Dvate’s two faces

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.

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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.

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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.

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Street Art notes January 2018

I had low expectations of the city’s first official street art precinct and they were met. The ‘official precinct’ was launched in December 2017. It is just a couple of murals by Adnate, Dvate, Fintan Magee, Rone and Sofles on walls in Lt. Bourke Street before it ends at Spencer Street. Several big heads and a big orange belly parrot.

Adnate

 

Fintan Magee

Sofles

Rone

Most murals in Melbourne serve the interests of property developers or local city councils; similar interests anyway. The realistic images are sentimental, superficial and a distraction from what is happening around the large wall. Murals are anti-graffiti, anti-street art management strategy… but enough about murals (or if you want to read more).

I am look for something else on the streets, something smaller. (The smallest piece perhaps…)

perhaps Sunfigo’s work

Twobe

Lister

I find a stencil; perhaps, given the geometric lines in the body of scorpion, it is by Sunfigo. A cartoon face by Twobe and one by the internationally renown artist Lister, who blurs the rough line between contemporary art and street art.

Lov3

An excellent piece and installation by Lov3 in Collingwood. Up-cycling three discarded mattress and using the quilting pattern as snake scales.

Silk Roy

In Flinders Court I saw a recent piece by local Melbourne artist, Silk Roy. Silk Roy loves painting. Sure many artists love to paint, often painting the same thing over and over again, in that they enjoy that experience. However, Silk Roy’s art shows more than just enjoyment like the conservative mural painters but artistic risk taking, changing and developing. This is graffiti aware of contemporary painting. (Read an interview with Silk Roy on Invurt.) Silk Roy does paint big walls but I doubt that he will be painting a multi-story mural any time soon and that, for me, is a relief.

Anti-Muralism

For the past three years murals, very large multi-story painted walls are the popular form in Melbourne’s street art. Murals are also very popular in advertising and with socialists. Van Rudd says that wants to revive the tradition of political mural painting in Melbourne that happened with Geoff Hogg in the 1970s.

Murals are seen as community art solution, read Tony Matthews and Deanna Grant-Smith “How murals helped turn a declining community around” in The Conversation, as well as an advertising technique. Dvate’s painted banner for The Lion King in 2015 or HaHa’s 2016-17 3MMM banner at Macaulay railway station, a favourite old haunt of HaHa when he was running around the city getting his name up. Smug’s mural on Otter Street promoting a luxury apartment development, makes gentrification cute. The popularity of murals makes for endless commercial applications.

I think that I lost a lot of my interest in Melbourne’s street art when murals became the dominate form of street art. I don’t like most murals, street art or otherwise, as I have already written about the Harold Freedman mosaic mural on the Fire Station. So I don’t feel as motivated to write about street art, although I have written about Rone and Adnate’s murals.

Rone in Collins Street, 2014

I’m not sure what it is about murals that I don’t like, after all they are just very large paintings. I do like a few murals in Melbourne. The Keith Haring mural in Collingwood but that is because I like his other work and the mural is simply a large example. I don’t think of the large walls by sprayed with fire extinguishers full of paint by Ash Keating and others as murals because they are just paint whereas a mural is about something.

Often murals are so about something that it feels like you are being lectured or advertised at. I’m not sure that I want the intended message or non-message of a mural and even if I do then what about people who don’t? The intended mass audience of a mural makes is like advertising. Whereas I like art that is aimed at a small audience rather than the lowest common denominator. The bigger the audience does not mean the better the art; size is kind of pornographic.

At other times there is so little content in a mural, like Rone’s faces, that being content free and abstract would have something more than these substitutes for content. For this reason I found Doyle’s Empty Nursery Blue to be more artistic than any and all of Rone’s murals.

I was also wondering if it is because murals lack a human scale. Murals are different to graffiti pieces in terms of scale. The reach of a graffiti writer defines the height of a piece, the arc of the curves so that a piece of graffiti reflects a human scale. Whereas the size of a mural is determined by the size of the wall and the equipment used.

Cam and Scale, Brunswick 2017