California State University East Bay

The Pioneer

California State University East Bay

The Pioneer

California State University East Bay

The Pioneer

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Graffiti: Street Art and Public Menace

Any trip spent outside the tunnels on BART and you will be guaranteed to see graffiti on every twist and turn. Highway overpasses are filled to the brim with vibrant looping characters and huge cartoon faces.

Graffiti lies directly on the line between art and crime, bringing down the value of a place while at the same time driving interest, and our cities do not know how to handle it.

According to the Department of Public Works, San Francisco alone spends over $20 million on graffiti removal within the city and county of San Francisco and they are fighting a losing battle. With the millions spent on covering, removing and managing vandalism such as graffiti, one would expect clean white walled businesses, unblemished billboards and untouched railways. However, any trip spent anywhere in the Bay Area and you’re guaranteed to see tons of graffiti.

This indicates our leadership has a problem. Why can no city seem to just get graffiti off its walls? The answer may lie in the complex history and culture of graffiti art.

Graffiti is an ancient art, which has stayed close to humanity from our beginning. Humans have been writing on walls from the beginning of time and it is spread all over the world. The oldest works of art, the 40,000 year-old cave paintings in the El Castillo Caves in Cantabria, Spain, can be considered the first graffiti. Ancient Egyptians put up hieroglyphic graffiti for much of the same reasons as modern graffiti artists put up their tags, to claim their property and to make a visual history of themselves. This practice is age old and is tied to humankind.

Graffiti relies on taggers’ names and symbols to be out in the open and ever present. A tagger would receive more recognition for their larger, more tactfully placed tags and the community attention. Movies like “Wild Style” and “Style Wars,” captured the public’s peaking interest in this rebellious and bombastic art form. Local artist, Not Your Average Joe, says of the early years of graffiti, “It was more about your name back then, the mentality was that any dude with a spray can could make it big.”

This was over 20 years ago, so why still do graffiti? “It’s all about breaking the rules,” said SOON, a local artist. SOON spent a few years as a self-described tagger. “I would go out at night and tag bus stops, sides of buildings, and mailboxes,” he said.  “I was young and stupid, but it was like f— everyone, so why not.” This attitude is prominent in graffiti culture.

Attitude is everything in graffiti. Artists put tags in hard to reach places, which shows their level of rebellion. “The best place I have ever done one was on the roof of someone’s house,” SOON explained.

From its rough past, graffiti has come to be an ever-praised form of art. Some artists who spent years tagging railroad cars and getting chased by police through darkened streets, are now selling their pieces in galleries. Artists like Shepard Fairey, Dave Choe and Banksy, have made fortunes out of their tags, street art and gallery art pieces.

The art form itself has also grown. So why do our cities fight graffiti? The answer is best described by Lily-Hayes Kaufman from Forbes by saying, “Crime, like beauty, is sometimes in the eye of the beholder.”

To many, graffiti is a symbol of the living, breathing soul of a city. It stands as a reflection of life in the city. While many artists may get their inspiration from vast expansive landscapes and the endless ocean, graffiti artists often get their inspiration from the grit, grime, and vibrancy of a city.

Graffiti at its heart is vandalism. The rebellious act of putting a bunch of paint on property that is not yours is actually a criminal act.  “Graffiti vandalism is a drain on our city’s resources, impacting our neighborhoods and quality of life,” said San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón.

According to Bruce Rogers, a longtime California conservationist, “Some of this equipment costs nearly $10,000 for assembly; costs to ship the equipment to the site, operate, and cleanup resulting in toxic waste add to the overall cost of such an operation.  Removing spray paint and other material from irregular surfaces without extensive damage to the surface and adjacent life forms is a complicated art and involves a great deal of study and experience to complete successfully.” It can be difficult and expensive to deal with graffiti, especially in natural environments, not on cement walls.

Graffiti is a huge concern for our local government. In the 1990’s, San Francisco created a Graffiti task force, which is comprised of 25 local leaders and community members whose main concern is the abatement of graffiti.

“Graffiti is a plague upon the natural landscape that both degrades the sites and encourage others to adopt a ‘I guess no one cares so why not deface the area’ attitude,” said Rogers. To the disdain of many officials of the state, graffiti has made its way out of the cities and into our natural park landscapes.

Despite graffiti’s spill-over into nature, the frontline seems to stay in urban areas.

In January of this year, San Francisco held an international conference called Zero Graffiti, in which legislators and community leaders throughout the world discussed possible solutions to graffiti vandalism in their cities.

The Department of Public Works, fights graffiti in one way: removal. They paint over defaced surfaces with a brilliant white paint, which most often does not match the original look. Also, they do not distinguish between artistic works and works done purely to vandalize.

Herein lies the problem: works of art, that may or may not be accepted with open arms by the surrounding community, get painted over just as much as gang tags and scribbled vandalism. Works are taken down despite merit.

This way of handling the removal of graffiti influences artists and taggers to continue their work. “Every time I see a big white splotch covering someone’s tag, I always want to paint right over it,” admitted Joe.

If your building gets tagged, it may be a good thing. As graffiti has become more popular, graffiti tourism is increasing as well. Towns and cities sporting works from famous artists such as Banksy, bring flocks of art fans and detractors. Clarion Alley, a street in San Francisco’s Mission District is famous for its graffiti and often has throngs of visitors taking pictures. It has a four and a half star rating on its Yelp page with 92 total reviews. Websites like Tripadvisor and Flickr have subsections highlighting areas where tourists can find important street art.

Can San Francisco stop the problem of graffiti while continuing to support the creativity and freedom that makes the area so popular? The answer may be education.

Cities are now promoting educational programs and alternatives to young artists to hone their craft legally. If you are talented enough, the city may even commission your work on a mural. Not Your Average Joe has been fortunate enough to get commissioned to do his work. His most well known work, which can be seen across from the San Francisco Zoo on Sloat Avenue, features a full two-story spray-painted mural.

“I was lucky enough to get asked to do my work legally, but most of us don’t,” he said. However, he is not so positive about educational programs. “A lot of us don’t want to do art in school with a computer or paintbrushes, we like to work in the street and use paint cans.”

When paired with the skyrocketing costs of handling graffiti, our cities budget strings are becoming tighter and tighter. Our legislature must ask themselves, “Is graffiti something we can really stop, or do we have to change our mentality?” We must collectively find more cost effective ways of dealing with graffiti, an art that seemingly has no end in sight.

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Graffiti: Street Art and Public Menace