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An eastside water tank becomes a canvas for local taggers
like Aimlow (above) seeking to "bring some color" into the
city.
To
avoid detection, graffiti artists do most of their work
after dark, but this spot is so remote that Zae and Aimlow
are willing to risk painting in the daytime.
City graffiti czar Hugh McDowell pursues a three-pronged
strategy to combat the scourge of
scribbling:
eradication,
education and enforcement.
Graffiti
artists often discard the standard spray-can nozzles and
use mail-order tips--known as fat caps, skinnies and softballs--
to produce
special effects.
This
year the
city will spend
at least $2
million cleaning up graffiti.
The
lawyer for David L. Smith, the New Jersey programmer accused
of releasing the Melissa virus onto the Internet, likened
the creator of the virus to a graffiti artist.
This
year the
United States will spend at least $12 billion on graffiti
removal, according to Artie Sutcliffe of the Jersey City
Incinerator Authority.
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The
Writing on the Wall: Sara Fisher's
forced apology
A list of Pro- and Anti-Graffiti links
.
In the daylight hours he is a typical 19-year-old, partial
to baggy jeans and wry asides. He makes $6.50 an hour pushing
shopping carts at a local supermarket. He lives with several
other guys in a nondescript house in Southeast Portland--pretty
well kept for a bachelor pad--with a chessboard on the coffee
table and a couple of dead plants in the picture window. He
listens to hip-hop and watches The Simpsons. More clean-cut
than most of his peers, he doesn't drink, smoke or do drugs.
Tattoos and earrings are not his style.
But several nights a week, long after the sun has set behind
the West Hills, he dons his jacket and his trusty backpack,
steps outside his house and becomes someone else. On the
street, his name is Zae. And on the street, his name is
everywhere.
Walk around the Hawthorne neighborhood and you'll see it
daubed on walls, rooftops, street signs and doorways, scrawled
on dumpsters and garbage cans, scratched into the glass
of bus shelters, a bewildering one-word mantra. "If there's
a big, ugly concrete wall, I'm going to paint on it," he
says.
Zae runs with a crew known as the Hand of Doom, or HOD,
and according to the city's Graffiti Task Force, he is one
of the most prolific taggers in Portland, consistently making
the "Top 10 Most Wanted Taggers" list.
For the past five years, a loose-knit guerrilla army of
somewhere between 50 and 150 taggers has been responsible
for what Hugh McDowell, the city's graffiti-prevention coordinator,
refers to as an "explosion" of graffiti. And for the past
five years, the city has fought to contain that explosion,
waging a relentless war against the scribbling on its streets.
In March alone, cleaning crews painted over more than 9,000
individual tags.
Last month, this simmering conflict bubbled over when Sara
Fisher, a Reed College psychology major, was convicted for
painting "MAUL" on walls, signs and utility boxes throughout
the city.
The news that one of Portland's most notorious taggers
turned out to be a student at one of the nation's most prestigious--and
expensive--institutions of higher learning unleashed a wave
of outrage. Radio call-in shows crackled with indignation,
including the inevitable calls for mandatory jail time.
When Fisher appeared at a Pearl District community meeting
earlier this month to make a public apology, one neighbor
asked her if she thought the death penalty was an appropriate
punishment for taggers. The question was met with scattered
applause.
This fury at graffiti masks a deeper sense of bewilderment,
however. Why would someone--anyone--go around writing stuff
on walls? The answer, surprisingly, has little to do with
poverty, gangs or political protest. Graffiti is about something
much more difficult to define. It is about anonymity and
narcissism. It is about affluent white kids searching for
a way out of the suffocating tedium of adolescence. And
most of all, it is about an issue as old as the city itself--who
controls the streets.
Graffiti may not be the oldest profession, but if the cave
paintings of Lascaux are anything to go by, it has a venerable
pedigree. Visitors to the catacombs of Rome can see obscene
Latin graffiti (which tour guides will translate for an
extra fee), and it's probably safe to assume that ancient
wall scribes were no more popular with magistrates than
their modern counterparts are. Throughout history, graffiti
has been used for all sorts of purposes: to mark territory,
protest injustice, brag about sexual exploits, hurl insults
or simply make a joke (such as the humorous warning scrawled
on condom machines across the world: "This gum
tastes awful").
But the vast majority of graffiti in Portland belongs to
another tradition entirely. Known as tagging, it exploded
into public view in New York City in 1971, when a young
messenger scrawled Taki 183, his name and street, all over
the Wall Street district, where he worked. "From there,
it just sort of took off," says graffiti expert Artie Sutcliffe,
special-projects coordinator for the Jersey City Incinerator
Authority. "It turned into a big deal."
Today, the urge to write on walls has spawned an entire
industry, complete with art shows, glossy magazines, T-shirts
and, inevitably, Web sites, where writers trade photos and
insults. Graffiti is gaining cachet in the art world, says
Hallie Kelly, a student at Pacific Northwest College of
Art: "It's a huge art movement."
It's also a crime. In Oregon, graffiti can be a Class A
misdemeanor or a Class C felony, depending on the circumstances,
with a maximum penalty of five years' imprisonment and/or
a $100,000 fine. In reality, offenders seldom spend time
behind bars, usually performing community service instead.
Either way, the penalties have done little to deter taggers,
who insist they are not intimidated by the threat of fines
or even jail.
This scofflaw attitude is all the more surprising given
the profile of the average tagger. Contrary to popular belief,
most graffiti in Portland is not caused by ethnic gangs,
according to graffiti czar McDowell. He says the culprits
are usually white boys, aged 12-22, who come from middle-
to upper-middle-class backgrounds.
Zae and his cohorts are typical examples. "The majority
of us have jobs," says Aimlow, 19, who works at a local
supermarket and goes to church on Sundays. "We pay rent,
taxes, just like anyone else."
True enough, many taggers look like ordinary teenagers
on the outside. But in their own minds, they are more like
comic-book characters--respectable citizens by day, daredevil
outlaws by night, with code names like Creep, Loser, Spoil,
Nepoe, Ming, Siren and Vicious, plotting surgical strikes
and bombing raids in a desperate insurgency against The
Machine.
It's a glorious spring afternoon, and Zae and Aimlow are
cruising past the endless procession of strip malls, car
lots, gas stations and fast-food restaurants on Southeast
82nd Avenue. "This area sucks," says Zae. "It's just dull."
As we turn down a side street, Aimlow points to the featureless
walls of the dentists' offices and low-income apartments.
"There's nothing going on out here," he says. "There's no
anything." Yes, they have decided, the city is ugly. And
they are on a mission to beautify it.
The road winds up a steep hill, leaving the concrete ribbon
of the highway far below. At the summit, birds are twittering
and bees are weaving through the brambles. Scrambling along
a trail through the trees, their swollen backpacks clinking
in time with their footsteps, Zae and Aimlow squeeze through
a hole in a chain-link fence and stride down a sloping path
to their destination: a 500,000-gallon water tank, 30 feet
high and 50 feet across, hidden from public view by the
green forest and a million tons of rock. Every square inch
from the ground to a height of about 7 feet is covered in
spray paint.
Zae unzips his backpack, slaps on a plastic glove, stands
back and surveys his canvas. He shakes a can of blue Painter's
Touch, pops on a tip and outlines a fluid trapezoid in short,
sure bursts. The sharp tang of aerosol paint cuts the air.
At first, the evolving image is as indecipherable as a wiring
diagram. Then you squint your eyes and begin to see the
outline of a majuscule, flourished with "offshoots" like
the illuminated uncials of a medieval manuscript, whose
very identity is almost choked by the chaotic profusion
of accents and curlicues.
Zae is painting a "piece," short for masterpiece, considered
the highest form of graffiti. Because pieces take hours
to complete, most are done in remote areas to minimize the
chance of getting caught. Writers, as they like to call
themselves, often prepare for weeks beforehand by drawing
in sketchbooks and seeking out the perfect spot. Watching
a full-fledged piece emerge from the hiss and rattle of
spray cans, you can't help feeling that there is
an artistic component to what they do.
At the other end of the spectrum from the piece is the
tag, a single, fluid motion completed in seconds. To the
untrained eye, tagging is the visual equivalent of white
noise, an indecipherable chaos of squiggles, ugly and even
menacing. But to exponents like Aimlow and Zae, tagging
is a beautiful, expressive art form--the spray-can equivalent
of a pencil sketch or haiku. "Some people's tags can just
take your breath away," says Aimlow.
You can argue all night about the aesthetics of a squiggle.
But there's a side of tagging that has nothing to do with
art. "It's really like a team sport," says Joker, 30, a
window-display designer and former tagger who now prefers
to concentrate on full-scale pieces. "It's a competition
to see who can get their name up, who can be the biggest,
who can be the best."
This aspect of graffiti perhaps best explains its appeal
to teenage boys. To them, graffiti is a sort of urban war
game, complete with an intricate set of unwritten rules
(avoid churches, houses and historical monuments) but not
always played according to those rules. The goal is simply
to spread the word, and the playing board encompasses every
vertical surface in the city, including walls, windows,
doors, signs, signposts, rocks, trees and even bushes.
Graffiti was once regarded as little more than a nuisance,
an irritating if harmless symptom of urban blight. That
changed in 1982, when two sociologists, James Wilson and
George Kelling, wrote a seminal article in The Atlantic
Monthly describing a phenomenon known as the broken-window
syndrome: If a window in a building is broken and left unrepaired,
all the rest of the windows will soon be broken, whether
the neighborhood is an inner-city slum or a tony suburb.
When a community allows small signs of disorder to persist,
the authors argued, it sends a signal: No one cares. Behaviors
such as aggressive panhandling, public drunkenness and graffiti
constitute a breakdown of public order, reinforce the sense
that the streets belong to gangs and criminals, and feed
the emotion that will destroy a community faster than anything
else: fear.
"When I walk out of my house and I see graffiti on the
street, I feel like I've been invaded," says Mayor Vera
Katz. "It's a violation of my space and a violation of my
neighborhood."
Many citizens worry that tagging is a sign that gangs are
taking over their neighborhoods, says Katz. Even though
such concern might be unfounded, she adds, the activity
"causes tremendous fear and anxiety."
To illustrate this point, graffiti foe McDowell cites the
case of an elderly woman who called him last month and said
she was now afraid to leave her house because of the graffiti
in her neighborhood. "This is a woman who has lived in her
community for 40 years," McDowell says. "That's pathetic."
In 1994 Mayor Katz convened a citywide task force to combat
the rising tide of graffiti. The city stepped up its cleaning
crews and installed a hot line. Last year, the council revised
an ordinance requiring building owners to remove graffiti
from exterior surfaces and declared the central eastside,
by far the worst hit neighborhood in the city, a "no tolerance"
zone. Finally, the council hired McDowell to coordinate
the efforts.
From an anonymous cubicle in the basement of City Hall,
McDowell, a whimsical, soft-spoken former social-service
administrator and landscaper, directs the city's war on
graffiti with almost military precision. The no-tolerance
zone is subdivided into 14 grids, prioritized according
to daily reports of activity. Every morning, McDowell's
crews go out to erase the previous night's tagging runs,
with the goal of removing graffiti within 24 hours.
In the past 18 months, city crews have painted over more
than 129,000 square feet of graffiti--an area equivalent
to one and a half football fields. When they return to the
office, they log each tag and site into a database, enabling
the city to compile an up-to-the-minute list of hot spots
and frequent offenders. This year, the Office of Neighborhood
Involvement will spend $280,000 on graffiti abatement. "However
persistent [the taggers] are, we have to be more persistent,"
McDowell says.
This effort doesn't impress the spray-paint contingent
too much. "Graffiti will not stop," says Optek, a 22-year-old
college student who goes out tagging once or twice a week.
"If they paint over me, I just do another one."
Asked to justify tagging, graffiti artists usually invoke
the mantle of political protest. "A lot of people do it
in reaction to being bombarded by corporate advertising,"
says Optek.
Others defend their work by attacking the very concept
of private property. "I really don't like the monetary system,"
Zae says. "It ruins people's minds. If you get into it,
we don't even own this land. We stole it. It's not ours.
They say we're stealing from them by tagging on their buildings.
They go so crazy over a little piece of paper. It's paper,
man. Cities are naked. They're ugly. They're dismal....
There's the artistic part. Then there's a whole 'nother
half that's, like, 'I don't like this country.' I'm not
going to defend myself. I'm partly in the system in order
to live. But you can still defy it."
Apart from their views on graffiti, however, many taggers
seem utterly unconcerned about specific political issues.
While activists last week marched through the streets of
Portland to protest the war in Kosovo, Zae maintained a
studied indifference. "I try not to pay attention," he said.
"Seems like a media frenzy."
This combination of apathy and narcissism infuriates traditional
activists. In a recent interview with WW, Todd Gitlin,
the New York University professor, author, cultural critic
and veteran political maverick, referred to taggers as "shriekers
of the raw ego" and denounced their "pathetic insistence
that 'I am the center of the world--I deface, therefore
I am.'"
Taggers say that critics like Gitlin have missed the point.
With graffiti, they say, the medium is the message: The
important thing is the act of writing on walls, not the
content of what is written. The act itself, they argue,
is what frightens the establishment. "They're afraid of
losing their power, losing control," says Aimlow. "They
want to claim the streets."
In a way, they are right. In the United States, it is axiomatic
that public space is dominated by individuals and institutions
with money and power, many of them eager to propagate their
own names--consider Trump Tower or the Rockefeller Center,
even the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall.
For taggers, graffiti is a way to even the score, a subversive
shortcut to fame, or at least infamy, a way to shout their
message to the world. What a shame that their message, when
decoded, should be so full of sound and fury yet signify
so little.
The
Writing on the Wall
It was a surreal scene, to say the least. Two weeks ago,
in the dining area of a local fast-food restaurant, Sara
Fisher stood before the respectable burghers of the Hawthorne
Boulevard Business Association and did her best to apologize.
Maintaining a dancer's poise under the glare of the TV cameras,
Fisher said she was sorry for scrawling her tag all over
their neighborhood. "I'm here today to apologize to all
of you," she said, an incongruous smile plastered to her
lips like a Halloween mustache. "I am very regretful. I'm
truly sorry for the nuisance I've caused."
The meeting was one of four public apologies organized
by the district attorney as part of Fisher's sentence. In
return for pleading guilty to 20 counts of criminal mischief,
she also had to submit to 30 days of electronic monitoring,
perform 400 hours of community service, pay a $3,000 fine,
make a $5,000 contribution to the city's anti-graffiti trust
fund, remain on probation for a year and perhaps undergo
psychological evaluation.
The meetings proved less cathartic than one might have
hoped, however. Time and again, Fisher's muddled explanation
for her own acts--an idealistic philosophy about bringing
art to the street combined with a desire to belong to the
community of taggers--left neighbors shaking their heads.
"I don't think you get it," graphic designer Alyce Cornyn-Selby
told Fisher. "I don't see any sincerity."
In a brief subsequent interview with WW, Fisher
said the smile was due to stress and that her apology was
"definitely not" phony. But at the same time, she remained
unwilling to recant her former activity. Indeed, just five
days before her public apology, she organized an art exhibit
at 17 Nautical Miles, an all-ages club near Reed College,
where she and several other graffiti artists scrawled pieces
and tags all over the walls.
Fisher is something of a conundrum. One one hand, she is
a ballet dancer, hailing from the affluent village of South
Orange, N.J., and attends Reed, where tuition currently
runs at $22,960 a year. On the other, she works as a manager
of the campus cafe, earning $500 a month while writing her
senior thesis on an obscure corner of psychology, the interaction
of imagination and memory. Friends describe her as popular,
artistic and introspective. Yet despite acknowledging the
frustration it causes, she has so far refused to denounce
tagging--or even to pledge that she won't do it again.
As WW went to press, it appeared that Fisher might
face disciplinary action at Reed. Jerry Shurman, associate
professor of mathematics, told WW he was considering
bringing a complaint against Fisher before the college's
judicial board. "Teen alienation is nothing new," Shurman
said. "But a 21-year-old on the verge of graduating from
college should know better." --CL
PRO-GRAFFITI WEB SITES:
Art Crimes: www.graffiti.org
Rose City Graff: www.geocities.com/SoHo/Workshop/1400/
Silence in Shadows: www.geocities.com/SoHo/3235/
ANTI-GRAFFITI WEB SITES:
Anti-Graffiti: www.dougweb.com/pgraf.html
Graffiti Control: mrsc-web.mrsc.org/pubsafe/graffiti/GRAFFITI.HTM
Salem Prevention: oregonlink.com/graffiti
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Willamette Week | originally
published April 21,
1999 |
