12.14.06 kulturnatib

Graffiti art

A friend, I think, is trying to make a career in graffiti art. He is equipped for this, more than anybody I know who has the temperament for such. He has enough years of training in art school to get a doctoral degree, though his original ambition was, and, perhaps, continues to be the more modest Certificate of Fine Arts.

I have seen him poring over his books on graffiti art by himself and with other artist friends as well. He has wielded his aerosol can paint spray on wall surfaces of his mother's properties that include two cafes and restaurant and an outdoor activities shop. He even hired an assistant, also a budding graffiti artist, to work with him on these. The reviews to these works are mixed, again coming, mostly, from friends.

I really haven't talked to him about this seeming turn in his career direction. So, I don't know how far he is planning or is determined to bring this forward.

But I would like to tell him that if he is more serious this time around than his last career stab at being a surfer -- or was that a restaurateur? -- then he should move. And move fast.

Because I have caught a glimpse of the future of graffiti art here. And it sucks. I am not talking about the walls that regularly get painted and repainted with civic-inspired works on peace, the environment, the family and all that spice and everything nice. Though these can suck too.

There is as much art on these walls as can be produced by the threat of a failing grade and the various inducements from monetary to funerary -- the promise of cookie points for that one-way trip to heaven.

I am not even talking about the slogan splashed walls of the left, whose imagination seem to be the fill-in-the-blanks kind where the blanks are filled-in with the name of the current national administration in power.

Historically and traditionally, grafitti art has been the canvass of the left or the left-leaning who gave voice to the voiceless, the powerless, the oppressed and, perhaps, even the simply bored.

No, I am talking about something more sinister. More ominous.

In recent days, I have have had to travel the stretch of AS Fortuna street, through both ends of Banilad; the Cebu City end to the Mandaue City end and back, for work.

When I first saw it, I noticed it but paid it no mind. I've seen it before, in more worrying profusion. But, this time, it was by its non-threatening lonesome. It even looked pretty, I grant.

But, the following day there was two more of them. The next day another one was added. This was just on one stretch of wall. The wall of the San Miguel Brewery and Bottling plant, I believe.

What I'm talking about has a name to it. Where I saw it first it is called MMDA Art. These geometrical, mono or trichromatic bunches – five or six to a bunch – you see along the entire length of EDSA. In many of these is the stamping, MMDA Art, like an artist signature or imprint.

This, of course, is an effort, an operation – military operation, comes to mind – to combat real graffiti of the sort that, to many people, especially those in authority who could be at the accusatory spotlight of these graffiti, see them as eyesores.

It won't will not be surprising that these people have an Imeldific view of art. Art is the the clean, the good, the beautiful. Graffiti, in this view is neither clean nor good nor beautiful. Therefore, not art. Even, therefore, nothing.

That's why my friend has to move. He has to claim his space. He has to assert the right for a public expression of art that is not merely cute, pretty, safe, soporific, ultimately boring and funded from the public coffers at that. For I cannot imagine that MMDA art is a free project from an artist's or an artist group's starving good intentions. No way, highway.

He has to assert his right to say that art is not always clean, not always 'good', not even always beautiful. For this, however, he has to realize that it is not the most solid of grounds to build a career on. So is surfing for that matter.