Graffiti Exhibit Sets Out to Show There’s a Positive Side to Vandalism

When a potential buyer asked the price of a painting Sunday at the Los Angeles Photography Center, he was told the artist had a strong incentive to sell--he was in jail and needed the money to make bail.

This was, indeed, not the kind of art show you would see at the Louvre. Many of the people who attended were youths in T-shirts and tattoos. And the artists represented are best known for works that adorn buildings and walls from San Francisco to South Los Angeles.

This was Aerosol ‘89, one of the largest gatherings ever in Los Angeles of graffiti--they prefer the term spray can--artists. The exhibition near MacArthur Park was designed to show that some aerosol artists are far more than vandals and to encourage the city to set aside public places where they can legally express themselves.

“It is vandalism,” said Carmelo Alvarez, a show spokesman. “But there is a positive aspect you see today.”

At least one city official, Adolfo Nodal, director of the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department, was receptive to the idea of designating certain walls or other areas for the use of graffiti artists. “We want to set up sites,” he said, although he said none has been selected.

Nodal said he has already taken the first step and asked the Public Works Department for a definition of what graffiti is “and what it is not.”

“We’re into supporting the positive elements of it,” he said as artists worked with spray paint on canvases tacked to the outside walls of the photography center. Some canvases, depicting images as phantasmagoric as floating eyes and as mundane as a lighthouse, were prepared in advance and hung inside.

Several Types of Graffiti

The promoters of Sunday’s show, the second of its kind at the city-run photography center, said there are several types of graffiti and controlling it entails understanding the differences. First there is gang graffiti, on which most public attention and fear has focused. But there is also political graffiti and the work of so-called “taggers,” who say they feel a need to “go up” on a wall and leave their mark for the world to admire and loathe.

Artists attending the show admitted that new laws and tougher police enforcement are putting increasing pressure on them. If there were sanctioned places for them to paint, the vandalism would drop off, they said. If such areas are created, one artist said, the community of taggers would show its good faith in return by reporting renegades who continue defacing property.

Others, however, said some artists would continue to take the risks--in fact, view the possibility of being caught as a thrill.

And one incident suggested that the legal graffiti zones might not do away with the competition--and tensions--among the artists.

“FrameOne,” whose real name is Raoul Gamboa, upbraided a trio of studiedly nonchalant youths for recently painting over a dramatic piece of graffiti done by his group atop a building. Gamboa’s “crew,” Second to None, was especially proud of the work because it could be seen from the freeway by “anybody going to the beach.”

“That wasn’t cool what you guys did,” said Gamboa, 23, who helped organize Sunday’s show.

“Hey, it wasn’t us,” replied one of the youths. But Gamboa remained convinced that they were the ones who had vandalized his vandalism.

Despite that incident, the painters argued that what makes them different from the gangs is that they confront each other through their art. They said a competition just concluded at one of the city’s original “yards,” the Belmont Tunnel near downtown, where a lot of painting occurs. It was between two of the best-known artists, Slick and Hex.

One painter depicted a rat, the second a scorpion killing the rat. The response was a Medusa killing the scorpion, followed by a guillotine killing the Medusa, and so on. Spokesmen for Sunday’s show said the final result attracted representatives of a local art gallery.

Gamboa called this further evidence that he and his colleagues are gaining acceptance in the art world. “It’s like this,” he said, holding his hands in the shape of a flower bud. “It’s just about to open.”

But one of Gamboa’s hopes went unrealized Sunday when few members of the general public showed up to tour the exhibit.

There were no price tags on the paintings, so any sale had to be the result of dickering. The jailed artist was at a disadvantage, therefore, when one potential customer expressed interest in his abstract swirls of colors. Friends of the artist said they will consult with him on a price, then get back to the man.