Beauty of stencil graffiti is in the eye of the beholder
Walking throughout the Grove/Goss area, it’s easy to notice that someone has been working on a new paint job for the city sidewalks. A rash of stencil graffiti has emerged there, and the blocks are speckled in some areas with myriad spray-painted caricatures and slogans.
“Graffiti is graffiti – it doesn’t matter if it’s stenciled or just sprayed,” said Julie Brooks, Boulder Police Department spokeswoman.
Not everyone feels that way, though. To some of the artists, the message behind the paint is the heart of the issue. However, for those who have to clean it up, the focus lies on whose property has been defaced and how to deter taggers in the future.
Felix Gallo is the Transportation and Utilities Maintenance Coordinator for the City of Boulder. It is his job to oversee the cleaning and removal of graffiti from city property, as well as to contact property owners when graffiti has shown up on private property.
“Across the U.S., you don’t see a lot of success in catching taggers,” Gallo said. “So the main deterrence is fast clean up. One of the rules of graffiti: the longer it lingers, the more artists will come. That works the other way, too. If someone tags something, and 24 hours later it’s gone, they’ll start thinking ‘What’s the point?'”
Gallo explained the method of graffiti monitoring and removal his team practices. One of his men makes the rounds daily, looking over more than 40 miles of bike paths and other public property in Boulder. Should the team find any graffiti on these grounds, they spray over it immediately, and the problem is solved. When it is private property that has been tagged, the process is a bit more complex.
In Boulder, the maintenance of a sidewalk is charged to the owner(s) of the house adjacent to it. Should graffiti appear on the sidewalk in front of a given house and be seen by Gallo or a member of his team, a report will be filed. This starts a 72-hour clock, the amount of time given to the homeowners in which to remove the graffiti. If they refuse, Gallo’s team will either remove it for them and send them the bill, or serve them with a summons to appear in court. Usually homeowners comply.
“Our method is pretty straightforward,” Gallo said. “Find who owns it, and make them clean it.”
Gallo explained that his team is very persistent in accomplishing this. Should paint appear on a cable junction box, they will call the cable company; if on a corner mailbox, the post office; a transformer, Excel; and so on.
Gallo’s office also keeps a detailed archive of the different tags reported. The reason for this, Gallo explained, is to create profiles for serial graffiti artists.
“That way, if the police catch a tagger in the act, we can just pull up his file and see that that same tag was reported twenty times across the city,” Gallo said. “This helps the police to determine how much community service to assign.”
Community service is one of the notions some taggers have in mind, as in the case of The Pink Guerilla Party, the name supplied by the artist interviewed for this story. He agreed to speak to The Campus Press on the condition of anonymity, which was granted as his is a unique perspective.
“Most of them (the stencils) pertain to gay rights activism; we have a gorilla for a mascot and we’ve borrowed the slogan “give me sodomy or give me death” from the performance artist Diamanda Galas,” The Pink Guerilla Party said. “We’ve also done a few supporting cognitive liberty/freedom of thought.”
He explained that he began stenciling about a year ago after an incident at a party.
“It began when someone broke my boyfriend’s nose at a party because they found out he was gay,” The Pink Guerilla Party said. “He wasn’t able to catch the person who did it and he never went to the papers because he worried that he would lose support from his family if they found out about his orientation. People have the impression that Boulder is a liberal and safe town, and it isn’t really. At night it can be a pretty aggressive and drunken place, and I know a lot of gay kids, even just unconventionally dressed kids, that have been harassed, beyond what’s reported in the papers.”
The Pink Guerilla Party’s graffiti is not only art, but also holds a deeper message for him.
“I wanted to do something that on the one hand would make those people feel safer, that they might look down and think, ‘that’s cool’ – and on the other hand I wanted to do something that would make the kind of person who would hurt another person because of their sexuality feel a little less comfortable living here,” he said.
The Pink Guerrilla Party makes his stencils out of cardboard and plastic transparency sheets, cutting the forms with an exacto-knife. He said that there are tutorials available on the Internet, and that the process is really quite simple. Tag spots are chosen based on the right mix of high visibility and low traffic. The Pink Guerilla Party has never been caught.
The Pink Guerilla Party feels that his graffiti is closer to art than vandalism.
“I think street art provides an opportunity to create, exhibit, and collaborate in a context that is nowhere near as dehumanizing and socially damaging as the routes currently open to ‘professional artists’,” he said. “Art should be the manufacturing of culture and a conversation everyone can take part in – not a commodity.galleries and museums become like coffins.”
Contact Campus Press Staff Writer Andrew Frankel at andrew.frankel@thecampuspress.com
