Graffiti

Walking to and from BART each day I encounter a myriad of things with the sight of my eyes. The one thing that is most prominent is graffiti. I have mixed emotions about taggers: on one hand I would like to see them caught and handcuffed to a pole with their pants pulled down (assuming they are male) and their crotch spray painted with the paint from the spray can or have them cuffed around a pole no matter whether they are male or female with a sandwich board sign around them telling they are graffiti taggers; on the other side I see art. The people doing the tagging who are just writing words that are probably gang inspired isn't necessarily art, though it could be, but just a way of letting other gangs know who is around - like a cat spraying its territory. Today, I saw that a new display was created on the Oakland Museum. I am sure it wasn't there yesterday, and it spells out something but in such large letters that I can't make out what it says.

In Fresno there was a program to stop taggers - graffiti was everywhere and when there was money the effort was placed in arresting taggers and sending them to jail. The money isn't there now, so the effort has been reduced to practically nothing and there is no room in the jail for them anyway. It was a model program - stress on the word "was." Now they can't keep up with removing graffiti. The cost to taxpayers is a lot higher than we want to admit, but the problem is NOT going to go away. Graffiti has been around for as long as humans have been around - it just takes different forms.

One could argue that hieroglyphics is a form of graffiti. Who gave the right to any living creature to write on a wall what was going on in the life of people hundreds to thousands of years ago? Today we look on it as a sign of a great thing - "Thank goodness they wrote on these walls to help us explain what was going on way back when." Why isn't writing on a wall now with a pen or a spray can taken the same way? Why can't we see that some of these taggers are really pretty good artists? I would encourage the art community to do something about this - to spend the time watching at night the walls where the taggers are focusing and arrest their minds and ask them to consider using their skills for the betterment of a wall.

Every object that is produced has a color to it. Let's take the Oakland Museum. Its entire border is cement! Cement is gray! Granted, the intention is for it to be that color, but do we really need to have another gray building in an area that is so diverse and multi-cultural? Why can't the art community - the painters of the area either use their talents to create a better looking facade - enlist the taggers to create a mural of what they feel represents their needs and achievements. Rather than painting over what the taggers do, let the taggers paint the walls! I have noticed that when a wall is tagged, generally, the tagged area isn't painted over, so why can't we take and make art in that manner?

We could fill our jails with taggers, but they will get out of jail and go back to doing what they have been doing. I really think that it is their way of expressing whatever it is they need to express - whether because they are told to express it or because they want the world to see it and hopefully understand it. Some of what these people do is really not bad in the eyes of an artist. The general public thinks it is disgusting and terrible - but if Picasso went out and painted his artwork on a building there would be people to find that distasteful. I think that community leaders need to take a different tact in their efforts to make graffiti more acceptable. You will notice that graffiti isn't painted on courthouses or police stations - but everywhere else it is painted. We could go after the spray paint can business, but I can see where that won't get us anywhere because it hasn't gotten us anywhere in the past and there will be those people who are regular users of spray paint for non-graffiti reasons that won't want it taken away from them. We could go after the marking pen industry, but we know that won't work. Graffiti will never go away until we are all dead! Animals marking their spot is a form of graffiti, so until Earth blows up we will have taggers and it all depends on how tagging is viewed in the eyes of the beholder and the beholdee.

I could write more, but the point is made in The View From Up Here.