A giant smiley face painted on a shack, a stripey T-shirt on a beach, a crook of an elbow in a rural dusty goat pen and an offbeat finger puppet on a Cape Town city wall: street art or vandalism?
The work of Falko Starr, which splits a giant mural over four different South African locations, could be classed as vandalism under a new Cape Town clamp-down that lumps graffiti with drugs, crime and gangs.
The toughened attitude is backed by a new control unit and by-law that classifies all graffiti as a public nuisance with a hefty 15,000 rand (US$2,200) fine or three months in jail for first-time offenses.
Photo: AFP
“The need arose for legislation in this regard because of basically the amount of graffiti that appears right across the city,” city official Anton Visser said.
The aim is to wipe out tagging — individual graffiti signatures — and in particular gangster tagging and offensive graffiti.
“I’d say in most areas in the city there is a high level of graffiti, especially in the gang-infested areas,” Visser said. “The intention is obviously not to target the graffiti artists.”
The law sets out a permit system for city-vetted works, with even private property owners banned from having graffiti on their properties without city permission.
Critics say it is too broad and violates freedom of expression and criminalizes public art.
Graffiti in Cape Town stretches from crude turf-markers to stirring works, with some artists exhibiting internationally.
Professional writer Starr, who painted the Splitpiece installations, said the city’s graffiti grew out of the sprawling Cape Flats to where the former white state forcibly relocated non-whites during apartheid.
“A lot of graffiti then had a little political connotation in it,” Starr said. “We kind of all just made it up. We were just doing it out of social cause, trying to make a change in our society because it was still apartheid then.”
Today there are an estimated 100 to 200 graffiti writers in Cape Town.
Nick Herbert, owner of Cape Town graffiti shop Shelflife, said the law will hamper well-known artists and require property owners to seek permission for anything beyond a street number.
“But you’re still going to get the guys who do the tagging and the illegal stuff,” he said.
The new four-person control unit is tasked with policing Cape Town’s huge metro area, attempting to tackle a backlog of lodged complaints, while the city aims to raise 1 million rands initially to fund a clean-up.
Submissions against the by-law, which states that graffiti damages the image of Cape Town’s world-renowned beauty, have included a petition with more than 2,000 signatures.
However, Visser said many had not read the law, which he said made provision for artists, with plans for dedicated walls, and for permits — which the city can refuse — to ensure works meet certain standards.
“People need to know what the law is all about. It needs to be enforced,” Visser said. “It [the graffiti] is going to cost the city thousands to remove, it’s extremely expensive, and it’s actually vandalism. And it reduces the value of property as well, so we need to take this seriously.”
Gently spraying a character on a mural-covered Cape Flats wall, Starr had few concerns.
“What difference is the by-law going to make? There’s been illegal graffiti before,” he said. “If you’re going to get caught, you’re still going to get into trouble, so what difference is it going to make?”
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