August 9, 2005

Struggling for Space in the Visual Environment

By Daniel Porras
Special to the Neighborhood Newswire

In a run-down bar in the Mission District, seven young professionals sit around a table plotting their next attack on the advertising world. The target is a series of billboards around San Francisco rented by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. One man, Milton Rand Kalman, ‘Chief Scientist’ of the Billboard Liberation Front, passes around ‘surveillance’ photos of the Vegas ads. Kalman (not his real name) is an advertising professional and can extrapolate the size and font of the letters on the billboard from analyzing the photos. The BLF will change – ‘improve’, as they prefer to say - the message on the Las Vegas advertisements in a meticulously planned covert operation.

“We need a twenty-foot ladder and a van,” says one BLF operative at the table, Duncan D. Nutz. “And bunny suits,” he adds. Though they could be arrested for ‘improving’ billboards, the BLF is only half-concerned with secrecy. Their satirical sabotage carries a message, and just like the advertisements they deface – and similar to other graffiti artists and taggers - they seek free expression in an increasingly cluttered visual environment. As one BLF operative puts it: “We are reclaiming space.”

People have always painted on walls, etched animal pictures into rock, and adorned the physical environment with slogans and symbols. In a dense and modern capitalist city like San Francisco, however, only those with money can pontificate legally from the sides of buildings, buses and trains. Those without the means are left to express themselves any way they can. For many young, low-income urbanites, graffiti is the alternative form of communication – the free press of the streets. A wall of tags is urban blight to one segment of society, but is a sort of neighborhood newsletter to another. That San Francisco spends over $20 million annually on graffiti abatement is certainly a problem: a problem, according to some, of fund misallocation.

“They’re pouring money into the back-end and locking these kids up,” says Benjamin Morgan, a break-dancer-turned-film-maker who has worked in the juvenile justice system for thirteen years. “They’re sending kids to prison – that’s 50 to 60 thousand dollars to lock one person up for graffiti. And at the same time they are cutting art programs in the schools.” Morgan is the director of a soon-to-be-released film called Quality of Life that tells the story of two Mission District graffiti writers who evolve into celebrated urban artists. For Morgan, who was arrested for vandalism at age 15, society’s reaction to graffiti is all wrong.

“If we put this money into prevention it would be better – prevention is what works on every level. We need to give kids more artistic opportunities at school and in the community so they don’t have to learn art on the walls.” According to Morgan, curated walls like those found in the Mission, where graffiti artists are given explicit permission to ply their trade, are one solution. But, says Morgan, this strategy also sends mixed messages. Society sends taggers to jail and calls them criminals, but also has corporate-sponsored graffiti contests. Altoids, Nike, and McDonalds have all jumped on the graffiti train with highly publicized street art campaigns. Nike had the most talented Los Angeles graffiti artists paint giant billboards that had the company’s ‘swoosh’ in the corner.

The Billboard Liberation Front, which has operated in the Bay Area for 26 years, uses advertisers’ own messages against them. The BLF emphasizes that they don’t destroy or vandalize: every billboard modification is done with removable double-sided tape, and they traditionally leave a six-pack or a bottle of scotch for the hapless billboard service person. “We’re satirical – not polemical”, says Milton Rand Kalman, who required a reporter to wear a red carnation for identification prior to meeting.

Many graffiti artists, says Ben Morgan, are “kids that are disenfranchised and frustrated with the hypocrisy of companies being able to dominate the landscape with corporate graffiti and [inundate] you with their messages.” Graffiti, from the Italian grafficar – which signifies drawings, patterns, and messages that are painted, written, or carved on a wall or surface – technically applies to advertising. “I’m far more offended by Gap and Coke and Ipod ads in my face everywhere,” Morgan says. “Tagging is a similar invasion of your privacy but it’s the voice of the individual not the voice of the corporation.”

For most people the only distinction that matters is permission. You can put up a city bus-size picture of sexy skinny models making-out in their underwear if you have permission. “We’re a society of laws,” says Jim Powers, Deputy Director of No Graf, a national anti-graffiti network. “If it’s put up without permission it’s vandalism.” But for Ben Morgan, who sees talented and ambitious kids locked up for expressing themselves, society’s laws are silencing the youth in favor of corporate expression.

“We need to acknowledge as a community that these kids have something that they are proud of; they want to excel at something and be the best at something and we need to recognize that.”