Melbourne's graffiti scene has given the otherwise unassuming city worldwide street cred. Allister Hayman explores the city's colorful laneways and asks the artists how this reputation came about.HOSIER lane in central Melbourne is alive with colour. It's a visual storm. Stencils, tags, bombs and pasted-up prints plaster walls that seem to drip with paint. Young Japanese tourists stand agape. There's nothing like this in Tokyo.
They take pictures of the street art as a group of high school students arrive.
"That one's a Ha Ha," one student says, shorts slung low, obviously excited. "And that's a Phibs."
The schoolboys know the artist's names because in Melbourne graffiti has become something more than vandalism. Unlike other cities, where graffiti apes the bold, impenetrably abstract forms of New York's "wild style," Melbourne's walls are covered with original stencil works and pasted-up prints.
The world's most well-known street artist, theUK's Banksy, has described Melbourne as the stencil capital of the world and many of city's artists are known through their exposure on the streets, the internet, and an increasing number of gallery shows.
Street art features in Melbourne's latest tourism campaign, and even the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) has got in on the act, acquiring an extensive collection of works on paper, which will be shown in a stand-alone exhibition in 2008.
Andrew Mac, Director of City Lights Gallery in central Melbourne, says the city has had a vibrant graffiti scene since the early eighties, but it was not until the late nineties that street art began to take on unique forms. With PCs, image manipulation software, printers, scanners and the internet all readily available, potential artists had all the tools necessary to create detailed, layered stencils and large printed images on paper. And with a rise in political consciousness after September 11 2001, people took to graffiti as a form of expression. "From 2000 to 2002 the scene grew from about two dozen people to more than 100 doing it on an ongoing basis," Mac says. "And of those about 60 or so were hardcore with a style you could identify and who were working and developing that style."
City Lights Gallery - a series of light boxes erected on the walls of two inner city laneways - was established in the late nineties as an inner city public art space. Initially launched with council funding, the gallery has been independent since 2000 and was a huge catalyst for the growth of the street art scene.The early shows were collaborative efforts by a who's who of Melbourne street art, with works by Markster, Perks, Phibs, Sync, Dlux, Reka, James Dodd, Civil and Ha Ha. The sites also functioned as hives of street art activity, with the surrounding walls painted-up. "The shows were a massive incentive for putting stuff up and having people go and view it," artist James Dodd recalls. "The openings were big piss-ups in the laneways, with new stuff all over the walls, and an artist got a show and got paid for it."
Melbourne's often maligned urban grid, with its rigid system of laneways, proved to be a great incubator for the scene. Artist's cutting their first stencils could literally disappear down a laneway and spray layered stencils undisturbed. With the graffiti hidden from the public eye, the council seemed unconcerned about buffing it off. The scene grew rapidly as a diverse bunch of like-minded artists met at events like the 'Empty Shows': when artists painted-up abandoned buildings and held impromptu 'openings' that attracted hundreds of people. Johnston Street, remained 'open' as a public art space for several months before the building was demolished. "They were just so exciting to do and to visit," James Dodd recalls. "Everybody started to meet everybody else and the scene just grew and grew."
By late 2003 Melbourne had become a global 'hotspot' for street art, attracting international artists, including the surreptitious Banksy, who came and left in secret, but not without daubing his characteristic stenciled rats all over the city walls.
One of Melbourne's best known and most prolific artists, Regan Tamanui, or Ha Ha, has a pokey studio three floors above the graffiti covered wall of Hosier Lane. Originally from New Zealand, Tamanui, 34, had a background in oil painting before he began spraying one-layer stencils on Melbourne's streets in late 2000. Choosing the name Ha Ha from The Simpsons character Muntz's malicious laugh, Regan became well known for his profligacy and repetition: some nights he would take two spray cans and not stop until both were empty, finishing with 15 to 20 fresh stencils.
Artists who went bombing with him found by the time they'd finished their first stencil, Regan had painted five. "One just wasn't enough," he says, "I had to do more and more - plus you make a statement if you do more." Starting out spraying robots - "They're a comment on the repetitive nature of our lives" – Tamanui developed his technique and began exploring imagery from the 24-hour mass-media cycle.
But he's best known for his use of iconic Australian imagery, most famously, Ned Kelly, who can be seen stenciled, sometimes alone, sometimes in repetition, throughout Melbourne. "Ned's an image that appeals to a wide audience and connects to as many people as possible," Tamanui says. He also identifies with the myth of Australia's criminal hero. "He was an outlaw and, in a way, street artists are outlaws too."Sprayed onto thick blocks of wood, Tamanui's latest stencils hang on the walls of his studio: an eclectic mix of Australian iconography, from AFL players to koalas and wombats. "That one," he says, gesturing to a stencil of footy players in a huddle, "is 33 layers".
A stencil begins when an image is broken down into shaded layers using photoshop or tracing paper. Each layer is cut out of a sheet of card or acetate and is sprayed onto the wall separately, starting with the lightest colour before moving to the darker details. Most stencils are one to five layers - 33-layered stencils are extraordinary.
But are they art?
Dr Chris McAuliffe, Director of The Ian Potter Museum of Art, is adamant stencil art is art – and not in the way a Beatles' song is art because the lyrics are poetic, but Art with a capital A. "Stencil art fulfills all the primary conditions of art," McAuliffe says. "And because the artists are seeking a signature style, there is an opportunity to make judgments on the relative skill, complexity and achievement."
Roger Butler, senior curator of the Australian Prints and Drawings section at the NGA, agrees. Butler has been responsible for the acquisition of around 500 stencil works on paper and says they're an extension of a long tradition of activist poster art and print-making.
"There's no real question they're artists," he says. "They put stencils up in what they call street galleries, which is different to graffiti or tagging where they seem to just put it up anywhere.""People would just drop in," he recalls. "The laneway became a public gallery with people putting up whatever they liked. Everyone was experimenting."
Vexta, 24, one of the few female artists in the scene, moved to Melbourne from Sydney four years ago and became involved in stencil art through Blender. Along with Tamanui, she is now considered one of the forms leading exponents.
Unlike bombing and tagging, which is more about the self – about putting up a name- Vexta says stencil art tries to engage with the public. She says placement is integral to stencil art and is highly selective about the walls she paints on. "If it adds aesthetically to a wall I'll do a piece. But you need to think if what you are putting up is adding to it or not."
Vexta says stencil art also questions ownership. Walls are private property, she argues, but by facing the public sphere they impact upon pedestrians more than those who work within them. "In a visual way," she asks, "doesn't the person on the street also partly own that wall?"
The laneway beneath the now defunct Blender studios off Franklin Street was one such gallery. Tamanui was living in the studios and says they became the creative home for the street art community.
Art is also, of course, in the eye of the beholder, and for some, like Steve Beardon, founder of Residents Against Graffiti Everywhere, all graffiti is vandalism. "It's a senseless illegal activity and a blight on our suburbs," he says. "The difference between art and vandalism is permission."
But for Vexta and Tamanui – who say they've never been caught - graffiti has been a platform to launch a career. Both have had several gallery shows this year and both are now practicing as full-time artists.
Melbourne's street art has also become a significant tourist attraction. Visitors can take walking tours of the laneways and their photos, which capture the evolution of the walls, circulate on the internet through sites like Wooster Collective and Stencil Revolution.
Andrew Mac says the scene has been a catalyst for the redevelopment of the city's forgotten laneways. As the laneways got painted-up, foot traffic increased and retailers arrived. Before long, bars, cafes, restaurants, clubs and galleries opened in unused spaces with cheap overheads and, suddenly, the central city had been transformed.
The vibrancy of the scene goes someway towards explaining the city council's attitude. As Mac says, the council is caught in a difficult position. "Street art gives the city a reputation as a creative hotspot, like Barcelona, Berlin and Sao Paulo, so the city gets free press and the council understand that, but they also want to be seen to be doing some thing to eradicate it or at least control it."In 2000, the council tried to introduce a zero-tolerance policy and sent letters to businesses ordering them to remove graffiti from their buildings or else the council would do it for them - and send owners half the bill. Mac says it was a disaster. "It upset a lot of business owners, not necessarily because they wanted to keep the graffiti, but they certainly didn't like the council coming and painting over their property."
Since then Mac says the council has looked the other way in the inner city, focusing instead on the train lines. "There was a lot said before the Commonwealth Games how all the graffiti was going to be buffed but really, apart from a few areas around the train tracks, they left most of the city alone."
But now the council is introducing a permit system for graffiti – or what it calls "wall art." As Councilor David Wilson explains: "Graffiti is tagging or one off stencils done without permission and is illegal, and 'wall art' has a planning permit process."
Wilson says the council recognizes the value of street art – "some of it's fantastic," he says - but stresses it needs to be controlled. Without a permit, he says, graffiti will be cleaned off. "We're not saying there'll be high tolerance zones, we're saying there has got to be a planning permit."
To apply for a permit an artist or building owner will have to provide the council with an outline of the piece that they want to put up or preserve. "The process will be based on content, not artistic merit," Wilson says, "and we won't allow something that is racist or sexist." Though Wilson says political works will be allowed.
Andrew Mac says a voluptuous nude on Routledge Place has already been censored. After receiving a call from the council about a "pornographic" image he went to look at the piece with a council representative."I actually knew who had done it and it was by a woman, and I tried to explain that it was perhaps a celebration of female sexuality. While we were looking at it three tourists came by and took photos."
Mac believes the council regulation could destroy the scene.
"The best things happen in this city when through accident or neglect, the council remains ignorant of what's going on, but now they want to have their cake and eat it. They'll take away what the public appreciates about graffiti, which is it's unmediated, and they'll kill it. It'll become murals."
Vexta is more diplomatic. She says council support through commissioned pieces could be good for the artists but says anything like zero-tolerance will fail. "They've tried that before and it didn't work." She stresses that it's difficult to separate 'good' forms of street art from bad, and says the scene is more organic than the council's definition allows. "Some people start out in tagging and move into bigger pieces and then some do stenciling. Some do it all. I'm not against tagging at all. I think some tags are really beautiful."
The schoolboys on Hosier Lane are oblivious to the debates. For them, Phibs, Vexta, Ha Ha et al are heroes, and they've already got their aerosol paints.
A version of this article first appeared in the 2006/07 Summer edition of PAVEMENT magazine. Photos courtesy of the author and Andrew Mac at Until Never Gallery
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