Melbourne street artist Dvate works in two styles: one is good and the other tasteless. I prefer Dvate’s dynamic graffiti to his tame aerosol paintings of native fauna that have gone up around Moreland.
Look at Dvate’s graffiti pieces: the calligraphy of the letterforms, the super clean lines (no drips), and an eye-popping palette of colours. There is so much more energy and other unique qualities to them than his sentimental representational work. In some graffiti pieces, he uses mortar fillers to build up sections of the wall to lift the parts of his letters off the surface of the walls, for example in this piece in Rutledge Lane that was part of “All Your Walls” in 2013.
His kitsch works of sentimentalism are the contemporary equivalent of chocolate-box paintings, aesthetic garbage sold to a population that hasn’t thought about taste. Dvate has been doing graffiti and tags around Melbourne for decades, but he probably makes more money from his tasteless murals.
According to a Moreland Council tweet, they are: “reducing graffiti in #Moreland by commissioning #murals in areas with high tagging rates. Street artist Dvate has installed these stunning native Australian murals in Coburg, and 3 more murals are due to go up once Covid-19 restrictions ease.”
The strategy of reducing graffiti by commissioning murals is not new. It is the standard strategy and is one of the reasons why I dislike murals (for more reasons read my blog post Anti-Muralism). It assumes that graffiti and tags are less desirable than other images based on popular prejudices rather than any evidence.
If Moreland Council wants public art, then they should commission public art, if they want to reduce tagging, then they should hire cops or some other law enforcement device, and they should not confuse the two.
Black Mark 