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Graffiti is a hallmark of rebellion.
It is a feature of every urban landscape, ranging from the mundane
tags of self-aggrandizing teens to intricate murals covering the face
of a building. It has been around as long as urban landscapes have
existed - "I am amazed,
o wall, that you have not collapsed and fallen, since you must bear the
tedious stupidities of so many scrawlers," reads a piece of ancient
graffiti on a wall in Pompeii, Italy. It also remains illegal,
punishable in most states by fines and imprisonment.
Anti-graffiti organizations and police departments say graffiti is a
blight on the city, causing depreciation of property values, creating
an eyesore, and serving as a vehicle for maintaining gangs. Graffiti
costs millions of dollars a year to clean up, and millions more to prosecute
graffiti vandals. The cost to neighborhoods may also be high, as graffiti
may be seen as a mark of a crime-ridden or poor neighborhood, reinforcing
the culture of poverty. As such, graffiti must be eradicated, where possible.
Of course, graffiti is not homogeneous
- the purposes and impacts of graffiti may be political, artistic,
or simply expressive. But the term is used to apply to any unauthorized
modification of private or public property, no matter what the nature
of the change. Whether you scrawl a circled-A or political statement
on a wall, or paint your rendition of the Mona Lisa - as graffiti artists
in New York and elsewhere are doing more and more - or simply leave
your name wherever you go, it all qualifies as graffiti. The failure
of anti-graffiti groups to make this distinction belies their stand
on graffiti as inherently and inevitably destructive. Sara Rudin writes
in defense of "art criminals": "If
graffiti writers are not a violent threat in the community,
if the work they do is not merely destructive scribblings, if the only
crime they commit is writing on a wall (in many cases making the usual
drab city-scape a bit more bearable to look at), what or whose quality
of life are they offending?"
In contrast to graffiti, advertising holds a sacred spot in the eyes
of the law. Cigarette companies, banks, phone manufacturers, face no
prosecution for renting billboards or walls in public spaces. But groups
who deface these advertisements - some of which, like cigarette ads,
have been shown to have a depressive effect on society - put themselves
at the risk of considerable legal repercussions. The debate over whether
advertising has adverse impacts on the public good does not exist - because,
as a right of property, it is state-sanctioned. Graffiti, however, remains
under attack. Graffiti is illegal not because of its negative effects,
but because it is an offense against property.
Some anti-graffiti groups attempt
to redirect artistic energy away from "destructive" unsanctioned
art by providing purchased or sanctioned spaces in which artists may
operate. Graffiti artists respond with an old adage: "The only difference
between art and graffiti is permission." A writer in an anti-graffiti
forum states it poignantly: "When you don't put it there with permission
it isn't art! When you put it someplace where you have permission,
no matter how ugly it is, it is art! Understand, aerosol breath?"
When faced with such restriction,
it's inevitable that graffiti would become a political tool. Often
times, it's the most accessible method of public discourse for young
people with an idea. Dead Prez, a rap group that focuses on prison
issues, uses graffiti to spread their message, leaving the tag "No More Prisons" all over cities through which
they tour. And no doubt readers are familiar with the "Stop Slavery" anti-Nike
stickers that have decorated bus stops and lampposts in recent
days.
Recently politically active artists
assembled in Chicago on the last weekend in April, for the first campaign
of the Department of Space and Land Reclamation (DSLR). The DSLR assembled
to combat what they perceived as a purchase and commodification of
public space, with graffiti as one of their tools. In announcing their
campaign, DSLR spoke of this transformation: "Global
capital has reached such a point that both the physical and intellectual
landscape have been completely purchased. To exist today means to tread
on the property of others. The city has increasingly become a space completely
built around consumerism. The freedom of expression has come to mean
the freedom to advertise. Advertisements on billboards, advertisements
on public buses and trains, advertisements on benches, advertisements
on clothes, advertisements on radio, advertisements on television, advertisements
on menus. Like a minefield of manipulative codes, urban space has been
designed to maneuver us from one point of sale to the next." The
transformation of graffiti into an explicitly political tool
has begun.
Of course, nothing resists commodification
for long, and even graffiti is not immune. While the political import
of graffiti increases, corporations are already seeking to use it for
their own purposes. Recently in Australia, Nike purchased 900 billboards
which were "pre-jammed", made
to look like they had been defaced by activists, with the name
of a mock-activist website www.ffff.com.au scrawled across them. The
campaign failed when outraged activists responded by replacing the
site with the name of an actual anti-Nike site www.bantheboot.com.
Still, the attack demonstrates the willingness of corporations to enter
into and subvert classically anti-corporate and anti-property tools
for the purposes of advertising.
More recently, IBM and its advertising
agency Ogilvy & Mather launched
a "grass-roots" ad campaign across several cities in the U.S.,
where they illegally stenciled the symbols for peace, love, and Tux the
Penguin, the Linux mascot, on building walls all over the country. In
Boston, Cambridge and San Francisco IBM went further, stenciling the
symbols all over sidewalks and even in MBTA stations. The phenomenon
is catching on: a recent stencil advertising shoes for Aasics reads: "Keep
Running!" Even this counterculture, it seems, may be purchased.
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