Cyber Poems

Ask anyone their view on graffiti, and you’ll get opinions of love and hatred : some individuals see it as vandalism, others a subtle artform. On the one hand, graffiti artists like Banksy have turned graffiti into an aesthetic pleasure, using stencils to create technically difficult graphics loaded with a nuanced political point. This sort of graffiti was likely to get trendy with both the masses and the artworld : visually pleasing and intellectually satisfying. This sort of graffiti is even purchased as graffiti prints, and hung in suburban households and corporate meeting rooms.

All the same, what about the other end of the spectrum? - the tagger, the gangbanger variety - this is just seen as vandalism, an offence perpetrated by the untalented. But this is to misinterpret graffiti as purely an art form. To lots of people, it’s not only an artform, but a means to put your stamp on a district, or even two fingers up at society : anti-establishment, anti-social, even anti-art.

Spraying has invariably been a clandestine pursuit, although the effects are public. The targeted audience is oftentimes unidentified. Is it for a competing gang? A communication to a single person? To the public at large? Perhaps it’s simply uncalled-for and out of nothing else to do.

Whatever the causes, there seems to be some kind of enduring demand to spray on walls. Some town councils have admitted that graffiti isn’t going to go away, so they’ve marked off areas where graffiti is permitted - usually derelict areas, but now and again more civic zones like temporary boarding surrounding inner city construction sites.