Magazine

Defining the Canvas

The proliferation of informal street art is a recent phenomenon in Toronto but one that seems to be building momentum as artists try to outwit each other or invent new forms of outdoor expression. Toronto’s street art scene is markedly more playful and ironic than the overtly political graffiti commonly seen in Berlin or Amsterdam or New York. Close to Dundas Square, where commercial postering is rampant, one artist has stenciled “Post No Bills” above stenciled portraits of Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Bill Cosby, and Bill Murray. Humorous pop culture references abound, including pasted cut-outs of Mexican wrestling masks, Batman heads, and of course, Val Kilmer. Around the trendy Queen West neighborhood a graffiti artist eschews the conventional portraiture of street thugs in favor of elongated, dopey-faced caricatures of disgruntled office workers. Offended by the garishness of one utility box, another artist took it upon himself to cover the entire thing with decorative wallpaper.

Organizational support has grown in tandem with the street art trend. One group, Style in Progress, holds an annual graffiti day along an alleyway near Queen West, in which artists claim a space as their canvas and - legally - paint away for the day. The non-profit Toronto Public Spaces Committee reinforces the “public-ness” of city streets by advocating for postering rights and against large billboard advertising. And two years ago saw the initial publication of Spacing magazine, which is devoted to writing about the city’s public realm, including the informal street art scene.

While these groups have been working to inform the local citizenry how street art can contribute to a beautiful city, the city council has pushed a contrary agenda. Under the helm of Mayor David Miller, it recently enacted the “Clean and Beautiful City” program, which aims to improve the visual environment of the city by landscaping streets, cleaning up litter, removing graffiti, and controlling community posters. The logic behind the program is simple: cities are engaged in a zero-sum interurban competition to attract businesses, professionals, and investments; to package itself as an attractive place to live and work, Toronto has decided that it needs to eradicate graffiti and control street art.

The council’s position is justifiable. Studies have shown that where vandalism or graffiti—including tagging, a kind of graffiti that consists solely of the artist’s name—is left visible for a certain period of time, more vandalism and graffiti appears. Oscar Newman’s much-cited but debatable theory of “defensible spaces” also warns that visible vandalism leads to a general lack of upkeep in an area and opens the floodgates to crime and out-migration. But herein lies a tricky aesthetic debate: when does graffiti cease to be vandalism and attain the status of art? When does it cross the line from destructive to valuable? Case in point: the city council’s bylaw charges building owners for the removal of graffiti if they do not remove it themselves in a timely manner. The bylaw distinguishes between murals, which are exempt from the regulation, and graffiti, which is deemed illegal. But what separates a mural from graffiti? A business owner who hired artists to spray-paint a mural could then find it deemed graffiti by city officials. The owner has the right to appeal the decision but would have to pay for the appeal—and still could lose and be charged for the so-called graffiti’s removal.

Poster Appeal

The city also wants to crack down on where and when people can legally post community posters. Currently the utility poles across downtown neighborhoods are used as impromptu community billboards advertising piano lessons, missing dogs, and local bands. Councilors who view this as visual blight have been trying to pass a bill that would limit postering to one percent of all available poles. Such policies aim for a return to more traditional notions of the beautiful city, to the romantic/nostalgic notion of antiqued Victorian houses, sand-blasted brick, and European streetscapes, or to the modern aesthetic of clean lines and uncluttered façades. Street art advocates have responded through works that mix the playful and polemic, such as the above-mentioned “Post No Bills” and the serial stenciling of “Heinz Kuck”—the name of the police sergeant in charge of graffiti eradication.

Shawn Micallef, editor of Spacing, explains his discomfort in cities wiped clean of these kinds of expression. “I just came from Edinburgh,” he says, “and while the old downtown is beautiful, there are no posters, graffiti, or street art, and it makes the place seem really sterile. Conversely, in Toronto, where there is a lot of street art and posters, it gives the sense of a place that is lived-in. Though some of it is quite ugly, it gives the sense that people are doing stuff here; whereas in Edinburgh visitors must ask the question, ‘Well, what do people do here?’”

 

Activist Dave Meslin founded the Toronto Public Spaces Committee specifically to tackle the proposed anti-postering bylaw. Meslin argues that it is inconsistent for the city to continually sell off air rights for billboards and even convert street furniture such as garbage bins and bus shelters into canvases for advertising, and then try to limit the ability of communities to advertise—on a much smaller scale—through posters on utility poles. Billboards are the visual blight, he believes, not the community posters: “No member of the public thinks that ads are beautiful; yet City Hall is actively involved in filling our public realm with them, on bus shelters, on garbage cans, on billboards, in our subways, on our buses.”

“There is a debate here about aesthetics, but the bigger debate is about democracy,” Meslin continues, explaining that the average citizen is being stripped of his right to express himself, while corporations are appropriating more and more visual space throughout the city. According to Meslin, community posters play a vital democratic role in disseminating local knowledge, while billboards only add to an increasing consumer culture. Street art, then, becomes not just an artistic debate but a political one. His campaign raised considerable awareness about the issue, resulting in a shelving of the proposed bylaw.

Painting, and Policing, a New Beautiful City

Spacing magazine has offered its own take on the role of street art in Toronto through its latest issue, entitled “The New Beautiful City.” The double meaning of the title suggests the two topics being explored: one the one hand, a new aesthetic is developing in the city; on the other hand, longstanding, inconspicuous parts of the city are finally being recognized by many as beautiful. Many of the articles revolve around small, clandestine acts of beautifying the city, such as the group in Kensington Market that paints random objects blue and the fully functioning metallic string bass that was constructed on a pole in Bellevue Park. Other articles discuss the beauty of overlooked spaces in the city, including abandoned buildings and manhole covers made with artistic designs, and debate the merits of graffiti, posters, stencils, and other covert forms of street art. The “new beautiful city,” according to this publication, is one that appreciates context and history over newness, layers and dirt over cleanliness, and open democratic expression over institutionalized expression.

Supporters of street art in Toronto are quick to correct one possible misconception of this vision: they stand in support of property rights, and “democratic expression” does not mean an anarchistic free-for-all. Micallef insists that marking someone’s private property without permission is indeed vandalism. Public space, however, is fair game.

That is not to say that advocates of street art desire a totally laissez-faire approach to art in public spaces. Indeed, they laud existing city programs that commission many graffiti and mural works, even while noting their irony given the policing policies: “the right hand of the city doesn’t know what the left is doing,” Micallef says. The city supports groups like Style In Progress, even cordoning off Dundas Square, the main commercial center of the city, for artists to spend a day spray-painting on canvases, allowing passersby to observe graffiti art in action. The event serves to normalize graffiti and strip it of its gang-related connotations. The more the city supports street art, Meslin points out, the better the art will become. “If you give a kid a spray can and say, ‘here, spend as much time as you like on this,’” he explains, “you’re bound to get a better product than if someone feels rushed because they could get caught and jailed.”

Total institutionalization of street art, however, could have its drawbacks. The bureaucratic public art machine in Toronto has produced some truly tepid pieces of art and is viewed by many developers as a tool for getting zoning bonuses, rather than as an opportunity for commissioning and displaying seminal pieces of art. Unregulated street art, on the other hand, gives artists the freedom to paint daring and contentious works. Micallef suggests a kind of decriminalization as a solution: “As long as there’s a law on the books that officially says, ‘We don’t approve of it,’ but the city turns a blind eye to most of it and at the same time supports the best aspects of street art by making space available and commissioning works—that could be a happy medium.” The law thus could be relaxed for the vast majority of artists who do not target places and façades that are obviously owned and in use by other people, or that are already aesthetically pleasing. Most Toronto artists choose bland, ugly, or unused spaces to display their work, making the surface more interesting than it was before. The exception to this rule is tagging, graffiti’s evil twin, which lacks any artistic merit. Micallef foresees the day when tags will be derided as mere litter, calling the activity, “selfish acts with little or no thought put into them.” Instead of conflating tagging with all street art, Micallef argues, the city should enforce the laws to eradicate the former, while encouraging the latter.

Amidst the aesthetic confusion over what constitutes graffiti or vandalism, there are signs that Toronto will not repeat the mistakes of other cities. When Mayor Giuliani instituted his Broken Windows program in New York City, ridding the subways of all their graffiti, he helped sterilize the city, contributing to a Disneyfication trend of the 1990s. What gives Toronto an edge now is that a discourse has exploded among citizens, exalting the messy, the layered, and the grassroots. Through street art, people not only live in the city but feel the city as “lived,” a welcome alternative to regulated historic districts or monotonous suburbs. Rather than treating it as anathema to a clean and beautiful city, city officials should try to use this “lived-in” feeling as an asset. With proper support, Toronto may well show the world a new kind of beauty: a city where every wall is a potential canvas and every citizen a potential artist.

Artlab: www.artlab.ca

Spacing magazine: www.spacing.ca

The Toronto Public Spaces Committee: www.publicspace.ca

The Toronto Clean and Beautiful City Program: www.toronto.ca/cleanandbeautiful

McBride, Jason & Alana Wilcox, eds. uTOpia: Towards a New Toronto. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2005.

Style Wars. Dir. Tony Silver. 1983. DVD. Plexifilm, 2003.

This article appeared in the Summer 2006 issue of Next American City magazine. SUBSCRIBE NOW!