The sound of voices and spray-painting below my bedroom window awakens me at 3:30 am.
I know instantly, from experience – I live in a downtown lane – that these are graffiti vandals tagging the light gray brick of my home, a turn-of-the century stable.
Half-naked, I throw open the second-storey window and yell, “What are you doing?” My aerial view is of a can of spray paint, a long-haired, bearded 20-something man looking up at me in stupefaction..
“What the fuck,” I think.
Dressing quickly, I grab a small child’s baseball bat and run down the stairs, out the front door and down the lane in their direction.
Four of them are sauntering down the street. These are taggers, vandals who leave a logo code of themselves in spray paint. Taggers are like pissing animals marking their territory with their toxic paint, adolescents acting out their undirected opposition to almost everything.
The streets are deserted. I’m thinking, “What good is this small bat? I don’t think I can hit someone with it, but it does make me feel safer.”
I stop running when one of them turns. He’s the largest of the gang, and he’s telling me not to go any farther. The actual tagger walks toward me. “You asshole,” I yell, “what do you think you’re doing?” The burly guy answers for his friend, “It’s art – get your head around it.”
Here are taggers who think they are graffiti artists, but they haven’t figured it out. They’re ego-driven primitives who have hardly reached the first stage of artistic development. Graffiti art is a subcategory of interventionist art, itself a category of public art.
If you want to be a graffiti painter, you buy one of those glossy graffiti magazines full of images of murals. You look at some alley walls around town and learn the style, the curves, the colours, the shapes, the template of painting techniques for the spray can. Perhaps you find a hidden wall and experiment, try a few cans and develop your technique.
But here’s where it begins to matter: Where are you going to paint your masterpiece? Are you going to ask permission to paint, or are you going to intervene in the night?
As you develop as a graffiti artist, you begin to understand. Perhaps you’ve watched the Occupy movement and now realize what “political” means. Yes, that spray paint is all about you, your empowerment, but there’s also an us, and action to be effective has to be directed.
For maximum self-fulfillment, you don’t just piss anywhere, but, rather, on the leg of someone who deserves to be targeted, exposed or censured. The mark you make is always symbolic and political. To leave it on a residence means something different than leaving it on a courthouse.
To spray unauthorized paint on a wall, a door or a sidewalk is an act of violation, whether it’s directed against a private citizen or an institution. If you are not consciously aware of the violation inherent in your activity, you are not a graffiti artist, but a graffiti moron. The interventionist artist is conscious of the power of his or her activity and its ability to critique impossibly strong institutions on the level of the street.
The interventionist artist, the graffiti artist, does not tag, does not paint pretty pictures, but intervenes in the social, political dialogue through a visual introjection in the urban fabric. Graffiti artists make a mark not to inflate and inflict their own ego, but like all true artists, to engage in a cultural exchange.
And I can’t give it up. I follow the four. As they approach Ossington, they get into a cab as I frantically try to memorize the licence plate. They’re getting away.
Falling into bed later, I consider how even in my Duchampian, inclusive definition of art – anything done by an artist – these boring curved lines of spray paint, in their total lack of inventiveness and dexterity, are anything but.
Eldon Garnet is an internationally known artist and creator of many public works in Toronto. His most recent is Equal Before The Law.
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