Author: Alison Young
Sunday May 20, 2007
Today is the final day of the 2007 Stencil Festival in Melbourne. Artists and admirers of street art have been taking part in workshops, film screenings, and artist talks. There have been stories in the newspapers about stencil artists, and letters written about the pros and cons of contemporary street art. You might almost think that street art is acceptable.
But, in fact, it’s a bad time to be a street artist. 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.
As is obvious to anyone walking around central Melbourne, graffiti takes many forms: political slogans, tags, large murals (known as “pieces”), and the stencils for which Melbourne is increasingly renowned. Street art is an even wider category, including all forms of graffiti plus stickers, pasted-up posters and paper cut-outs, objects fixed to walls, sculptures, and even ephemeral performances. But 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.
What would a lawful reason be? The bill doesn’t say. Will people have to prove they’re enrolled in an art class that uses aerosol paints? If a gallery sells your stencil art, will it be lawful for you to have the tools of your art in your bag if you’re searched by police? If you are travelling by train to your studio from the art supplies shop, with a bag full of spray paint, will police believe you have a lawful excuse? Or will you end up at the police station waiting to be charged?
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. A sliding scale is intended, with repeat offenders being sentenced more severely, as you would expect. But what is the activity that artists are repeating? The legislation no doubt is directed at tagging, the form of graffiti that is most disliked. But the Bill doesn’t specify tagging. It talks only about “graffiti” and “graffiti vandalism”, meaning that all forms of street art can be included within its scope. So if you are one of Melbourne’s prolific stencil artists, or one of the street artists who paste paper cut-outs on the city’s walls, you are just as vulnerable to the legislation’s impact as any of the “bombers” who write their tag on every wall.
Having said that, it’s worth thinking about why tagging is apparently so disliked. It gets called “scribble” or “scrawl”; taggers get compared with animals urinating to mark their territory. What’s important here is the assumption that tagging has no value. Comparing a tagger to a urinating dog equates tags with bodily waste products.
It’s worth thinking about two issues here. One is that not all tags are alike. Some tags are pretty mundane, yes, but others are like calligraphy, a complex orchestration of lettering and format. In Doug Pray’s documentary Infamy, graffiti writers show the audience the ways in which the lettering of a tag can be developed, adapted and written in public space. Some of the graffiti writers and street artists I have interviewed talk of spending weeks perfecting the shape of a single letter, practising in notebooks before venturing out on to the streets. Renowned artists such as Barry McGee from San Francisco or Todd James from New York have tags as well as gallery representation.
This leads us to the second thing to remember about tags: their function within the culture of graffiti and street art. The tag is the building block of graffiti; you can’t have big colourful pieces without tags as well. Graffiti writers start with tags and progress from them to larger images. It’s easy to understand why people find these more acceptable than tags, but saying that graffiti and street art should involve only stencils and murals is like asking opera singers to skip the boring musical scales and only ever sing Puccini arias.
This is not to argue that there should be open slather for graffiti writers. Many try to think about where they are putting their graffiti, but perhaps they need to give this even greater consideration.
But we also need a government that takes into account the cultural value graffiti and street art can bring to a city, whether that means tourists visiting Hosier Lane, the National Gallery of Australia buying stencil art for its permanent collection, clothing companies incorporating graffiti into their designs, or the use of Melbourne’s graffiti-filled laneways as film locations. If a cultural activity can lead to all that, the State Government should not put its practitioners at risk of imprisonment.
Alison Young is a professor of criminology at Melbourne University.