I just came from a Housepaint event at the Royal Ontario Museum, Signy & Cléophée Eaton Theatre in Toronto. The night brought together an artist named Dan Bereron (aka fauxreel), a city councillor (Adam Vaughan), a curator (Devon Ostrom) and an artistic director (David Liss of MOCCA).
Devon Ostrom started off the introductory remarks by describing some of the art events he has participated in. The list was impressive. Check out some of the visuals here on the them.ca website. One of my favorite projects involved the organizers getting inmates in a prison to select graffiti artists' work that they liked. The artists then came into the space and put their art up on the wall. The results of this activity included an increase in social actions in the community space, an increase in attendance in this area of the prison, pictures for families taken in front of the art, and inmates creating their own art work.
Adam Vaughan, the city councillor, began by remarking on how his lengthy resume demonstrates his age and proceeded to donate extra cv information about his beginnings as a cartoonist (an attempt to mark his street credibility). He continued by tying the concept of weeds to graffiti (the task force that deals with both lawn weeds - that is people complaining about too many weeds on their neighbors lawn - and graffiti) in his use of metaphors. He didn't mention that people complain significantly more about the weeds of their neighbors' lawns than they do about graffiti (that's the statistical reality of the matter).
David Liss described his position in the field as the "gatekeeper of culture" and discussed graffiti art as a "global movement." Finally, Dan Bereron discussed his beginnings as an artist and why he got into "creating works outdoors." He explained that the street art he saw in England inspired him because it was inclusive.
The question and answer period didn't offer any profound debate or insight but entertained the crowd with a few laughs here and there.
What strikes me now about the conversation were the aspects that evoked the global or universal language of graffiti art. For example, Devon mentioned an art project where artists from different nations painted on bank notes. Adam Vaughan referenced a local public school in his district where for Chinese New Year's the students decided to sing reggae tunes with French words. Vaughan added that Toronto is one of five or six cities in the world where that type of cultural mix is possible (and proceeded to link this to his theme of despair, poverty and creativity by saying that "THAT is the culture of the poor"). ?? David Liss remarked on graffiti art at its best as an affirmative act of resistance and a 'global language.' Finally Dan's reference to the UK in general, or the scene in Montreal, provided him with some points of comparison to Toronto. Both Devon and Dan wanted to make explicit that this artistic movement was middle-class in Toronto.
What to make of all this?
I'm not sure yet (maybe it's a girl thing - no women were represented in the discussion panel or Q&A). The debate did sound like the same one I heard in Toronto about seven years ago. The cultural position of some of the graffiti artists over this time have been elevated and given more value and attention so perhaps that's the best result of public forums like this, that is promotion of talented artists like Elicser.
What is worthy of checking out is Well and Good who are doing great historical documentary work to share the stories of some (of my favorite) Toronto writers.
Writing Toronto's (Hi)Story from Well and Good on Vimeo.
Finally, here's the BOMB IT documentary site and a trailer for the film about global graffiti culture from a little while ago:
The general consensus during my trip to Toronto seems to be that the creative (street) artists making art and dance don't want to be tied to hip hop too tightly. Both dancers and writers that I've been talking to say that they want to advance their cultural productions in ways that suit their local inspirations and trajectories rather than fit to a model of what people think it should be (the global opinion on what is b-boying or street art). It's probably this collective mentality that has allowed so many artists to veer off the course of dogma and into their own expressions.
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