And that often provokes other artists to spray over the same surface again, and often with less beautiful artworks.Ĭritics of our liberal approach say legal walls incite more illegal graffiti elsewhere, but we haven’t seen that. You can fix a window, but when you paint over a graffiti you destroy an artwork. Are you not convinced by that argument? The broken windows theory cannot be really applied to graffiti in a straightforward way. The most commonly cited argument against graffiti is the “ broken windows theory”, proposed by social scientists James Q Wilson and George L Kelling in 1982 : that allowing visual signs of civic disorder creates an environment that breeds more of the same disorder. Now we have official walls where people can paint all around the city, and see graffiti as a colourful part of our city’s culture. In 2008, we succeeded in scrapping the zero-tolerance policy of old. I campaigned against Helsinki’s harsh measures and the waste of taxpayers’ money for seven years, and eventually people started to listen. Young men were fined or sent to prison: the war on graffiti was destroying lives. After I initiated a motion to paint back an erased graffiti in east Helsinki, I got a lot of phone calls from the mums of kids who had been beaten up by security staff. I got back into graffiti through politics, when I got elected as a member of Helsinki city council as a 23-year-old in 2000. There was a huge campaign trying to paint them as criminal and drug addicts, and the city hired plain-clothes security guards to catch them in the act. Graffiti writers were effectively declared enemies of the state. Paradoxically, the idea was to clean away lots of culture to make way for culture. Things really changed when Helsinki was announced as the cultural capital of Europe for the year 2000, and the city started a big anti-graffiti campaign in the run-up. I campaigned against harsh measures - and in 2008, we succeeded in scrapping the zero-tolerance policy of old We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.Īfter newsletter promotion The war on graffiti was destroying lives. For more information see our Privacy Policy. Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. It wasn’t legal then, but it also wasn’t taken too seriously. So graffiti arrived a bit later, but there was a massive boom in the late 80s: every boy and girl at my school had their own tag. What’s the history of graffiti in Finland? In a way graffiti came to Finland via the same route it came to most countries in Europe: there was the 1983 documentary Style Wars, Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant’s 1984 book Subway Art, and the more Hollywood-style film Beat Street around the same time.įinland was a special case because even though we weren’t on the wrong side of the iron curtain, we were still somewhere in between east and west. But I can see why, because it would have probably become a tourist attraction otherwise. It’s a shame that it had to be removed so quickly – I didn’t even get a chance to take proper pictures. My friend and I will also pay the cleaning costs, which may be around €3,000. Of course, it was a really stupid thing to do. Have you been fined? Not yet, the police hearing will be after the summer. ‘Pasila’s two famous tower blocks’ … the impromptu work of Arhinmäki and his friend. Which I guess is ironic given that I got caught and some people even called on me to resign. The words I painted are really a reference to the early New York graffiti of the 70s: “GCM”, which stands for “great career moves”. The two grey things in the middle of the text are two famous tower blocks in the neighbourhood. We painted the skyline of Pasila, with the sun going down. What kind of graffiti did you paint? These days, graffiti is mainly about the lettering, but when my friends and I got into painting in the 80s, the backgrounds were more important. I mean, were were two middle-aged guys, we weren’t going to run anywhere. We were about to take pictures of our work when there were suddenly guards everywhere, shouting at us not to try to escape. It took us two hours to finish the painting. The tunnel wall wasn’t an official wall for graffiti, but there were already lots of old paintings on it that no one had cleaned up for years, so we thought people just didn’t care. We stopped the car and got our spray cans out.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |