Nazis of taste want to grey your world

OPINION
Anyone wanting to paint a picture on their external wall should have to go through a full planning approval process including consultation with surrounding residents in case they didn’t like the design, according to anti-graffiti campaigner Deborah Cameron on her 702 Radio Morning show (29 June).

Apparently one of her neighbours had commissioned a Danish muralist (“Not even Australian,” she grumbled) to paint a giant kangaroo with Martian joeys coming out of its pouch. Debs doesn’t like it and do you know, her council just refuses to have it removed.

Another neighbour might give a small grimace and have a chuckle – there’s no accounting for taste but at least such a wall would be a rare sign of life in this dull and controlled town.

But no, Debs seems to share that affliction of the middleclass mind – a certainty that its taste is absolutely correct and everyone else should be brought into line.

It’s one thing bitching about tagging. That arouses such passionate hatred among so many that I for one am not going to oppose the attempts of the establishment to eliminate it. In fact I give a small grimace and have a chuckle when I see anti-spraycan measures driving unrepentant taggers to etching glass on trains, buses and bus stops, a far more damaging and less attractive thing than spray tags.

It’s a perfect example of the ‘balloon effect’ triggered whenever prohibition is applied to a social phenomenon – squelch it in one place and it swells somewhere else. Still, the middleclass mind is always convinced that yet more prohibition is the answer, and Debs lamented that new NSW laws were not tough enough. Her on-air guest from ‘Graffiti Hurts – Australia’ agreed. His website describes even commissioned, approved wall art as ‘vandalism’.

I find it strange however that paint on a wall, which in fact protects and preserves the fabric, upsets these people only when it is given shape and form. I have not heard any of them grumbling about people who paint their houses with unusual colour schemes.

One of my near neighbours painted their large Federation terrace a blinding yellow/gold. It’s so bright that on a sunny morning my bedroom ceiling takes on a golden glow. The house spreads warm, reflected light in all directions. Even though it stands out like the proverbial in its sedate Victorian-hued street, I love it. As it happens.

But another neighbour did the big renovation and followed fashion by painting their supersized place a dark, dark grey. Others choose a dark, dark drab green or an ambiguous dark, dark purple grey. I loathe these hues with a passion that equals Deborah Cameron’s hatred of graffiti art.

This particular grey wall overtops another yard which, being south-facing, gets no sunlight at all in winter. All its natural light is reflected from the high wall that used to be a warm beige gold offset with sky blue, like our whole row of terraces, courtesy of the Italian and Portugese fisherfolk who historically settled here.

These colours of sun and sky create a golden glow that suffuses into our potentially dark houses through their small side and rear windows.

However the south-facing house now has a cold, dark ambience courtesy of the dark grey wall. It’s light levels are down easily 20–30%. There is an economic effect, too. The house is a renter with a high turnover and I wonder to what degree the cold light contributes to this. Then there is the extra power needed to light it early and late in the day.

When you get a whole section of street going the same way, the effect on public space is palpable. As a photographer I particularly notice it. Back laneways and odd spaces that used to bask in a reflected glow are now dark and gloomy. It’s not just the house colours creating this, but also the City’s obsession with erasing all warm terracotta paving from the city in favour of cold grey granite.

I don’t understand this drive to dark grey. It’s not a colour, it absorbs light, it’s dull, depressing, lifeless, introverted and good only for disguising navy ships. It’s an attempt to overlay charming pre-modernist forms with a coat of neo-modernism that confuses ‘cool’ with coldness. It steals light from the street and from neighbours.

This trend upsets me far more than wall murals but somehow it does not bother the Deborah Cameron types. They seem to get upset only if the paint on the wall has shape and form and has not been authorised by an Authority. Lifeless grey is good, colour and form bad. It’s simple conservatism, nothing more.

But, you know what? There are worse problems to worry about than my reaction to the colour of someone else’s wall. It’s their wall and they can do what they like with it. Anti-graffiti zealots similarly need a reality check, to relax a bit and mind their own business.

Council boasts about how much it has spent on graffiti removal, including fine quality street art. I for one think there are far better ways to spend tens of millions of dollars than aggressively imposing conservatism in the name of those whose neurosis drives them to control the look of other people’s property.

by Michael Gormly