Now Cape Town’s art establishment can’t take its eyes off them. Impressed by the enormous murals brightening large swaths of the city–many supporting causes like anti-retroviral drugs for AIDS patients or quitting smoking–gallery owners have begun inviting the graffiti artists to exhibit their work on canvases. The shows have become so popular that some of the artists can now make a living solely off their graffiti. Advertisers, corporations, political candidates–even private art collectors–are commissioning their work, sometimes for as much as 10,000 rand (about $900). Two of the country’s top graffiti artists, Mak 1 and Falko, have been hired to decorate buildings for the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens. At home they lecture at universities and recently organized a “graffiti tour” of Mitchell’s Plain, the township where they painted their first murals. Artist Tyler Murphy, 21, edits a magazine of graffiti culture, Realife; Mantis, who at 29 is one of the city’s oldest and most respected taggers, runs a business making customized graffiti-style shirts and pants. And the artist known as Eeb, 23, recently directed a documentary on graffiti art, called “Overspray,” for national television.
So it came as a surprise two months ago when city officials announced a crackdown on graffiti. “We were shocked,” says Mantis. “One minute we’re the kings of Cape Town, and the next minute everyone wants to see us disappear.” Indeed, officials hoping to lure tourists and investors suddenly decided that the graffiti–which had gone largely unpoliced–was unsightly. City councilor Jean-Pierre Smith announced a new package of laws that would regulate spray-paint sales, confiscate artists’ property and initiate a 24-hour “graffiti hot line” for citizens to report unlawful painting. Offenders could be fined up to 2,000 rand (about $180) and even sent to jail. A few weeks ago police made their first graffiti arrests in years, says Smith. The offenders: a pair of academics protesting the proposed bylaws by spraying the words free art on an overpass. “We felt the new laws sounded extremist and unfair,” says one of the culprits, Clinton Osbourn, a design teacher at Zonnebloom College. “There are a lot of artists who put a lot of energy into making big, beautiful public murals.”
Contemporary graffiti art started in the 1980s in Cape Town’s mixed-race, or “colored,” communities. Inspired by television images of New York buildings and subway trains covered with graffiti, a few young artists created their own tags, spray-painting their signatures on walls. “Under apartheid, our schools didn’t have a proper art program,” says Falko. “So we didn’t have any training or materials, but we wanted to make our environments more beautiful.”
Today graffiti has spread to the affluent southern suburbs, and is becoming popular elsewhere in the country as well. Two of Cape Town’s most admired artists–Mantis and Tyler Murphy–are white. “I was the first white friend Falko ever had,” says Murphy. It took him a while to win acceptance; at first Falko’s crowd nicknamed him “Herald,” after an apartheid-era newspaper. But eventually he proved himself. Now, Murphy says, “the graffiti scene is the only place in Cape Town where everyone is judged strictly on skill. We don’t care what you look like because so many of us are rootless ourselves, trying to create a culture that’s not like the one we grew up with.”
Even graffiti art’s staunchest opponents are reluctant to criticize their murals, which not only are stunning but also incorporate such elusive values as racial harmony and opportunity for the disenfranchised. Officials are careful to distinguish the murals from tags, the ugly signature scrawls that mar the city landscape. While they’re hoping to eradicate tagging, they don’t want to ban murals outright. “We simply want to regulate them, the way you would regulate putting up a billboard,” says Executive Councilor for Safety and Health Ian Neilson. Smith, who hired graffiti artist Sky 189 to paint a mural for his campaign, is worried about the impact on the artists’ livelihood. “We’re just seeking to clean up the city, not to criminalize their profession,” he says. He even invited 15 artists to a meeting where he sought their input on the new bylaws. But they all walked out. “It was obvious the [officials] weren’t taking us seriously,” says Falko. “And anyway, they need to focus on what’s really making the city ugly: poverty, homelessness, crime.”
Indeed, some believe officials have fixated on graffiti because Cape Town’s bigger problems are so intractable. Six months ago art editor Roger Lucey commissioned three graffiti artists to paint a piece on the front wall of his suburban home, prompting his outraged neighbors to file a complaint with the city council. “My neighbors say I’m bringing crime into the area, but it’s just a bloody piece of art work,” he says. “They’re so afraid of young people’s real problems that they fix on small things like this.” Like that of all art, it seems, graffiti’s appeal lies squarely in the eye of the beholder.
