‘Stop calling it graffiti’: The visual rhetoric of contamination,consumption and colonization

Abstract

Spanish

French

Municipal graffiti abatement approaches in North America have shaped the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves upon these city walls. This article examines how the City of Ottawa (Canada) manages graffiti and murals. In doing so, I demonstrate how those management practices connect to longstanding tensions about unauthorized markings in public places and the criminalization of style. Drawing from extensive ongoing ethnographic research on graffiti and the moral and legal regulation of urban performances, I reveal the aesthetics of security which fosters a visual logic of so-called ‘crime prevention,’ state-sanctioned redactions and racialized dispossession of phrasing and text. To close, I consider how urban art regimes are implicated in the colonizing of public spaces, while also considering the liberating possibilities of graffiti.

Keywords

Dramatism graffiti Kenneth Burke municipal governance pandemic culture risk urban art

Introduction

In a meeting between Crime Prevention Ottawa (CPO) and members of Ottawa’s graffiti and urban art community, the bylaw officer impatiently offered this advice: ‘Just stop calling it graffiti!’ The meeting was called to inform artists who paint in the stylized script style of graffiti, and whose income relied on CPO funding, of new artistic guidelines. Most notably, the program would no longer permit Hip Hop graffiti (see Figure 2 for an example). The artists asked the panel to consider less restrictive art directives to no avail. CPO relies on City of Ottawa funding and mural guidelines; as such, all art programs were now expected to come in line with the city’s graffiti-abatement policies: ‘We will only support defensible art,’ and in the City of Ottawa, graffiti is not a defensible art form.

The City of Ottawa takes a conservative approach to urban art, in large part due to legislation created during a politically reactive ‘War on Graffiti’, which took place nearly two decades prior. Before 2001, the city hosted a thriving graffiti community and some of Canada’s most accomplished artists. Figure 1 captures Evoke’s (Patrick Thompson) early work. Today he lives and works in Toronto with his partner Alexa Hatanaka, whose collaborations have been recognized by Canadian Art Magazine as among the best in Canada (Cooley and Sanader, 2016). In recalling his beginnings in Ottawa, Thompson expresses discomfort with the label graffiti writer because he finds the label stigmatizing. Moreover, he adds, committing to a single style would limit him creatively (Rahn, 2002). My point here, is that graffiti, and the people who participate in its production, are far more dynamic and complex than the logic of the city’s bylaws affords. These bylaws, and their long-term negative impacts, are outdated, inflexible remnants of an ill conceived ‘War on Graffiti.’

Figure 1.

Evoke’s early Ottawa work.

The City of Ottawa’s approach to graffiti is not unique. Other authors have noted similar abstinence-based graffiti legislation, critiquing these approaches as unjust and short sighted (Avramidis and Tsilimpounidi, 2016; Ferrell and Weide, 2010; Halsey and Young, 2002; Iveson, 2010; Kramer, 2010; Low and Iveson, 2016; McAuliffe, 2015; Ross, 2016). An overarching concern with the privatization of public space is a key component to research on urban displacement and gentrification (Burnett, 2014; Dunster, 2015; Madsen, 2015; Patch, 2004). Graffiti is rarely spoken about in public discourse as a normal element of urban living; instead it is worried about as a signal for something sinister, which demands legal intervention (Ferrell et al., 2005; Plenty and Sundell, 2015). However, urban murals do not seem to illicit such anxieties, even though most people would be unable to distinguish graffiti from murals, or the people who produce such art forms.

Urban murals are a popular idea in economic development strategies in North American cities (Koster and Lemelin, 2009; Koster and Randall, 2005; Skinner and Jolliffe, 2017; Sofield et al., 2017; Widdis, 2000). Canadian cities, such as Montreal and Moncton, have hosted mural festivals that attract globally renowned urban and graffiti artists who adorn buildings in spectacular murals. Artists who participate are able to make a living painting in the international mural festival circuit. Indeed, this suggests walls are not simply passive elements in cities, they matter. Walls of buildings communicate something about the people who live here, and the power dynamics that shape our everyday world (Soja, 1996). This article will illuminate how the wide appeal for municipalities to participate in hosting mural-based tourism events lies, at least in part, in an underlying ‘crime prevention’ logic that typically circulates in explanations that justify a pro-mural/anti-graffiti stance. In this way, the article assumes that urban spaces are relationally constituted (Fuller and Löw, 2017).

I use the term aesthetics of security to describe an overarching narrative about risk, contamination and public health, which I noticed circulating in the early stages of my research, which reflects earlier scholarly contributions regarding the political nature of style (Ferrell, 1996; Kramer, 2010; Snyder, 2016; Young, 2010). In what is to follow, I will contextualize the problem of graffiti in Ottawa, the problem of graffiti historically, and discuss how Kenneth Burke’s social theories about communication will provide the analytical tools to reveal the aesthetics of security in one government town. As a project of visual sociology, I employ images to demonstrate how the walls of this national capital city communicate a dramatization about people and the art that they create. In doing so, the images illuminate four key components endemic to the aesthetics of security: the visual authority of crime prevention; the co-option of artists into crime fighters; the visual colonization of public space; and the proliferation of redaction murals. I conclude the article with a brief discussion regarding the impact aesthetics of security has had on the visibility of the most vulnerable populations in this city and make suggestions in the service of working towards creating more equitable civic spaces.

Setting the scene: Graffiti abatement in Ottawa

In 2001, the newly amalgamated City of Ottawa entered a cultural battle initiated by one city councilor. Councilor Alex Cullen, seeking re-election into the new municipal government, campaigned on fears about urban creep in the face of an unpopular provincially mandated amalgamation. The councilor offered a solution to these fears: a ‘War with Graffiti’ (Barthel, 2002: 110). It is important to note that 89% of Ottawa’s population lives in the suburbs; further, the average household income in the City of Ottawa is at least 20,000 CAD above the national average (Government of Canada, 2017). The relative economic stability of many citizens in Ottawa, however, does not extend to Black and Indigenous people (Government of Canada, 2017). The reality of geographical disparity is important because city councilors are given mandates from their largely suburban, private property-centric constituents. Suburban interests shape municipal votes on issues of public health and accessibility that primarily impact those few who live in the urban core. To illustrate, suburban councilors unanimously voted to withdraw funding from a successful harm reduction drug treatment program in 2007 (Reevely, 2007); similar responses to safe injection sites remain nearly a decade later (Egan, 2015).

Mural regulation in Ottawa falls under the Permanent Signs and Advertising on Private Property bylaw (2016-326) and the Graffiti Management bylaw (2008-01). Here, art and commercial advertising are treated as if they were one and the same. Art, according to the City of Ottawa, should be evaluated in terms of its compliance to advertising and commercial purposes. It is through this lens that the municipality maintains its authority to target and redact graffiti. The City of Ottawa’s Mural Review Process states:

… murals cannot include text that advertises a specific business or product. Additionally, trademarked symbols, text and business or artists’ names are not permitted in any mural in the City. One exception is the one-square metre at the bottom of a mural where artist name(s) as well as sponsors may be listed. (City of Ottawa, 2001a)

Further this, the Graffiti Management bylaw extends the restriction beyond the material and into the ideological realm by making it illegal for building owners to have graffiti on their structures without permission (City of Ottawa, 2001a). The only permanent structures where graffiti is legally permitted are the two sanctioned legal walls: House of PainT and The Tech Wall. Figure 2 illustrates Hip Hop graffiti typically produced at the House of PainT wall, which features some of Ottawa’s most prestigious graffiti writers (shown here are artists: Prank, Never and Hiero). Given that Ottawa is one of the largest cities in Canada, geographically, this lack of permitted space is miserly, to say the least. Of course, while the lack of space afforded to graffiti writers is a clear example of systemic exclusionary practices, I would like to draw the reader’s attention to the wider impact of the underlying ideological war that informs such silences.

Figure 2.

Graffiti by Prank, Never and Hiero on the House of PainT.

Vandalism and graffiti: The antecedents of urban murals

The push to eradicate graffiti symbolically and materially is not unlike similar attempts in other North American and Australian cities in the growing wake of two major events: the popularity of Hip Hop graffiti in the late 1970s, and Kelling and Wilson’s police-centric Broken Windows hypothesis in the 1980s (Halsey and Young, 2002; McAuliffe and Iveson, 2011; Rahn, 2002; Young, 2010). The conceptualization of graffiti as a key symptom of urban decline aligns with cultural anxieties associated with the emergence of neoliberal governance strategies (Kramer, 2016). I have similarly located these anxieties circulating in the rhetoric of the social science research on graffiti from 1950 to the present (Landry, 2017a). Prior to the 1960s, archeological research investigated graffito, single etchings upon all manner of surfaces, as evidence of everyday living: affirmation of language use, belief systems, political discourse, religious rituals, movement of communities and complex social roles. Graffito was taken up in the social sciences ontologically as a normal part of everyday living; to make sense of such markings, one needed to read the symbols in relation to the culture, time and their location in relation to other symbols (Ferrell and Weide, 2010). The logic guiding the interpretation of graffito assumed, as symbolic interactionism does, signs only make sense in relation to the context in which they are embedded (Burke, 1973; Geertz, 1973).

By 1952, The American Journal of Archeology defined markings made on a cultural artifact by someone other than the original artist as vandalism (Blegen et al., 1952). Coming from archeologists, who would presumably be aware of graffito as a normal element in civic life, this moral phrasing is striking. Vandalism comes from the term Vandals, Germanic peoples who are believed to have invaded Rome in 455 CE (Clover, 1973). Vandalism, against this backdrop, implies a willful and morally objectionable destruction of buildings and culture, by way of invasion. By 1967, the social science research community adopts the term graffiti (a homogenizing aggregate term for graffito) to denote a symptom of delinquency, and as a justification for rehabilitation regimes. By 1969, graffiti is written about as an object of law, regardless of discipline or epistemology (Landry, 2017a). This shift in talking about graffiti is connected to professionalization, as well as institutional changes in academia, peer review, publishing and research funding: a complex history that deserves more attention than can be tended to here, but has been addressed more broadly in terms of disciplinary practice elsewhere (Bourdieu, 2004; Chan and Bennett Moses, 2015; Chapelle, 2014; Hannah-Moffat, 2011; Parys, 2014; Shore, 2010; Young, 2011). The trajectory of this thinking about graffiti manifests in Ottawa’s graffiti policy, which rhetorically authorizes the municipality to criminalize a style of art, based on commercial worth. Graffiti is formally defined by the municipality as any writing or markings made without permission; this permission is at the pleasure of the state, however, not the preference of individuals who may quite like the look of uninvited art in their alleyway. More importantly, graffiti is paired synonymously with vandalism, thus framing it as a legal problem – an invasion of the marketplace – rather than an aesthetic preference (Ottawa Police Services, 2017).

The legal term vandalism assumes that the morally proper state of any object is its original condition. If Veblen was correct in his 1925 observations about the social performance of class and privilege through conspicuous consumption, this ideological shift away from graffito makes sense. Cultural capital and lifestyle are performed not simply by spending well beyond one’s needs; one demonstrates wealth and authority through wastefulness. Luxury is communicated in the authority one holds to destroy property, or not (Veblen, 1925). Ottawa’s current regulation of urban art is tethered to a visual logic of class that presumes it is better when objects (or surfaces) do not illustrate practical or common use. Ergo, to appear economically prosperous, the city should appear relatively unlived in and, ironically, wasted.

It would be overly simplistic, however, to suggest that moral regimes of urban art are simply all about class. There is growing agreement among critical scholars that land use regulations, such as zoning practices and bylaws, are increasingly the way in which municipalities regulate moral behaviors of the homeless (O’Grady and Greene, 2003; Valverde, 2006; Walby and Lippert, 2012), sex workers (Bruckert and Dufresne, 2002), skateboarders (Howell, 2008), buskers (Kaul, 2014) and so on. Further, urban planning and land use strategies at the municipal level are informed by less consistent trade-based knowledges of real estate development boards and Business Improvement Associations (BIAs) (Valverde, 2011). This makes for both contentious and collaborative working agreements among key stakeholders. The City of Ottawa’s approach to managing graffiti certainly mirrors these complex relationships, whereby property developers and BIAs work with Ottawa Police Services to determine what kind of art is appropriate for each neighborhood, or, said another way, whose voice will be heard. Nevertheless, graffiti and mural bylaws stand as a point of contention for landlords and artists who have been professionally impacted by these laws in negative ways (Lofaro, 2013).

Curiously, all parties seem to agree that murals prevent crime and graffiti spreads crime, a common claim that comes up in newspapers, artist mural applications, council minutes and newspaper articles in Ottawa. There is a large body of questionable graffiti prevention research tied to supporting anti-graffiti/pro-mural programs, in which municipalities invest heavily (Davis, 2008; Greenberg and Rohe, 1984; Nolan et al., 2004; Ross and Jang, 2000). This seems to persist despite substantial research that effectively challenges the idea that ‘murals prevent graffiti’ (Austin and Sanders, 2007; Craw et al., 2006). Both sanctioned murals and legal graffiti walls merely displace unauthorized markings or art, which is a common critique of environmental crime design and Broken Windows policies in general (Jefferson, 2016; Sharp-Grier and Martin, 2016; Wicherts and Bakker, 2013).

Dramaturgy: Illuminating the performance of moral order

While largely missed by contemporary sociologists, Kenneth Burke stands as a foundational thinker for contemporary sociological theories about social order and framing (Duncan, 1962, 1969; Goffman, 1959; Mills, 1959). Burke’s dramatism moves beyond the application of theater metaphors by providing a framework that is sensitive to the political and historical contexts through which the ideological performance of meaningful human action appears natural (Manheim and Overington, 1987; Overington, 1977). The production of art is shaped in part by the ways in which art is talked about (Klostermann, 2016). Kenneth Burke’s work further reminds us that in any collectively produced text, such as a mural, the social critique can locate an assumed audience and the expected social order. If we change the way we talk, or paint or write a law, we can speak to a different kind of audience and create a different social order. Cultural texts (such as murals or bylaws) represent collective choices made in the process of production; in this sense, murals provide us with a window into what is sayable in these moral orders played out in our public spaces.

Burke’s analytical approach assumes language and rhetoric are fundamental to understanding social order and human behavior (Brummett, 2014: 179; Burke, 1973: 293–304). It is through language and symbolic systems of meaning where ‘associations between and among terms reveal much about associations between and among people’ (Cheney et al., 1999: 135). Explanations about this or that are taken by the audience as legitimate only insofar as they contain the implied relations of authority (Brummett, 2014; Cheney et al., 1999). Symbols link to some social orders and discourage others (Giddens, 2013); therefore, seeing how cultural texts make sense of some types of people and their place within a social order is one way to demystify social control.

Burke’s dramatism is a useful heuristic framework for interrogating any cooperatively produced communication, as well as individual vocabularies of motives, regardless of format or genre; while most communication scholars use Burke to demystify text-based discourse, there is nothing limiting us from using Burke to deconstruct visual, auditory and sense-based communication as well. My ethnographic research embraces this approach. Communication is a manifestation of explanations about moral orders, and ethnography allows us to examine how these moral orders are experienced and negotiated (Berg, 2007). Rhetorical analysis and ethnomethodological approaches assume that ‘knowledge is humanly produced’ (Gubrium and Holstein, 1997: 3). As such, they share an epistemology while shedding light on different aspects of social phenomena (Lincoln and Guba, 2013). My research strategy investigates how the stories we exchange in everyday interactions manifest materially and affect how we move through the world. My analysis also sheds light on narratives that resist such orders in the struggle for social change (Kenneth, 1973; Overington, 1977). My findings are based upon over seven years of ethnographic research into the regulation of urban art and performance in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, which includes participant observation, visual sociology and discourse analysis of mass media productions (websites, online news, social media), public meetings and public records. Further, my findings are informed by numerous conversations with artists, police officers, municipal councilors, landlords and other stakeholders within the urban art scene.

Visualizing risk and contamination

Empirical research on risk has largely been approached from a realist perspective, where factors that appear to contribute to risky outcomes are assessed to produce ways to prevent risk (Ekblom, 2017; Lupton, 2006). Sociological and cultural research on risk tends to focus on news reports, regulatory bodies and public news releases (Altheide, 2006, 2013; Ijaz et al., 2016; Reiner, 2002). Risk is also communicated through popular culture. Entertaining narratives connect the collective act of blaming with the function of justice to a very wide audience, which demands more critical attention (Byers and Johnson, 2009; Douglas and Douglas, 2013). Many popular productions of risks frame moral issues through a scientific lens, whereby the text offers up explanations that authorize consent for proposed solutions to risky situations (Douglas and Wildavsky, 1983). Individuals who pose a threat to the social order tend to be presented in relation to pollution or contamination (Douglas and Douglas, 2013; Lupton, 2006), which this article demonstrates. To be clear, I am not suggesting an anti-humanist syringe model approach to communication, whereby the audience merely consumes what is offered (Jewkes, 2015). I am concerned about the messages that are repeated, circulated, responded too, reoffered and recreated, but which also have a consistency that speaks to cultural values for particular times and places (Brummett, 2014; Overington, 1977) .

Symbolically, these anxieties about crime and graffiti communicate a wider cultural concern with ‘individual and collective embodied and affective experience of living under the constant awareness of, and threat of, global viral pandemic’ (Hamilton, 2017: 54). Gerlach and Hamilton (2014) alert us to a pandemic culture, a concept that I find useful in understanding the criminalization of one kind of art, while bestowing healing qualities to another. Note the way in which pathology is called upon to frame the risk posed by graffiti in the following excerpt. The rhetorical authority of science dramatizes and animates graffiti with an agency, through which risk travels virally:

When graffiti is left to spread in the community it can leave the impression that nobody cares or that nobody is in control. This is called the ‘Broken Window’ syndrome. When graffiti is allowed to spread it can harm economic development and can lead to further disorder and more significant crime to property. Unwanted graffiti defaces the surface of the vandalized property. Removal of graffiti is expensive and may cause damage to the original surface. (Ottawa Police Services, 2017)

This pandemic description is echoed in the CPO Youth Engagement Mural Program guidelines: graffiti ‘discourages business and shopping as it can be unsightly and can cause fear’ (Ottawa Police Services, 2017). When the (urban) body is at risk of infection, then vigilance in the fight towards eradication is a commitment that good citizens are called upon to make. Indeed, in this excerpt, graffiti is clearly framed in terms of an invasion of the marketplace.

The convergence of pathology and risk narratives perpetuates a sense of urgency to criminalize those who would paint in the style of graffiti. Moreover, it justifies a process of state-sanctioned redaction, in the interest of public health. Here, I employ the term redaction inspired by Linnemann’s (2016) analysis of black sites of inhumane imprisonment used and concealed by the Chicago Police in the name of public security. Redaction operates on both symbolic and material landscapes, creating unmemorialized scenes of state violence. The zero-tolerance approach to criminalizing and silencing artistic resistance has been widely adopted across North America and Australia, in large part due to the blurring ideas about war and policing post 9/11; militaristic rhetoric circulates in talk about potential signs of urban disorder (Iveson, 2010). Working class neighborhoods and vulnerable citizens face decontamination and state-sanctioned censure in the service of protecting the symbolic city under siege: ‘Danger is defined to protect the public good and the incidence of blame is a by-product of arrangements for persuading fellow members to contribute to it’ (Douglas, 1992: 6).

A Burkean drama of graffiti and risk: The aesthetics of security

Murals are legal performances of symbolic and material moral orders; art (and artists) are implicated in performing in the drama of law, consumption and health. In the early days of Ottawa’s anti-graffiti legislation, campaigns to (mis)inform the population relied on the language of disease and contagion, presenting graffiti as a health issue: ‘Abandoned, run-down, old, and dirty places covered in spray paint; broken windows and boarded up buildings that suck the life out of a city. These are the images that pop into our minds when we hear the word graffiti’ (Harder, 2015: 1). This section will illuminate the visual manifestations of this dramatization of risk and contamination as an aesthetic of security which is accomplished through: the visual authority of crime prevention; the co-option of artists into crime fighters; the visual colonization of public space; and redaction murals.

The authority of crime prevention

Municipal mural guidelines state that murals must be ‘safe for the public’ (City of Ottawa, 2001b); one way this safety is procured is by restricting the use of words and letters (graffiti) by some agents (artists). The city makes exceptions to who can creatively employ text when it comes to branding; however, as illustrated in Figure 3, the state is willing to make some exceptions. The use of letters as a central component to this permitted mural is poignant. And, certainly, graffiti writers know hypocrisy when they see it, and they respond in kind.

Figure 3.

Permitted graffiti (artist: Nicole Belanger).

CPO has funded at least 60 murals in Ottawa since 2010; as such, their brand features prominently in the urban landscape. Murals stamped with the CPO logo frames the art as civic duty: it fights crime. Further the logo teaches the audience: this art is not graffiti. Many crime-prevention murals are commissioned by building owners and community centers in response to the Graffiti Management bylaw, not artistic preference. This means the landlords have participated in the lengthy review process with the City of Ottawa. This approval indicates that the mural meets the City of Ottawa’s restrictive advertising and sign bylaws, which disallows the use of lettering and restrictive sizing. Consequently, most murals in Ottawa rarely exceed a height of 8 to 10 feet. For example, see Figure 4. This curious stunted pattern reflects the funding and legal sanctions supporting the mural and graffiti cleaning industries in Ottawa. To avoid being fined for not cleaning up graffiti, and to avoid paying professional cleaners to service the popular surfaces of your building, many landlords opt for the least expensive solution: a mural that is not taller than the reach of most graffiti writers.

Figure 4.

Graffiti adhering to maximum height rules (artist: Group AMPLove).

Co-opting artists into crime fighters

Artists are drawn into the drama of crime prevention because they must ask the municipality for permission to paint outside, regardless if it is for a private client. The City of Ottawa webpage on successful mural applications explicitly defines the artist’s moral relationship with the municipal government: ‘working together to prevent graffiti’ (City of Ottawa, 2001b). To illustrate how this shapes artists’ explanations of their work, consider the following excerpt:

This piece will creatively use the entire height and width of the wall, with the densest amount of detail closer to street-level to discourage vandalism. Our subject will face towards Montréal Road, her head lifted high with optimism and grace, ready for the future but guided by the knowledge of the past. (House of PainT, 2017)

The obligation to claim support for anti-graffiti policies creates conflict for many urban artists, who do not view themselves in such binary terms. Mique Michelle, who speaks of discouraging vandalism (a subtext for graffiti) in the excerpt above, is an Indigenous Franco-Ontarian artist who also identifies herself elsewhere as ‘a strong advocate for abolishing negative perceptions of graffiti and street art’ (Studio Sixty Six, 2017). To paint legally in the city, however, she defers to crime prevention in her successful application for a substantial mural project. My point here is to make visible the colonization of language and imagery at play; I question the authority of the state to restrict how Mique Michelle, an Indigenous person, can speak on these unceded and unsurrendered lands.

The visual colonization of public space

Substantial municipal funds are made available to Business Improvement Associations (BIAs) specifically to fight graffiti; some of this money is put towards commissioning murals for this purpose. The resulting imagery brands communities in terms of lifestyles: images of objects that one might purchase fetishize consumption while appearing to support cultural pursuits of the leisure class. It is not uncommon to find cell phones and brass musical instruments as features within the murals, capturing experiences of entertainment and shopping. Other areas of Ottawa feature military installations and nostalgic murals of conquest and nationality.

Municipal funding structures and bylaw regulation contribute to the racialized dispossession of the visual landscape by criminalizing Hip Hop graffiti specifically, a style rooted in civil resistance to racial and economic disparity. Reflecting upon the murals that have been approved in Ottawa thus far, this process has not made space for the raw artistic expression of grief and anger over such lived experiences as police violence against Black, Indigenous and People of Color, for example. A several month long approval process does little to facilitate the expression of outrage and immediacy of a call to action following the violent death of Abdirahman Abdi at the hands of Ottawa police officers and racist comments made by another Ottawa police officer regarding the death of Inuit artist Annie Pootoogook that same summer (Global News, 2016; Porter, 2016). Legal dramas that regulate who can paint in this city, how and when, symbolically dispossess the people in these troubling stories about security and risk. Graffiti that appeared during the Canada Day celebrations in the summer of 2017 (see Figure 5) draws attention to the unceded Algonquin lands that currently hosts the City of Ottawa, and problematically is muted by its status as graffiti vandalism.

Figure 5.

Illegal stencil that appeared on Canada Day 2017 protesting the colonization of Indigenous lands.

Redaction murals

It is poetically ironic that Ottawa, Canada’s capital city, assumes ‘beauty’ in redaction. Commonly called buffing, patches of grey, black and beige subvert uncomfortable messages explicitly. The following images demonstrate how the voices of some citizens are silenced to reaffirm the appearance of security for others. Instead of a range of styles and imagery, the walls project a crude patchwork that traces the ongoing violence of redaction and decontamination, as illustrated in Figures 6, 7 and 8.

Figures 6, 7 and 8.

Examples of buffing to conceal unapproved graffiti.

These images shed a light on the irony of redaction strategies. The City of Ottawa’s policies promised to rid the city of tags. Today the most common kind of graffiti that exists is tags. Set against the swathes of grey, beige and black, arguably these tags are amplified. The city mandates painting over graffiti by landlords, graffiti writers respond, engaged in a kind of debate about who has a right to speak in the city (Dovey et al., 2012; Harvey, 2012). Graffiti writers disinclined to spend time or money in creating a complex production painted over the next day resort to quick and low-cost productions. The more colorful productions are hidden underground, and the images of these complex hidden works circulate online ensuring that the popularity of the style continues (Blommaert, 2016). And, ironically, many writers find themselves pushed out of the city and into the suburbs where there is far less surveillance (Lasley, 1995). Hence, attempts to eradicate graffiti to protect the suburbs has only invited the production of graffiti into those areas. What remains in the city core, now, are blatant redaction attempts, or graffiti that returns only to mock the arrogance of the state, which assumes it could ever win this ill advised ideological war.

Conclusion and implications

Arguably, the War on Graffiti proved to be a successful campaign, but at what cost? This article has demonstrated that in attempting to secure the city symbolically, those whose lives are marked with real insecurity, lived violence and disparity are erased from the civic landscape. Graffiti writers invite us to critically reflect upon the relationship between the everyday and collective cultural productions, such as bylaws and art (see Figure 9). This article has demonstrated how the art and voices of the least powerful are framed as contamination, which thus authorizes and invites a legal response in the service of public health (Douglas, 1992; Lupton, 1999). We see traces of these logics in sanctioned murals, in the redaction of graffiti, in branding art as crime prevention, and in the colonization of civic spaces into secure shopping opportunities.

Figure 9.

Graffiti artists continue to fight back in the ‘War on Graffiti.’

Given this, the decriminalization of graffiti seems a just direction for municipalities, such as Ottawa, to consider. If the purpose of law in the Western world is to ‘place binding constraints on the exercise of political power’ and abuse (Groarke, 2013: xxxv) then these bylaws do little in serving the public good towards social equity. Let us invite art into the city for art’s sake, not to prevent crime. The aesthetics of security, which characterizes Ottawa urban art, marks the loss of appreciation for art that affects. Instead, the aesthetics of security summons – under force of law – unmemorialized urban inequality and disparity. Practically speaking, repealing performance regulations would save the city millions merely in ceasing the policing of art (Barthel, 2002; Landry, 2017b). Moreover, opening civic space to less privileged artists to work is one way the city can easily address the economic disparity created unfairly for some artists, such as those who were impacted in the meeting described in the introduction of this article. Finally, because the current graffiti bylaws problematically criminalize support for graffiti, creating cumbersome bureaucratic red tape for mural approvals, it makes it unnecessarily difficult for the City of Ottawa to host internationally recognized urban art and graffiti festivals like Montreal’s Mural Fest or Under Pressure and Moncton’s Festival Inspire. Allowing building owners more leniency in deciding what art adorns their walls would provide local artists the experience necessary to participate in these festivals.

Of course, the issue of social disparity is a complicated problem; however, by changing the way we speak about social order, we can begin to change the social order to be more equitable (Burke, 1973; Manheim and Overington, 1987). Certainly, when advised to ‘stop calling it graffiti’ graffiti writers were asked by the municipality to change the way they were speaking, but in the interests of the state and commerce. In the interest of empowerment, I suggest we stop calling it vandalism, and address the redaction that exacerbates the idea that the words of the dispossessed contaminate the security of the city.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Author biography

Deborah Landry, PhD, is a former long-time adjunct academic. Her current project, Canada Via Music (CVM) extends her critical socio-historical work on performance and space, to explore the longstanding relationship between Canadian musicians and railways. To paraphrase a respected friend and colleague, Dr Jeff Ferrell, from his recent keynote address to the British Society of Criminology: if academia is going to abandon us and make us into underpaid contract workers, younger generations of academics must figure out how to abandon academia as conventionally understood. To those of you who choose to take up this challenge: courage!

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