Post No Bills
Filed under: art, Art, Street Art, cinema, law | Tags: advertising and art, Banksy, Exit Through the Gift Shop, Mustafa Hulusi, Public Ad Campaign, Street art, Vandalog
Comments (3) 
In the above photo you can see posters advertising Banksy’s movie, Exit Through the Gift Shop, on a hoarding in SoHo in New York.
A brief post on Vandalog recently sparked an interesting conversation in the thread of comments – around the vexed qurelationship between street art and advertising.
On Vandalog, RJ wrote:
‘Banksy once said “‘Every time one of my friends borrows my ideas, mounts a huge art show and becomes a millionaire celebrity,’ a little bit of me wants him dead.” I’ll amend that to “Every time a street artist turns their back on their values, mounts a huge flyposting campaign and becomes what is essentially an advertising executive, a little bit of me wants to write over their work.”
But I suppose that’s the natural order of things.’
Comments in response to this were sharply divided between those who basically agreed with the point he made, a second group who interpreted Vandalog’s comments as unfounded criticism of their fave street artist, and a third group who thought that since the main objective was to get people to see a thoroughly worthwhile movie then bill posting was an effective way to inform people (especially people who might not be plugged in to networks and blogs within the street art community) about the movie.
Over the last week in New York, bill posters for the movie have gone up in a lot of places – Williamsburg, SoHo, the East Village, the Lower east Side (there may well be more that I haven’t seen). The question of where to draw the line (and in fact whether there is a line) between art and advertising is a tricky one. Sometimes artists certainly do use advertising – when they have an upcoming show, their gallery might advertise it in a listings magazine, or the artist might post a status update about the show on Facebook or tweet about it on Twitter. (There’s a whole lot of thinking to be done some day about the role of social media sites and their relation to art and to advertising.)
But bill posting – well, that’s often seen as something different, something done by clothing companies and by music promoters. Agencies pay bill posters to wheatpaste flyers around a city – an activity often done late at night because it is usually illegal. A number of years ago, the City of Westminster, one of the London municipal authorities, decided to crack down on fly posting as it’s called in the UK, issuing fines to the companies whose wares were being advertised rather than to the fly posters and the advertising agencies (not much came of this, and there’s as much fly posting in London as ever).
Anyway, Vandalog asked why use bill posting to advertise Exit Through the Gift Shop rather than something more directly related to street art, like stencils (or indeed, why not stickers?). Asking such a question assumes that bill posting is different from street art.
It’s worth thinking this through: what, if anything, makes bill posting different from street art? I think it’s complicated. Bill posting involves putting material into public space, usually without the permission of the owner of the property it’s placed on. It’s usually as illegal as street art. In 2008, when the Tate Modern ran a series of talks on street art, the curator, Cedar Lewisohn prompted discussion around exactly this issue by inviting former fly poster Mustafa Hulusi (who is now an artist who sometimes puts images on billboard spaces – click on the link and then on ‘Posters’ and then on ‘2007’ for some examples) to speak along with Brad Downey on art and the politics of public space.
But maybe it really does come down to aesthetics (and the relationship of the image to capital). The posters for Exit Through the Gift Shop are attractive posters, especially when positioned in multiples, and when placed on wooden hoardings (the wood makes an excellent background to the poster’s colours). But I’ve seen them now in several places around NYC and they’re almost always next to the same other posters, especially one claiming to involve a free MacBook giveaway. Here’s one in Williamsburg:
And that confirms that these are not aesthetic interventions in public space, however appealing the poster is. They weren’t put up by Banksy’s assistants or anyone connected with him; they must have been put up – I’m guessing – by the standard bill posters who work in the illicit economy putting up posters for anything, just pasting up whatever they are given.
And in another fascinating development, Vandalog published news today that some of these posters have in fact been gone over by Jordan Seiler of Public Ad Campaign (click the link for photos and for Jordan’s essay on this issue), replacing ads with street art….
I’m not trying here to provide any kind of definitive word about art and advertising. Far from it. In fact, I think it deserves more discussion. After the furore about Fauxreel recently (see the discussion of this by Hrag Vartanian on Hyperallergic), now Banksy (as ever) ups the ante and makes the need for such a debate even more compelling
Banksy at the movies: Part II (Banksy’s hands)
Filed under: art, Art, Street Art, cinema | Tags: art, artist, Banksy, Exit Through the Gift Shop, stencil art, Street art
Comments (2) Since the previous post, about expectations of what Exit Through the Gift Shop is about, turned out to be a long one, I thought I’d write a separate one dealing with what it’s not about.
So let’s go back to the second response that a lot of people seemed to have after seeing the movie – a feeling of surprise that it’s not ‘about’ Banksy, or at least not as much as they had expected.
It’s worth looking at this closely. Is the film ‘about’ Banksy? Well, the film is made by him, and thus it provides us with a text which tells us something about the artists and his concerns, just as his artworks, books and exhibitions do.
And then again, Banksy is in the movie: we see him in his studio; we see him stencilling; we see him with his crew of helpers creating the famous ‘vandalized telephone box’ in London (which goes on to sell for an extraordinary sum at auction); we see him installing a blow-up doll, hooded, shackled, and wearing an orange jumpsuit, at Disneyland, in a direct juxtaposition of American mass entertainment culture with the torture of detainees at Guantanamo. (All of these occurrences are filmed by Guetta.)
But of course, while all of these events are taking place, Banksy still withholds himself from any kind of identifying gaze – he wears the hood of his sweatshirt pulled over his head, his face is blanked by pixillation, his voice distorted (and his assistants’ identities are similarly masked).
So Banksy’s certainly in the movie, but he’s simultaneously on display and hidden from our view. But what we do see in plain sight are his stencils and his hands: as Banksy himself states in the film, ‘I told Thierry he could film my hands but only from behind’.
As he says these words in voice-over, the film shows us Banksy at work, cutting stencils (for one of his signature rats, to be put up on a wall in LA). And for me, that was one of the highlights of the film – watching those hands, whether at work on the stencil or gesturing along with the words spoken by Banksy’s distorted voice.
They’re slender hands, with long fingers. They’re the hands of an artist. What does the face matter, or the voice? Watch the film – and watch out for the scene of Banksy cutting stencils, with speed, and with great skill. That moment might not be central to the film, but it’s certainly what street art is all about.
Banksy at the Movies: Part I
Filed under: art, Art, Street Art, cinema | Tags: Banksy, commercialisation of street art, Exit Through the Gift Shop, Mr Brainwash, Shepard Fairey, Street art, Thierry Guetta
Comments (5) I’m in New York City right now, and last night I attended a preview screening of Banksy’s film, Exit Through the Gift Shop. The film is being released in a number of US cities from April 16th and if you click here you can find a list of release dates, cities and theaters. (If you’re reading this in Britain, the film’s been out for a few weeks; if you’re reading this in Australia, be patient a little longer because the film will be released there in early June.)
Given the intense interest in Banksy as an artist and in the mystery of his identity, it’s inevitable that this film will attract a lot of attention. What’s as interesting as the movie itself is the range of responses that people are having to the film. Among those who’ve seen it so far, people speak positively of the film (as they should, since it’s a highly enjoyable documentary), but they also seem, first of all, surprised that it is more about Mr Brainwash (aka MBW aka Thierry Guetta) than it is about Banksy; and, second, disappointed that, because the film is more about Mr Brainwash, Banksy doesn’t reveal much of himself in the movie.
Let’s start with the first of those reactions, that the film’s not ‘about’ Banksy, which certainly raises the question of what the film is about. Well, the film operates on many different levels, and one of its main ones is the story of how street art took off, from being something with an intense local significance which was shared through the networks of the global street art community for the enjoyment of those who practice or appreciate street art, to became an entrenched part of the mainstream art world, whereby paintings (and artists) are commodified for profit.
To tell that story, the film focuses on Thierry Guetta’s transformation from amateur film-maker into artworld succes du jour, as a means of demonstrating both the possibilities open to anyone with the will to put up art and the (slightly frightening) logical consequences of those possibilities (for example, having people queueing for hours to get into your art show, simply because they’ve been told by the media that your art is important).
The film treads a clever and careful line between condoning and critiquing the commercialization of street art, as its embodied in Guetta’s transformation: it really is left up to the viewer to work out where you stand on the issue. In some ways, the film seems to be criticizing the people who have bought Mr Brainwash’s work for vast sums of money and who have contributed to his art world stardom, but, then again, isn’t this the same art world that has made stars of Shepard Fairey and Banksy and Blek le Rat? If we want to critique the art world, it must be a critique that can specify why Mr Brainwash’s stardom is problematic when that of the others is not.
So: how do we think through that problem? Is it because Mr Brainwash doesn’t make all of his art himself? Neither does Shepard Fairey nowadays, nor Banksy (both of whom have assistants – and we see some of Banksy’s assistants at work in the film), and neither does Jeff Koons, for that matter. Is it because Mr Brainwash’s work is derivative (his work repeats many of the devices used by Andy Warhol, Banksy, Fairey, Nick Walker, Blek…)? Well, that might be a better founded criticism, but it still requires us to think through its implications: each of those artists borrow from other artists and art movements, re-presenting certain tropes in order to create a new art idiom. Perhaps Mr Brainwash’s endless borrowing (what some would even call plagiarism) from the borrowers lacks aesthetic merit because it does nothing new – no new idiom emerges from his pillaging of pop culture and street art.
At any rate, I think these issues form the heart of what the film is about – and I’d back this up by referring you to the movie’s title. By calling his film ‘Exit Through the Gift Shop‘, Banksy is both having a sly dig at museum culture, which often cynically seeks to extract more money from visitors after they have viewed an exhibit, but he is also pointing out to us the direction that street art may be heading in, now that its commercialization is so advanced – the only ‘exit’ is to find a way through the endless consumption offered to us as a poor substitute for the art itself.
The walls of Fitzroy: a love letter
Filed under: art, Art, Street Art | Tags: Al Stark, Everfresh, Fitzroy, paste-ups, political graffiti, stencils, Street art
Comments (3) When I first moved from England to Melbourne, in 1995, I lived in Carlton North but I spent a lot of time in Fitzroy, and I was struck by what I could see on the walls there. Not stencils (they would come later), not tags or pieces (they were on the trains, and the walls adjoining the train lines), but a kind of conversation taking place on the walls. Sometimes the conversation was between the authors of the comments, but oftentimes the addressee was me – or at least any individual who was walking, or taking the train, or driving, or sitting on the tram – any individual who happened to be looking. I saw graffiti that said: ‘subjugate thyself to the screen’; ‘this is the wrong site for the museum’; and ‘corporate whore’.
I became fascinated by the ways that these comments addressed the passer-by. Some seemed to simply express a view (for example, ‘this is the wrong site for the museum’); others seemed to be seeking an object of denunciation (for instance, ‘corporate whore’). And one day I passed by a wall, on which weeks before I had seen a piece of writing that said ‘Real Men Don’t Rape’. It had been edited, either by the original author or by another writer, and it now read ‘Dead Men Don’t Rape’. Something in that moment, which caused me to pause and think about the difference in the politics of each of the two statements, made me realise that the activity of writing on walls generated an encounter with the spectator (me, or anyone else), which can be educational, emotive, perhaps even transformative.
Over the years, the walls of Fitzroy hosted a huge range and number of statements, the majority being intensely political: ‘Refugees ain’t got fleas’; ‘Save Goolengook’ (an old-growth forest in Gippsland that was being intensely logged for woodchipping), and the myriad comments made by members of grrr, an all-women collective whose aim was to comment on and critique the narrow range of acceptable body types and identities depicted in television: ‘more fat women on tv’, ‘more dykes on tv’ and so on. (I was living in Northcote by this time, and I was delighted that one of grr’s comments, ‘more hairy women on tv’, was painted on the pavement in my street.)
After the explosion of stencilling in Melbourne from 200o onwards, the walls of Fitzroy became more known for its stencils than its political slogans – although many stencil artists used their medium for political ends, exploiting the stencil’s ability to catch the eye of a passerby, and using its combination of word and icon to provoke critical thought, as you can see in these examples:
And nowadays? Well, Fitzroy is still synonymous with the communicative and creative use of wallspace but now it’s the diversity of styles and media that is most remarkable. There are entire painted walls, such as the ‘Welcome to sunny Fitzroy’ wall by Everfresh (the subject of an earlier post on this blog). There are amazing paste-ups like these:
It’s worth taking a closer look at the details here. Rone has made each image slightly different, and has placed them under a ‘BILL POSTERS PROSECUTED’ sign:
There are plenty of tags, of course, and some of Fitzroy’s laneways have some very old tags, such as this 70k one:
And stencils: there are certainly still stencils around, and, once again, some have been there a long time:
The history of the appropriation of the walls in this area by artists has been on my mind a lot recently, because I’m now living in Fitzroy, so these walls provide the backdrop to my everyday life, and when I walk past them I get a strong sense of the layers of street art, visible and invisible (through the effects of time, weather, buffing, and other artists), that have become part of the very geography of this suburb.
And it was while I was walking home the other day that I came across this piece: a stunning work by Al Stark, wrapped around the corner of a house, intricately painted, simultaneously evocative and elusive:
It’s almost fifteen years since I came to Melbourne, and I wanted to write a love letter to the walls of Fitzroy (and the artists who have transformed them), providing me (and many others) with so much pleasure. Long may it continue.
Jenny Holzer and the Art of Words on Walls
Filed under: art, Art, Street Art | Tags: art and politics, Jenny Holzer, Redaction Paintings, Street art, torture, Truisms
Comments (2) Last week I was among the lucky ones who heard the American artist Jenny Holzer speak at RMIT’s Capitol Theatre. Holzer presented a slide show of her work, which spans thirty years, from its earliest Truisms series, through the Inflammatory Essays and the Laments to the more recent Redaction Paintings. She spoke modestly and with humour, often seeming to downplay the impact and intelligence of her formidable artworks. Since last Friday evening, I’ve found myself thinking frequently about her work and how enormously insightful it is; I was assisted in this enterprise by visiting the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) last night, to see her current exhibition, and to listen to a conversation about her work between Louise Adler and Juliana Engberg, ACCA’s art director.
Holzer has become such a colossal figure in contemporary art that it’s easy to forget how she first came to public attention: as a street artist, wheat-pasting posters on the streets of New York in the very early 1980s. These posters contained lists of the ‘truisms’ she became famous for: short statements that sounded sometimes banal, sometimes profound, sometimes sensible and oftentimes directly contradictory. The posters stated, always in upper case, always justified to the left hand side, always in a vertical list: ‘ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE’, ‘TORTURE IS BARBARIC’, ‘RAISE BOYS AND GIRLS THE SAME WAY’, ‘MONEY CREATES TASTE’, ‘AN ELITE IS INEVITABLE’, ‘PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT’ and many, many more. The Truisms were also printed onto T-shirts (and I was the proud owner of one): Holzer said in her lecture on Friday night that she wanted to make ‘cheap art’; art that would be ‘useful’ and that could circulate among people.
She spoke about how she made the Truisms series anonymous, because she wanted people to pay attention to the subject-matter, and she related the reactions that her work attracted: sometimes people edited the statements (circling ones that they approved of, crossing out others that they disliked). As she put it: ‘that’s the thing about working in public: people are immediate and truthful’.
Holzer is rarely included in discussions about street art (one of the few books that I know of which does discuss the importance of Holzer’s work for street art, is Cedar Lewisohn’s excellent book, Street Art). But there should be more consideration given to her work as a form of street art; if you do, a number of interesting consonances can be seen.
First, in many of her works, Holzer provides an account of consumer culture and its impact on contemporary society. In this respect, she has much in common with culture-jammers and adbusters who alter billboards or produce counter-images, inviting people to think differently from the ways advertising discourse would prefer. Second, Holzer’s fascination with public space aligns her with street artists, who share with her the desire to make an image that can be seen outside a gallery (even if Holzer now tends to make her works in public space on a rather larger scale than the Truisms series, projecting words onto the outside of buildings as massive and as monumental as the Louvre and the Guggenheim Museum).
Third, she also shares with some street artists an abiding interest in textuality and the possibilities of the word. One of the things that Holzer ‘s work does superbly is the investigation of the iconic properties of the letter form, and the ways in which words (whether static or in motion, racing crazily across her LED signs or progressing with inexorable slowness across the façade of a building or a body of water) can constitute images in themselves. And when I listened to Engberg talk about the combination of stoicism and poetry in the texts that Holzer uses (sometimes her own, more recently often the work of others), I was reminded of the way that Laser 3.14 writes aphorisms on the walls of Amsterdam (see my earlier entry on his work). And, of course, the possibilities of the letter form are taken to their calligraphic limit by graffiti writers’ wild style innovations (although Holzer would no doubt rightly point out that graffiti writers are not so interested in an accessible experience for the public in general and are engaging in a rather more private conversation).
Another consonance that struck me relates to Holzer’s recent fascination with light and projection. Holzer has used lasers to write the text of works such as Lustmord, and has created many installations that project words onto buildings, creating an utterly ephemeral image, just as artists such as the Graffiti Research Lab have experimented with lasers and LED devices to ‘write’ on walls.
But finally, and more generally, somehow, the quiet, determined politics of Holzer’s art seem to me to share something with street art, at least in its continual refusal to be erased from the streets by municipal zero tolerance. At ACCA last night, Juliana Engberg said that Holzer comments on, but doesn’t critique, various phenomena – I would disagree with this, in that Holzer’s selection of texts clearly leans towards the indictment of certain issues rather than detachment from them. There’s also a fascinating interview on the site ArtInfo (which you can read here) between Holzer and Benjamin Buchloh in which Holzer states quite explicitly her opposition to the war in Iraq, for example. So although her word lacks the didacticism of, say, Barbara Kruger, it actively seeks to communicate a political view.
Take Holzer’s recent Redaction Paintings series. In these works, declassified government memos regarding the torture of detainees have been screen-printed by Holzer onto large canvasses painted in various sombre and unassuming shades of brown. Last night, Engberg lamented the fact that some critics had opted to focus solely on the words contained in the memos, thus downplaying their nature as paintings. It’s a good point: what Holzer is doing requires the spectator to look at those words endorsing the torture of others in the same way that one might look at a landscape or a portrait; in the relationship of contemplation that is thus engendered, the spectator takes in those words of war in a wholly different way. Those words laid bare across the canvas are hung in the gallery next to paintings which contain screen prints of palm prints, prints taken by American soldiers after the death of a detainee, with the black lines of censorship drawn brutally through the whorls and inlets of the dead man’s identity.
Works such as these clearly have a lot in common with Lustmord, the installation Holzer made in connection with the rape and murder of women and girls in the former Yugoslavia (an installation I wrote about in my book, Judging the Image), but also have a long lineage, right back to the Truisms of 1981, in which Holzer wrote ‘TORTURE IS BARBARIC’. In the Redaction Paintings, it is as if Holzer is still saying those three words. Three decades on from the pasted-up Truisms, with great patience, Holzer is still telling us that torture is barbaric. When will we heed her words?
The City and the City
Filed under: art, Art, Street Art | Tags: China Mieville, city, Gorker Gallery, Miso, Street art, Tchusse
Leave a Comment Imagine that the city you live in actually intersects with another city… Every street, every building exists in your city, but also in another city, which occupies the same space as your own…
This is the premise of the wonderful novel by China Miéville, The City and the City, which I read during the summer vacation. It tells of a fictional city, Beszel, somewhere on the far edges of Eastern Europe, which intersects with another city, Ul Qoma, in the way I’ve described. People live in the same space, but they are citizens of one city and not the other. The inhabitants of Beszel speak a different language to that spoken in the other city; each citizen of Beszel has to learn to ‘un-see’ the presence of the citizens of the other place, and vice versa.
It’s a fascinating idea and makes for some amazing reading. But it has also made me think about street art and the city, and about some recent work by Miso, in her show in December (which I wrote about really briefly here just before the summer break). Although the show is no longer on, I think that there were some really interesting ideas going on in it, and wanted to write a little about it.
Miso’s show, Tchusse, was at Gorker Gallery in Fitzroy,. I went there on an extremely hot night in December, to see the show and to hear Miso speak about the work. The gallery was crowded, indicating how much interest there is in Melbourne in her work.
In some ways it’s hard to think of the show as having individual works within it (although it does), because it also worked very well as a large installation. Have a look at these pictures, from Miso’s website.The gallery was transformed into a street space, by virtue of the layers of drawings and objects hung on the walls and criss-crossing the corners of the space on string. There were many of Miso’s beautiful drawings, often showing women in the midst of various activities, and many object that she had made: for example, small models of buildings lit from within.
But there were also objects that had been brought into the gallery as part of the setting for the works, some of which had themselves been transformed by the artist. There were wooden doors, upon which pages from books, or posters and notices had been affixed. Items of clothing were suspended from string like laundry from washing-lines; tea-bags also hung drying in corners. There were pages taken from books, pinned upon the wall, next to framed photographs of some of Miso’s street-based art works (which brought other, real, locations into the simulated location within the gallery, but did so through the means of mediation themselves).
The result, when one walked into the gallery, was a sense of entering city space rather than gallery space, albeit a city whose dimensions had been compressed and constrained into multiple layers around and across the gallery.
And it was not simply any city that was being created here: it was in fact Kharkhov in the Ukraine, the city that Miso is originally from; a city which inspires much of her art and which her art in turn remembers and recreates.
On that hot, hot night in December when we all crowded into the gallery to hear Miso speak about the work, I was struck by the way she spoke about her aims – to bring Kharkhov into Melbourne, through her drawings of its inhabitants, through the wooden doors covered with notices of items for sale or pages torn from books, through the tiny scale models of buildings with bullet holes in them, through the clothing hanging from the string. It is not a literal Kharkhov that is being created, but rather a representation of the city, a city that is sensed and experienced through standing in the gallery.
And so Kharkhov becomes a part of Melbourne, rather than a city on the other side of the world. It seems to me that such an achievement testifies to what art is capable of – to make another city within the city that we all take for granted. Miso’s show is an example of what street art and graffiti can do to and for the cities we live in.
China Miéville’s book The City and the City describes what it’s like to live in a city which is inhabited also by ‘others’ (people who speak differently from us, people who think differently about the same streets and spaces). Miso’s work allowed us to see the city of Kharkhov by temporarily bringing it into the physical space of Melbourne. And street artists and graffiti writers do this for us over and over again, pointing out that for every person who inhabits Melbourne as a space determined by private property and ‘clean’ walls, there is another citizen of the city, one who sees walls as surfaces to be painted. Miéville’s book may be classified as an ‘ urban fantasy’ on amazon.com, but the split experience described in his novel is one which certainly applies both to the art created by Miso and to the day-to-day experiences of anyone living in Melbourne today.
Update on the Graffiti Prevention Act…
Filed under: Art, Street Art, graffiti, law | Tags: art and crime, criminalisation of young people, graffiti, Graffiti Prevention Act 2007, police powers, State Government of Victoria, Tagging, young people
Comments (5) Back in 2008, I posted an entry about the newly introduced Graffiti Prevention Act here in Victoria… The State Government created that Act as part of its ‘get-tough’ stance on graffiti: the Act expands the definition of graffiti (so that more activities are now classified as graffiti), gives the police greater powers in responding to individuals they suspected of writing graffiti (increased powers of search and seizure, for example), and gives powers to councils to enter properties in order to remove graffiti without requiring the property owner’s consent (previously that was impossible).
It also created a raft of new and harsher penalties for those convicted under its provisions, and was constructed so that individuals facing a charge under the Act would be likely to pay an on-the-spot fine rather than try to contest a charge through the system (and in ensuring that on-the-spot fines were the preferable option for individuals facing a charge you could almost say that the Act engages in a bit of revenue-raising, like parking fines, for the State).
Contesting charges was made harder by virtue of the Act reversing the burden of proof so that anyone suspected of being a graffiti writer has to convince the police officer that they are carrying, say, an aerosol can for legitimate purposes rather than for writing graffiti. (Previously, and in relation to most offences rather than ones involving the possession of drugs, police officers had to actually do some detective work and ensure that they have evidence proving that the person charged had committed the offence.)
Back in 2008, I commented that it was likely that the Act would increase the number of individuals being criminalised by the system, and, since it facilitated police reliance on stereotyping in relation to who might be a graffiti writer, would have a disproportionate effect on young people. At the time I was writing, police officers were being trained in the implementation of the Act, and there was no information about how they were going to put it into operation. But now, thanks to an article in The Age newspaper recently, we can finally get a sense of what the police are doing with their new powers.
And the news is not good: what they are doing is more or less as I predicted, at least according to the article, ‘Graffiti tags help police put names to offenders’, by Andra Jackson in The Age on 22 December. The article describes a police operation, apparently in one municipality of Melbourne (Kingston) rather than city-wide or statewide, in which police have ‘raided the homes of 53 teenage suspects’ over the last year. The Act gives police the power to apply to a magistrate for a search warrant ‘when they have reasonable grounds to suspect’ that the individual has been writing graffiti. In the resulting raids, police have taken possession of aerosol cans, sketchbooks in which tags are practiced, and any other item which has been tagged.
In the article, the author states that the police ‘acted on intelligence’ to carry out the raid. I presume this means they obtained sufficient information to go before a magistrate and get a search warrant. It’s not clear how much information a magistrate would require before granting a warrant but if one year results in 53 warrants being granted in this one municipaility, I’m thinking that the local magistrates aren’t being overly strict with their interpretation of the Act).
The article doesn’t go into details of what actually happened to these 53 teenagers, but simply says that ‘usually’ they are given a community-based order by the Childrens Court. (Subsequent offending under the same Act will result in being sent before the Magistrates Court where higher penalties will apply.) So it would appear that one of my speculations about this Act was pretty accurate: would these 53 individuals have been brought before a court prior to the inception of the Act? Maybe some, but I would doubt that all of them would have, and so the Graffiti Prevention Act is proving to be a clear instance of what in criminology is called ‘net-widening’, where people who would otherwise not have been at risk of acquiring a criminal record and facing punishment within the system are now included within its ambit.
In terms of my other prediction – that the Act would facilitate the steroetyped targeting of young people – well, that seems to be coming true as well. This particular police operation was directed at two groups of people: the first involves teenagers, as already mentioned (because no-one other than teenagers ever does graffiti, right??), and the other is retailers who sell spray paint to teenagers. This other part of the police operation even involved sending under-18 year olds posing as would-be graffers into shops to attempt to buy aerosol paint during one week in December. Any retailer who sold paint to the kids was arrested. According to the article, 24 shops were approached, and ‘half willingly sold the students paint cans and other tools’. Throughout the last year, 120 retailers were charged with 1310 offences of this type. The penalty is an on-the-spot fine of $234 (hello!), and any subsequent offence sees the retailer in the Magistrates Court facing a $2000 fine. But even though this second group involves retailers, what’s striking is that the concern is with retailers who sell paint ‘and other tools’ to under-18 year olds, meaning that this issue has acquired its currency only because it relates to graffiti by young people. And it’s in this way that the Act is proving to be a powerful and flexible tool in the criminalisation of young people and others associated with their (illicit) activities.
It’s interesting that there’s been so little information until now about how the Act has been used since its implementation. I would very much like to know what is being done by the police in other parts of Melbourne and Victoria. It’s possible that perhaps the Act isn’t being used to criminalise more and more young people – but, I have to say, I doubt it. The State Government created the Act for exactly these purposes (against the advice of many individuals and groups), and it looks, sadly, as though the Act is doing what it was made for.
‘Tchusse’: new show by Miso at Gorker Gallery
Filed under: art, Art, Street Art | Tags: Gorker Gallery, Melbourne, Miso, Street art
Comments (3) It seems like every recent post I have uploaded to this blog has begun with an apology about how busy/sick/distracted/hectic I have been…. Well, why break a pattern by doing something different! Apologies for taking such a long time to add a new post here. I had been holding off on doing so because I was due to travel overseas (to Berlin, Paris and London) and I wanted to create lots of posts about the street art I would be seeing there. Instead, my daughter got pneumonia, and I managed to catch it from her, so my trip was postponed, then postponed again, then I finally said, ‘I give up and admit it, I am too sick to travel this year’. So I have had to delay with visits to those amazing cities until next year.
And then just when I thought that I would resume blogging about the fabulous street art in my home town of Melbourne, my partner managed to get sick (yes, apparently I passed on the whole pneumonia thing to him) plus we decided on an impulse to move house, so we have been consumed by the obsessive, stressful and depressing process of selling and buying. And while that’s not over yet, some of it is (we sold our house last week), and it’s definitely good to be able to feel that there’s a little more time in the week as a result.
I wanted this first-post-in-ages to be about something very special, and I’m happy that it is indeed. Miso, one of my very favourite artists in the world is having a new solo show in Melbourne at Gorker Gallery in Fitzroy. It opened a little while ago so to some of you this will hardly come as news (did I mention that I have been crazy busy?) but it is on until 20 December and in fact on Wed 16th there will be an artist talk by Miso at the Gallery.
Some info about the show and what to expect, which I have taken from Miso’s website:
Miso – Tchusse
Miso – Tchusse
{Stanislava Pinchuk}
Opening Night: Thursday, 3rd December {6-9 pm}
Gorker Gallery – crnr Gore & Kerr Streets, Melbourne.
“‘Tchusse’ sees Miso re-create & condense her home city into a gallery.
Kharkov {Ukraine} becomes a floor to ceiling installation – portraits of
strangers in the street, of friends, folk stories and things otherwise
forgotten, turned into a city built from paper, material and decaying wood,
as Miso replicates buildings, street signs and notices, ladders, empty
bottles, criminal tattoos and clothesline and clothesline from memory.
In this way, Tchusse becomes an extension if Miso’s widely renowned
work as a street artist, as well as being her most ambitious installation &
gallery project yet.”
Miso will be doing an artists talk on the wine tasting evening – Wednesday,
16th of December, at 6 pm. ‘Tchusse’ will also be the launch of a
collaborative clothing project with Warren Harrison.
The exhibition will run until 20th December;
3-7 pm Wednesday-Friday // 11am – 7pm Saturday-Sunday.
If you click on the link for Gorker, you will see some shots from the opening night and get a sense of how amazing the show is. And if you know Miso’s work already, you will realise that this is definitely a show not to be missed.
It’s also a great way for Gorker to end the year. In 2009, they have put on some of the most interesting exhibitions in Melbourne, and I’m looking forward to see what they have lined up for 2010….
Three Variations on a Theme of Surveillance
So much street art and graffiti depends upon thwarting the technologies of surveillance. I was looking back through some photographs taken on a trip to London last July, and came across three images, each of which are to do with surveillance in different ways.
Here’s one, taken in Rivington Street:
I like the double-layering that my photograph creates. The notice announces the fact of being filmed, at the same time as my camera films the notice.
This type of notice and device is typical of what can be seen all over London (and in many other cities around the world). London has filled itself with surveillance mechanisms, the most obvious of which is of course the closed circuit TV camera. They can be seen in so many streets, angling downwards from their elevated positions, like ugly metallic carbuncles on the walls of buildings. And the idea is certainly that in the streets where a camera can be seen, you can be seen on camera (although this Big Brother-esque cliché is often not true in practice: a few years ago I visited the control room for Melbourne City Council’s many CCTV cameras, and staff there admitted that there were so many screens and so few staff that it was impossible for them to properly see much of what was filmed).
The camera on the wall is just one type of surveillance device; there are others. One is the Oyster travel card that allows users to move between modes of public transport. As they travel, it deducts the cost of their journey from a prepaid account in their name. Super convenient, of course,, but when I was visiting there were a number of interesting stories in the media about how the Oyster system was being used to provide information about people’s day-to-day movements. Cases were cited of individuals who believe their spouse or partner is cheating on them looking at their Oyster statements to check where and when they travelled, in the hopes of revealing illicit trysts. Others believe that such computerized systems can be used for data profiling, either for more extensive marketing and advertising or for the straightforward surveillance of citizens that all governments engage in.
And one street artist in London was promulgating a critique of the surveillance systems surrounding citizens: Xylo’s stickers denouncing the Oyster system and mobile phone records were everywhere in 2008. Here’s one, in which he has transformed the very recognizable Oyster logo into the word ‘Voyeur’:
The final image doesn’t survey, and doesn’t denounce: instead, it transforms. The phrase ‘Bill stickers will be prosecuted’ is well known; it announces that bill posting or sticking is a crime and acts as a warning to anyone engaging in the activity. (It has also led to a commonly-seen variety of corny graffiti, in which individuals might write, as a riposte, ‘Poor old Bill Stickers’, or something similar.) In Brick Lane, I found this object affixed to a wall:
The artist has taken a printed version of the warning, and has edited it (illegibly now), and reconstituted it as part of an artwork itself. Thus the will to prosecute (to ‘put someone in the frame’, as the police might say) has been transformed into an image, itself framed and hung upon a wall, in public space, for all of us passers-by to see it, and to smile.
The Everfresh wall in Fitzroy
Filed under: art, Art, Street Art | Tags: crew, Everfresh, Fitzroy, Melbourne, Street art
Comments (4) Recently when I was reading the excellent blog by Very Nearly Almost, I came across a recent post which was celebrating some of Melbourne’s street art (which you can read here) and noticed that the Everfresh wall in Fitzroy was featured.
The post reminded me that I photographed this wall a few weeks ago, with the intention of dedicating a whole post to the amazing work of the Everfresh crew in creating this wall. So here is that post…
Everfresh will be well known to many readers of this blog, since their contribution to street art in Melbourne has been enormous. Their work, both commissioned and uncommissioned, can be seen on walls in many areas of the city (they are well represented in Hosier Lane, for example), but they are most closely associated with Fitzroy and Collingwood, and it’s in the streets of those suburbs that their works can be seen to best effect.
Everfresh are a crew of several artists (including Sync, Rone, Makatron, Reka, Meggs, and Phibs), who work as a group, solo, and in all possible combinations allowed by the group. They have evolved a very distinctive style, which, once you are familiar with it, is instantly recognisable. here’s one example, seen in a laneway in Fitzroy:
Last year, when I was in Amsterdam, I had the pleasure of looking up at a wall outside the Cafe Belgique in Gravenstraat and seeing an image that I immediately associated with Melbourne, and ‘home’:
Quite a while ago, I had heard that there was a large wall in Fitzroy that Everfresh were going to paint, outside the Black Cat nightclub. I know this wall well, in that I drove past it every day for two years, on my way to work. It was like any other wall in this semi-residential, semi-industrial area: tall, brick, occasionally tagged, occasionally billpostered. But now – now it looks quite different… I guess the painting happened during the several weeks that I was ill with the dreaded whooping cough earlier this year. At any rate, I didn’t see any of the work being carried out, but one day when I drove by – there it was: quite wonderful. ‘Welcome to sunny Fitzroy’:
The car parked next to it gives you a sense of the wall’s scale and size. The artwork that completely covers it is an intricately designed homage to Melbourne in general and Fitzroy in particular. The fact that it is painted in black-and-white (and shades of grey) gives it a startling prominence amid the naturalistic colours of the street around it. It looks like a frame from an old film, somehow transported into the everyday ‘real’ world, located as it is opposite a petrol station and a row of terraced houses. It also manages to showcase the distinctive styles of the artists who worked on it (for example, by incorporating some of their signature images within the letters that comprise the words) within the overall sense of a single coherent visual style. It’s such a huge work that it’s hard to photographically do justice to all the complexities within it, but here are some examples.
A section by Rone:
And one by Meggs:
And here are a few more, just for good measure, because the work is so great:
In this last image, you can really see the brickwork under the paint, a reminder that underneath there is a rather drab wall, now transformed into something which embodies the very idea and spirit of Fitzroy. Which is what Everfresh is all about, really.
Images to Live By 