinct parts. The (tiny) ‘Jekyll’ part looks like a typical mural painted on the inside of a train station walkway. You know the ones I mean – they’re all pretty much the same, even in the US and England, and probably everywhere else in the world. The archetypal ‘train station mural’ is painted with honourable intentions, bright primary colours, and (usually) comically crook execution. Diego Rivera does not, at any stage, spring to mind when looking at it. But despite this, train station murals actually improve most people’s lives. This is because they are painted by good people, with sincere faith in humanity, for good reasons. TSMs are nearly always about one of two issues:
a. Saving the environment, and
b. Achieving worldwide racial harmony.
Both are obviously noble causes. TSMs won’t win any prizes for artistic excellence, but they are uniformly honest, positive and direct. And faith in humanity is sorely needed when you’re being squeezed through the godforsaken bowels of Sydney’s Central Station.
Graffiti Junction Part A. is part of the TSM school. It contains a cartoon version of a tram, an Aboriginal flag, and (from memory) assorted Australian flora and fauna. It reminds you what a nice city Melbourne can be; makes the underpass look more cheerful; and perks you up when your hangover threatens to destroy you. Job done.
Graffiti Junction Part B. is a very different beast. Here, we have the graffiti ‘artist’s’ dream – finally, a legal place to express one’s inner thoughts, within the cosseting embrace of a government-funded social improvement project!
It’s probably too kind to call Graffiti Junction B a two-dimensional representation of a Technicolor Yawn. Walking through the brain-fart-art of the underpass is oppressive to the point of nausea.
There is a glimmer of artistic hope in a figure that looks like the Monopoly Mascot, complete with cigar, bowler hat, and monocle, standing pompously against a wall, brandishing a whip. The sentiment’s inane (Capitalism’s bad, m’kay?) but I like the Monopoly man.
But the rest! Did a vast graffiti artist convention pass an unbreakable decree that its every member must paint like a degenerate? The walls of the underpass are full of that bubbly, bespangled lettering that has somehow become the official letterform of the Graffiti movement.
The standout picture - and I mean that in a bad way - depicts a comely, green, be-warted Martian woman in a low-cut haltertop top commandeering a personal flying saucer, which she controls via a ‘Space Invaders’ joystick. Remember: an adult painted this.
I have come up with a theory on why people praise Graffiti ‘art’. When you’re on, say, the Frankston line, and you see an ornate tag – such as ‘Wozza ‘D4ZA!’ or some other witty jibe – why are you impressed?
It’s not because it’s good. It’s because such art forces us to imagine the circumstances under which it was produced. i.e. the spraypainter’s manic foray at the wall before fleeing from the cops. And we think: ‘Wow! Just imagine what he would have had time to do if he wasn’t a criminal!’
But at Graffiti Junction shows, more time doesn’t help. Ripping off the bandaid of criminality only exposes the suppurating wound of basic artistic incompetence. Seeing Graffiti as a rebellious act makes the juvenile, emotionally stunted, glittery crap that constitutes ‘Graffiti art’ seem much better, ‘edgier’, than it really is.
For now we know what happens when Wozza gets the chance to express himself. Gaining an outlet – a patron, I guess you’d say – doesn’t improve on the first products of his artistic urge, i.e. carving of ‘I H8 Fags’ in his school desk with a rusty compass. The official version of Graffiti looks shoddier than the rushed, illegal version, because you know that the artist wasn’t dodging Police when adding the last sparkle to the ‘A’ in ‘Wozza’.
Perhaps I take the Graffiti too personally. But I have friends who are seriously talented fine artists who take immense care with their work. I don’t hear, however, any arguments saying: ‘Just imagine what they could do if they had a massive piece of government-funded, weather-protected canvas to express their views!’ Sure, perhaps my upper-middle class background, and that of virtually all of my friends, is clouding my empathy for the misunderstood graffitist, but I doubt it. Criminality is Graffiti’s reason for being. It automatically turns an illegal act into a political and/or artistic statement. (The officially-sanctioned pseudo-rebellion of the title ‘Graffiti Junction’ is a desperate attempt to maintain an antisocial pose in the face of government-funded evidence to the contrary.)
But there’s also the ‘different in kind’ argument, which distinguishes noble, exulted Graffiti from mere ‘tagging’, the pastime of degenerates. This false distinction is based on the idea that adding borders, three-dimensionality and basic shading to illiterate slogans is sufficient to ‘art-ify’ it. The difference between a tagger and a Graffiti artist is one of degree, as both art forms exist for the same sole purpose: to escape law enforcement. (Granted, some graffiti displays a level of low-level dexterity – but so do compulsive masturbators, and I don’t see anyone giving them government grants. Perhaps that’s because they’re all in government themselves.)
Lest I be accused of being an elitist bastard, I want to finish with a case in support of stencil art, a phrase which I’ll allow to escape my terrifyingly sharp scare quotes.
Unlike graffiti, stencil art enriches its surroundings. This is because stencils are created, of course, away from the ‘scene of the crime’, giving the artists time to craft something of aesthetic worth before illegally depositing it. There is not the same obsession with naming in the stencil as in graffiti, where the perp’s greatest wish is to let people know that he has metaphorically pissed in a spot he shouldn’t have (I’m using the male pronoun out of respect for women). The stencils around Melbourne often suggest that their creators are capable of thinking a more complex thought than ‘Tracy = Slut’ or ‘Lebs: Go Home’.
To sum up, then: stencils = art, while graffiti = mild scourge. Society isn’t duty-bound to provide a ‘space of expression’ to everyone, least of all people whose sole claim to artistry is the possession of an opposable thumb to grip the spraycan with.
Posted by Timothy Roberts at 9:04 PM 0 comments