Urban Art Association

Evening Standard Last Night, by carlito on Oct 2, 2007 10:35:43 GMT 1,

October 1, 2007




I can see the writing on the wall for graffiti


SUKHDEV SANDHU



ONE OF my favourite London libraries has just been decommissioned. Actually, it was a wall, in a small street off Brick Lane, which was knocked down recently. On it, over weeks and months and years, local kids, nocturnal bards and lairy outsiders had sprayed, scribbled and stuck on an entire archive of ephemeral texts -- bigging up their posses, offering up praise songs to Osama bin Laden, volunteering the phone numbers of sex-hungry pals, advertising gigs and gallery shows, or just writing their names over and over again.

Were future historians, like those who excavated Pompeii, to dig up this part of east London, they would get a good sense of the nervous, scabrous energy -- artistic, political, religious -- that makes the place such a magnet for outsiders. Graffiti is an ubiquitous element of all cities, an attempt on the part of bored, creative people to turn the abandoned or dully corporate architectures of their neighbourhoods into personalised "graphiscapes".

Rather than being, as Rudolph Giuliani thought when he was mayor of New York, evidence of urban entropy, I see it as a sign of vitality.

Not every one of London's subterranean community of taggers and graffiti artists aspires to be Banksy, the stencil-artist prankster whose works have sold for more than £100,000. But they are committed to their art, spending long nights looking for new surfaces to paint.

They may not have been top scholars at school, but those I've met devour art books and specialist catalogues and frequent graffiti websites, looking for inspirational colour combinations and painting styles.

Life is getting harder for London's graffiti artists. Bust-up arches and derelict spaces are being built on by property developers. CCTV cameras are everywhere. Local authorities are establishing specialist squads to track down individual authors.

"They're spending quids on fat 40- year-olds in Japanese vans with highpressure hoses to rid the streets of chewing gum," one graffer grumbled to me. Part of the impetus, he thought, was the city's need to present a glossy, tidy face to the world before the 2012 Olympics. Not that graffiti will entirely go away; it will continue to be etched on glass if not walls.

In the meantime, my own favourite wall, a near-daily bulletin board of community goings-on, has disappeared. Just as the idiosyncratic typefaces and hand-painted storefronts that gave character and charm to London are vanishing.

What's a bigger eyesore? Street-level graffiti -- or huge Clear Channel billboards advertising satellitetelevision series and designer-label underwear? Sukhdev Sandhu is the author of Night Haunts: A Journey Through The London Night (Verso)..