NAKED CITY: THE LOST ART OF GRAFFITI
Travel anywhere on the Sydney suburban rail network and you’ll be constantly assaulted by an endless landscape of graffiti tags and hip hop-style daubs. Like some kind of endemic disease they cover everything that vaguely resembles a canvas and can be seen from the passing trains, extending from railway property to nearby houses, commercial building and even churches.
Where once City Rail attempted to halt the onslaught it now appears they have all but given up and modern day graffiti is seldom painted over or removed. Let’s not get too political but the end result, the constant repetition of mindless tags and zig zag artwork, is akin to living in a totalitarian state. Imagine a swastika on every corner or a poster of Kim Jong Il nailed to every lamppost and you’ll get soon get the picture. The only thing radical about this kind of graffiti is a strict adherence to a fascist ethic, not only style wise but backed by a rigid doctrine and a contempt for the local community.
Oh for those now long gone days when public vandalism of walls and bus sheds actually meant something, when the message was easily decipherable and registered immediately with the present day psyche. Yes – the days when graffiti was a genuine form of political and social protest, when the slogans were clever, pithy and sometimes even gloriously oblique.
Back in the 50s and 60s some Sydney graffiti became legendary like WHOEVER YOU VOTE FOR A POLITICIAN ALWAYS GETS IN – VOTE INFORMAL, a mantra attributed to the Sydney libertarians. During the Vietnam War peace signs proliferated from the hastily scrawled to the enormous wall size mural. And billboards, spruiking a corporate shtick were often “rearranged” to deliver a message with real political clout. Even public toilets had their own brand of poets and pundits with the memorable AUSTRALIA’S FUTURE IS IN YOUR HANDS often doodled directly about the urinal.
Sadly these days the only thing you’ll see written on a wall is that strange self promoting hieroglyphic known as the tag, a ritualistic marking of territory, common throughout the animal kingdom but usually achieved by urination or some other marking of the scent. When it comes to graffiti, it seems taggers have no morality, no social conscience and just about anywhere is fair game, whether it’s a community mural, a railway carriage or a public housing dwelling.
Some potential targets do remain sacrosanct and you’ll seldom see tags on a Maccas or the local Nike outlet. Much has been written on the motivation of taggers but does this suggest that they are primarily aspirational, a disassociation from the local community but an allegiance to the globalised machine that provides them with their fast food and footwear and the ticket to a better life?
Yeah, that might be stretching the bow and maybe taggers are just spotty faced teenagers, loaded with testosterone and running amok but why not replace the tag with an identifiable slogan that rings a bell with the everyday passer-by. Taggers could stake their territory with highly personalised lines of epigrammatic wit and wisdom, from single words like the iconic ETERNITY to a complete discourse like THE ONLY STATES WHICH ARE NOT OPPRESSIVE ARE THE POWERLESS AND EVEN THEY ARE CRIMINAL IN THEIR DREAMS. No longer would the rampant illiteracy of the tag resemble something scribbled by Mr Squiggle on acid. The City Council could hand out free chalk to replace felt tip pens and spray cans and a new literacy would be born. Okay, it’s unlikely to happen but as one long surviving piece of old style Sydney graffiti once read – BE REALISTIC – DEMAND THE IMPOSSIBLE!
