Published in Arts in the City, Issue 1, July 2006

It’s a Sunday morning in May at the Rose St Artists Market in Fitzroy. The organisers of the third annual Melbourne Stencil Festival are getting ready for a charity auction which will be held in a few hours – last year it raised $4500 for the Youth Substance Abuse Service, with the highest bid being $850. The weather has been beautiful all weekend and they have their fingers crossed that the dark clouds will keep at bay until the end of the day. Meanwhile, visitors take in the exhibition of graffiti art in the makeshift gallery at the back of the block.

A father of two flaxen-haired, Von Trappe-esque children approaches Festival Director JD Mittman. He’s after some advice about materials and techniques.

‘I just got some plastic from work and cut it out and did some spraying in the backyard,’ he tells JD. He says he and the kids did some painting on clothing, but they don’t know if the paint will hold. JD recommends some fabric paint.

‘And you can get that in a spray can?’ asks Dad.

‘Yes, you can, but a roller is better for clothing,’ JD replies in his thick German accent. ‘And it’s much safer for the kids.’

Many, if not all, of the artists represented at the festival do other work illegally, spraying their designs onto public walls across Melbourne. Some have been in trouble with the police. Council bodies spend thousands removing stencil artists’ work from their municipalities, and in the lead up to the Commonwealth Games the City of Melbourne announced a zero tolerance policy on all graffiti.

But on the last day of the Stencil Festival, it’s all family values. Parents and their children are out in droves, soaking up the visual treats on display. It’s testament to the popularity of stencil art in Melbourne. The city is considered, by fans and practitioners alike, to be among the best street art locations in the world, up there with New York, London and Paris. Last year the book Stencil Graffiti Capital: Melbourne was released, and a visit from world-famous British ‘art terrorist’ and stencil artist Banksy confirmed Melbourne’s status as a leader in the realm of street art. ‘Melbourne’s graffiti scene is a key factor in its status as the continent’s hothouse of creativity and wilful individualism,’ Banksy said in an article for The Guardian newspaper in England. ‘Melbourne and London are genuine epicentres of the skewed human touch that can bring a little sparkle into the drudgery of public space.’

Stencil art grew out of graffiti culture. Motivated by a desire to reclaim public space from commercialism and to leave their mark in a world that might not otherwise listen, artists risk arrest and huge fines in order to express themselves. ‘All street art is political in some way,’ says Fray, a 19 year old artist who has been part of the scene for three years. ‘The government says you’re not allowed to do it, and label street art vandalism, saying people don’t want to see it. If you go out and put your art up, you’re basically giving a big “fuck you” to the government.

‘I have to walk down the street and have billboards and advertising shoved down my throat, so why can’t I put my art up? All I’m trying to do is have a positive effect on people, instead of the passive consumerism they’re used to.’

Artists cut designs out of acetate or cardboard, sometimes using multiple stencils to create layers of colour and build up tone. The preparation is meticulous and the work intricate. The advantage is that most of the work can be done at home, meaning less time on the street. The huge mural-style spray paintings of traditional graffiti can take hours or even days to complete, leaving artists exposed and vulnerable to encounters with police – a stencil, on the other hand, can be put up in a matter of minutes. And when the council comes along with cans of grey cover-up paint, the piece need not be lost – the artist can return and simply respray the design on a fresh canvas.

Some artists save even more time on the streets by doing paste-ups – stencilling onto huge sheets of paper and sticking them to walls with wheat paste. One prolific paste-up artist is Sync, whose images of screaming faces appropriated from horror movies can be found lurking all over inner city Melbourne. Commuters who travel on the Sandringham line might recognise the fanged features of Bela Lugosi pasted on the side of a building below the south side of Richmond station; another of his stencils depicts Janet Leigh in the shower scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.

The paste-ups highlight the stencil’s place within art history. Theoretically speaking, stencil art has more in common with printmaking techniques than with painting. Images are produced from a plate that can be used to reproduce the design multiple times. Institutions such as the National Gallery of Australia are taking note – both of the techniques involved and of the social, historical and artistic significance of the form. In 2003 Anne McDonald, the Curator for Australian Prints and Drawings at NGA, told The Age: ‘The National Gallery has the premier collection of Australian prints and it’s very important for us to keep up with what is happening in the current scene – it seems to be a very vibrant movement. While the gallery would never condone graffiti, we are interested to reflect what is happening in the contemporary public art scene.’

Also seeking to document the scene is Jake Smallman, author of Stencil Graffiti Capital: Melbourne. The book is a celebration of the diversity of the scene, with profiles of the city’s leading artists and five hundred photographs of their work. The book is divided into sections, each of which explores a common theme or motif in stencil art – skulls, politics, text, robots, comics. Stencil artists started making their mark on Melbourne in 1999 with work by local artist Psalm appearing around town, but the scene really took off a few years later. Despite a period in which the commercial world appropriated stencil imagery to saturation point, the scene has flourished in the laneways and alleys of the city. Tiny streets like Hosier Lane and Centre Place are meccas for fans and artists alike, with new work appearing regularly. The book’s stunning photography and insightful profiles of artists such as Civilian, Vexta and Meggs make for a brilliant snapshot of the scene.

Thanks to the dedication of local artists, as well as Banksy’s endorsement, Melbourne attracts many visitors keen on seeing some of the vibrant street art being produced here. Last year the Stencil Festival was run with the support of the City of Melbourne, which provided funding and a venue. However, the council did an about face later in the year when, in the lead up to the Commonwealth Games, it announced a zero-tolerance policy under which ‘tagging and stand-alone stencils [would] not be tolerated’.

‘In context of the Commonwealth Games, it seems obvious that Council had to change official policies,’ says JD. But when the City announced that $1 million would be spent on cleaning up graffiti, JD was appalled. ‘I can understand that a certain amount of clean up has to be done, but a million dollars spent on that is outrageous. It seems like overkill to me and I would question the whole concept. If there’s a million dollars available to do clean up, then there should also be a million dollars available to do workshops, to employ art teachers and social workers and so on, because with one million dollars you can do a lot of work.’

That the City of Melbourne wants to obliterate graffiti makes legal sense, but it’s a shame considering the vast array of talent on display at the Stencil Festival. Producing work for a gallery show has freed up the artists who normally work within the strict parameters of stencil, paint and wall. Traditional stencil designs on canvas or board hang alongside mixed media pieces that utilise found objects like sections of street signs, fence palings and raw canvas. Some pieces, like Ape Seven’s ‘Train Line’, are stencilled onto vinyl LPs which are synonymous with hip hop culture. Each layer of Hardrive’s ‘Mahatma Ghandi’ portrait is stencilled onto a separate layer of Perspex, creating a three-dimensional feel. Julie Shiels’s work takes another unique approach – she stencils slogans like ‘cold comfort’ and ‘armchair politics’ onto hard rubbish furniture.

Towards the back of the gallery hang the entries to the Pinxit Young Artists Award, a new initiative JD and Festival Co-Director Satta came up with this year. The competition was open to emerging street artists with a $500 first prize. The theme is ‘censorship’.

‘It seemed timely to talk about censorship in this political climate,’ says JD. Where once street artists could be charged with vandalism, there is now potential for them to be charged with sedition. Rational Australians are appalled by this turn of affairs, much like the figure in a piece by Meek featured in the pages of Smallman’s book. A homeless man sits against a wall, holding up a cardboard sign:

‘Keep your coins. I want change.’ Hear, hear.