5 Responses to “ [Melbourne] Sketch City’s Super Spring Paint Party ”

1. What street artists who live by the light of graffiti seem to forget is that it is not graffiti if it is legal. A legal ‘piece’ merely borrows stylistically from graffiti, yet in terms of art history it occupies a space within the tradition of mural painting, compared to which it is generally lacking in any remotely interesting content, other than that of spraycan and design skill, which is a craft and has nothing that necessarily implicates it in art (other than a lack of historico-critical reflection). A legal ‘graffiti’ whose laurels incestuously rest in the tradition and forms created by graffiti proper is not unlike a self-marketing exercise, a kind of brand association with something ‘edgy’. But then, being an ‘artist’ today basically means to be a petite-bourgeois salesperson. Be that as it may, it sustains a vast dissimulatory scene of both spraypaint muralists and fans who either are afraid to participate in systematic street bombing and train painting, or who are too egoistic - by which i mean too ‘artistic’- to be content with the in-famy and properly radical, fugitive status of illegal graffiti… the activity alone is not enough for such egoists: they want legitimate fame. Yet what makes graffiti historically interesting is what is expressed through its illegitimacy. It has absolutely nothing to do with art-galleries, except insofar as it may deface them, of course without permission.
   Graffiti should no longer stand for the culture industry and the ’street-artist’ intestinal worms who parasitically feed off the aura sustained only by graffiti’s illegitimacy, its radical mode of insurrection against property, against art and against the culture industry.
   Banning the can will make no difference to illegal graffiti writers, who already know the risks, which excite them and which is the most important aspect of the phenomenology of graffiti. If there is no risk, there is no graffiti. The aesthetic of graffiti is its risk. Of course the state can get fucked in this matter. However, expecting the rats of the repressive state apparatus to tolerate graffiti is both naive and uncourageous. If you really wish to change this, then become revolutionary anarchists, not culture-industry artists and hand-bag lobbyist (hoping to not get fined for carrying art-spraypaint-mediums in their street-design satchels). The don’t ban the can campaign is merely a lobby on behalf of spraycan-mural-designers, who do not wish to be implicated in the illegality their craft wholly borrows its purported validity from.

   By Guy Debord on Sep 7, 2009 | Reply

2. Take it how you want to take it.
   We make stuff good is a large crew.
   Don’t believe everything you read in the newspaper and then use it to suggest that we’re leeching from your aura..

   The crew is underground and will continue to represent that way.
   The movement started from a law to charge people found with cans on a train. We didn’t support the right to be searched on that basis.

   Dont put us on the “instestinal worm” unless you’re looking for confrontation.

   By Bjorn on Sep 7, 2009 | Reply

3. I looked up the meaning for graffiti in 5 different dictionaries and found the exact same description:

   graf⋅fi⋅ti
     /grəˈfiti/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [gruh-fee-tee] Show IPA

   –noun
   1. pl. of graffito.
   2. (used with a plural verb) markings, as initials, slogans, or drawings, written, spray-painted, or sketched on a sidewalk, wall of a building or public restroom

   It says nothing about the legal side of graffiti. It would be like saying the same thing earlier in history about the legalities of homosexuality. Even though homosexuality isn’t an art form (most of the time), you get my point. With legal graffiti, it also gives the artist a lot more time to spend on a wall without the threat or paranoia of lawful interference. As far as artistic integrity, a lot of graffiti is site specific with a lot of social commentary and other forms of communicating through artistic expression. Banksy, Seen and Keith Harring are prime examples of such communication. It definitely isn’t a ‘movement against art’. I can name at least 20 street and graffiti artist off hand who have exhibited in galleries around the world. By galleries i don’t mean alleyways either.

   In western culture, using the system to your advantage always works better than working against it. We aren’t living in communist Russia. I share with you fond anarchic ideals but in reality with the birth of modern day media and the common man’s lust for comfortable living, this remains a fantasy. We all have seen how the media portrays known ‘terrorists’.

   At the end of the day, it is all about freedom of artistic expression, whatever your creative vehicle may be. Tagging could even be compared with a contemporary calligraphy with its fluidity and its technical credibility. So many different forms of art from surrealism to cubism were persecuted all through time just as graffiti is right now. When German expressionism evolved into cubism, the movement was scrutinized just the same. People from the art world and the rest of the collective population are being made aware of the power of graffiti and street art and its relevance to modern day culture.

   Dont Ban the Can should be commended for exposing the culture with such rigor and glorious fury. I have spoken to many people inside and outside of the art world and the acceptance of the culture is starting to take root. It is no longer the artists who appear to be the crazy kooks. It would be safe to say that this is the beginning of the ’silent revolution’.

   By Jester on Sep 11, 2009 | Reply

4. And Sketch City for that manner to Jester!

   By Krystal Stuff on Sep 11, 2009 | Reply

5. yeah totally. sketch city too. sketch city is a prime example of understanding graffiti through education and experience. as well as ‘we make stuff good graff tours’, Juzzo and Spud Rock ‘Graff Hunters’, etc.

   By Jester on Sep 11, 2009 | Reply