When did Graffiti become illegal?
The following is a reposting of a short piece I wrote this spring. I’m reposting it today because there is an anti graffiti conference happening in Edmonton this week with “experts” who have suggested (reported today on page 3 Edmonton metro) that graffiti is a gateway crime. The Edmonton Journal reported that
If a boy doodles graffiti sketches at the back of the classroom, that should be as clear a warning sign as if he brought a knife to school, argues Sgt. Val Spicer, a presenter at Edmonton’s two-day anti-graffiti conference that opened Tuesday.
“I compare it to girls slashing their wrists. That’s their way of getting out aggression,” said Spicer in an interview before she presented to a group of 160 police officers, business representatives and community groups Tuesday at the Westin Hotel.
The diverse group gathered from across Canada to discuss latest research, share experiences and find solutions to the common tagging and hip-hop pictures many say encourages more law-breaking in communities.
But graffiti writing is also an urban art practice with 40 years of cultural history and professional development. Why hasn’t this perspective been reported in the press?
Edmonton journal reporter Elise Stolte, in an attempt to balance the article concluded the piece:
Daniel Kirk, a former graffiti writer from Calgary, said he came to the conference to advocate a deeper look at the cause.
What the research and many mural efforts miss is the people behind the problem, he said. “It doesn’t go away if you just paint over the graffiti. It’s cause and effect. Graffiti is an effect,” he said.
Kirk first picked up a spray can when he was 14. He got in a bit of trouble, then his dad found out. Eventually, he and his parents found a solution – art classes every Friday night.
“To watch progress in my ability was great. To me, art was transformative,” said Kirk, who now teaches drawing to adults at a continuing education centre. He credits the art classes for giving him a way to express himself, and getting him through university.
The prolific taggers he knows see themselves as non-conformists on many fronts, and in that they share more with the Occupy Wall Street movement than hardcore criminals, he said.
“The more you try to suppress it, the more it tends to proliferate,” said Kirk, who is scheduled to speak on a panel with other graffiti writers. Look at the bigger picture, he said. “The anger you can see in riots in Vancouver after a hockey game. You think that’s something different than why someone wants to go out and write (a swear word) on a wall?”
This discussion is based on an a-historic view of graffiti as a contemporary social problem – and does little to clarify the connection to hiphop culture or any of the historic aesthetic issues at stake. How is it that the EPS and everyone writing about this issue seems to imagine that graffiti is not already a global art phenomena that still is an expression of alienation in a society that continues to alienate by dismissing our own social history. If you want an example of how alienation works – read the coverage of this anti-graffiti conference. History is painted over and replaced by hyperbolic claims based on tiny samples of people. We are supposed to believe that the colour of a wall will cause someone to steal? Does that mean that people who wear striped ties are more likely to gamble? (rock and roll and devil worship?)Because that is about as direct as the paint can-to-violent-crime argument is. It seems that journalists and politicians and police are preying on long standing fears of poverty to criminalize a 40 year old cultural practice instead of seeing the lack of its local development as an example of our failure to properly update our social services and education policies. Let’s spend time figuring out how to help taggers become artists instead of tracking them down as criminals.
–here’s the original post —
As a lecturer in popular music I find myself often saying that the main components of hiphop culture are MC’ing, Breakdancing, DJ’ing, and Graffiti. But today I was stopped dead when a student shot up her hand and said, “A friend of mine was arrested recently by the Edmonton police for graffiti.” She went on to explain that he was found guilty of nearly 50 counts of mischief for spraying his tag around town. He is now apparently not allowed near Whyte avenue, the main social street here in Edmonton, nor is he able to own paint, or markers, or even sidewalk chalk.
It appears that this is not an isolated case in Canada. Recently in Ottawa City police arrested three people for spraying.
But how did this happen. How is it that theoretically graffiti is an important element of hiphop culture, one that continues to have an impact on urban style, but still remains illegal to practice? How do we balance the contradiction inherent in graffiti being both high art and an illegal activity, simultaneoulsy. Even the current president of the U.S. reached out to graffiti culture in his now famous Hope poster. But wait even that artist, Shepard Fairey, was arrested for his art.
Can we continue to both celebrate graffiti and make it a crime? Shouldn’t we be having a conversation about art in our social spaces and providing young artists with support as they take on the city scape and their identities simultaneously? And why is it that corporations can plaster signs in the public space in the form of ads but artists can’t do the same. Isn’t the public space in the public domain and therefore open to public discourse. It seems to me that as long as governments blindly continue to make public art illegal they are, intentionally or not, preserving the public space for the needs of private business.
I am not saying that local police should be having a balanced conversation “art in social space” policy – because it is not up to the police to make policy decisions – communities and governments should be having these conversation and informing the police service about what our shared interests are. Here is what a balance conversation would sound like. Notice that graffiti and vandalism are not necessarily the same thing.
Graffiti as an art, as well as the act itself, is a form of protest. Like any sort of direct action it requires people acting as if they were already free. Free to create. Free to engage. Free to openly assert oneself in public discourse without conceding one’s will to existing institutional constraints. Free to take control of ones own life.
It is also a willful and open negation of the legal-political bedrock of Western capitalism- the exclusivity of private property rights. Graffiti flaunts and rejects the idea of private space in the public sphere. While rejecting the idea and actuality of private space and narrow private gain, graffiti is simultaneously an act of transforming space into a public- open to all, democratic. It is no mystery that graffiti is and has been an almost exclusively anti-capitalist art-form rooted in anarchist politics for much of its existence. Graffiti is anti-colonialism.
Further, the notion of graffiti as ‘high art’ is a contradiction in kind. As long as graffiti is accepted for passive consumption, commodifiable entertainment and salable for private profit, it is no longer direct action- acting for and asserting oneself in opposition to institutional constraints. Instead, it becomes embedded in and mediated by the same capitalist forms it ostensibly rejects. Capitalist graffiti is about as sensible as Stalinist graffiti in the 1930′s Soviet Union. Graffiti that avows authority is not graffiti, but state-propaganda. Graffiti is a challenge to the distinctions between, and the hierarchy of, ‘high art’ and ‘low art’ (similarly to its challenge to the public-private distinction).
In short, graffiti is an act of civil disobedience. The anti-graffiti legal arguments given by the City of Edmonton, for example, in explaining its recent ‘crackdown’ are phrased in two ways: graffiti is inimical to private business and private property generally, and graffiti reduces a city’s ‘livability.’ The former is straightforward, but the latter can be interpreted as a re-phrasing of the former. Livable for whom? For the wealthy, for the owners, for the process of capital circulation generally. Graffiti is a small gear thrown into the wheels of capitalism. Hoping that civil disobedience as such is made legal out of the goodwill of government and private business is as sensible as saying that one hopes that the wealthy accede to giving up their own privilege out of goodwill. They won’t.
‘Crackdowns’ or not, graffiti will continue to thrive.