Showing posts with label Perth Street Art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Perth Street Art. Show all posts

11/04/2012

Musing About: Perth Street Art-2 (Perth WA)

1.  It might be because I live close to the CBD and I move in central suburbs, but I rarely find proper graffiti beyond name tagging and stickers. I grew up in a place that hidden corners and empty walls are covered by graffiti, from ejaculating penises in areas where teens meet, to love declarations, unveiling secrets, insults, squatters promotion political anti-system tagging, colourful murals and everything in between - in any semi-hidden corner in the city centre or suburbs. In Perth, I am mostly used to wonderful murals in the lanes of the city or in abandoned empty walls, artistic tagging, and stickers. I am sure there are lot of dirty secrets written somewhere, but they are not around my suburb. Please point us to the dirty secrets.
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2. Graffiti and vandalism are sometimes associated in the mind of our politicians and of many citizens. Some TV shows and a.c.a.s give the same bad name to destroyers of public furniture, buses and trains and those who do artistic tagging, graffiti and/or painting. Still, overall, there is a respect towards wall painting and street art in this city. So much so that the City of Perth and the City of Subiaco are sponsoring educational projects of street art targeting the youth and Perth lanes - Food Chain is an incredible initiative. The City of Subiaco was also behind the painting of the Gold Lane. Of course, if a government or institution promotes something, you are not going to find anything subversive. Still, it is great.

Education Institutions are also acting as sponsors and paying for murals on their campuses. An exhibition at the Central Institute of Technology in Northbridge called Street Art 2012, was held between 23-28th July 2012, sponsored by HepatitisWA with works, street-art style, showcasing "young people's creative interpretation of the key health messages associated with viral hepatitis". The guys were selected from several youth agencies and selected to raise awareness of hepatitis. Well, if that is the case why not doing Street Art properly in the streets where, using abandoned walls, where the message can be seen by hundreds the people and be called street art? Street Art on canvases indoors. Truly Odd!  

3. We do not have guerrillas cleaning up viciously and obsessively in Perth, but mostly people admiring the work of the artists or ignoring it. Yes, there are examples of cleaning guerrillas, like in my attached photos, but I have also seen cleaning of graffiti on murals painted by streets artists! I love oxymorons! I also have seem certain sticker areas being continuously cleaned and repeated in a loop of eternal resistance.


4. One thinks of New York, Tokyo, Berlin, or Manchester as heavens for Street Art painters and aficionados. Still, at least at present, a more more vibrant street art scene, and more in connection with Perth, is happening elsewhere. Just to put an example close to our shores, I am thinking of  the Malay city of Melaka and its wonderful riverside, and the street art  murals covering night clubs and businesses non stop, spreading to the walls of new buildings. I found street art in Kuala Lumpur incredible, too. I thought that Perth and Melaka share the idea and feeling that a city and its public and business spaces can be beautiful canvases of creativity, and that they look much better painted than in blank, grey or bare bricks. Still, Melaka's murals are quintessentially Malay, as they use motifs (traditions, myths, and ways of life) and colours that perfectly represent who they are. Our murals, in that regards, do not reflect a clear Australian or Perthian identity, or they have it in the fact that they are artistically individualistic.

5. I had this conversation with an art gallery owner. I told him, "why don't you call an street artist to paint your [ugly] building with a funky mural?" His answer was that there is no street art in Perth, and those making it in Perth act as if they were the last big thing. Yes, ugliness can be subversive and even provocative, but I disagree with his statement. Yes, we do not see any Banksy here, or subversive street art, although isolated examples do exist (I am thinking on those stencil posters glued on the walls after the death of Osama Bin Laden, quickly removed or sprayed over). 

Perth Street Art do exist and is indeed very artistic. Not as spontaneous, sub-culture, protest, provocative, and subversive as in other societies and countries. However, there is a reason for that. We live in a rich peaceful country with a democracy, where people live their lives as they want, choose their religion, politic and even their sexual orientation. Therefore, their ways of expression are never going to be the same as those of artists and people who live in societies where there are marked class differences, political oppression, racial and sexual extermination or alienation, extreme poverty, widespread corruption, or simply a big economical crisis. Perhaps our city is too bourgeois to have radical street art, or politically or socially mindful street art, but our street art is just artistic.  Is that bad?

On the other hand the sticker street art is quite personal, provocative, cute, daring, and eclectic, a bit funkier. Electric switch boxes, poles, and any type of traffic signs are spread throughout the city. There are a few people who have been doing so in the city and have just opened a collective exhibit in Perth Art Gallery Kurb. The girl behind the bunny stickers is not only a lovely girl, but a talented young artist with nice pieces for sale at ridiculous prices. She is talented and nice. Good start girl! I got my two stickers in my visit. Yoohoo.

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6. Art, by definition, is subversion, reflection, transformation, subconscious approximation, cheekiness, provocation, a comment on the needs, hopes and illusions of the human soul and the society we live in. A window to or tap into the personal and collective subconscious. Not just a way of individual expression. In that regard, I miss from the Perth Art scene alternative conscious oriented street art focusing on our crap, as we have lots of it, too: immigrant alienation, refugee rejection, Aboriginal exclusion, cultural racism and biases, land and real state speculation, uranium sale, the projected pipe from the Kimberly, domestic violence, drunk violence, just to mention a few. I do not see them artistically explored on the walls of the city. It puzzles me that Aborigines and Aboriginal themes and issues are almost absent from our walls. I do not understand either why beautiful cannot be subversive, mindful and socially conscious. I do not expect Government sponsored Street Art to do this sort of thing, but I do expect non-commissioned pieces to do so. It is just a wish.

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A few useful links for Street Art Lovers Below


10/28/2012

Fremantle Council's Anti-Graffiti New Policies

A full page of Friday's Western Australian newspaper was devoted to the new anti-graffiti campaign started by the Fremantle City Council in which everything that is not Art or artistic will be removed. A step ahead with regards to the current erase-all policy of the Council. The Article, among other things, says:

"Any work considered potentially interesting will be referred to other staff, with the city's public art officer and director of community services making the ultimate decision." 


It worries me that an administrative institution considers itself good enough to discriminate Art from non-Art based on the initial evaluation of a group of cleaners or Art Department officers. Unless a group of artists is walking the streets and/or part of the department, the news should be taken with caution. Australia is full, I mean full, of examples of idiotic senseless policies by City Councils. If we knew who these final-decision people are, we might feel more at ease with this new policy and join the clapping party.

Let's be clear. 

I hate my taxes paying for the indiscriminate destruction of private and public property. I hate buses or trains being scratched, painted or destroyed with ugly scrawls and insults, vandalised by young kids who use their spray cans to kill their time or get a thrill by doing something illegal. I hate the front of a household being painted with a scrawl or tag. There are plenty of lanes, back walls, car parks, and abandoned sites where they could do so easily and will save us the expenses of the cleaning up. I do not support or encourage any sort of vandalism.

Still, there are many forms and styles of graffiti. You cannot put all in the same bucket based on the opinion of a group of cleaners or public officers whose knowledge of Art is unknown or dubious. And, to be honest, if the graffiti is not damaging anybody's house or it is not especially ugly, why remove it? It would be cheaper for the tax payer to leave it there, no?

Plenty of "illegal" tagging, sticks and stencils in our State are -I'd dare to say- quite artistic and philosophical, as they are the way in which their creators show their inner world, wishes, frustrations and/or creative side and connect with us. It is a way of saying, I do exist and my opinion also counts and of the readers to share the same feelings or just reflect on what it is said.


If Councils regulate Art, Art is going to become a sheep within a herd, and nothing truly creative or slightly critical will come out. If Councils invest themselves with the power to decide what Art is or should be, they are killing its very core - Art is challenging, provocative, thoughtful and magical, no matter how beautiful it is. Look at Picasso's work. Not all of it is beautiful, easy to look at, or approachable to the vulgus; still, he was the most remarkable artist of the 20th century. If he was painting his work on the walls today, we would find plenty of people, and I mean plenty, that would think that it needs to be removed because it is non-artistic and ugly. If you are a fan of Picasso, think, for example, about Pollock or Rothko?

I am convinced that anti-graffiti campaigns actually encourage illegal graffiti and tagging, sticking and painting. Councils should be diverting the cleaning money to implement policies that let the youth use their cans in ways and places that suit their needs. I think that would be cheaper than cleaning up. So many millions spent on erasing instead of creating something.

Graffiti is a valid form of expression. It shows the pulse of a city, of a generation, and of a Culture. That is why there are remakable differences between the Street Art and graffiti you see in Granada (Spain), Malaka (Malaysia) or Perth WA, just to mention three very different places.

There is an empty wall close to my place, the lateral wall of a building hosting several businesses. A freaking ugly huge wall that I pass by every day to always tell myself that it needs of something painted on it. Last week, however, the wall was fully covered by a sentence -written in white- expressing a deep sense of social alienation. I guess, it was written by an Aborigine or an Immigrant. Or so I thought. I thought that that was subversive, in a good way, and something that lived up the ugly wall. The graffiti has barely lasted a week, now dormant beneath a layer of ugly brown paint that does not make anything lively. 

Many graffiti vigilantes -City Councils included- look with scary eyes at the world and see scary things everywhere, so they need to cover their eyes and ears from anything that subverts their pink unrealistic view of our community. Who is cleaning their way of looking?

8/17/2012

Perth Street Art - 1 (Perth WA)


In our contemporary world, Art has become a Mass product, another commodity that needs to be sold and marketed, usually by middlemen, not the artists themselves, and bought by people who buy Art as it was a Gucci bag or an Alfa-Romeo -as a sign of status- or as an investment, in the best case as a whim.  Artists have to make a living out of their talent, but Art, the way I see it, the way I like it, is free in conception and genesis (no ties but you and your creative world) and gratis. In that regard, Street Art is what Art should be, especially when it is non-commissioned.

Perth Street Art is beautiful, colourful and very artistic. Our Street Art is not very subversive in its visual language as it moves around well-established formats and ways of expression. It is polished in forms and structure, rarely dirty, and it reflects the artistic tendencies in vogue among paper illustrators and comic book illustrators, just expressed on big walls. Our Street Art is not subversive in its message either, and it is more an artistic individual expression than a political or social way of protest. We are not San Francisco or New York, Tokyo, Amsterdam, Granada, or Barcelona, Melaka or Kuala Lumpur. Our street art is a reflection of what this country and this city is. We do not have the same culture, the same problems, issues, or lifestyle of those cities, our street art, per force, is going to be different.

There are a few regular artists who have left and leave their imprint on the walls of the city, with a cult following fan-base: Creepy, Stormie Mills, Rough, TwoOne, Beastman, Numskull, Robert Jenkins, Yok, Kid Zoom, Ryan Boserio, Daek, Hurben, Timothy Rollin, blackgreyviolet, Jeto, ROA, among others, which are talented artists painting on wall but exhibited authors too.  Some of them are locals, some others are visitors from the eastern states or from overseas.
 
There is a great deal of commissioned street art in Perth, mostly sponsored by government, city councils and Universities. However, non-commissioned pieces are spread in abandoned buildings, empty walls and public spaces throughout the city, some of them quite cute, artistic and even funny: murals, individual scenes, artistic tagging, simple tagging, stickers, and stencils can be found everywhere.

Business have also embraced Street Art as a way of cool, and they use themes and styles that suit the vibe, name or atmosphere of the place. It is a modern way of  patronage, of which Art History is full. On the other hand, movies have given an halo of funkiness and edge to street art, to the underground culture,  which is what many new places want to have because, well, Perth is not especially naughty for anything, but it is certainly becoming more edgy thanks to its Public Art. Examples can be found everywhere: The Flying Scotsman, Daily Planet, Lemon Lane, LTN - name it.

There are awesome murals in the Grand Theatre Lane, This Walk Talk and Wolf Lane (CBD), Street Art Gallery Building (Roe corner with Miligan St), Gold Lane (Off Rockeby St, Subiaco), various car parks and back streets in Northbridge and Highgate, some creative studios in North Perth an Northbridge, Collie St and Henderson St Mall (Fremantle), McGiver and Shenton Park's train Stations, Lemon Lane in Claremont, Williams Lane and LTN cafés walls. So many places all over Perth! Just open your eyes: Indoors, outdoors, on the roof, on the floor, on the wall, whatever, wherever, whenever.

I love illustration and magic worlds, I love comics and graphic arts, so I love Perth Street Art. What about graffiti?... 




  Two slideshows with commissioned and uncommissioned artwork

 
THE SECOND ONE