By Andrea MacDonald
A picture is worth a thousand words – unless there are too many words on the picture.
That’s what John Corner, a local graffiti artist, learned when his proposal for a mural was rejected last month.
Unlike most graffiti artists, when he wanted to put his artistic talents to use, he offered his services to the city before picking up his paint cans.
The city asked him to design a mural for the wall of a skate shack at the Hunt Club Community Centre in Ottawa South. The wall has been repeatedly targeted with hate graffiti, despite the city’s attempts to clean it up.
The hope was that a graffiti mural on the wall would stop the hate messages.
His proposal celebrated the ethnic diversity of the community. It featured a picture of the globe with colourful characters holding hands around it. A banner above read: “diversity is the one true thing we all have in common. Celebrate it everyday,” and “community diversity” was scrawled around the edges in graffiti lettering.
But Corner’s peaceful message was too wordy for the city. He was informed that the words on the mural might be considered a sign under a municipal sign bylaw, which would raise sticky issues such as obtaining a permit and following language laws.
The city asked him to redesign the mural, but he refused.
“I didn’t want to prostitute my art,” he says.
Corner says that the mutual understanding between graffiti artists would have stopped the people writing the hate messages from painting over his mural.
“They would have respected a graffiti mural,” Corner says. “It is street art, not something that looks like it was taken out of a gallery and posted on a wall by the city.”
Bob Anderson, project officer for the city, says that while the sign bylaw eventually broke the deal, the city also had to keep other existing bylaws in mind, such as the property standards bylaw and the traffic bylaw. He says there are still plans to put a mural on the wall, but it is still covered in illegal graffiti.
And the irony in this story?
The illegal graffiti remains on the wall, while Corner’s mural is now nothing more than an idea. His attempt to work with the city was shot down because of bureaucratic red tape, and his work would have existed had he just painted the wall without permission.
That’s what happens when controls and regulations are placed on art, and especially graffiti. The people who are deterred are not the ones who posed the problem in the first place. People like Corner, who is simply interested in creating art, will not break the law again by continuing to do graffiti. He already received a $500 fine and 64 hours of community service for painting a mural on a garbage dump in Montreal.
But people who paint hate messages on walls, scrawl their names on bridges or who paint swastikas on mailboxes, will not likely stop just because a law says they are not allowed to do so. It just adds to the thrill that what they are doing is not only offensive, but illegal.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a mural celebrating diversity should be worth more than the bylaws stopping it from being painted.