A question sometimes said and heard in museums, galleries, movie theatres, concert arenas, any place of creation. One such place is also the street, where the spectators often seem to wonder: “Is graffiti art or vandalism ?” If we take into consideration that graffiti have been around since prehistoric times, it sounds as if this debate is all too hoary; however, we shall look at graffiti as the phenomenon of a much more recent period, and in that context, the debate is only about fifty years old. As a response to modernism and social segregation, graffiti became the means
of communication and identity for young people in New York City in the 1970s. The famous story of the NYC subway graffiti culture and the almost two-decade long struggle of the authorities to eradicate tagging represent the starting point of the conversation, a hot topic of the art world even today. Where do you expect to see graffiti? Probably not in a museum. Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, in the south-west of England, was the kind of place you went to see classical statues and stuffed animals in cases until the arrival of the
‘Banksy versus the Bristol Museum’ exhibition in the summer of 2009. The exhibition hosted more than 100 works by Banksy, one of the world’s most famous graffiti artists. There is something more important to discuss here. The opinion that street art is vandalism (that is, not art) is widely held. Many people despise graffiti but we are more than happy to line our public spaces with something much more offensive: advertising. That’s the bigger story here, the use and abuse of public space.
Sculptures are what we usually see as a clay, stone, metal, ceramic or any other material carved in a creative way to give it a beautiful and a definite look. Sculptures can be moulded, carved or welded. When these precious sculptures are displayed outside a museum, a temple or anywhere from where the local public can view it, it takes form of a street art. Certain artists, namely Tejn, a Danish artist is known to attach sculptures with public furniture using chains, bike locks or similar things. This technique is called “Lock On”.
Wheatpaste, as the name suggests, involves use of a paste made up of flour (preferably wheat). It is a technique that street artists use to put up detailed images quickly. One can make posters, drawings and paintings on paper which can be glued on the streets using this paste. This technique is fast, easy, effective and cheap. JR is a popular street artist who uses wheatpasting and combines powerful political statements through large portraits and murals.
These posters can be made by hand or can also be graphically printed on a thin sheet of paper. Some posters are rather funny while others can be informative. A lot of people believe that the streets will be a dull place without these colourful posters, yet they are mostly illegal and are not considered as a form of contemporary art.
Unlike other conventional street art forms, street installations use three dimensional spaces in which objects are set in an urban environment. Mark Jenkins, an American street installation artist, shook the people around by creating a street installation of a human figure with a detached head. He was trying to convey his thought about the modern generations’ fixation with technology that is resulting in breaking ties with people who are actually around them.
This form of street art is used to bring about a change in the existing system. It is a process of intervening with already existing art works, with people or with a specific area.
Video Projections have emerged out as an interactive form of street art lately. In this technique video projections are made on a wall or a building forming interesting images and animations. A German based company “Urbanscreen” is working on such video projections from recent few years and have a group of street artists and architectures as its members.
This art is also famous by the names of sticker bombing, sticker slapping, slap tagging and sticker tagging. This form of street art uses stickers to display a message or an image which is generally associated with a political agenda. Sticker art is also used to comment on an issue or a policy.
Conventionally made by spray paints and markers, these can either be just for displaying art or they may contain a serious social message. Most of the graffiti artists work anonymously and leave their initials along with their work at the wall of display. These can be simple or calligraphed writings or an elaborated work of painting. Stencil graffiti is one of the many types of graffiti. These use a design cut on a cardboard that can be easily used to produce a number of graffiti’s. Stencil graffiti also uses spray paints and markers just like a normal graffiti, and these paints are applied across the stencil to complete intricate designs. Hugo Kaagman was a Hollander who started graffiti in 1969 and created his first street stencil graffiti using a spraypaint.
3D street art or the Three Dimensional street art is not an art that has emerged up in recent years. 3D art dates back to 1980s when Kurt Wenner invented this fabulous form of street art which can be done with chalk or paints and are surprisingly successful in creating an optical illusion in the eyes of the viewers.
One of Brixton’s most famous sons, David Bowie, has been immortalised in a w painting at the heart of the town. The mural was painted by Australian street a ist James Cochran and can be found on the wall of Morley’s department store, Tunstall Road. It is inspired by the album cover of the Thin White Duke’s 19 record Aladdin Sane. It was commissioned as part of a summer exhibition call The Many Faces of Bowie, at Opera Gallery, central London. Bowie was born Dav Robert Jones at 40 Stansfield Road, Brixton in January 1947, where he lived w his family. He went to Stockwell Primary School until his parents moved to Broml in 1953. Speaking at the wall’s unveiling Cochran, also known as JimmyC, said: have much respect for the artist David Bowie. Not only does he write great mus there has always been such a strong visual and aesthetic element to his image a performances. “To create a canvas and a wall piece for the streets of Brixton fe like a fitting tribute. I hope Brixton’s residents enjoy it.”
Maid in London by Banksy was commissioned by newspaper The Independent for a wall in Chalk Farm, North London around 2006. It shows a woman dressed as a maid: she has finished sweeping dirt into a dustpan, and is now putting the dirt under a cover over a brick wall. She is slightly bent over; her hands and face are in color. The rest of the painting is done in black and white. Banksy modeled the woman in the painting on a hotel maid in Los Angeles named Leanne. She was a feisty lady, and this piece is partially about democratizing subjects in art. Banksy said that it used to be just popes, kings, queens, that could afford a portrait painted, and so he chose a maid.
East London artist Stik has painted the tallest street artwork in the UK to highlight affordable housing issues and to show solidarity with groups such as the New Era estate tenants and Focus E15 mothers. The mural, entitled Big Mother, stands 125 feet (38.2 metre) tall, and is painted on a condemned tower block in Acton, West London. Painted in Stik’s characteristic style with two large-eyed, long-limbed figures against a bright yellow background, the artwork depicts a mother and child gazing forlornly from their soon-to-be demolished council block at the apartment complexes being built around them. Stik, who started painting 10 years ago whilst homeless in Hackney, said: “Affordable housing in Britain is under threat, this piece is to remind the world that all people need homes. “The mural is a symbol of solidarity with the pockets of resistance across the country like Focus E15 single mothers community and New Era estate in Hoxton who are refusing to leave quietly.” Big Mother by Stik is painted on Charles Hocking House, Bollo Bridge Road, South Acton, W3 8DA East Acton Estate, 10 minutes from Acton Town tube station and is visible from the Piccadilly line and London flight paths. Charles Hocking House was built in 1967 for low income families and is due for demolition in 2016.
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Graffiti in public places can make passengers feel unsafe and, if not dealt with quickly, can lead to further undesirable activity taking place. It can also create a climate of fear for those using and working on the railways. Graffiti also poses safety issues. Vandals often put their lives at risk in the act of spraying difficult surfaces, such as bridges or trains in sidings.
The costs of cleaning up are enormous: Network Rail estimate that it costs at least £5million per year to clean up graffiti, not including the loss of revenue or delays caused to the service. London Underground meanwhile says graffiti costs them a minimum of £10million per year, and it would cost about £38million to replace all of the graffiti-etched windows on every Tube train. Dealing with graffiti also diverts valuable police and staff resources. Hundreds of thousands of staff hours are taken up in cleaning, repairs and police time. London Underground devotes some 70,000 hours a year just to cleaning up graffiti. With these issues in mind, we work with rail operators to achieve reductions in this type of crime. In 2012/13 the total number of graffiti-related offences reported to BTP was down seven per cent on the previous year.
‘Criminal damage’ is an offence involving damage to property. ‘Vandalism’ is a form of criminal damage, which involves damage to, or defacement of, property without the express permission of the property owner. The police and the judicial system tend to use the term criminal damage when referring to acts of vandalism. The level of punishment meted out for vandalism is proportionate to the seriousness of the damage done to the property. The majority of vandalism cases are minor and, as such, are dealt with in the Magistrates Court. The penalty applied depends on:how much damage has been inflicted, how much it costs to repair the damage and how much disruption has been caused. If the damage to the property amounts to more than 5,000, the maximum punishment is six months’ imprisonment and a fine of 5,000. If the damage done is less than 5,000, the maximum punishment is three months’ imprisonment or a 2,500 fine. There are alternatives to imprisonment and fines for vandalism. The police and local authorities have the discretion to issue ‘penalty notices’ to vandals. For children under the age of 16, this means an on-the-spot fine of
In the spring of 2008, the Tate Modern opened the world’s first major public museum display of graffiti and street art, inviting six international artists to decorate its facade with enormous, eye-catching murals. Meanwhile, just down the riverbank at Southwark crown court, eight members of London’s well-known DPM crew were tried for an estimated £1m in graffiti-related damages across the country, and sentenced to a total of 11 years in prison – the biggest prosecution for graffiti that the UK has ever seen. The Anti Social Behaviour Act of 2003 defines graffiti as “painting, writing, soiling, marking or other defacing by whatever means”. Anything from a quickly executed “tag” to a detailed mural could be deemed illegal, and the artist subject to a £5,000 fine or prosecution. But despite this clear-cut definition, there are double standards in the way graffiti is perceived, and the law creates pockets of permission for some artists while penalising others. In December 2013, for instance, a magistrate glowingly used the phrase “the next Banksy” to describe a Manchester graffiti artist who ultimately avoided jail. But when sentencing London tagger Daniel “Tox” Halpin to a 27-month jail sentence in 2011,
the prosecutor told the jury: “He is no Banksy. He doesn’t have the artistic skills.” (A commemorative Tox mural by Banksy appeared in Camden soon after, and was quickly protected by Perspex casing.) But this authoritative distinction between “good” and “bad” graffiti does not have a place in the rulebooks. Since its contemporary birth in 1960s Philadelphia, city leaders have tended to condemn graffiti as mindless vandalism. Policing later began leaning towards the “broken window” theory, which argues that if petty crime like graffiti is visibly ignored, suggesting general neglect, it could inspire more serious offences. The UK spends £1bn on graffiti removal each year. But as cities seek to “clean up”, could graffiti’s ephemeral role within the urban environment actually be good for cities? For Ben Eine, a graffiti artist whose work was gifted to Barack Obama by David Cameron, graffiti leads not to drug deals and robberies, as the broken windows theory suggests, but to something very different. “If they [councils] stopped painting over them, they would get tagged and then they’d do silver stuff over it. And then eventually, people would do nice paintings over it … The natural evolution of graffiti is that it will just turn out looking nice,” he told the recent
Graffiti Sessions academic conference. Adam Cooper, cultural strategy officer for the Mayor of London, thinks graffiti is a positive force in its own right. He questions whether graffiti artists are vandals or “pioneers of a new kind of visual arts”, and suggests that the mayor’s office could provide more spaces for graffiti, as they do for buskers. Citing the success of the recent Long Live Southbank campaign to preserve the skate park, as backed by Boris Johnson, Cooper says graffiti adds “social communal value” to the Undercroft space – though he is quick to point out that the mayor’s office are in no rush to change the law. While Boris might not be seen wielding a spray can anytime soon, in Bogotá, mayor Gustavo Petro was forced to change the laws after public outrage over the police shooting of 16-yearold graffiti artist Diego Felipe Becerra. Seeing the tension between artists and city police, Petro opted to promote urban art as a form of cultural expression, and decriminalised graffiti. Certain surfaces like monuments and public buildings are off-limits, but otherwise artists in Bogotá now have the freedom to colour the city without fear of prosecution.
Banksy is Britain’s most celebrated graffiti artist, but anonymity is vital to him because graffiti is illegal. The day he goes public is the day the graffiti ends. His black and white stencils are beautiful, witty and gently subversive: po licemen with smiley faces, rats with drills, monkeys with weapons of mass destruction (or, when the mood takes him, mass disruption) little girls cuddling up to missiles, police officers walking great flossy poodles, Samuel Jackson and John Travolta in Pulp Fiction firing bananas instead of guns,
a beefeater daubing “Anarchy” on the walls. He signs his pieces in a chunky, swirling typeface. Sometimes there are just words, in the same chunky typeface - puns and ironies, statements and incitements. At traditional landmarks, he often signs “This is not a photo opportunity”. On establishment buildings he may sign “By Order National Highways Agency This Wall Is A Designated Graffiti Area”. (Come back a few days later, and people will have obediently tagged the wall.) Banksy has branched out recently - he designed the cover of the Blur al
bum, Think Tank, and tomorrow is the opening night of Turf War, his first gallery show in Britain. He is somehow managing to straddle the commercial, artistic and street worlds. It is easy to become addicted to his work. They say that Banksy has customised the city, reclaimed it, made it theirs.
King Robbo started tagging trains in London in the 1980s after the practice became popular in New York, though he became less active in the 90s. He was known by a lot of underground graffiti writers, old-school writers, the original pioneers. He was infectious. Once you’d met him, you’d know that you would have met him. His notorious feud with Banksy began in 2009 when the Bristol-based artist painted over one of his tags next to Regent’s Canal in Camden, which dated from 1985. London graffiti blogger Joe said it
was one of the last authentic pieces from the hey-day of graffiti, which was why Robbo was so angry. In retaliation, he painted his name over Banksy’s artwork - an image of a painter and decorator hanging wallpaper over Robbo’s original tag. The street war continued and the pair painted over each other’s work numerous times. The feud reignited interest in Robbo’s work, which he said gave him the impetus to return to the art scene, and an exhibition of his paintings was subsequently held in a London gallery.
Team Robbo said the artist was the self-appointed king of the London graffiti scene in its 1980s. At 6ft 8in tall, he was an imposing figure on the graffiti scene, his team said. Banksy has paid tribute to Robbo on his website, listing the names of the graffiti crews he was a part of: “Robbo WRH WD PFB - RIP”.
Ever since graffiti started artists have been pushing the style as hard as they can to get the most intricate or the most visually appealing work out to the public. Since the early days not much has changed in the actual technology of graffiti – paint is still paint, cans are still cans. However we are now in the technological age and I believe that we are only recently starting to see the merging of graffiti and technology to produce something that is truly a hybrid or at the very least a style that is going to take graffiti into the next phase. I’m sure I am not the only one that sees how far graffiti has managed to infiltrate society. Once graffiti was a major illegal art form, now mass corporations have adopted the style to sell anything from cloths to anything that is considered “street”. If you’ve seen some of their works you’d be familiar with the laser based graffiti tagging rig. Essentially the concept behind it is using lasers and projections to tag a public space with light. What I really like about this is that it takes the clean commercial sterile advertising of a city and projects its own message on top of it without destroying anything. The technology aside, this is a powerful way of getting a message into a
public space – what really is significant about this is that it is the message itself that is the problem…. People’s thoughts projected on the side of a building could be a very dangerous thing. What is the future of graffiti? I really think that at some point there is going to be a shift in thinking towards graffiti. As future artists come along they are going to want to make their work stand out and try to take the style in a new direction (as has been the way from the beginning). Future generations will have tools available that we can’t even imagine today. 20 years from now who knows what type of technology or device/s will be available to young people to express a message or idea. I for one hope that it is something widely accessible, cheap and digital and that it take graffiti beyond a crime and moves it into a widely acceptable artistic style. Everyone has an opinion on graffiti. From the accusations of vandalism to the activists who seek to protect it, graffiti will always attract controversy. With its established stigma as a force of evil in the urban environment, it’s understandably problematic to see just how spray paint can be acknowledged on the same level of proficiency as the paintbrush. The govern-
ment made their stance on theactivity blatant in 2003 when they pronounced the activity to fall under the Anti Social Behaviour Act with the potential to be considered illegal. When so many artists face living behind bars for experimenting with their craft, how do famous names like Banksy get away with it? As with the rest of art and its politics, it tends to depend on what is deemed conventionally “good” or “bad”. People turn their noses up at tags left on train lines, yet can’t get enough of spotting a well painted mural in Brighton. Regardless of how people classify it, isn’t there something to be had in people finding agency and attempting to transform the world around them as opposed to mindlessly supporting the erection of more glass buildings? Instead of viewing it as a destructive force, the creative possibilities graffiti promotes must be appreciated and promoted.