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Ireland (mostly Dublin)

bodice_ripper

By bodice_ripper
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HardyBucks

HardyBucks

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Nearly 15 years ago, two artists were eager to be the first to paint a train in Ireland. These young Picassos weren't hoping to capture one of Iarnrod Eireann's engines on canvas.

 

Their dream was to use the train itself as their canvas. They scouted out a train yard on the North side of Dublin that was relatively easy to access at night, and waited till the early hours of the morning. They jumped the fence, found a safe carriage tucked away from prying eyes and nervously began to paint their first carraige. Their timing, however, was all off.

 

Unfortunately, for these young pioneers of the Irish graffiti world there was one big problem they hadn't taken into consideration. At this time in our troubled history all the problems in the North were still in full swing and, apparently, guerrillas of a different kind also had something planned for Irish trains.

 

The gardai had been informed by a certain loyalist paramilitary group that they were planning to leave a bomb on a Dublin train and so they were watching the yards like hawks. As soon as the two artists went to make their exit, they pounced. Before the pair knew what was happening, they had been piled into two police cars and were speeding through the city, sirens blaring. It seems the gardai were waiting to catch two potential bombers, but instead caught bombers of a different kind.

 

Luckily for the two, the case of mistaken identity was quickly realised and they were let off with a slap on the wrist. ‘Bombing', you see, is a well-worn term in the graffiti world; essentially it just means the illegal act of graffiti art, to ‘bomb' a wall, for example.

 

Graffiti has always been an art form with its roots firmly planted in illegality. Artists take to the streets in search of a good spot to paint — a bridge, a wall, an old mill, somewhere their work can be seen but where they won't be seen putting it up. It's a dangerous game, arrests are frequent and in some parts of Europe and the US artists are actually serving hard time for putting up their spontaneous street exhibitions.

 

Ireland's strong graffiti tradition is alive and kicking. Well known by many in the Dublin art and hip-hop world, Discipline cut his creative teeth almost 20 years ago on the walls of Dublin's fair city — no DART line was safe from his identifiable stamp.

 

“Those days, there were a few of us at it, but I went out pretty much on my own with a friend keeping watch. I remember thinking at that time, in a pre-Celtic tiger Ireland, that an addition of something colourful to one of the many waste patches could only be a good thing, and more than likely a source of visual entertainment rather than something to inspire anger.”

 

Graffiti art has always been about the streets. It began in New York City in the 70s when young artists would hop into train yards at night and spray their aliases across carriages. The vision was that, when finished, they had a travelling exhibition that the entire city could see. Soon some of the artists became established, and their work began appearing in galleries. Lee Quiñones, for example, exhibited some of his canvas work in the Galleria Medusa in Rome in 1979. This was one of the first times that the street art of graffiti was presented as a consumable art form. Subsequently, many more artists around the world began to take their work indoors in the form of installations and canvas-based work. But it was the streets that would remain the real gallery for the graffiti world.

 

It's always been a dangerous game, too. Irish graffiti artists are regularly chased by dogs, security guards and police, sometimes even being shot at when trespassing on private property. Jor, another established artist, recalls a fellow painter, while being chased down a railway line, was left with the option of being caught or jumping into a river below him — being both lucky and a strong swimmer, he managed to escape.

 

“But over the years, I've heard lots of stories of people losing limbs, there have even been some deaths,” says Jor. “And these accidents occur when people involved in a chase panic or make stupid decisions.” A risky business, yes, but this danger is an integral part of this culture.

 

For Discipline, the positive aspects outweigh the negatives and have led him to try to develop youth workshops. “Graffiti has had such a positive influence on my own life, so I decided to look into ways of trying to secure spaces [to paint] in neighbourhoods where kids were hanging out.”

 

“Some of us did approach various county councils about the possibility of creating ‘legal walls' in areas of Dublin and other towns, and we managed to work together on a big Sherrif Street project. Sadly, due to a number of different factors, the lack of legal spaces is still an issue.”

 

Most European cities have allocated space for graffiti artists to work in with imposed rules and restraints to stop things getting out of hand. But Ireland is noticeably lagging behind in this respect.

 

“There are artists who want to keep their work illegal, that's how the movement began and they believe it should stay that way,” says another of our more familiar street artists, Myne, who has been leaving his mark for many a year.

 

First times are always memorable and such was certainly the case for Myne. “I was about 15 and a mate and I had been painting for about an hour or so when gardai suddenly appeared on either side of the bridge we were adorning, leaving us no direction to run.”

 

Myne and his accomplice were sent straight back to school, where he, unknowingly, would leave his most memorable work to date: “I only realised later that afternoon that our green primer had been leaking from my bag and I'd created a trail from where my mother had parked her car to the school entrance. I recently went back to my school and there's still a forest green trail all along the ground, bringing you straight to the school's front door.”

 

So how do you separate the term ‘graffiti' from ‘vandalism'? “I don't like seeing tags on the side of people's houses or on their front walls, they are certainly aspects of graffiti I'd like to see disappear. But on the whole, with so many billboards, so many ugly buildings, how are kids expected to respect their urban environment?” asks Myne.

 

Jor, too, feels that vandals are giving the real artists a bad name: “Anyone with a spray can can go out and cover a wall, and a lot of it is awful rubbish. But you can't generalise about anything. It's not the fault of a good musician that there's a crap band on the radio.”

 

What will become of graffiti in the future remains the biggest question. Increases in anti-graffiti action, such as regular observation of known graffiti spots [DART lines and LUAS lines in particular are strictly supervised now, with fresh graffiti covered over almost before the paint has dried] means that the illegal artist must think of more diverse ways to get their art out there.

 

However, old-school writers such as Discipline remain positive: “From what I can see, time changes everything and there are increasingly open-minded people gaining positions on the councils and on community groups which, in time, should lead to legal areas for public painting.” The question remains — will the artists want to paint once the thrill has gone?

 

- Patrick Fennelly

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