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I am excited to continue on the push for more critical response and a recent issue in school is well worth thinking about.
Of course it is the graffiti business which was announced during Tuesday assembly where a bench was discovered on the 3rd level to be covered in graffiti. I have come across several blogs mentioning the issue in passing and so I think this would be a perfect time to provide more critical discourse on this topic.
Graffiti is Dissent
Graffiti has often been linked to political activism. The greatest example is probably in Berlin, where our Sec 3 students will be visiting the remaining parts of Berlin Wall where graffiti artist decorated the entire stretch of the wall in agitated expression and anger against the effects of the Cold War.
A recent British graffiti artist had the audacity to graffiti on the West Bank barrier itself (where the Israel border patrol shoots on sight). On one side he painted a view of an idyllic beach while on the other side, a beautiful mountain landscape.
Graffiti is Identity
Graffiti expresses it strong territorial marking through the function of tagging. Tags are basically stylised writings of the graffiti artist’s nickname. Graffiti artists will usually tag out their territory, and it acts as a form of self-advertisement and effacement of your identity. This phenomenon is usually more noticeable in suburban neighbourhoods linked to ghettoes and underprivileged homes. In poor communities where youths are disadvantaged through limited education and endemic social violence, tagging becomes the only means of making their voices heard. Similarly, gangs from these areas also relies on tagging as a way to mark out their own turf, and tagging directly over another gang’s tag is seen as a sign of aggression.
In Northern Ireland, political graffiti parades the beliefs and identities of each community and they are particularly prominent over the Belfast Peace Line. Despite attempts by the British Army to demolish some of the graffiti, the local community went about replacing the same graffiti over the same spot in no time.
Graffiti is Art
From the very early prehistoric cavemen drawings on the wall to the present, graffiti has never failed to draw outspoken groups of supporter and detractors. There are strong views that graffiti should be viewed as legitimate artistic expression of our times, and our repression of this art form as no more than what the Nazis were trying to do by banning progressive art in Germany in the past. Many famous international artists had their start as graffiti artist, including famous names like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
In my former school, I organised a graffiti event for the Art’s Day where the school paid a token sum for a group of professional graffiti artists to paint their designs on the school wall next to the sports centre.
Graffiti is Crime
The greatest problem with graffiti lies in the ethics of the act - it is morally wrong to abuse, damage and deface the property of others. Public property are considered as government property, and hence it definitely does not belong to you as well. If I were to take your bag without permission and doodled some cartoon on it with a permanent marker, I do not think you will be pleased if I told you it is art. This Roman sculpture above was vandalised surprisingly by Christians.
Governments and authorities have understandably often taken a harsh line against these vandals. One of the most well documented cases of action against graffiti is by the New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani (now Presidential Candidate 2008) in 1995 when he launched a crackdown against graffiti in the city. He banned the sale of spraypaints to under 18s. This is known as Broken Window Theory, which suggests that houses with broken windows invite more windows to be broken, hence the solution is to stop the problem before they escalate. Recent studies and reports indicate that there are no direct evidence that such zero-tolerance policy helps to reduce crime in the city, while other more affirmative actions like legalising abortion might have more to do with the reduction of the actual crime rates.
Recently, New York Mayor Michel Bloomberg was successfully sued by fashion mogul Marc Ecko when Bloomberg tried to raise the age of the spraypaint ban to 21.
Graffiti is Michael Fay
In Singapore, we made international news back in 1994 when we caned the 19 year old American boy Michael Fay for acts of vandalism and stealing road signs. The incident happened during a time where there were several complaints in the papers about cars parked in HDB carparks being vandalised, and then there were some high profile cases in the Orchard area, where 6 cars were spray painted overnight, and then the following night, the car of a judge. Whether this last case pushed it from a simple misdemeanor into a serious crime is debatable, but the police managed to arrest a HK student from the Singapore American School and then through more investigation, eventually they caught up with Fay.
Fay was charged under the Vandalism Act, then drafted in 1966 to combat communist graffiti, and sentenced to 4 months jail, a $3,500 fine and 6 lashes of cane. If you have no idea about how they cane in the prison, this video from Malaysia on the Youtube might be instructive. (Warning: Brutal violence. Not for the faint hearted.)
Michael Fay was later rehabilitated back in the States for butane abuse and arrested for possession of marijuana. He claimed that “sniffing butane made him forget what happened in Singapore.”
So Graffiti is… ?
What do you think of Michael Fay’s experience? How should we view graffiti? Is it Art? If it is not Art, does it make it a crime? What should be its proper punishment? Is the caning excessive for such a non-violent crime?
How then should we view the recent case in school?
References:
“Bombing Modernism: Graffiti and its relationship to the (built) environment” by Amos Klausner
“It’s All Under Control” by Robert Lederman
“Graffiti” by Crispin Sartwell
