Art or Vandalism? : City Program Tries to Create a Dialogue Among Graffiti Artists, Graffiti Fighters

To some people, the way to describe Raul Gamboa is as an outlaw muralist--a guerrilla artist whose more than 70 works have enjoyed sometimes fleeting lives on walls all over Los Angeles.

But to others, to call Gamboa and other practitioners of his genre an artist at all is to overly romanticize. To these critics, he and people like him are simply graffiti vandals.

Conducting two visitors through an industrial complex near downtown whose walls--with the permission of the owners--are covered with his work, Gamboa describes the vagaries of technique in an art that consists exclusively of spray painting. Almost boastfully, Gamboa, 24, insists that his “can control” surpasses that of all but a handful of his rivals and friends in the graffiti subculture.

He admits that 80% of his works have been executed illegally. Sometimes, because the genre of the graffiti writer (artists like Gamboa refer to themselves as writers , regardless of the content of their work) necessarily includes word messages, he has been threatened, he says, with gunfire by gang members who think he is simply marking over their territory.

“This is my life,” he says. “I think, live and love graffiti. If I ever did meet an owner (of a building selected as a mural site) I’d tell him it’s nothing against him personally, it’s just that his wall just happened to be in a prime location where I thought my mural would look good. It was the perfect canvas.”

It is this kind of bravado that has helped polarize a festering public debate over graffiti--whether it is guerrilla murals, gang territory marking or tagging, the narcissistic practice of painting a personal trademark on as many visible spaces as possible.

To many segments of the arts community, graffiti is an irrepressible manifestation of a search for means of self-expression. But to a probably much larger portion of the population, there are no subtly graded differences to the artistic merit of the three main forms of graffiti. It is all vandalism. It is all destructive and it must all be prevented or removed as quickly as possible.

Now, however, an unlikely entrant in the graffiti debate, the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, has begun a new program to try to differentiate between graffiti art and what nearly anyone would classify as criminal defacing of property, public or private. If that can be done, the department hopes to find ways to provide legal spaces and opportunities for street artists.

But carefully, top city culture officials starting with Adolfo Nodal, general manager of the department, are trying not to oversell the potential of their newly organized program. If it is successful, agreed top officials of the department and graffiti artists like Gamboa, the program might help to reduce the number of incidents in which muralists execute their works without permission.

It might also help to reduce the volume of tagging, said Nodal--since many graffitists continue as taggers as they graduate to mural-making but would get out of tagging if there were more outlets for their art. But, said Nodal, the program almost certainly will have no direct effect on gang graffiti.

Nodal earlier this summer began a series of eight evening seminars for graffiti artists. The objective was to persuade them to participate in a program in which the city agency will help them find legal spaces and try to direct them toward more rounded training in the visual arts.

And on the weekend of Sept. 14 and 15, Nodal will assemble what is clearly a wary coalition for an issues conference to seek common ground--or at least ways to find it--between graffiti artists and graffiti abaters.

Present will be at least 10 graffiti artists--chosen by the artists attending the earlier workshops--and representatives of the Los Angeles Police Department, the city attorney’s office, Caltrans, the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission and the City Council. Also scheduled to attend are representatives of at least three prominent graffiti-suppression organizations that adhere to the philosophy that the only good graffiti is graffiti that does not exist.

The conference, said Nodal, may provide few answers. But, he said, if it can start a dispassionate dialogue among the various sides, it could eventually result in the framing of relevant questions and even answers to some of them.

“We’re against vandalism, but we can’t get rid of (the increasing pervasiveness of graffiti) without volunteer programs with some of these artists,” Nodal said. “This is an area in which cultural and political and social issues very often merge. We can’t hit all of the artists over the head and put them in jail. It won’t work. We can’t just decree graffiti out of existence.

“We’re being looked at with distrust by other elements in the city. They think that they’re out there trying to abate graffiti and we’re trying to glorify it. In reality, all of us want to reduce vandalism and visual blight.”

Michael Davis, an architect and author who has written about Southern California urban design issues, said the dialogue process Nodal is attempting to set into motion may result in alteration of perceptions about what art is. That change, he said, may have the potential to disarm some of the more impassioned aspects of the graffiti debate.

“All cities have an obligation to insure that there are public spaces for what is one of the most vibrant and interesting art forms in Southern California,” Davis said. “Almost anyone would recognize the difference between graffiti art and the simple tag. There are a lot of derelict and unused public spaces that could be brightened and enlightened.

“And concerning tagging, there is an enormous demand to increase punishment. I’m not denying this activity is a tremendous blight. But the thing to be recognized in a city where our school system is collapsing is that we provide pathetic resources for self-expression. (Graffiti) is an almost inevitable symptom.”

Graffiti street art, he said, requires both recognition as a legitimate art form and more effective means to control how and where it is created. But even the modest charge for the upcoming issues conference has prompted suspicious reaction among some of the anti-graffiti organizations that, with the artists on the diametrically opposite side, pose a daunting challenge for Nodal.

Fred Karger, an organizer of the newly formed Citizens War on Graffiti and Gangs, said he had difficulty imagining how training in the arts could come to involve graffiti. Karger’s group hopes to work for passage of a statewide anti-graffiti ballot initiative to clamp new criminal penalties on graffiti.

Stuart Haines, chair of Mayor Tom Bradley’s citywide Graffiti Advisory Task Force, said his organization would not compromise on its position that graffiti of any sort that is applied without permission of whoever legally owns the site is criminal activity that should be harshly punished. “I think it’s a crime. It shouldn’t be allowed and I’m against it,” Haines said.

Nodal said the task force will grapple with possible First Amendment concerns about graffiti-control laws and their effect on freedom of expression. But he said a balance must be struck to protect property, as well. To Helen Samuels, who helps run Earthcrew--a graffiti mural organization that tries to combat gang graffiti and other visual blight in the Westlake and Pico-Union neighborhoods--the fact that the conference will bring to the same table people with such disparate values as Gamboa and Haines may be its most promising element.

“Every plan (for dealing with graffiti) has been made without bringing writers to the table,” Samuels said. “The conference should also hear a lot of the reasons why this is such a problem and why some (graffiti writers) are willing to die for it. (Everyone) should hear the other side. On one side are writers who refuse to see the side of the property owners. On the other side are the (graffiti) abaters who refuse to see the side of the writers.”