Outsider Art, Back In The Day
One day, I imagine there’ll be a glossy hard-cover book published of the great memes. Hell, even the great Pepes would be a volume on its own. And don’t forget the Wojaks or Norf FCs. I hope someone’s onto that task.
I have this one at home, and it covers the graffiti of 1980s-early 90s Melbourne. The documenting of how the scene emerged and developed, and the clashes with authority are pretty fascinating. I was once neighbours with one of the guys from this era, and he has a tag featured in the back-pages of this book. He related to me about how alot of the people who were tracked down in the making of this book were very reluctant to talk about their work. They’d gone from teenage truants, vandals and crooks to respectable people with respectable jobs and families, and didn’t want to revisit their dodgy past. He himself was by that point an IT guy, but still doing pieces in his own garage which, fittingly, was made of red-bricks.
There’s some great photo snaps of the old Melbourne cityscape, which was essentially the cityscape of my early childhood as I remember it. I remember the height of bombing on the old wooden-veneer tram and train fleets. Going onto a tram and seeing black ink everywhere. I remember paper-punched yellow tickets, gumby conductors and the little workstations they had (which i got to sit in if unattended), the 3-zone system, the angular metro map, the windows you could open yourself and subsequent window-opening wars you’d have with other passengers sitting opposite you. (It was passive-aggressive, but you knew when someone was pissed).
There was a massive problem with train-surfing and these kids being at risk of injury. One of the ones featured in the book has no legs. I remember when a kid died and there was a memorial on the bridge near my local station, attended by his friends.
This book talks about these days and covers the development of urban grafitti tagging. Melbourne naturally borrowed it from its fellow decrepit prog urban hellhole, New York. A couple of the more prominent names are still around. Hugh Dunit with his giant Pinocchio is still visible behind the Corner Hotel as far as Im aware.
Quite alot of the sites they spray-painted on are now gone. There were a lot more unsupervised brick walls in those days, no cameras, no electrical fencing. The city was emptier and less densely peopled. And that was exacerbated by the time of the 90s recession. But growing up in the inner east, I remember the Belgrave/Lilydale line-to-cbd corridors looking a lot like this. I recently also spoke to an acquaintance who knew PT staff of this era and said they found their lives pretty depressing, and suggested this stuff was a major burden on their existence. Noted. That being said, a lot of the photos in the book were taken by a train driver who was a fan of the work. Cuts both ways, hard to split the middle.
There’s one bloke who was a prominent Greek-Australian grafitti artist, Constance Zikos, who seems to have later on moved to doing post-modern sculptures that sit in leading established galleries. Talk about a journey. From outside vandal to inside elite, within a couple of decades. I think I liked his graffiti pieces more, I just can’t relate to PoMo very well. I hope he does some spray-paint work again… in a legit and law-abiding way.
….By which I mean, I respect visual creativity. But also oppose senseless vandalism. My own fence got vandalised last night and VicPol are predictably hopeless about solving the crime, (All bureaucracy, no actual policing). But then, on the flip-side of that contention, last year I saw a guy making a piece, layer by layer, on the edge of a storm-water drain near where I work. He didn’t see me, but it was interesting to see him work his craft over several days (layer by layer, as i do at home), and I thought the end result looked pretty good. Wheras my fence is already pretty nice and, moreover, it’s my place dammit! The stormwater drain is pretty damn ugly, out of the way, and has been blighted with tags for God knows how long. We all know some civic structures are so brutally ugly that “the vandals are just finishing the job” (borrowed line that off PJW who took it off some British historian i don’t know).
This is Victoria. Everyone’s a criminal no matter what they do, but no actual criminals are really caught or penalised anymore. Least of all the ones in the Labor Party. The law regards a vandal as a vandal but puts varying levels of pathetically low effort into bringing them to justice. So I hope the vandals have a code of honour and can discern what should and shouldn’t be “worked” on.
Kings Way: The Beginnings of Australian Graffiti. By Duro Cubrilo, Karl Stamer and Martin Harvey. Originally published 2009.