Showing posts with label Broken Windows Theory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Broken Windows Theory. Show all posts

Friday 26 November 2010

F*** the F***ing F***ers - FREE 10FOOT

photos: NoLionsInEngland except Joeppowhere noted


Standby for a bit of a rant at inappropriate sentencing.


Artist unknown - view LARGE


London tagger, bomber and graffiti artist 10FOOT has been sentenced to 26 months in prison for a long list of acts of graffiti, also known as crimes. On release, he has a weird 5 year ASBO stopping him carrying “unset paint, permanent marker pen, shoe dye, permanent ink, grinding stone, glass cutting equipment, glass etching solution or paste” or from entering train yards.

That sentence is crass beyond belief. As balance between punishing a specific individual and deterring the rest, there no doubt 10foot is suffering way beyond what would be reasonably due him. 26 months banged up is just irrational, disproportionate, unjustifiable and quite capable of having a life-destroying impact.


Do you believe society is capable of electing representatives to create laws that are then used fairly by the judiciary? You can't justify believing that when you look at the stupidity of punishments like this.

For bringing it to my attention, cap is doffed to Joeppo and the London Vandal. You can read the full list of 25 acts of “criminal damage” 10FOOT pleaded guilty to, from the BTP press release on London Vandal here.

Looking at the list, not one of the criminal acts involves rape, dangerous driving, assault, theft, fraud, public indecency, threatening behaviour or racism. They are merely making a mark on walls. So some of those marks are on trains and they are private property, that’s a crime and crimes get punished after a “guilty” verdict but there is no way our world is going to be a better place for having 10foot locked up for 26 months.

The vast majority of the acts relate to trackside shit. Now if there ever was a kind of property that the word “marginalised” was invented for, it is on the whole the kind of spots that 10foot has been bombing. The clean up costs cited in the press release have to be fabricated as there is no way that any sane individual would want to spend 31 grand (about 52,000 dollars) creating buff coloured rectangles where 10foot has done his artwork. Quite what goes into those cost estimates (railway overheads?) we’ll never know but you can employ a feck of a lot of painters for that amount.

Why are those costs so high? To make us gasp, to smear some kind of shock factor to wave over the excessive prison sentence handed down. The costs are quoted to the nearest 37p or 24p which is so ludicrous it must be just done for comic effect.

It seems pretty clear that BTP have gone after 10foot motivated by vengeance, by a vandal headhunters blood lust, they must have been burning with a crazed ambition to make a name for themselves (bloody hell, that’s close to graffiti) and to obtain a huge sentence guaranteed to make the press. You can just see them high fiving, funny handshaking and off out celebrating on hearing the sentence.

In the two photos accompanying this post you can see the name Saycell, it’s not difficult to find information on the internet regarding Colin Saysell of the British Transport Police and his obsession with making examples of some high profile graffiti artists. The Fuck the Fuckers piece also rants about “fuck jizz wally” (SIC), Jeremy "Jez" Walley is also BTP and it is he who gloats over the fate of 10FOOT in the press release:

"[the] vandalism was nothing more than wanton damage that costs thousands of pounds to clean up”

Well quite, “nothing more than”, so how does that suggest 26months is the appropriate punishment?


photo Joeppo, aka LDN GRAFFITI


It also seems way over the top to take this crime to Crown Court. This can only have been to add a veneer of apparent gravity to the offences and to give BTP the big stage for their performance.


Did the judge have discretion to impose a more appropriate, less damaging punishment? We don’t know the technical legal answer to that but surely some serious community service perhaps coupled with that ASBO would have been less harmful. That last word is key in our minds, harmful, this punishment is likely to cause great harm to 10foot yet he has not actually caused harm to any individual anywhere.

Do you think the experience of sending 10foot inside is possibly going to “improve” him? 10foot is personable, affable, articulate and socially is not particularly attention seeking. After 2 years inside he is likely to pick up a shit load of new skills and attitudes that may make him a completely different proposition.

Of course, if he signs up for all the basket weaving and art classes the irony is when he is released he won’t be able to buy art materials unless someone else carries it home for him.

We are alarmed to read in the press release that his girlfriend’s house was raided. In the BTP press release they say the raids yielded photos of him fraternising with other known graffiti “vandals”. Well bollocks, Graffoto can be seen fraternising most weeks with some well known graffiti vandals and we’re not aware that that was a crime.

Just going back to the 26 months inside, how can this possibly proportionate or appropriate when a very cursory search on the net yields sentences such as 12 months for multiple stabbing and 24 weeks SUSPENDED for careless driving in the hit and run killing of a cyclist. In the list of headboard notches displayed in BTP's list of press releases there is a case this month of a man sentenced to 1 year imprisonment for raping an 86 year old woman travelling alone in a train carriage. Compare the horror of that crime, the impact on the woman and her family, the heightened fear engendered in her friends and other elderly people and solitary travellers with the nature of 10foot’s campaign of quietly sneaking about and writing his name. There won't be a single individaul who said "my life is perceptibly worse after that piece of graffiti" yet 10Foot is doing twice as much as a rapist. This may be law but it is not justice.

BTP, The crown court, society at large, you should be ashamed of yourselves. FREE 10FOOT.


artist: Robbo; photo: Joeppo, aka LDN GRAFFITI

Selection of 10FOOT graffiti here and here.



After a recount, this is Graffoto’s 200th post and we are proud that it is about such an important and serious matter



Broken Windows Footnote:

As a curiousity, in doing a bit of googling for this post, we came across a statistical analysis in the US which proves there is very little link between incidents of graffiti and incidents of other forms of crime – despite what the authors of the web page say. You can see generally from the graph plots that things are pretty scattered and you’ll be greatly puzzled by the low R-squared coefficients which suggests the correlation between the two graphed parameters is tiny, you need a number close to 1 to indicate a close relationship between occurrence of graffiti and occurrence of other crimes and the values in the plots are no higher than 0.26. And that’s after they removed some data which would have made R squared even lower. Check it out here.

Saturday 11 July 2009

Bill London: They Seek Him Here

Rarekind Gallery
London
Jul 10 – Aug 1 2009


all photos: NoLionsInEngland


After a fallow period buried beneath the post Banksy tidal sludge of pasted lazer jet print-outs, real painted graffiti has been showing signs of a pulse the last four months or so in Shoreditch. Some spark has triggered an avalanche of graffiti in all its' full glorious letterform manifestations from pissed up tags to Olympic standard wild-style burners. Many sperm have nibbled at the egg to create this fertile explosion of life, one of the most potent seemingly being the arrival of Chrome and Black in the area, the other obviously being the Meeting of Styles event.

Among the various species making up the spectrum of graffiti life, at the top of the food-chain are master writers from RT crew such as Vibes.


Vibes RT


Of course, there is no link between the artist Bill London whose show opened in the Rarekind Gallery beneath Chrome and Black and anyone who would write VIBES RT on walls around London, at least there isn’t in the show flyer, and no one met at the show preview went by the name VIBES (actually, no one I met went by the name Bill London either but there ya go, just one of those evenings where people weren’t wearing lapel badges).


Vibes RT, Parklifers, DasR


First impression of the show was a refreshing sense of restraint, this wasn’t a pile ‘em high sell em cheap “here’s everfink from my black book ‘n stuff the gallerist had out the back” exercise. The gallery walls have been given an illusionist relief jigsaw treatment, providing a background matrix to small number of canvasses spanning themes from urban realism to oriental fantasy landscape.


They Seek Him Here


With the range of styles in the show, Bill London transcends the limited graffiti form. The show can be divided into canvasses with letter forms for folk who like graff content in their wall decoration and art with no particular links to graff. The work ranges from almost realism to abstract and from austere urban to the almost pastoral.


Rising Down


Using classic fades combined with splatters, the charmingly named Chlamydia forms a wild calligraphic exercise in writing letters, in a form recognisable instantly as VIBES, compare with the street pieces photographed above. I’m told that the colouring in the picture is similar to the colour of a pair of skimpies tossed on the bedroom floor in a public information film here in the UK, maybe I just haven’t found the right channel.


Chlamydia


One common and somewhat baffling gallery show feature is the part-wall-part-canvas mural, it always seems weird to contemplate taking away a small piece of what is a larger single artwork, They Seek Him Here offers some kind of way round this defect by throwing in a photograph of the complete piece separately with each of the ten canvasses in the mural.


VIBES


The individual canvasses from this wall piece are going to look fairly abstract, in the example below there is a horrible Andrew McAttee type thing going on (horrible if that’s your reaction to McAttee’s squeaky clean bubbles)


They Seek Him Here (1 of 10 unique canvasses)


Signs of Life takes a macabre eco-doom stance and combines it with a futurist urban landscape, where close scrutiny reveals all is not as it seems. Buildings made of ghetto blasters, grenades and hand signs crowned by a winged spraycan deity form a backdrop to yoots lobbing molotovs across an arena of dead bodies, syringes and pipes like fat doobies leaking toxic waste.


Signs Of Life


If graffiti is art lying in the gutter then Broken Window Theory is a trompe l’oeil looking up at kind of tenement whose rough inner-city appearance condemns the place to become a self fulfilling kind of housing project hatchery breeding crime and attracting crime. Sufficiently flat and cartoonish to avoid looking like an attempt at photorealism (thank god), details like the clothes line emphasize the residential and community use of the building, perhaps appearances can be deceptive.


Broken Window Theory

At the other end of the spectrum from the gritty urban feel of the last two pieces Bill London tends towards a eastern natural minimilism in the trio of tryptichs Bamboo which owe no debt to the alphabet at all.


Bamboo


The rustic theme is maintained in the rural pond scene “Untitled”. The dragonfly which may be about to become fodder for the fish is a motif element which repeats in several places (and had me scanning though old photos of un-attributed graff as this dragon fly has been seen on walls recently if recollection serves).


Untitled


Take You There (below) follows the countryside theme of the two works above, though if you were to take a stab at where the scene might be, a molten sunrise over the Yangtse Gorge might be a reasonable guess. The cloudscape being scorched away by the rising sun has VIBES wild tag in the formations but the impact is almost subliminal, non-graff heads could be forgiven for not realising that there are any letters at all. So, good one for the parents and other-halves.


Take You There


The usual reaction within the graff community to writers putting work in galleries is to treat them as sell-outs and call them art-fags, Bill London exposes himself to this knuckle minded reaction but shows his work is varied enough and strong enough to make such sentiment pretty irrelevant (not to mention irrational). Curiously, whereas street artists prize an element of roughness, grime and runs in their work when they move indoors, as a writer Vibes seeks to display his incredible refined skills to produce a very clean image and highly proficient collection. Rarekind have done a great job of staging a very interesting show in their utilitarian white space.


Untitled


More pics from the show here