Scrawl on the Wall

Bristol, UK - Natali - Friday, May 6th, 2005 : goo

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"A group set up to combat graffiti in Bristol has been nominated for two national environmental awards. The Bristol Graffiti Partnership is one of four groups shortlisted for the ENCAMS People and Places awards. The partnership is made up of representatives from the police, the city council and other local groups. It discourages graffiti through education and campaigns, and carries out targeted graffiti removal around the city.

The group will find out if it has won the awards, for best partnership working and best local environmental initiative, at a ceremony in Birmingham on 22 February. Bristol city councillor Matthew Symonds said: "To be the only body of its kind in the South West to get this far is a tremendous achievement. "It demonstrates that the partnership is beginning to have a real impact, but there is still much to be done. ENCAMS (Environmental Campaigns) is the charity which runs the Keep Britain Tidy programme."

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/bristol/4123065.stm

Exactly when did we decide, as a society and a city, that graffiti is still something to be discouraged as an art form, and removed as an apparent scourge of society? Exactly when did we decide to stop educating ourselves in respects to graffiti as an artform?

Bristol has many many "listed" buildings of historical value - the city dates well back into Saxon times, and quite a few buildings escaped damage from the Blitz, so we have 17th century churches and original architecture that is stunning to experience on a day to day basis. I can understand why there is such vigilance when it comes to protecting buildings. But not all buildings. Most graffiti of worth can be found in urban areas in the south of the city and areas like St. Pauls and Easton, where the buildings are cheap, ugly and of absolutely no aesthetic worth whatsoever. I spent 5 years walking through the one way system in Bower Ashton: tiled, beige, dirty, stinking tunnels beneath commuting traffic. The graffiti that appeared in those areas improved it. But no matter how amazing it was to look at, no matter the artistic value and the cost and effort that went to put it there in the first place...it was always removed.

Fact : the most famous mainstream graffiti artist in the UK is Banksy. He's designed album covers for Blur. I grew up with his stencil designs in my eyeline. He's not the only artist that's out there - the infamous Louis the Baron populates the Ashton/Southville areas with his tag and the appropriate year added on the end. And the other no-name artists who deface mainstream ads (mostly seen in the Redcliffe Hill area, before the billboards were torn down and replaced by building works) to criticise the capitalistic bent of advertising. And the rest of them.

"When I first moved to Bristol I was struck by the intelligence and artistry of its street graffiti. I was also struck by its content. At first I tried to shoot pictures of what I saw including its context, but over the course of time it became evident that this was not the way forward. It was what the graffiti said that was so striking, both literally and figuratively, not where it was situated. It was the emotional truth reflected in it, that was so attractive; and just as in life, it was necessary to ignore some of the jumble in order to concentrate, heighten and define its essence."

www.graffiti.org/bristol/

If you've lived anywhere near the rough edge of Bristol, you know graffiti like it's your best friend. You don't hate it, you laugh at it, or think about it. It's never made my day worse. It's part of this city : a city with an awful violent streak, a city with intense history, a city with culture and balance, a city with two urban ghettos, a city with just 400,000 people. Removing graffiti is like removing an admittance that we have an edge in the first place.

And then you move onto the idea that graffiti as an artform should be discouraged. Perhaps this article is a little unclear in that respects, but it certainly sounds like they are pissing on the idea that a) spray paint is not an acceptable form of art material and b) anything that is created on the street can't possibly be of any worth. Don't pick me apart for this, that's just how I'm interpreting it. Perhaps they are standing in schools telling kids that graffiti is great, just don't do it on buildings, but I really doubt they are. As a culture, us Westerners are incapable of balance. Only Canadians can achieve that, and unfortunately, that's why I barely bother to read their news (much love to Canadians though).

For some kids on estates and in shitty circumstances, the urban scene is important for them keeping their stuff together, giving them something to focus on. This can lead to counterproductive aspirations : like drugs and violence and gang activity, but just because the scene involves that, it doesn't mean to say that if you graffiti, you're someone who's heading for jail. So why is the art perceived in such a negative manner? Perhaps it's because it's an underground culture, where a certain selection of people have alternate identities, their own methods of expressing themselves, their own rules and their own patches of ground to exert it all out on. Kind of like the internet: within society, but without it. We fear what we do not know, and we perceive things to be dangerous and damaging when they can be harnessed and analysed and understood with far more ease than is necessary.

Regardless, I find it saddening that there would be such an organisation that would be so nihilistic when it comes to graffiti art. As a Bristolian, I am not proud that we are so intent on "removing" art from our buildings, especially when we are so culturally diverse and so embracing of creativity. We have Indians, Africans, Somalians, musicians, Pakistanis, Muslims, Buddhists, whites, blacks, Christian, poets, Jamaicans, Chinese, Japanese people. Why can't we have graffiti artists too?

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