But is it art?

• The Age - Good Weekend magazine

Whether it's murals, "tags" or glowing plastic butterflies, graffiti ignites passion and debate. Nikki Barrowclough meets the artists who use the streets as their canvas.

0N AN AUTUMN DAY IN SYDNEY, I MEET A VETERAN OF GRAFFITI culture. He's 40 years old, thoughtful and intelligent; his eyes track every coming and going in the cafe we're in, which is only to be expected. As a member of the Australian defence forces, he has been actively deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan and has worked in counterterrorism.

As he talks, it's easy to see the parallels between his job and the "training" he had in his past racing across train tracks or spray-painting the sides of buildings in the shadows late at night.

"It's a spontaneous, singleminded, concentrated act," he says. "You're applying strokes very fast. You're not sitting in a room, dabbling with a brush. Your whole body is moving. It goes through every stroke and motion, especially if you've got limited time. I preferred to go out alone, so I didn't have to rely on anyone, and nobody could compromise me. Getting in and out without being seen or heard."

These days, he goes on, he paints only legal walls, although he's in no way regretful about his illegal graffiti activities. Rebellion was undoubtedly part of it when he started, at 15, as well as the desire to "live free". And later on? "You can put it down to some desire for adventure in the left field," he says.

His passion for painting parts of the city must be more complex than that, though, I suggest, given that he's still out there, painting walls - albeit legally. It's not easy to put into words, comes the reply, but he sees a link between his painting and the flower-arranging that the samurai, Japan's soldier elite, took up as part of their practice of Zen, which teaches the importance of a free and spontaneous mind.

"I'm an aerosol artist," he goes on. "Everything takes training - so does this. You develop your own style, technique and use of colours. Is the lettering balanced and in proportion? Does it flow? Flow is important.'
Why not paint indoors, on canvas?
"Because it's about putting it out there, in the streets," he replies.

COULD IT BE THERE'S A TYPE OF ART THAT WORKS BETTER IN THE STREET, that belongs in the street even, and not just because street art is ephemeral and uncurated? Political graffiti is rarely talked about as "illegal" but, of course, it is - including the powerful, poignant graffiti that once covered the western side of the Berlin Wall that divided East and West Berlin. More recently, brave souls have been covering the Zimbabwean capital, Harare, with anti-Robert Mugabe messages, rather turning on its head the allegation that all graffiti is menacing and makes the public feel unsafe.

Basic street graffiti, however, is another matter altogether  although what's "graffiti" and what's "street art" continues to be a vexed question. Another Sydney graffiti veteran, "Mare", 38, is clear about it. "Graffiti needs to be illegal. Period. Anything on a legal wall is straight art," he says. "Anyone can paint walls ... graffiti also means painting walls illegally."

Further complicating matters, there's the crossover from illegal to legal artwork, par for the course in graffiti-art circles, and it's not unusual for some artists to make a good living selling to commercial galleries. Sydney artist Ben Frost, whose paintings subvert the icons and symbols of Western culture as a statement about mass consumerism, and who says street art is an immediate way of responding to the environment, sells his original works for between $8000 and $9000 to galleries and private collectors in Australia and overseas.

The dark side of graffiti - the criminal element involved and the vandalism that goes on - angers many street artists, although there are ambiguities here, too. There's a general view within the culture that "tagging", for instance, is a sort of entry-level graffiti and a rite of passage. It's about where you take the letter form after that. "Wildstyle", which is looked upon as just more graffiti mess by many in the community, is regarded by its practitioners as a complicated construction of interlocking letters and one of the hardest styles to master in street art.

"Sirum', 28, a freelance commercial artist in Melbourne and long-time graffiti practitioner, has a view about tagging that's commonly expressed by some academics - although it may outrage some. "Writing your name in a particular style takes literally years of practice to perfect, and although [the public] sees tags as an unsightly mess and vandalism - due to the fact that it's mainly done in an illegal context - in all honesty, it's no different to the art of calligraphy," he says. "The simple beauty of letter style and form is an art within itself"

Sirum's first, illegal piece of graffiti, at 14, was on the back of a scout hall facing a reserve. Recently, he and a fellow graffiti artist were commissioned by a firm of solicitors in Melbourne to paint two murals with a justice theme on the side of its building.

"Some parts of the graffiti culture and the people in it are so far apart from each other that the only thing they have in common is the street," comments Andrew Mac, who occupies an interesting place in Melbourne's street-art culture.

Mac has his own art gallery, Until Never, just off Melbourne's official graffiti mecca, Hosier Lane. He's also the director of the Citylights arts organisation; he has been documenting street art since 1990 and hosting laneway street-art exhibitions since 1996. He spent three years putting together the National Gallery of Australia's first collection of contemporary street art - 350 stencil designs by more than 30 graffiti artists, including the prolific "Ha Ha" whose graffiti images of Ned Kelly and robots became a familiar sight around Melbourne in the late '90s. The National Gallery bought the collection two years ago.

"I think at this stage it's definitely safe to call graffiti an art movement," says Mac. "Even in 2000, the idea that people would be painting works to be bought by the National Gallery of Australia would have seemed impossible. Graffiti by definition is artwork on the street that is uninvited. But if it includes the aesthetic use of symbols, images and/or words, and if the main purpose is to transmit an idea or a feeling, then by its very nature it has to be art - unless it's selling something other than itself, and then it's advertising."

Mac says that what distinguishes graffiti from other art movements is that it's carried out by people who aren't necessarily trained practitioners, often because they're so young. And it's different from movements such as fauvisim or cubism, which had use-by dates, he adds. Graffiti, because it's both illegal and ephemeral, is constantly reinventing itself.

"Graffiti artists experiment and borrow from the culture's past and present. It's a completely different beast," he says. And by continually ordering graffiti to be painted over, the authorities face "the law of unintended consequences", he adds, since they invariably end up with the least interesting street art. Good artists aren't going to waste time on a substantial artwork if they know it may only last a few hours.

As to whether graffiti is art or a crime, he replies that if the intention of someone who goes out to graffiti is not to produce art, "then it's not art".

Constantly, while working on this story, I hear that the sheer size of the sides of buildings is a huge attraction to graffiti artists. No one can afford to buy canvases that big, I'm told. Some artists also claim that it's the streets themselves that trigger wilder, more original work than the graffiti artists would otherwise create if they were painting for mainstream art galleries (the flip side to this argument, of course, is that a lot of people claiming to be graffiti artists have no talent and would never get their work hung in galleries).

THERE'S NO DOUBT ABOUT THE STUNNING arrogance of those graffiti artists who believe all property, including private homes, is fair game. Imposing their own taste on other people would be decried as a fascist act if the tables were turned.

Robert Cripp is a Melbourne businessman who runs the Guildford Lane Gallery in a city warehouse that doubles as his private residence. He is constantly cleaning graffiti "art" off the walls of his building, and finds claims by graffiti practitioners that passers-by enjoy their work infuriating.

"Enjoyment is in the eye of the beholder," he retorts. "Graffiti is noticed, but it's not necessarily supported, so it's another form of pollution ... It's not that they have this monstrous need to express, because what do they actually express? Very few people understand what they're expressing."

The council has allowed graffiti to happen in certain city lanes, he goes on, and that's fine. "If the property owners in those [areas] support it, then great. But why don't they stay there?"

They don't, comments Scott Hilditch, CEO and founder of Melbourne-based anti-graffiti organisation Graffiti Hurts, because street permits for legal graffiti simply encourage the spread of street art to local neighbourhoods.

Veteran Melbourne art dealer John Buckley, a close friend of the late Keith Haring, the celebrated New York artist whose graffiti-style art made him a colt figure in the '80s, is cautious about absolutist opinions. I ask him whether graffiti on private property becomes less vandalistic if it's a great piece of art. "There's no definite position on that," he replies. "Yes, they've created a wonderful piece of art and, yes, somebody is very angry that it's been done on the side of their house. There is sheer vandalism, which is purely subversive without the art. I get it on my front door. It's about 'F... you, you've got a bright-blue door, you live in a place that looks as if it might have cost a few dollars."

However, Buckley adds, "I do see the kind of graffiti that's going on in laneways around Melbourne as having some kind of value ... and the recognition of it as being part of the resurgence of the CBD as a kind of European, liveable city. But that's quite distinct from the kids who skateboard around the suburbs, scribbling on walls."

Sirum, for one, likes graffiti that can totally change an environment and give it "a new lease of life", no matter for how short a time - on a crumbling wall that's due to be demolished, for instance. For the graffiti to work, though, he adds, it must have "elements of spontaneity".

"Graffiti works hand in hand with discarded or abandoned environments, due to the fact that it's an imperfect art form. As aerosols are the main medium we work with, a graffiti artist can manipulate any surface, no matter the obstacles, as you can simply paint over anything," he says.

"So an artist can work a piece around a corner, up and over a drainpipe, across a broken window with an old beer bottle in front of it as if it was a perfectly smooth concrete wall. Or it might simply be the challenge of painting over an awkward surface and making discarded objects disappear."

"Detch", 32, a Sydney graffiti artist, whom I talk to in a Bondi pub, risked arrest many times, painting the walls of train corridors, and the trains themselves, often when they were idle in the train yards. "There's something about urban squalor and derelict places when nobody's around - something totally surreal about being on your own in the middle of the train tracks at 2am with no light, or if there's a bit of a moon, getting totally into the work," he says.

Detch makes a living from commercial art these days, but he also defends graffiti as an art form. "Making a shadow so that it looks as if it's jumping off a wall - that's not easy with spray-paint," he remarks.

SIX YEARS AGO, SOMEONE STARTED PAINTING little boats at ankle height in the gutters of Darlinghurst in inner-city Sydney. The artist's identity was a mystery, but local residents loved the work. Rainy days provided a magical effect, as gondolas and junks, stencilled in black and white, "sailed" down Darlinghurst Road and into Liverpool Street. An art crime?

The artist was Mini Graff, 34, the street artist also responsible for the "running couple" graffiti that appears intermittently on walls around Darlinghurst and Kings Cross. She runs her own graphic-design business, working out of an old warehouse (not in Darlinghurst), and says she tries to produce street art "that people will enjoy and the council won't notice"

In December five years ago, Graff covered the wall of a commercial building in Darlinghurst with a "flutter" of three-dimensional butterflies, hand-cut and painted from "post-consumer plastic", with tiny lights behind some of them. There were 300 butterflies in all.

A local resident dragged a sofa into the street and left it there, so people could enjoy the "show" in the evenings. The city council removed the illegal display within a month (70 butterflies were lost before that to souvenir hunters).

A frustrated Graff says it's the different and the original that enhance the streets of great cities. in Paris or Madrid or Mexico City, people sitting on a sofa in a street, "watching' a wall of butterflies, would become an enduring memory for overseas visitors. The constant talk about reinvigorating Sydney's inner city seems to be more about creating centres of commercialism, she adds.

"I think if you're driving on the Great Ocean Road in Victoria or through the Hunter Valley in NSW, there's no place for fluorescent anything" says Sydney graffiti artist "SMC (3)", who's 34. "But I think the culture of the city is asking for street art. People live, work and commute in the streets."

The interaction between artist and place is appreciated by many "consumers" as well as practitioners of graffiti, believes Christine Dew, author of the 2007 book Uncommissioned Art: An A-Z of Australian Graffiti. "It's the immediacy, urgency and sense of location that you cannot get in most art galleries," she tells me. "It's about seeing graffiti that helps you map your place, your train trip to work, your walk to the bus stop. As well, a lot of graffiti is enhanced by the surfaces it's painted on, or the location it's in. A lot of graffiti is good, site-specific art."

Dew, who lives in Brisbane, became intrigued by graffiti when she was still living in inner-city Melbourne and working as a senior lecturer in gender studies at La Trobe University. She began looking more closely at the way some graffiti had been affected by the weather, or had interacted with the surface on which it had been painted - on ageing red brick, for example. She also started reading some of the scrawled graffiti messages and began to see them as "conversations going on in public places," in a similar way to internet chat rooms.

"I was a teenager in the '70s, and we used to get onto crossed phone lines and talk to strangers. This was nothing new," she says. "And it's a kind of marking of public space, [which] architects, advertisers, engineers, graffiti artists all do. Who is the person who should say what public space should look like? People can't agree on public art that has been commissioned by a reputable body. No one gets a say in the advertising that goes up everywhere. Most of us don't get a say when it comes to architecture or streetscaping. I thought it was interesting that a lot of anger gets directed at graffiti."

Dew also points out that fine-art galleries and advertisers have begun to borrow from the graffiti tradition to give their commercial activities some "highly marketable street credibility". She suggests that the "illegal placement" of graffiti in the public domain is central to its meaning.

"For many people, it is the illegality that makes graffiti ugly; for others, this may be precisely the attraction of the form. Graffiti artists often play along with such meanings ... Inside a gallery, where art belongs, a 'messy', chaotic or obscure aesthetic might be prized as the highest expression of modernism or postmodernism, and readable images might be dismissed as outdated appeals to realism," she writes in her book.

On the street, this order is reversed, with many people preferring the clean lines and readable images of stencil art to the "obscure calligraphy of subway-style graffiti" she says during our chat.

Whether or not the spirit of street art is diminished when graffiti artists exhibit their work in art galleries (which also means the artists are becoming part of the economy of the art gallery business) is a complex question, agrees Sydney graffiti researcher Cara Cumming. Cumming has curated graffiti-art exhibitions locally and internationally and is focusing on cross-cultural graffiti for her masters degree in art curatorship with the University of Sydney.

"On one hand, yes, [the spirit] is contradicted, because artwork for exhibition is solicited - therefore that element of graffiti being a freer form of expression is lost. It's not illegal if it's painted for exhibition," she says. But she then points out that the famous British graffiti artist Banksy subverted this idea in 2004 when he hung a caricature of the Mona Lisa, with a yellow smiley face, in the Louvre, in Paris. "It was still illegal, but the work was gazed at by gallery goers for several hours before someone realised it wasn't meant to be there.'

THE SAME QUESTION TAXES TUGI BALOG. A charming, slightly enigmatic man of 50, who left his native Croatia for Australia in 1988, he walks a fine line between the different factions in graffiti culture. For the past four years, Balog, who once studied archaeology, has invited local and overseas graffiti artists to paint the walls of the gritty inner-city Sydney laneway where he runs a graphic art framing business.

The Mays Lane Art Project is free for anyone to view, at all hours. Every month, a different artist paints a large, removable panel on the side of Balog's business. A selection from Balog's collection of these works recently went on exhibition at Carriage Works, the arts centre that now operates in the former Eveleigh rail yards, close to Redfern.

"From a romantic angle, it would be right not to intervene [in the work of graffiti artists] in any way," he comments. Balog is determined to document as much good street art as possible, since its ephemeral nature means that much of it is lost.

The May's Lane Street Art Retrospective is packed on opening night. A large crowd mills around the vast foyer at CarriageWorks, drawn to artworks that seem to explode with energy and which are, by turn, bold, humorous, mystifying and unsettling. Hanging at the highest point, facing the foyer entrance, a giant green comic-book-style demonic face with extremely white teeth - unnervingly white teeth - painted by an artist called "Kerup", seems ready to devour us all.

Writer: Nikki Barrowclough


Pictures: (clocwise from top) a paste-up by "kirpy" at Flinders Street Station in Melbourne; the opening night of the May's Lane Street Art Retrospective in March; stencil artist Mini Graff and one of her "running couple" works.