Yup – Banksy makes it to Melbourne.

Here is a cute cultural dilemma.

I pretty well detest tagging. Some moronic brat rushes up to a bit of plastic on a train and scribbles a blot that is claimed as an identity. Is that all they can do with their lives?

They “progress”, and put more elaborate tags on other bits of private property. Sometimes they put them on top of pictures already drawn on walls. For some weird, cowardly reason, they don’t deface the advertising that so richly deserves attack.

As far as I am concerned, my visual environment is being defaced, without my permission by crapheaded juveniles – and ponytailed shitwits who want me to buy this or that, or pay attention to some dumb product. You can tell I am no fan of shopping. They have put a moving sign up at the top of Fitzroy Street, and I am regularly distracted as I move into the traffic stream, just where I have to change lanes, by a giant television image carefully crafted to claim my attention. The turds who sold this space probably use their mobile phones as they drive.

But then, we have stencil art. I love stencil art. It is witty, provocative, surprising, goes far beyond some pheromonal assertion of identity.

In North Fitzroy recently, I was taken to see the side wall of a building on a lane which now held an elaborate scene a bit like something out of Maurice Sendak. It was put up in the dark, in a single night, as far as the neighbours could tell. Assuming it went up without the wall owner’s permission, the artist has created some rules of engagement which s/he is compelled to follow. Instant attention, some surprise and disruption of the usual boring visual order, with some delight and perhaps the rage of the owner. But s/he can’t complain if the owner paints it over.

If the owner copies the image and sells it, I am not sure what the claim would be. Do you have moral rights over an act of trespass? We as a community certainly have the right to get shitty if some dumb tagger sprays over it.

So far, this is a bog standard rant by a middle-aged inner city paid up culture vulture. But there is a twist –

Melbourne now claims to be the stencil capital of Australia. The Age quotes an itinerant street artist called Satta:

“Once you’re aware of street art, it will change the way you look at the city… Graffiti is a very important subculture here … Melbourne is known worldwide for its street art, especially stencil art..

… Melbourne is much more open-minded than most places in Europe. People are interested in art here,” says Satta. “In Europe, graffiti has a bad reputation, and people can’t distinguish between the different disciplines. In Europe, people will just tell you that graffiti is rubbish. If you ask most people here what they think of ’street’, they will answer in a way that separates graffiti, stencils, pasteups and tags.”

Kicking this alleged affection along, we have an annual festival, and a good documentary on the subject, called Rash by Nicholas Hansen. Some of the city works that blend into the street level graffiti are formal pieces of art, part of the Melbourne Streets and Lanes project, funded by the city council.

Unfortunately, the dreadlocked Satta turns out to be a bit optimistic about our collective tolerance of all that painty stuff that appears on the walls at night.

“At the end of 2006, the State Government released a draft Graffiti Prevention Bill, aiming to “reduce both the incidence and impact of graffiti on the Victorian community”. The State Government is considering about 75 public submissions and expects to introduce anti-graffiti legislation…

… the Graffiti Prevention Bill doesn’t distinguish between types of graffiti – any graffiti writer or street artist risks becoming a target of the legislation.

Under the proposed laws, anyone found with a graffiti implement (this obviously includes cans of spray paint, but could also include stencils, paste, and so on) while on public transport or adjacent land, or trespassing on another’s property, will have to demonstrate to police that they have a “lawful excuse”. This reverses the burden of proof – normally it’s up to the prosecution to prove someone did something wrong, but here it’s up to the street artist to prove they have a lawful reason to carry stencils, paste, or spray paint…

… If convicted under the proposed legislation, street artists will face penalties of up to two years’ imprisonment or a maximum fine of about $25,600…”

This comes from a piece in The Age by Alison Young, who is a surprisingly hip professor of criminology at Melbourne University. I think her argument wobbles off into a defence of tagging, on the grounds that the signature thing is a training ground for real graffiti artists, like a visual way of doing scales. As per my dyspepsia above, I don’t buy that argument – I think the little jerks are putting her on.

But this does drop the city into a bit of a nightmare. If you like stencils, and cut out art, and rock posters because they add to the built environment, how and where do you draw the line? Trying to use art as as defence creates some wonderfully farcical trials, as the censors will ruefully admit.

At the moment, we have a practical compromise. All this nocturnal visual fun is illegal already, but it is difficult for the police to catch anyone. Nonetheless, stencil art goes with a certain vigilance, and occasional games of chasey round city alleys. However, the government is claiming that the status quo leaves us with a lot of dreck graffiti, which degrades our public spaces and is expensive to remove.

So where do we find a balance? I don’t want to decriminalise stencil art; if you ignore all that messy asking and planning that goes with getting permission, then the price is a certain risk. And the frisson of illegality is surely part of the romance.

But I don’t want it wiped out either. And I do dislike tagging and vandalism. I get a laugh out of coming round a city corner and finding a life-size chimp on a post, but I get depressed by tunnels full of visual rubbish.

It is too simple to bring the argument back to a defence of property. The owner of a wall possesses an artefact for engineering purposes; the visual reality of it belongs to the wider community which has to look at the damn thing, which brings me back to my point that graffiti and most advertising is the same, as I experience it.

The discussion document is here. It points out, by the way, that much of Australia already has legislation like this.

Maybe we should take a leaf from the buskers’ book, and issue licenses. That could be fun.

Perhaps the government is relying on a secret fact of street art. Taggers are broke, and liable to catch the tram, where they can be intercepted by the transport police for whom this law is clearly intended. Maybe stencil artists are not so broke, and travel in the household car.

If so, balance is assured and the problem is solved.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 20th, 2007 at 10:43 pm and is filed under Austrapolitics, visual media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.