By Alistair Steele
It was at a Christmas dinner party, of all places, that I first started thinking about the two solitudes of street art. I was across the table from a middle-aged couple, both well-spoken and well-educated. We were talking dinner-party talk when I asked whether they had any children. Yes, a son in his 20s. And what did he do? “He’s a tagger,” the woman replied matter-of-factly. “A graffiti artist.”
The couple became very animated. Their son, it turned out, specializes in painting freight cars. Wasn’t that fabulous? How many young artists have exclusive, traveling exhibitions?
The fact that their son was not only creating art but also committing a crime wasn’t mentioned. The fact that he was vandalizing someone’s property never came up. They were absolutely unapologetic about his occupation.
Taggers and their admirers believe that what they are creating is art. But others think the tags — the fat, often indecipherable inititals and designs taggers leave behind — are nothing but a blight on the public landscape.
“My understanding of art is that it’s something you get when you want it, not something that’s thrust upon you,” Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson told me.
“All graffiti is vandalism,” agreed Paul McCann, coordinator of the city’s Community Pride Program. He draws no distinction between the primitive scrawls and foul words that pop up on walls, buildings and bridges around the city and more artful graffiti. If it’s on public property, it has to go.
So this year, the program’s annual Spring Cleaning the Capital campaign will include a graffiti paint-over initiative. The city will provide paint and other supplies to volunteers who want to cover graffiti on public property, whether it’s art or not.
While some of the artists are disinclined to distinguish between the good, the bad or the ugly, one Ottawa tagger who would only go on the record as “a member of the notorious GRA” artists’ collective, and who is still “busting tags” despite three convictions, says there is a difference.
“I don’t have as much respect for someone who just throws his name up as I do for someone who creates something beautiful,” he said. He predicts the city’s campaign will result in a few casualties — that well-meaning volunteers will cover up the good art along with the bad.
Should we be painting all graffiti with the same brush? The taggers think they know the answer to that question. But then so do the politicians and the throngs of volunteers who line up each spring to clean up the city.
Tagging is the art of rebellion. The idea of controlling it, therefore, is antithetical to the form. But maybe it’s time we realized that some graffiti is art and started to distinguish between the good stuff and the other stuff.
That’s what the regional police have done, setting aside “walls of consent” where artists can work with impunity. It won’t stop all tagging, but it’s a step in the right direction. And if the taggers can recognize that covering buildings with ugly, sloppy tags is unacceptable, that’s another step. Most of them already adhere to an unwritten code of ethics that frowns upon tagging churches, schools and private homes.
These are the two solitudes of street art — the artists who believe they’re creating something beautiful and the councillors who refuse to discriminate between graffiti and other forms of vandalism. Until they can find some common ground, Ottawa’s perennial graffiti problem is here to stay. Every spring, armies of volunteers will paint over the previous year’s crop of tags. And every night, when most of us are in bed, the taggers will come out to prove that neither art nor vandalism can be kept off the streets.