Sunday, November 16, 2014

Dallas considers opening levees to invited graffiti

Dallas has been tepidly experimenting with the idea of "free walls" for graffiti artists (see prior Grits coverage) to divert them from private property, reported the Dallas News (Nov. 15), but the real game changer could come from a different government source. The story concluded:
The Police Department’s experience with graffiti is one that Trinity Watershed Management has been watching closely as it seeks ways to mitigate vandalism on the bridges over the river, said Dhruv Pandya, the watershed’s assistant director.

Street artists were allowed to paint the underside of the Commerce Street bridge during the city’s last Trinity River Wind Festival. For Pandya, that has meant a slight change in attitude as he looks at ways to allow street painting legally — and to keep it only where it’s allowed.

“We have 30 miles of levees and we have concrete structures,” he said, “and there’s nothing but gray.”
Bingo! Grits has been advocating just such an approach: allowing graff artists to decorate blank portions of the urban landscape, both publicly owned sites like drainage culverts, highway supports, and even the backs of street signs and, where permission can be obtained, on private property in the vein of the Cardiff Empty Walls festival. (I'd also like to see arts re-emphasized in schools, but that's another subject.) By comparison, the cost-benefit analysis underlying an enforcement-only, arrest-and-incarcerate model makes no sense at all. Remove the emotionalism and tribal disdain and there are ways to manage this millennia-old problem that address concerns of property owners, but it won't be resolved by cops, courts or ever-more criminal penalty enhancements that never worked before and won't work now.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

A nice, but misguided idea. Possibly a notion of the reasons graffiti vandalism and gang tagging takes place might help to see the light. Offering up city surfaces for "artists" will certainly get those areas covered with artwork (and promptly covered by other graffiti), but will absolutely NOT stop gangs from pi$$ing on their turf and other budding artists from painting closer to their own homes. Marking territory is not about art, and random displays of visual artistry can not be contained to designated areas. I'm just sayin'........

Anonymous said...

Because a segment won't cooperate is no reason to reject the work product of those who will.

I for one (an engineer NOT an artest) would hope the program adopts a business model that would employ high definition digital cameras to record the work when it is fresh as years from now we as a society will regret the lack of such foresight.

Anonymous said...

Looks like we are trying to bribe the thug bangers. Or, are we just caving in?

Gritsforbreakfast said...

@2:28, re: "Marking territory is not about art, and random displays of visual artistry can not be contained to designated areas."

Three responses: 1) this suggestion won't affect those "marking territory." For them, rapid cleanup and (vanishingly rare) arrests are the only valid responses.

2) graff can never be eliminated, only managed (it predates Christianity, for heaven's sake), and if providing free walls diverts a fraction to invited spaces, the time spent tagging there is tagging time NOT spent on private property. The criminal justice system clearly doesn't have tools to address graff effectively. What's the argument against supplementing it with an approach that reduces uninvited graff at the margins?

Finally, 3) re: "budding artists ... painting closer to their own homes," that's the argument for expanding invited spaces to blank structures (drainage culverts, highway underpasses, the backs of signage, etc.) throughout the city instead of just one area. In Europe, experiments with free walls found graff writing on streets to and from the site. But if the nearest site is the nearest drainage culvert, and the stuff you put there doesn't get immediately buffed while uninvited work does, over time IMO you'll see behaviors shift.

@8:22, one can't solve a problem if you don't understand it so pretending all graff is from gangbangers basically guarantees it won't be stopped. There are different types of graff writers with different motives and a variety of incentives and disincentives that can make people stop (though seldom do those include arrest and incarceration, since graff has among the lowest clearance rates of all crimes). If you think the status quo is working, great. In Dallas they don't and thus are willing to try other tools.

Anonymous said...

I like your idea of
"...allowing graff artists to decorate blank portions of the urban landscape, both publicly owned sites like drainage culverts, highway supports, and even the backs of street signs and, where permission can be obtained, on private property..."

Let's give them a free hand at re-designing our urban landscape. We will probably share their vision.

Gritsforbreakfast said...

@7:27, what's so visually appealing about a plain drainage culvert? Why would you care?