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This project investigates the ways in which Australian graffiti functions as a set of highly visible and adaptable aesthetic forms. Firstly, it will undertake a detailed examination of the aesthetic qualities of Australian graffiti: its visual elements, overall style and spatial location and context. Secondly, the project examines the processes through which forms of graffiti are attributed aesthetic value: for example, as objects of heritage protection, models for information exchange on the Internet, stylistic devices for advertising and the stimulus for urban design and architectural projects. In addressing this question, this project employs the notion of cultural aesthetics , the idea that concepts of beauty and aesthetic value are embedded in cultural processes and the material conditions of culture.
Thus, this project aims to investigate:
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how the aesthetic qualities of graffiti in Australia have changed over the last decade;
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how forms of graffiti become culturally constituted as aesthetic objects across different domains in Australian cities;
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how the cultural aesthetics of graffiti function in four key domains in Australia: cultural heritage policy; new media technology; architecture and urban design; and, advertising.
Background
For such a highly visible and global cultural phenomenon, graffiti has received relatively little academic attention. The few published studies have had a narrow focus in terms of the types of graffiti they have examined, their methodologies and the disciplinary frameworks they have used. In general, they have been either criminological (Ferrell, 1993; Coffield, 1991; Young, 2001) or sociological (Castleman, 1982; McDonald 2001; Miller, 2002; Rahn, 2002) in focus and have used interviews with graffiti practitioners to explore the genre of Hip-Hop style graffiti that emerged in New York in the early 1970s. While many of these studies have included photographs of graffiti, they provide little visual or aesthetic analysis, except for a deciphering of the content of the graffiti for the general reader.
Following Chalfant and Cooper's best-selling collections of photographs of New York murals and subway graffiti (1984; 1987), there have been numerous photographic collections of graffiti, from small studies of local graffiti such as Folk's collection of stencil graffiti in Melbourne (2004), to large-format volumes such as Graffiti World: Street Art from Five Continents (Ganz, 2004) which documents the global circulation of graffiti. However, like the key academic studies, these books provide little substantive commentary or analysis of the aesthetics of graffiti. While popular photographic studies published in the 1980s and 1990s originally focussed on murals painted in the New York-derived Hip-Hop style, they have begun to documents other genres of graffiti, such as political slogans, children's drawings, calligraphic 'tagging', stencils, stickers and posters.
Despite the global circulation of graffiti, the idea of regional and national styles is a persistent organising feature of graffiti aesthetics, with a number of studies examining the historical roots of national graffiti (Bushnell, 1990; Brassaï, 2002; Bojorquez, 2003). In Australia, early studies framed graffiti as a form of folklore that manifested a particular national character but was also international in outlook: "a nation's folklore expresses something of national mores...but most Australian graffiti belongs to the world" (Ellis and Turner, 1975). More recently, accounts of graffiti in Australia have been brief, and designed largely to provide a context for graffiti prevention or diversionary programs (Callinan, 2002; Halsey and Young, 2002; Young, 2005). There have been few popular studies of graffiti in book form, aside from a number of small volumes of slogans and toilet graffiti published in the 1970s. However, since the early 1990s, there have been dozen of underground magazines and web pages displaying photographs of graffiti in Australia.
As Frow (1995) and Heathcote (1999) note, forms of graffiti often operate according to strict rules and conventions of genre, however recent photographic studies suggest there is now significant aesthetic interchange between previously discrete styles (Ganz, 2004; Smallman and Nyman, 2005). This has lead to the development of the concept of "street art," (Ganz, 2004) to capture the idea that graffiti is a broad field of highly adaptable aesthetic forms, rather than fixed, independent genres. While popular photographic studies demonstrate that contemporary graffiti ranges from scrawled signatures and child-like drawings to complex murals and repetitive stencilled designs, academic research has not kept track of these changes.
Over the last decade, graffiti in Australia has developed a significant international profile for innovate graffiti and "street art" (Young, 1995; Donovan, 2004; Craske, 2005; Young, 2005). In particular, Melbourne has been listed as a "graffiti capital," along with cities such as New York, Berlin, Barcelona and Sao Paolo (Young, 2002; Small and Nyman, 2005). Some forms of Australian graffiti, particularly stencilling, have attracted the interest of art historians, who have noted their continuity with previous traditions of poster and print-making (Heathcote, 2000; Donovan, 2004; Smallman and Nyman, 2005). While much graffiti has been centred on inner-urban areas, graffiti is also highly visible in a range of suburban locations, such as shopping centres, as well as in mediatised and virtual spaces like television advertisements, billboards and web pages. Graffiti in Australia has shifted from a marginal, illicit practice to a broad-based cultural aesthetic.
This increasing interest and visibility has prompted vigorous debates over the cultural value and appropriate public responses to graffiti (Young, 2005). While these debates have centred on graffiti in Melbourne, they have also had an impact on other cities, particularly Sydney, Brisbane and Newcastle. They have led to highly uneven approach to graffiti across different zones of Australian cities. For example, while some local councils have deployed urban design and planning controls to minimise graffiti, other councils have supported the view that "graffiti writers as a group are able to contribute diversity and value to the social fabric of the city" (Young, 2005, p. 3). Also, while graffiti is cleaned from many urban spaces, images of graffiti circulate in unregulated ways on the Internet or appear selectively in advertisements.
This study examines four domains that have emerged as key sites of contestation over the public meaning and value of graffiti in Australia: cultural heritage; new media technologies; architecture and urban design; and, advertising and visual culture
Cultural Heritage
Debates about the cultural value of specific instances of graffiti was stimulated by recent framings of graffiti as a form of cultural heritage in Melbourne, beginning with a 1999 proposal by the National Trust to classify a piece of 1950s political graffiti in the inner city suburb of Richmond. Since then, the City of Yarra has formally recognised the cultural value of local graffiti and a number of examples of graffiti deemed significant have been given protection under local planning regulations and heritage legislation. Also, and the City of Melbourne Draft Graffiti Response has proposed "creating and supporting areas of high tolerance in which high quality street art can exist is recognition of the cultural significance that street art has today, especially for young people" (Young, 2005, p. 4). These developments can be read as part of a longer history of Australian local government "liberal" interventions to "reform" graffiti, an enterprise which Frow (1995) argues is at once "an aesthetic and political project" (p. 147).
New Media
Existing accounts of graffiti and the media note the importance of photography, magazines and videos in the circulation of graffiti (Austin, 1996; Austin, 2001), but do not examine the role of mobile phones, computer games and the Internet in reproducing graffiti (MacDowall, 2005b). Graffiti is a common aesthetic device in web design and new media art works, however new forms of technology are adopting graffiti as concept as well as content, seeing in graffiti a model for the consumer-driven circulation of information in urban environments (Rice, 2005; MacDowall, 2005b). As Miller (2002) notes, "the Web is really an extension of graffiti" (p. 142), however, the reproduction of graffiti images on the Internet and the simulation of graffiti writing in computer game have also attracted public censure. In February, 2006, the Atari computer game Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure was refused classification by the Federal Government's Classification Review Board due to its depictions of graffiti writers. Thus, new media technologies are transforming the relationship of a range of stakeholders in contemporary graffiti in Australia: graffiti practitioners, law enforcement officials, cleaning companies, community organisations and cultural institutions (MacDowall, 2005b).
Architecture and Urban Design
Graffiti has traditionally been associated with "the remnants of the industrial age," urban spaces such as trains, factory walls, abandoned buildings and street signs (Rice, 2005). However, in contemporary Australian cities graffiti forms are now produced and consumed beyond these industrial sites, for instance in shopping centres, galleries or the virtual spaces of the "information city" (Rice, 2005). Graffiti has also become embedded in the built environment through legal graffiti murals, the cleaning process and programs such as CPTED (Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design) that have limited graffiti, especially in Australian suburbs (Geason and Wilson, 1989; Sim, 2003). While the built environment of Australian cities is transformed into post-industrial spaces (Dovey et al., 2005; Birrell et al, 2005), graffiti is still theorised through the oppositional relationship between the hand-drawn, sensuous graffiti mark-making and monolithic industrial environments (Ellis and Turner, 1975; Brassaï, 2002; Foster, 1985; Rice, 2005).
Advertising and Visual Culture
The term 'visual culture' describes the nexus of art, design, fashion and advertising. As many theorists have noted, graffiti forms borrow heavily from advertising signage, television and popular culture and in many cases moves quickly from the street to the art gallery (Austin, 2001; Stewart, 1989; Varnedoe and Gopnik, 1991). Many of the formal features of graffiti, such as stylised lettering and the rough texture of spray cans or stencils have become part of the visual language of contemporary culture, however this appropriation of graffiti in advertising is highly selective. While previous research have noted graffiti's debt to the aesthetic feature of advertising and its subsequent commodification as art (Stewart, 1987; Varnedoe and Gopnik, 1991), there has been no detailed study of the circulation of the visual elements of graffiti in advertising and visual design.
These four domains represent the key sites of contestation over the value of graffiti in Australia. In different ways, each of these domains produce forms of graffiti as objects possessing aesthetic value, with significant overlap between advertising and new media, or cultural heritage and urban design. The challenge for graffiti research in Australia is to provide a detailed account of the complex ways in which graffiti circulates across these key domains.
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