By Fiona Story
Ottawa is proud of its thriving arts community. There’s a gallery or museum on almost every downtown city block and the regular art opening isn’t hard to come by. Yet even in this community of art lovers, graffiti always kicks up quite a fuss.
A $400,000 fuss to be exact. That’s how much Ottawa spent on graffiti removal in 2001 according to Paul McCann, coordinator of Ottawa’s community pride program. The number gets bigger every year as more graffiti keeps popping up.
Is the city fighting a losing battle and what exactly is it fighting against?
The word graffito is Italian, meaning to scratch or scribble and the plural form, graffiti, is often associated with property vandalism.
The idea of scribbling on a wall is nothing new. The Lascaux caves in France are surely the work of prehistoric graffiti artists and throughout history, using walls to declare political statements or mark territory seems to come naturally.
Graffiti art, as we know it today, has its origins in 1960s Philadelphia. It was rooted in “bombing”in which artists attempted to “tag” — basically leave their signature, in as many places as possible. Cornbread and Cool Earl are credited with the first deliberate “bombing” effort which garnered local media attention.
The underground movement spread to New York in the 1970s where it started to gain speed. Tags became more creative, stylized and personal, in order to distinguish each writer from the other.
They became bigger and flashier. Arguably the most famous tag in the culture’s history is Stay High 49, who used a smoking joint to cross the letter “H” and a stick figure from the TV series The Saint.
Tags are the main problem in cities today. They aren’t always artistic, aren’t always the work of true artists and can be simple vandalism, giving all graffiti a bad name.
McCann says most of the removal in Ottawa is concentrated on hate graffiti, which the city’s Graffiti Removal Task Force pledges to remove within 24 hours of notification. The proliferation of tags on mailboxes and telephone poles is prompting the city to begin coating these surfaces and concrete walls with a brand of repellent which prevents paint from sticking.
In Toronto last May, Mayor Mel Lastman declared “Graffiti Eradication Month.” He said graffiti removal would ensure a safer city, voicing a stigma that where there’s graffiti there must be crime.
“Tags are sometimes seen as urban decay,” says Jessica Webster, a member of a collective of artists called Artzlink Ottawa. “But it’s a language, a hand print, artists can read the walls.”
Eradication of all graffiti whether it is truly artistic or simple scrawl has never been easy to accomplish and raises questions about the destruction of a work of art.
The solution to Ottawa’s graffiti problem might lie within the art itself.
During Lastman’s graffiti eradication project, Toronto police found a 77 per cent reduction of tags in areas where graffiti murals, compositions of urban images in graffiti art style, were painted.
Webster attributes this to the unspoken etiquette of graffiti artists not writing over any piece of work that is better than what they plan to paint.
“It would be beneficial to both the community if private businesses and the city dedicated money to painting murals.”
Sounds a lot better than what some of the dirty walls along Bank Street look like when left to the whims of pigeons.
Ottawa is already moving towards the idea of murals. A project is underway in collaboration with local graffiti artists, to paint a mural in a tag-saturated alley on Rideau Street.
Looks like the Ottawa graffiti community might finally be allowed to thrive too.