Greg Ansley: Taggers versus street artists

Street art in Hosier Lane, Melbourne. Photo / Supplied

You can see the beginnings of the end for Ganesh in Hosier Lane already, with the first tiny, tentative squiggles of tagging appearing like a cancer that will inevitably destroy the Hindu God.

All around this narrow Victorian brick laneway running from Flinders St to Federation Square, similar scars mark Melbourne's underground war between street artists who have become their own elite and the spray cans of suburban taggers.

There are other fronts: definitions that divide legal street art from illegal tagging; furious debates about the artistic merit and commercial worth of art on walls; the adoption of its stars by corporate Titans such as Pepsi, Optus and Absolut Vodka.

Last year, the obliteration of a stencilled parachuting rat by British artist Banksy, cleaned from Hosier Lane by an over-enthusiastic Melbourne City anti-graffiti team, caused outrage.

A couple of years earlier, the council had tried to protect another Banksy work with a perspex screen: taggers got to it anyway.

Down in cobbled Hosier Lane, Adrian Doyle, former illegal street artist-cum-fine arts student-cum-youth worker, artist and art tour operator, is thrilled and exasperated by it all.

Around him are the styles of the street: legal street art and its often vast, elaborate works; paste-ups of paper or cardboard glued to walls with cornflour and water glue; "pieces" a New York style signed by the artist; the rapid and chaotic thrusts of taggers' spraycans; stencils; and "throw-ups", works of one or two colours in quick "bubble-style" writing.

On this brick wall is a Virgin Mary and a paste-up exhorting me to think positive through the bleakness and futility of it all; on another the surrealism of a 55-year-old psychiatrist called Phoenix; and work by Regan, a rising Kiwi star.

Doyle straddles a form that has evolved from the early illustrated and often angry frustrations of inner-city kids who spray-canned buildings, walls, fences, railway lines, carriages and trams. As its styles and quality mushroomed, Melbourne learned to loathe and love its various forms with almost equal passion.

While Melbourne City promoted its street art internationally, former Victorian Premier John Brumby ordered the state tourism department to pull a replica painted lane from a promotional Disney World campaign in Florida.

And then the war started. You see its scars everywhere, from Hosier Lane to tram tracks.

Melbourne decided that street art, according to its subjective criteria, is good and all other forms bad. Street art is promoted, valued (Banksy's extinct rat was, according to one estimate, worth A$40,000), and commercially exhibited. Its stars are lauded.

Other illegal forms - especially tagging - are reviled and heavily punished with fines and even jail. It is a crime to sell paint sprays to anyone under 18, or to possess them without lawful excuse in the vicinity of public transport.

This, says Doyle, has accelerated the covert war between artists and taggers. Speakeasy-type shops in the suburbs sell cans illegally to underage kids. Taggers compete for space and prominence, and target works by known artists.

"Kids raid from the suburbs," he says. "We had two artists working here. Some kids came, stole their paint and took over."

They work fast and unpredictably and, since anti-graffiti laws were tightened five years ago, with greater vigour and more risks to get the best spots - high on walls, in abandoned buildings and in drains.

In this world, art really is what you make it.