Graffiti Versus Bad Art in L.A.

The Kids Are All Write

The recently announced plan for Los Angeles County and the Sheriff’s department to crack down on graffiti, and especially graffiti inflicted on murals, has revived an old debate. The demagoguery goes something like this: kids who get into graffiti are coddled urban layabouts who, for lack of nobler pursuits, take to the streets and degrade the quality of life enjoyed by upstanding (i.e., adult) citizens. To stop to this delinquent behavior, L.A. Country will henceforth penalize not just the offending graffitists, but also their indulgent parents. Message to the grownups: we’re serious—confiscate your kids’ markers and spray cans and set them on the course of more socially acceptable pastimes, such as spending hours inside playing ultra-violent video games or preparing to enlist in the Army.

In particular, the county has taken on the practice known as “tagging,” which is how most graffiti “writers,” as they are known in their demimonde, get their start. Tagging, at its most basic level, is fairly crude. A new writer will take to the streets with a thick marker and scrawl his stylized signature on any available surface. Generally speaking, graffiti writers either tag for a while and give up, or graduate to more elaborate forms. As far as contemporary urban graffiti goes, there is a forty-year history of this apprenticeship. According to story published in the L.A. Times several weeks ago, the latest generation of taggers has provoked the ire of the country by tagging public murals. In fact, much of the graffiti on the murals has been mislabeled as tagging—it’s actually closer to the “throw up” bubble-letter style that’s considered a stepping stone to the far more intense “wildstyle,” which should be familiar to anyone who lived in New York in the 1970s and early ’80s, when subway graffiti was at its peak. People who like and defend graffiti as legitimate art will often draw a line when it comes to tagging. County officials have opportunistically seized on this distinction to commence their latest battle in the graffiti wars.

Public murals are a cherished aspect of L.A. vernacular visual landscape. The vast, spread-out nature of the city means that there is plenty of available canvas on which to create sprawling imagery. They are beloved here in a way that’s baffling to residents of other cities. There’s even a non-profit corporation, the Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles, dedicated to preserving and protecting them. And make no mistake, the enemy of the mural and its affluent supporters is the graffiti artist, who is a vandal and a criminal bent on defacing this happy legacy of… well, what exactly?

Bad art. And not even merely bad art. Astonishingly bad art. The majority of L.A. murals are thematically childish and laughably executed. Their basic form, which was codified in the 1960s and ’70s, represents the worst excess of a stalled esthetic counterculture. They pollute our freeways and neighborhoods with themes of bland uplift and multicultural empowerment. It ought to tell us something that young people with the energy to take to the streets with spray cans in order to express themselves see these monuments to mediocrity and city-hall cronyism as a primary target. It doesn’t necessarily mean they have negligent parents. It could mean they simply don’t like being oppressed by images of ethnic striving, universal goodwill, or hippie visions of politically neutered progress.

All art of significance, from the ancients to the dazzling works of one-time graffiti writer Jean-Michel Basquiat, is rebellion. So get used to it. We’ve come a long way from the glory days of the New Deal, when real artists produced murals. The 21st-century muralist is more likely to be an art-school washout who turned to painting on buildings when the major gallery career, for understandable reasons, didn’t work out. Ironically, muralists hope to be well-known but are usually just as obscure as the taggers they loathe. The difference is that taggers aren’t interested in wider fame (although, interestingly, more than a few graffiti artists have made the jump from concrete jungle to stately museum). They write in a code accessible mainly to their peers. For them, non-profit means too broke to afford more spray paint. They do not expect their work to endure, much less be protected by tax dollars.

Should the county back off and allow the taggers to tag? Probably not, as tagging wouldn’t be tagging with some persecution thrown in. And admittedly, a fair amount of tagging is bravado, signifying nothing more than surplus testosterone. But the terms of the debate should be more honestly framed. Contemporary graffiti has been around long enough to establish itself as a rival to the mural. In this latest case, it’s not a crime—it’s criticism. Those in the mural camp should acknowledge that their challenge is largely esthetic and not run crying to the authorities because there’s some competition in town.