Painting From Life vs. From Photos
Guest Post by Mark Hobson
Some graffiti and a mural in Pittsburgh, PA. The mural, lower right, is of Pgh’s 2 Andys – Andy Warhol and Andrew Carnegie – getting their hair and nails done. • The photos can be seen large on my blog
Recently, on my photography blog (The Landscapist), I posted a topic about graffiti – for purposes of this discussion, it might be helpful to read it.
The gist of it was simple – I had just returned from Pittsburgh, PA where the Graffiti Task Force had made what was being billed as the biggest graffiti bust in U.S. history. A lone graffiti artist with over 80 ‘tags’ to his credit is estimated to have caused over $500,000.00 in public and private property damages (keep in mind that, in this case, ‘public’ = bridge abutments and ‘private’ = abandoned structures).
Without going into great detail and for those of you not familiar with Pittsburgh, I will simply sate that the city is awash in visual eyesores which are the inevitable result of the severe economic devastation the area has experienced over the last quarter century. The city keeps trying to rise from the ashes of the end of big steel but it never quite seems to get it right.
The U.S. graffiti community considers Pittsburgh as a target-rich environment, quite possibly the largest ‘canvas’ in the U.S. Many travel here for the abundance of ‘opportunities’ the decaying public and private infrastructure present. The powers-that-be in the Pittsburgh body politic, to include law enforcement, have essentially declared this activity to be a scourge. The ‘miscreants’ need to be hunted down and punished with the full weight of the law.
No effort or, for that matter, consideration has been given to the notion of harnessing this situation for the enrichment of the community. No effort or consideration has been given to the fact that there is a difference between vandals with spray paint and artists with a voice. No effort or consideration has been given to the possibility of turning the area into the Sistine Chapel of the graffiti world.
That said, I am wondering what a diverse group of artists such as the one here on Art & Perception thinks about this situation.
I don’t have any links, but while in Los Angeles, I read in the paper about several successful programs for constructive use of the energies of graffiti artists. Authority respects authority. Showing city officials how programs have worked in other cities can be persuasive.
Then there are taggers. Not to be confused with graffiti artists. These cats just make the same mark, usually their nickname, sometimes their gang tag, on everything. In their culture, pride is measured by 1. The prominence of the result, 2. The danger of the tag, and 3. The destructive value. Among taggers there is the occasional creative type, but for the most part, the only thing worth admiring is their spirit of revolution.
One tends to have little luck converting them away from the dark side. I know from personal experience just what cunts cops can be, so once the war is on, it’s on.
Sounds like the authorities in Pittsburgh have fallen into the same damn pit. These things take a champion. Someone whose come from the streets and thus will be respected by the street artist but who also has transcended the system, like, has a law degree and public manners but retains a sense of justice and duty.
Mark,
Your posts brings several others to mind.
Richard Rothstein’s Please Move On discusses post 9/11 negative reactions by authorities to a photographer making photographs in NYC. Paul Butzi’s The Photos to Not Take reacts to this and raises interesting questions about property rights and art. On Art News Blog there was also a debate about property rights and graffiti specifically. Finally, Steve Durbin’s Photograffiti discusses turning graffiti into a subject for photography.
Your posts and those linked to above all raise the issue, is there a right to art that supersedes other rights, such as property rights?
To me what makes this question interesting is that graffiti has as part of its nature that it is illicit. To deny that artists can break the law for the sake of art is to disallow graffiti altogether. Graffiti painted in some permitted place isn’t really graffiti, is it? The question is, is graffiti really art?
As the Brecht poem above hints, Europeans have a tradition of expressing their political graffiti in chalk. I think this raises an important issue of materials. Could American-style graffiti, which now covers European cities as well, benefit from a wider range of materials than spay paint?
Oh God. Karl? Why’d you have to drag the “Is graffiti art?” question in again? Hasn’t that been done to death?
Mark’s question is what to do about the situation not engage in theoretical wanking.
Sorry Rex!
No effort or consideration has been given to the possibility of turning the area into the Sistine Chapel of the graffiti world.
Okay Rex,
The situation: I don’t think authorities can harness graffiti without taking away its essence. Perhaps the individual painters could do work that doesn’t upset people so much. It might be art, but it wouldn’t be true graffiti, I think.
Anyway, looking at the photos, I think the most important thing is to get those painters a ladder so that they can reach higher up on the underpass vault.
Karl,
You’re right; if graffiti artists are commissioned to do murals, the work loses much of its original substance. The same goes for graffiti style work shown in galleries, most of which is awful.
Graffiti can be both art and vandalism at the same time. It can have aesthetic merit (even to the point of being a masterpiece) and still be against the law. For those of us who value both art and private property rights—probably most of us here—this is likely a problem without a solution. So we muddle through.
So, to embrace graffiti as art may be to embrace an absurdity—something that is simultaneously beautiful and against our moral values.
I’m with Arthur — muddling through is about the best we can do. I’m grateful that the graffiti folks around me stick to mostly to public property and big flat ugly surfaces that may be private but need some artistic (or even humorous) relief. However, I also worry about the taggers and about meeting them in a gang when they are about to do their work. And I was downright grumpy when someone tagged my fence.
Pittsburgh (and elsewhere) may be a case where a bit of selective benevolent neglect might be worth having. Neglect the best, pursue the worst. The official who does this will inevitably get it wrong, but in the meantime, Pittsburgh might be a bit more interesting. Of course, in the end, someone will decide that wiping out graffiti will help the crime stats and we’ll have a big bust.
I’ve not seen any real success with the kind of thing that Rex suggests can be done, but maybe that’s because here in Portland, the areas that get graffitti also get tags also get transients looking for a quiet spot to relieve themselves also gets thugs looking for a bit of fun. Sorting out who is who takes some doing.
And, again to agree with Arthur, self-consciousness doesn’t attack only those on the right side of the law — it can also hit the kid with the paint spray if s/he’s encouraged to mural instead of graffit. There’s perhaps more than one reason why it’s the dark side of buildings that catch the paint.
I remember riding in subway cars whose entire outside surfaces were tagged. It felt oppressive. I think it was in NYC. I wonder how tagging was stopped there. Perhaps, it went out of fashion.
Wikipedia says about graffity that
Tagging hasn’t been stopped there.
A worse experience was riding in a NYC subway car whose entire inside surface was plastered with Chevas Regal ads.
Perhaps, it is the homogeneity of liquor ads or tagging that is oppressive.
Which is why we need the mixture.
tagging is a big problem here in New Mexico with gangs..the graffitti is different and incredible. Much of it has been done..building offered and the graffitti done and the art work is so vibrant, rich and full of culture.
I don’t think we don’t have to worry about authorities harnessing graffiti, so we don’t have to worry about the essence being lost. The people who do spot the good artists and hire them are counter culture figures themselves who appreciate the value of good agitprop.
Real life example: A buddy of mine who goes by “Inners” started out as a tagger, but his tags were really stylish. He started doing wild scenes of skateboarders doing impossible stunts or pictures of authorities engaged in illegal acts, like GW snorting coke. One day he got hired to do the interior of a skateboard shop. He had free reign. He had all his tagger buddies help on the job. That’s how these things go.
You can bet that the guy who hired Inners does not have to worry about his place being tagged.
That’s a clue about how to handle taggers. Verbum sapientis sat
From http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/4035793a14297.html
“LONDON: Transport workers in London have painted over a mural by world-renowned graffiti artist Banksy, erasing a piece of art estimated to be worth $500,000.
The mural, depicting a scene from the Quentin Tarantino movie Pulp Fiction in which Samuel L Jackson and John Travolta are holding bananas instead of guns, was spray-painted on the side of an electricity substation around five years ago. It became one of the most famous graffiti paintings by Banksy, a reclusive artist whose work has attracted star-studded buyers including Angelina Jolie and Jude Law. ”
How come when the perpetrator of graffiti gets fame around the world, the same costs $500K?
Personally, I’ve almost always enjoyed the graffiti I’ve seen. I admit I’d probably feel differently if I owned the tagged property, though not if it was abandoned and the graffiti not offensive. I saw the results of an interesting experiment in Dillon, Montana, where a bunch of graffiti artists were invited to decorate the sides of a largely abandoned warehouse. I thought it looked great, but apparently some locals disagreed and spontaneously covered part of it over with ugly paint swaths. While checking on this via Google, I came across the following suggestion in a blog entry on a panel at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco:
I used to run a nonprofit donated goods brokerage and used a lot of miscreants doing community service. A number of these guys had been tagged tagging. The crime and punishment thing for them came across as a form of validation and one guy, especially, was full of himself in describing the artistic virtues of his work. He didn’t have any photos in his wallet so I had to take his word.
Tagging would seem to be a flip side, of sorts, to something I used to see down at the museum. One of my educational responsibilities was conducting art classes for inner city kids. Sometimes I would have them do self portraits and found that too many would draw a small face and figure in the corner of a much larger piece of paper.
They, many of them, were unable to enlarge that figure upon request. That was their self image – insignificant. Taggers can go to the other extreme and announce themselves to the limits of their paint and reach and I wonder if we aren’t looking at the flip sides of a common currency.
And do remember that a legion of taggers would have been glad to white out that $500,000 extravaganza so as to get their respective cracks at the wall.