Just a week ago, the discovery of tens of thousands of paintings of animals and humans was made public in a series of cliffs stretching for twelve kilometers in the Lindosa mountain range, in the Colombian Amazon rainforest. According to their discoverers, the oldest date back 12,500 years. Soon they can be seen in detail in a Channel 4 documentary.
The dating of their age is based on the fact that many represent animals extinct more than ten millennia ago, such as mastodons, paleolamas, or giant sloths. The magnitude of the discovery is overwhelming. As is the artistic quality of these drawings, which have traversed millennia and continue to preserve their ability to transmit beauty and emotion. The vastness of the work suggests that, of course, it is not the work of a single artist, nor even of artists who knew each other, as the murals were completed over many generations. Although the clarity and good state of preservation of the paintings have raised some reticence about their authenticity, for the moment we can revel in this extraordinary discovery, which is already beginning to be known as "the Sistine Chapel of Antiquity." They maintain the same style as the cave paintings of the nearby Chribiquete National Park, discovered three decades ago.
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Well, the nature of these paintings could well deserve the epithet of graffiti: made in public space, the work of anonymous artists, and intended to decorate the habitat of the neighbors of their authors. Hopefully, the bulk of contemporary graffiti artists would be able to leave a similar legacy. If we walk through the streets of Barcelona, we will also discover thousands, or rather millions, of illustrations and scribbles stamped on walls, shutters, and even lampposts, trash cans, or benches.
Modern graffiti
The vast majority of graffiti and tags that proliferate on Barcelona's shutters and facades cannot aspire to any kind of posterity. There are those with protest messages from the most diverse political tendencies, with a desire for personal notoriety and with artistic pretensions. Those that proliferate the most and pose a greater challenge for the visual rest of Barcelona residents and municipal cleaning services are the tags (or signatures) that proliferate on walls and shutters, and that have no other pretension than the display of their author, not to the general public, but to the members of their community.
The success of a graffiti artist has gravitated from trying to make a quality graffiti to doing it in a difficult-to-access space and colonizing public space as much as possible. Something similar to what felines do by spreading urine to mark their territory. Manifestations of an urban subculture that, although it has a certain tradition claimed by certain chroniclers of contemporary subcultures, for the most part simply become vandalism that neither beautifies the city nor will earn its authors any kind of recognition beyond their closest circle or social networks in which, increasingly often, they collect and document their graphic feats. What can most shock even connoisseurs of the subject is the general low quality and clumsiness of most of these executions, which seem more destined to mark territory in circles of urban tribalism than to aspire to excellence. If you enter the hashtag #grafitibarcelona on Instagram, you can access a rich graphic sample of interventions on all kinds of supports in the city.
Some graffiti artists have passed into the local intrahistory of graffiti by planting their signatures in as many places as they could, like Chupet Negre, a true veteran, and others more recent, of whom it is unknown if they are a single person or a collective, like Sinpapeles, which seems to contain a political message but which, by being repeated like garlic on walls all over the city, is now as anodyne as a certain Farlopa, who years ago colonized with such a futile expression a good part of the walls of Ciutat Vella, Gràcia and the Eixample. There is even someone who wanted to make a minimal version of the matter, and who limits himself to planting red dots on the walls of buildings (thousands of them, mind you, because the work can be replicated with great ease), in an exercise of minimalist insistence that, at least, is less invasive than that of some of his colleagues. It is difficult to discern in that case if the author is really an artist or simply suffers from an obsessive compulsive disorder. The truth is that the dots turn out to be, oh surprise, an "artistic project" that, under the name of Red Dot Theory has its own Instagram account, of course, and some videos on Youtube where it explains the evolution of the project.
We do not know if the wet dream of many graffiti artists would be to transcend the attachment to the shutter and achieve international glory among critics and collectors, as Banksy did, what seems evident is that although we have an abundant quarry of graffiti artists, talent does not shine especially in that collective.
The price to pay
Graffiti cleaning, which obviously does not manage to curb the phenomenon, cost the Barcelona city council 3,942,604 euros in 2019, spent on cleaning some 400,000 square meters, with a total of 164,000 interventions by municipal workers. An amount even higher than that planned for the coming years: the tender for cleaning graffiti in the period 2020-2023 amounts to 13,751,686 euros. A not inconsiderable amount, but one that will surely not ensure that many of the city's walls and shutters are free of graffiti, most of them perfectly devoid of reason for being. Graffiti considered offensive is attempted to be removed in less than 24 hours.
The system currently applied is limited to cleaning graffiti from walls, but does not extend to commercial premises' shutters, garage doors, or residential building doors, whose cleaning is the responsibility of private owners. The intensity of the bombardment is such that most private individuals have given up cleaning them, given the prospect that doing so would constitute an invitation for them to be immediately replaced by new ones.
Until 2006, the Barcelona City Council had no specific graffiti cleaning program. The civility ordinance approved that year began a battle against graffiti after many years of tolerance. It is a battle lost to date, but one that is still being fought at high costs to the public purse. The latest trends among the youngsters of the new generations consist of climbing to any place that allows them to leave their marks in places inaccessible to municipal cleaning teams, which would prolong their lifespan. This forces them to work in increasingly uncomfortable conditions, which results in the scribbles also becoming increasingly crude.
Although spaces have been enabled in the city where street art can be practiced legally, which can be consulted on websites such as this one, this one or this one, the very transgressive nature of the movement makes it impossible to restrict this activity to designated areas.
The fixation with trains
A separate chapter is deserved by the graffiti made on commuter trains, metro network, and long-distance trains, which, in addition to aesthetic damage, cause mobility incidents and risk situations for people. The Barcelona metro registers an average of four intrusion attempts per day, of which 626 were successful in 2019. The consequence was 1,444 vandalized wagons, with a total of 41,774 square meters of graffiti, equivalent to no less than six football fields. The result is an annual cost of more than four million euros between cleaning costs and specific surveillance, which is obviously insufficient to curb the phenomenon. As a consequence, often the withdrawal of trains from circulation (often the first thing graffiti artists paint is the driver's window, which renders the train unusable until it is cleaned) ends up affecting a service that already normally suffers the consequences of an infrastructure precarious due to lack of investment, as its long-suffering regular users well know.
The infrastructure management companies have long been demanding an increase in judicial reproach for this often organized activity. Some recent rulings go in that direction, although the results are not yet detectable. On November 11, the arrest of 99 graffiti artists was announced for their responsibility for more than 1,000 graffiti made on Metro or Renfe wagons throughout Spain, but with a special incidence in Barcelona. Apparently, our city has become a kind of tourist mecca where spray lovers from all over Spain and also from abroad come, thanks, it seems, to the ease they find in Barcelona to carry out their favorite activities. Even a subcontracted ticket seller indulged in the pleasures of defacing the mobile material of the Barcelona metro, clearly exceeding the functions for which she was hired. The cost of these acts for the Rodalies train network is not minor: in 2018 alone, the cost of cleaning graffiti from Rodalies was ten million euros, which are added to another twenty million spent on repairing other acts of vandalism. An amount that would have allowed the purchase of three new complete trains in just one year.
Those who are saved
Perhaps the previous diatribe may earn the author of this article epithets such as "señoro" (a derogatory term for an older, privileged man), boomer, or the more transversal "facha" (fascist), although perhaps the most sensible thing would be to distinguish the wheat from the chaff and put everything in its place. That urban space is for collective use and belongs to everyone is an obvious truth, and that civility should not be at odds with freedom of expression also. The city will continue to be graphically bombarded by vandals, artists, or activists, and perhaps some of these expressions will be recognized, valued, or even admired by their potential audience, which is anyone who passes by. Unfortunately, even the best run the risk of passing unnoticed among the tangle of worthless and meaningless scribbles that colonize public space.
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Keith Haring's Intermittent Graffiti
Despite the enormous pressure from inane or directly execrable graffiti that invades Barcelona's public space, the city has also accumulated works that deserve consideration and are part of itineraries frequented by those who value this form of urban art. Some still remain in their locations and others have disappeared, victims of municipal services or, also frequently, of other spray enthusiasts who use preceding works as a palimpsest.
Some have become part of the city's heritage, such as Keith Haring's graffiti located next to the entrance of the MACBA in Barcelona. The ill-fated artist (who died a few months after completing the work, a victim of AIDS) originally painted it in Salvador Seguí square (where the Filmoteca building now stands), encouraged by his friend, the gallerist Montserrat Guillén, and with the acquiescence of Ferran Mascarell. It is titled Todos juntos podemos parar el sida (Together we can stop AIDS in its original title). The mural gradually degraded until it became unrecoverable, mainly a victim of other graffiti, but also due to the vandalization by the owner of a nearby brothel, who feared that the theme would scare away his clientele. Municipal services had documented it, and years later it was replicated in its current location, where it has already had to be recreated three times after successive destructions by other artists. The last version dates from 2014.
The disappearance of a graffiti, even when it can be recognized for its notable artistic values, is not a drama either. Its very nature is ephemeral, and almost all those of value will be well documented, at least in the Instagram accounts of their authors. Banksy himself (whose exhibition, The World of Banksy, can currently be visited in a gallery on Trafalgar Street), who has elevated street art to the most exclusive art circuit, created some works in our city in 2002 and 2003. Works that have only been documented in some of his books, and that went completely unnoticed at the time, before they were inadvertently erased by some cleaning operator or by some ill-informed rival.