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May 15, 2007
The fourth Melbourne Stencil Festival is currently happening in Victoria. This stencil form ---outlines cut into paper to be quickly sprayed with aerosol cans---of street culture--- is more aesthetically appealing than your average tagging kind of graffiti. The latter is unpopular and is usually seen as a meaningless and pointless marking of territory. Melbourne's Hosier Lane or Centre Place in the CBD, or Canada Lane in Carlton, and other public laneways, walkways and segueways, have been transformed into unofficial art galleries by stenciling.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Tagging, Adelaide, 2007
Adelaide is yet to have a stencil festival that showcases the thought and effort put into this street art. Though there is no need to cover the city covered in stencil graffiti, there is a need for specific places to be designated for street art. Stenciling turns an urban wasteland into something whimsical or thought provoking places. Tagging cannot, and should not, negate good street art.
Juliette Hughes has an op-ed inThe Age entitled Remember when graffitists used to have something to tell us? She argues that the political graffiti of the 1970s and '80s has gone to be replaced by tagging.
everywhere I see tagging, the stunted by-blow of graffiti. Tags don't invite us to consider political or artistic statements. Taggers are the bottom-feeders of street art, spraying solipsistic signatures without politics or art to justify them. Tags express nothing but ego; their very illegibility is a symptom of their irrelevance to anyone else. Yet they force themselves on our sight like a flasher or a hedge-burner, subjecting us to the personal addictive compulsions of the perpetrator. Political graffiti assumes a community that can respond to arguments; a street full of tags is like a house that's been trashed.
She says that tagging can be interpreted as a creative impulse that was frustrated by lack of skills. Deprived of skills they deface buildings. Maybe schemes are needed to help taggers acquire the skills to become street artists and graffitists.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, wall + drawing, Adelaide, 2007
Doesn't Hughes see the other forms of street culture such as stencils and pasting---glueing painted paper images to a wall? These are currently being celebrated by the Stencil Festival. So why is this ignored? What do these images about politics today?
Update: 16 May
Chris Johnston conrtests to Juliette Hughe's declinist argument in an op-ed The Age. He points out that:
Stencil art, and the vivid canvas that somewhere like Hosier Lane represents, is why Melbourne, like it or not, is regarded as the street-art capital of the world. This has been recognised by the City of Melbourne and the City of Yarra, which sanction stencilling in some of their lanes. The National Gallery of Australia has bought examples of it. The National Gallery of Victoria has exhibited it. This is not some underground Cave Clan type criminality. This is mainstream art now, right under our noses. And once you actually walk through these places, it becomes clear that far from being benign or apathetic (or any of the other presumptions forced on the younger generation by the older), it is actually deeply, cleverly political.
Johnston says that to walk through Hosier Lane, between Flinders Street and Flinders Lane behind The Forum, is to go straight into the modern nexus between politics and art. It's as if the ruling conservatism in politics and Australian society - and the lack of political invective in young people's rock music at the expense of corporate balladeering - has found an outlet in the very foundations of the city. In these laneways Johnston says:
The topics covered are an encyclopedia of current themes. The rise of military culture; the Americanisation of Australian foreign policy; the mysterious weapons of mass destruction; the faces of Saddam, bin Laden, Howard, Bush and Blair as symbols of our troubled times. Petrol, oil, the Twin Towers and bombs over Iraq. Hughes pines, rather, for the graffiti of her day; "Out Menzies" written in one colour on a wall, or "Chappell, you stink worse than your underarm". Maybe it's just me, or maybe it's the generation gap in full effect, but the beautiful barrage of neon-coloured stencil art in Hosier Lane - where popular culture, media culture, terror-culture and a new protest culture sit brilliantly rendered - seems far more effective. It says more. It looks better.
I agree. The street culture of today is innovative, expressive than that of the 1970s, and it is visually interesting.
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