| |
| |
 |
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
Melbourne. Australia's most multi-cultural city. The gourmet capital of the land down under. Home to the Great Ocean Road and the Great Alpine Road. Site of a covert guerilla street war fought out nightly in the heart of the city by young men and women known only by pseudonyms, cloaked in mystery?
It is Melbourne's last great urban secret. The war used to be fought against city councils, police and angry shop and home owners. But now, it's mainly a fight against each other - for real estate, for that latest dash of colour, for space on already crowded walls. It's become an international phenomenon. Bright young recruits from all over the world descend on the city to participate in this cat-and-mouse game of strikes and withdrawal, the latest being this month for the Melbourne Graffiti Festival.
This is the graffiti war. It is a war being fought over Melbourne's urban streetscapes, with aerosol cans and imagination.
Think graffiti and the first thought that comes to mind is a bunch of lazy young street punks with nothing else left to do crudely and mindlessly vandalising property.
Well, think again. The National Trust of Victoria is thinking of listing some of Melbourne's most intensely graffitied laneways as heritage sites. This means that they can't be tampered with, just like historic buildings and monuments. Galleries from around the world are paying for that bit of wall, or at least for the artists that are painting those walls - no one has figured out yet how to own graffiti on a wall of a building that belongs to someone else.
Graffiti is in. Graffiti is ART with a capital A - street art to be more precise. And Melbourne is an international capital for it.
It all started in the 1970s, with graffiti being used as a form of low-cost publicity for rock bands and other fringe groups. Then, flyers were either surreptitiously posted or stencilled on walls.
Graffiti also has deep roots in political protest at a time when the Internet was not available. It proved to be a cheap and effective way of getting a message to people on the street.
International graffiti artist Banksy's iconic rats are stunning symbolic images of the graffiti artist as provocateur, as the unwanted voice of the marginalised parachuting into mainstream consciousness, questioning our accepted values.
At its most complex, graffiti can present thoughtful, sophisticated commentary and critique of culture. And lest you think graffiti is all about street grunge and hiphop, Melbourne contains rare gems of street art that incorporate local aboriginally-inspired motifs and even references to the classical pieces of Renaissance Europe.
The simplest form of graffiti is just a tag - where an artist simply sprays her name or identifier on a wall. But even these tags can morph in the hands of a dedicated artist into murals of personality.
And then there are paste-ups where an artist prepares the work away from the scene and then sticks it on a wall. And of course there are the murals, whole walls painstakingly covered with paint. Some of the largest pieces cover entire shop fronts.
And graffiti isn't necessarily just painted or sprayed. Graffiti artists are creating installations from material found on site, art made of bolts, string, discarded wooden panels, steel cans.
Local jeweller Susan G spent her 50th birthday on a blistery winter's afternoon doing a walking graffiti tour of Melbourne with a group of her closest friends. Asked what prompted her to do this, she said: "We are surrounded by art every day. We walk past it. But most times, we don't notice what is right in front of us. And it's just so wonderful to see all the creativity, the energy here in the street where everything has the potential to be turned into something beautiful. It's wonderful."
Graffiti has always been about individualism - the rugged resourceful artist exercising her creativity with whatever can be found in the urban landscape, working against the pressure of time so that she is not discovered. And the sheer joy of this appears in work that is vivid, rich and always just that little bit out there.
The hotbed of the graffiti movement in Melbourne is a series of alleyways in the inner city - Caledonian Lane, Hosier Lane, ACDC Lane. But graffiti can be found pretty much anywhere in the city for anyone who looks closely enough. Gentrified inner city suburbs such as Fitzroy and Brunswick are laden with walls.
But perhaps the best way to get started is to get on a train and simply look out the window. It's there. It's everywhere. Art from a guerilla war, waged with aerosol cans.
- TODAY/rs
|
