(via Art Crimes)

Full article after the jump.

Coverup worse than crime? S.F. outspends other cities fighting graffiti

By Peter Jamison
Published on December 07, 2009 at 4:25pm

The scenery at Warm Water Cove isn’t what it used to be. The aging industrial buildings that front San Francisco Bay along this bleak patch of shoreline north of Hunters Point once teemed with bulging, bright graffiti letters. Now their only distinction is large rectangles of cream-colored paint — evidence of where the city has obliterated the work of artist-vandals.

This is one front in a war city officials have been waging for years — and one that is costing San Francisco taxpayers far more than they might realize. According to deputy city controller Monique Zmuda, the Department of Public Works currently spends $3.7 million per year on its antigraffiti program. That sum dwarfs the $1.9 million spent annually in San Jose, which, with its population of 1 million, is 25 percent larger than San Francisco. It’s also more than twice as much per capita as Los Angeles, a city of 3.8 million people that spends $7 million per year fighting graffiti.

This is big money, particularly at a time when the city is facing an intractable budget crisis. Last month, the Board of Supervisors was desperately trying to scrounge up $8 million to prevent layoffs among public health workers. The Public Works graffiti-abatement program burns through that much in less than three years. Is it worth it?

Officer Christopher Putz of the San Francisco Police Department’s graffiti unit sure thinks so. He acknowledges that the amount of graffiti here has drastically declined over the last decade, as SFPD and Public Works have stepped up efforts to remove graffiti and crack down on vandals. But he thinks this new state of cleanliness is fragile: “I think if the city relaxed on this issue and cut back their spending, it would be horrible. We’re a tourist destination, so we should look nice.”

Others think the War on Graffiti has spun out of control. “I think it’s nuts,” said Steve Rotman, a prominent graffiti photographer who has authored books on San Francisco’s street-art scene. “Here we are during a time of recession. Libraries are being cut back. And meanwhile the city is spending this enormous amount of money to get rid of what little graffiti is left.”

That sentiment might be more widespread than zero-tolerance graffiti opponents would like. Putz says he routinely gets calls from neighborhood groups concerned about graffiti. But according to Paul Henderson, chief of administration in the district attorney’s office, this zeal isn’t mirrored in an average sampling of city residents. Earlier this year, Henderson said, a prosecutor actually went through three pools of potential jurors before selecting a suitable group that thought graffiti was even a crime: “They said, ‘This is a waste of my time, because I think trying someone for graffiti is stupid, and I’m not going to do it under any circumstances.’”

It’s sometimes said that the city’s budget meltdown is a priorities crisis. To judge from courtroom apathy about graffiti convictions, San Franciscans might not mind seeing the $3.7 million campaign to remove this supposed urban scourge deprioritized.

The International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam has selected Graffiti Archaeology to be part of their Doc Lab program for 2009. More about Doc Lab:

IDFA’s Doc Lab investigates the relationship between documentary filmmaking and new media. The program is open to all media that can be used to tell a documentary story. During the festival, Doc Lab presents films, web documentaries, and installations that innovate the documentary genre. Projects are showcased in the Doc Lab Media Lounge and in cinemas during a number of special Live Screenings and events. The theme this year is Live Stories, and the principal guest is Ira Glass.

So, if you’re in Amsterdam this week, stop by the festival and check it out!

Serge Gainsbourg – animation des graffitis sur 5 ans du mur rue de Verneuil from Arnaud Jourdain on Vimeo.

This video, by Arnaud Jourdain, documents five years of the history of a graffiti wall in Paris dedicated to Serge Gainsbourg. What’s brilliant is the way he does it: instead of just playing back the photos in series, he isolates each individual tag, puts it on its own layer, and explodes the whole glorious mess out into space with 3D animation. It’s a beautiful, fresh take on the Graffiti Archaeology meme. The wall itself, with love notes and other hommages interspersed among the tags and wheatpastes, reminds me of the John Lennon wall in Prague.

Updates have been kinda slow on the site lately, mostly due to this new project I’ve been working on (see above). This is not a personal blog, but I had to post this shot here because of the sweet T-shirt Nate1 sent us from New Skool. Go check out his other wares, there are some excellent designs (I especially love the Krylon and headphones shirts!) Thanks Nate!

Photographer Steve Rotman (better known online as funkandjazz) has just released his much anticipated book, Bay Area Graffiti. It’s the first book ever to document the San Francisco Bay Area’s vibrant graffiti scene. Steve’s been a good friend and contributor to Graffiti Archaeology for years now, and his work is consistently the best of the best. Get the book! You won’t be disappointed.

If you’re local, there will be a book release party on February 6th, from 4 to 9pm, at 111 Minna, and on the walls will be artwork from a number of writers featured in the book. Don’t miss it!

Right next to Apex’s new piece is another huge, intensely detailed burner by CHEZ. Once again I was lucky enough to capture several stages of the work in progress to share with you here. Chez’s way of working with color here is something I haven’t seen before: overlaying a white-on-black backlayer with transparent colors for the fill. Check it out!

Apex has just finished an incredibly ambitious piece in the center of the Bluxome wall back here in San Francisco. It’s a third of a block long, and he used over five hundred different colors of paint to create it. It took him almost three months to finish, so I was able to catch several stages of the work in progress. I particularly enjoyed seeing the layering of color on color for the fill, and how he used the blank parts of the wall as a sketchbook for trying out different ideas. Check it out.

Just weeks after the legalization of graffiti (and re-criminalization of pixação) in Brazil, there’s more news on the split between these two subcultures. Some pixadores were not too happy with the commodification of street art, so they got together to tag up an entire gallery, walls, paintings, prints and all. Read on to see the flyer they distributed to organize the event. (Via Wooster Collective.)

Update: Wooster Collective got the photos from the Gallery’s Flickr stream, and if you follow that link you can see a long list of comments from Brazilians who are fans of either pixação or graffiti/street art. There may be some interesting discussions brewing in there, so if I find any choice bits I’ll try to post translations here later.

Here’s the flyer:

And here’s what it says:

Art Attack 2

The Path to Revolution

We are going to invade with our protest art a shitty art gallery (Culture Shock), which, as per its ideology, gives space to underground artists – well, then it’s all ours anyway – and we will declare total protest.

Meeting point = Praça Benedito Calixto, Rua Cardeal Arcoverde @ Rua Lisboa, next to metro stations Clinica and Sumare.
Time: 3pm, Saturday Sept 6th, 2008.

Protest slogans:
Long Live Tagging
Art as Crime
Crime as Art

All for the Tagging Movement

Thanks again to the lovely Raquel Rabbit for the translation.

Are some government ministers secret skateboarders? We think they must be. Back in January, we reported on rumours that the underpass of the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank was set to be developed into retail outlets.

Last month Downing Street responded to the campaign with a statement that read: ‘The Southbank Centre (SBC) is an independent arts organisation and decisions about the undercroft are a matter for them. [But] any activity that engages young people can have a positive impact on society, and the skateboarding community that has grown up around the undercroft has brought together people from various backgrounds, created a vibrant public space and added real value to the lives of many young people.’

London’s skaters are delighted. ‘It’s rad, obviously,’ says skateboarder Ninian Doff. ‘If skaters left the South Bank now, it’d be like the Tower losing its ravens – the place would crumble.’

The next battle for the skaters is to get the area returned to the size it was before the SBC boarded up two thirds of it to use as storage during the redevelopment of the Royal Festival Hall.

Also be sure to set aside 23 minutes of your day to check out this excellent documentary about the space. It succeeds wonderfully at explaining why a shared public space like this, with its own organically-grown street culture, is so important to the life of any city.

(found via this photo on Flickr.)