Urban Art Association

Now we know the street art scene's gone to hell..., by raiden on Dec 6, 2008 4:42:34 GMT 1, From the Times... surprised no one posted it... As soon as the religious nuts start co-opting the practice, you know its time to move on... I see a "death of Disco" moment fast approaching for urban art as we know it.

www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article5294092.ece?token=null&offset=12&page=2

Graffiti and God
Church groups are using graffiti art to evangelise
Bess Twiston Davies

The word and the tag. Graffiti and the Good Book. An unlikely mix? Right?

Well, if that's your considered view, take a trip tomorrow to Church House, the organisational HQ of the Church of England, and amid a plethora of youth activities including video diaries, puppet theatres, and skater theatres, you’ll see a handful of teenage believers attacking large canvasses with chunky marker pens. Their aim? To create a graffiti which, in the words of the organisers, " reflects their vision of the Church of the future."

The four canvasses – each a metre in size – will eventually grace the 12th century walls of Lambeth Palace. Graffiti - whose political value has been emphasised by artists such as Banksy - has certainly come a long way since the unsightly scrawls which mar urban buildings and subways. But surely the Church isn't endorsing vandalism?

"Graffiti isn't a crime if it's done with permission," qualifies Canon Paul Bayes, the Church of England's adviser on Mission and Evangelism. He adds: "The best graffiti-style art is fluid, intelligent, streetwise, direct communication. And Christian graffiti artists ‘spray the gospel’ with permission in a way that many young people can immediately understand. They contribute to the task of sharing the Gospel with every part of our culture."

Increasingly, mainstream Church workers embrace graffiti as means to engage with anti-social, disengaged youth. There even exist Christian graffiti crews, such as the ESC East London/Essex collective, linked to the Re:generation Church in Gidea Park, Essex, who use graffiti as a way of getting a Christian message of love, forgiveness and redemption, to non-Churched youth.

Graffiti is also part of Fresh Expressions, an Anglican-Methodist drive to bring Christianity back into secular, contemporary culture , explains Dr Rachel Jordan, the organiser of tomorrow's youth forum event. "Fresh Expressions is about trying to embrace other cultures, including youth culture," she says: "What the Church has done in the past has been very English and very middle class. Graffiti is a medium young people can use to express themselves."

Sarah Hicks, the artist supervising tomorrow’s graffiti bonanza, says the medium “attracts the naughty kids, the ones that hang out and get involved in drink and drugs. It’s not seen as an art form but at the end of the day it is.”

Hicks, a life-long Christian, speaks from experience. For the past year, she has worked with a local graffiti artist and between 20 to 30 10 – 16 year olds on a lottery-funded project to create graffiti artwork in a skate park in Longridge near Preston.

At first, Hicks admits, the kids were “a nightmare” who spent their first session “lobbing things across the room.” But it was obvious they also suffered low self-esteem: "They arrived fed up, saying things such as "I'm rubbish, I can't draw a circle."

Gradually Hicks helped them create vast panels with images including giant monkeys or pandas with punk hairstyles. By the end of the project each had acquired a qualification in graffiti design. "As a group they had bonded and grown in confidence and were starting to take pride in their space and area," she reports.

Now the group are monitoring the panels, and a credit system may be introduced to reward those who wish to remove negative abusive graffiti scrawled on top of their designs. The scheme also provided a chance for the organisers to explain what the law was concerning graffiti and vandalism:"something many of the kids had never heard before," says Hicks.

It also showed that graffiti can act as an “ice-breaker” , a way into discussing other issues – including bullying and anti-social behaviour.

This approach is popular with Christian youth mission groups. The Jesus Army, for example, a Baptist-inspired Christian youth movement, regularly offers chances to create legal graffiti on walls, boards or panels as part of its annual RAW youth outreach, which attracts several hundred young people each summer in Northampton.

"Graffiti is not in a frame in a youth gallery but in the street right behind where you are hanging," says James Stacey, a RAW organiser. "It gets away from the idea that Church is for old people."

Rob Cotton, senior campaigns manager for the Bible Society agrees. So far, he has used graffiti art in two Bible Society campaigns, one in Bristol, a second in Nottingham: "The first was for a citywide media campaign involving billboards which links stories in the soaps (especially EastEnders) to stories in the Bible. Alongside the billboards we had graffiti art projects telling the story of the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan."

"Our vision is looking to engage culture – to relate to people where they are. The Prodigal Son graffiti opened up some interesting conversations," he reports.

"Why is graffiti so engaging? People tend to think of graffiti as vandalism or irresponsible, but it is contemporary and can be used in a positive way to reach out to people."

Really? Surely an illegal tagger, probably high on drugs or drink, is unlikely to respond to a piece of Christian graffiti, however appealingly presented?

Stephen Smith would disagree. A softly spoken 26 year-old, he is part of that rare breed, the Christian graffiti artist. His signature graffito is a large bubbly-lettered graphic spelling the phrase "Remember Jesus." It is, he claims, a frequent conversation-starter: "People ask questions and are open - they expect you to condemn them for the way they are living and are surprised when you don't," he says.

Now he tags legally, but five years ago, Smith belonged to an eight-strong London-wide graffiti crew spending his nights energetically scrawling on trains and buildings across the city. "It was tagging streets, purely illegal," he recalls. "Part of the culture was about getting your name up on buildings [tagging]. It gives you a buzz that someone sees something you have done."

Brought up in a Roman Catholic household, Smith felt his lifestyle was "spiralling out of control." "I did get caught and arrested on a number of occasions," he says. "I was landing in trouble with the courts and was on first-name terms with the police."

"Once I was walking down the street with my dad and jumped when a police siren went off. I thought "This is not the way I want to live."

Flipping open his Bible one day, in search of peace, he started to read it and experienced “complete freedom, no sense of stress or strain, just this peace. I didn’t want to go out. It was like a complete spiritual re-birth.”

“Once you have been awoken like this, you can’t go back. You can see the error of what you have been doing before" says Smith.

From then on, Smith decided to use graffiti "which is a gift, and a passion," to spread his Christian faith. "Instead of putting up my name, I put up Jesus' name," he says.

For the Bible Society, he has created larger works referencing Bible stories such as the Good Samaritan. All are signed with his tag name - Lovepusher. “My original tagname Feud was negative. After being awoken spiritiaully I was filled with so much love and I thought “What does love mean to me?” My answer? Jesus represents love, and what am I doing? I am pushing a message with persistence and passion.”

Smith is not alone. In the US, some churches, such as the Christian Life Center in Merced, California, are holding legal graffiti competitions in a bid to attract young people caught up in illegal tagging.

The church's pastor Ronnie Coyle explains: "Here we have an epidemic on our hands: our parks are being vandalised by young kids doing graffiti and much of the community is really fed up with the disrespect. We saw this as an opportunity to show students how to use their gifts in a positive way."

Participants were given four hours to create graffiti on plyboards, which were then sprayed over to allow the next person a chance to make their mark. A police officer from the local graffiti task force attended too.

Coyle explains: "We see so much that is negative – quick tagging for five seconds – but this was more mural type artwork that you could admire, the first time the group of students could use their talent in a positive way right now. A few students joined the youth ministry."

Others have joined a bible study group for taggers, founded by the competition's co-organiser Rui Machado, who is seeking ways to mentor young people caught up in graffiti culture. Machado has no illusion as to its appeal. "Graffiti," he says bluntly, "is addictive. It gives you a high".

For seven years, from the age of 19, Machado was an active tagger too, "bombing" the "freeways" around Merced. "Bombing is real quick" he explains. "That’s those bubbly letters you see. You have to do it real quick to get your name up. You create a spot and try to get your name up as soon as possible. There are different crews so you stake your territory. If somebody goes over [puts their name up over yours] you, you go over them. You don't back down for nobody."

He describes creating graffiti as a lifestyle which is both compulsive and nocturnal: "Some guys plan it out right when the sun goes down – they get spots then move down the freeway. Most people are doing things all night long. You plan it out like a murder: you think of every situation that could happen when you get a spot."

The birth of his daughter prompted Machado to give up a party lifestyle and change. However, the process was gradual : "I would go out on the freeway and tag the word "Jesus".

" People were noticing it, everyone started calling me Jesus. But God kept eating away at my heart. He said 'You are out there tagging Jesus but you are not living like Jesus. ' "

Eventually, he stopped drinking and stopped tagging: “I had to put my trust in God that he would still allow me to paint."

Now he paints legally, "piecing" – creating larger graffiti works, using "more colour - 10 instead of one or two. I take time: six or seven hours instead of one. I enjoy the piecing more - bombing is an eyesore." The past few years have been "really tough but they have drawn me so close to God I am thankful" concludes Machado who is hoping to organise regular graffiti opportunities at the Christian Life Center - a "new" Church - which sees its outreach out to taggers is part of its overall drive to reach teenagers involved in Hip-Hop culture - of which graffiti is an element.

"Wherever you find a graff artist, you find hip-hop" says an associate pastor at the church, "C-flo" Johnson. "Some people in the City were upset that we were doing graffiti up at the Church. But we were not pushing vandalism but art .

In our church, we have graffiti in the art rooms. God loves everyone no matter who they are and our main purpose is to lead people to Jesus Christ. These are urban kids: a lot come from broken homes, and have experienced abuse. The mindset of the people in power is that graffiti is bad, yet St Paul says : “I become all things to all men that I may win souls.”

One of the "four elements" of Hip-Hop (along with the music, breakdancing, djing), historically graffiti has always had a subversive connection with the underground, and Christian faith on the margins, according to Dr Graham Howes, a sociologist of religion and an Emeritus Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge,

"Christianity began as an underground movement," he says, "It was often persecuted, never triumphant. The Oxford Companion to Art and Architecture talks of inscriptions in the Roman catacombs, made by pilgrims and mourners in Latin and in Greek and scratched in charcoal and chalk."

In the main these consisted of "invocations and prayers, lists of the dead and names of those who had been buried. You can find invocations in the papal crypts such as: “Paul may you live! Marcian sleep in peace!" or "Justus pray for me! Remember me in Prayer!"

Early Christians frequently employed "symbolic" graffiti to represent their faith, explains Sister Mary Charles Murray, a nun of the order of Notre Dame de Nemurs, and a lecturer in Early Church History at the Theology Faculty at the University of Oxford. "The anchor in particular was a kind of graffito as it looked a bit like a cross with a curved end. Another symbolic graffito was the fish – the Greek word Icthus meaning Fish was an acrostic for Iesos Theou Huios Soter – the initials of the letter ichthus – this meant ‘Son of God and Saviour’.

The most famous graffito of all is on the Palatine hill and dates from the first century and is a pagan graffito showing a donkey’s head being crucified, mocking the crucifixion. "

This tradition, of graffiti being associated with faith on the edges, continued in later, though often equally intolerant ages, according to Dr Howes. "Graffiti are a continuous phenomenon which mark religious identity: they did not stop with the catacombs," he explains.

During the religious persecutions under Bloody Mary and Elizabeth 1, Protestants and Roman Catholics imprisoned in the Tower of London, often scratched graffiti in their cells. Later still came" modern graffiti in Northern Ireland associated with denomination and also demarcation of territory."

Graffiti " also surfaced during the French religious wars - prayers were inscribed in the dungeons during the St Bartholomew's Eve massacres, or later by aristocrats en route to the guillotine or on the walls of her cell in the Conciergerie by Marie Antoinette. More recently, there have been interesting parallels in Eastern Europe: Christians living under Stalin and Ceau?escu used a sign language on the walls of deconsecrated churches. A Russian art historian told me that the same thing had also happened in Russia in some of the monasteries."