Head to Head does graffiti

This week’s topic: ‘That graffiti artists are unfairly treated by the law’

Peter Whitehead
It is human to want to make a mark. We adore cave art, the scrawled evidence that some time way back then one of our forebears saw fit to record an event and so marked the dawn of a distinctly human consciousness.

Now young Cheyane [how do you reckon that’s pronounced’] is showing some sign of humanity and being put behind bars for her temerity. If Magistrate Ian McRae had frogmarched Ms. Back across the road from the Downing Centre Court to Hyde Park café, he could have enjoyed a latte while supervising the removal of the ‘2shie’ tag she applied at the witching hour on the second Sunday of January.

Her grandmother may have been ropable her granddaughter did not cop 18 months but, maybe, said sad matriarch should be reflecting on her own duties of care and spending more quality time with her descendants.

Sure ‘Little Miss Shy’s’ action was inappropriate and unattractive and caught on CCTV. But are our gaols such havens of rehabilitation that three months with a new social group is the best cure for her behavioural misjudgements’

Shadow Attorney General Greg Smith supported the prison sentence because ‘It’s time we did what they did in New York and Chicago’. Yeah, Greg, let’s follow the Land of the Free’s example on law and order. Arm our citizens!

On the other hand, Dr Kurt Iveson, Senior Lecturer on Cities and Citizenship at Sydney University, does know what he is talking about when he recommends ‘the resources devoted to addressing the graffiti problem must be proportionate to the actual harm caused’.

Po-faced Premier Rees reckons $100 million is spent annually expunging graffiti in NSW ‘ not including the cost of incarcerating the texta and spray can wielding menaces, about $20,000 in Cheyane’s case.

The Hyde Park café owner, Song Wang, wanted $200 compensation to cover the cost of the reparatory lick of paint.

With this draconian policy implemented for the continuing war on graffiti, next year’s bill will be up one hundredfold.

What a way to blow a fiscal stimulus package!

Let’s end these wars on things’.

Andrew Woodhouse

Graffiti is not art. It’s illegal scrawling on other people’s property and is narcissism. The oldest single graffito is pre-Roman with the word itself deriving from Italian, graffio, ‘a scratch’.

Graffiti can sometimes be powerful, witty, even intelligent. Pompeiian archaeologists unearthed a phallus with the wall text Mansueta tene: ‘Handle with care’ (!) 1960s French students plastered Paris with Lisez moins, vivez plus: ‘Read less, live more’.

Today’s street scriveners push aerosol spray and Texta tags in our face. I don’t want them. Their fatal flaw is in thinking they’re more important than their scrawl. They’re not. Real artists know the art is more important than the artist and good art has three qualities: excellent technique, understanding of form, and presenting things in a new way.

Graffiti doesn’t qualify. Graffiti is anti-art. Even my Grade 1 gooey, green, finger-painting had more promise, said my art teacher Miss Till, showing great perspicacity.

I do not want heritage buildings or street cafes degraded. If architects wanted graffiti they’d have designed-in spaces for it.

18-year-old Ms Cheyane Back, sentenced to three months gaol last week, now on appeal, for her graffito, has learned her lesson ‘ perhaps. Her personal facebook site gives her motto as ‘f*** the law’. Ouch.

An on-line poll said 62% thought her sentence was satisfactory (‘OK’ or ‘not too harsh’) with her own grandma saying 18 months would have been better. Thanks Gran, I bet your mince pie ration will be cut next Christmas.

I disagree. First time offenders should do community work removing graffiti, a better astringent: let the punishment fit the crime.

Graffiti costs the nation $50’100 million annually in clean-up costs and affects property values and civic pride. You and I pay for this.

Cheyane can go and express herself at design school.
Graffiti-ing is also a health hazard with numerous deaths recorded along train tracks and tunnels. The impact of aerosol fumes is also a real, serious concern.

It’s an anti-social, two-fingered salute to a society from those it supports.

Bring down the guillotine on these petty self-indulgences I say.