A writing interlude from Tilly Hinton, PhD
The emergency motion included that FoLAR would have to bear the costs of the graffiti removal. Man One told me that a $10,000 bill was sent to FoLAR and, almost a decade later, it remains unpaid. There is record of this in the FoLAR archives, too. Weathering a storm of abatement was enough to bear for FoLAR and the Meeting of Styles local organizers, let alone paying for it:
“When you have a permit to create a mural, and then you have to remove it because someone in power doesn’t like it, without any dialogue, that’s censorship. That’s a dictatorship.“
The murals could have been sandblasted or whitewashed. It is fairly routine, though controversial, to use pressure hoses to strip away every trace, transforming art into tiny chips of paint. The other—whitewashing or buffing—simply hides it away. The County Department of Public Works chose the latter option. This means that the Meeting of Styles murals, all 900 square metres of them, plus the extra tagging, the extra pieces, and probably even the gang kill-order on Gloria Molina, still remain, hidden beneath layers of grey abatement paint. Saber describes these artworks as ghosts:
“I knew, I know, that some way, shape, form, or fashion, that the ghost of that piece will come back in some way. So that’s me, is the need to feel relevant and live on, you know.
Ghosts of art, culture, anger, love, and displacement all languish at the confluence, gathering at the river.
Joe Linton has been watching, drawing, walking, and biking the river since the early 1990s.” Of Joe, Lewis MacAdams said, “he has come to know more about the Los Angeles River than almost anyone else alive today.” When Joe thinks about graffiti, it is as a marker of jurisdictional borders. He recalled the period when the County would abate graffiti but the Army Corps would leave it be. This changed when then-Supervisor Molina lobbied for the Corps to be more militant about removing graffiti and, now, an annual federal allocation of $6 million funds the Army Corps’ graffiti abatement program. Joe thought out loud about where else that quantum of funds might be spent. It seemed to him like a waste; he “would rather they did habitat restoration.” Compton Creek, Joe told me, was a prime example of these jurisdictional switches, because it moves several times between federal and county jurisdiction. Abatement would stop abruptly every time a boundary switched into federal territory and resume once back within county lines. Abatement is appreciated by many, of course. Jim Burns associated his initial fear of the river back to graffiti. He readily described his emotional reaction to it as one of hatred. Murals are okay, he told me, but graffiti is “an exclusionary thing and a threat [of] violence.” For him, as for many, graffiti is the broken window referred to in the criminology principle that, if a neighborhood looks disheveled, unruly behavior will quickly follow. Joe Edmiston—head of an agency that endlessly removes graffiti within their park facilities—was also frustrated by it. He was quick to tell me that it is “a horrible problem” that must be eradicated “one hundred per cent.”
In contrast, kayaker George Wolfe misses the graffiti; for him, it is a signature that gives the river character:
The LA River, if it has a signature, it’s this weird mix now of things. Like graffiti juxtaposed to sycamores and willows and whatnot in a kind of crazy combination of manmade wildlife and natural, or nonhuman, wildlife. To me, that’s always been something that’s kind of peculiarly LA-like. That’s one of the reasons I like the river sort of, as it is because it is like no other river and it brings forth things you’d never find elsewhere. That’s sort of the twisted fun of it.
One of the pieces that George Wolfe remembers is an enormous MTA tag that stretched for almost a kilometre along the channel wall of the river in Downtown Los Angeles. It, along with Saber’s renowned wildstyle graffiti piece on the river, were abated by the Army Corps in 2009 in a large-scale “clean up … of urban blight” along the river and its tributaries. The process took almost $1 million of federal stimulus funds. It was launched with a media opportunity, a kind of reverse ribbon-cutting ceremony in the bed of the river right by the MTA tag. Sergeant major Jeffrey Koontz stumbled over his words a little when he described it as an “awards ceremony or presentation ceremony.” It was an unconventional ceremony because nothing was being launched or recognized, except absence. The only thing officials attending the ceremony could do was don a chemical safety mask for a moment and wave a spray-paint hose around, weapon-like, in promise of the forthcoming abatement program. Smiling officials gathered for the launch to speak heavy-handedly about the criminality of graffiti, praise the Sheriff’s Department for prosecuting graffiti writers, seek further funding, and make promises about the returned hope for the city and the river brought about by graffiti abatement.
The mechanisms by which graffiti is abated are themselves impactful, and they rarely entirely disappear the marks that were originally made. The more extensive the work, the more extensively its traces remain and persist. Saber told me how the War on Graffiti program added:
I don’t know, eight thousand more gallons of paint to the surface of the LA River, I don’t know, ten thousand more gallons. I don’t know how much fucking, how many gallons you guys used, I mean, come on.
The paint color used for buffing graffiti in Los Angeles is called Palomino Beige. It is drab. As Joe Mozingo wrote in the Los Angeles Times:
even [graffiti abatement] success is not always pretty. Once-scenic brick storefronts are now lacquer-smooth with dozens of coats of palomino beige. Freeway signs are ringed with ominous loops of razor wire to discourage would-be taggers. Windows are shuttered with steel curtains and stucco walls are splotched with haphazard rectangles of mismatched paint.
Saber has called it “the color of suppression.” The artist statement for one of his gallery exhibitions, a 2012 show at the Known Gallery in Los Angeles, tells us that:
Saber sees beauty in the chaos of the streets. The beautification of a city instead of the depreciation of a city. The constant fight against as Saber puts it “the struggle and innovation that is covered in 1,800 layers of ‘Palomino Beige’.” The constant fight against the city’s attempts to white wash over the beauty of graffiti.
Abatement comes quick and often, by design, to minimize the exposure of graffiti and to keep things clean. For Man One, the normality of abatement never counters his desire for work to be long lasting:
To be honest, whenever I paint I want it to last forever, you know. I know the reality is it probably won’t. But I do paint with the intention that it’s going to last forever.
For Leo Limon, there is excitement in the fresh canvas provided by a lick of abatement paint. Towards the end of our interview, I watched him carefully as we walked together to the Oros Street stormwater drain cover that Leo has been painting and repainting for decades now. It is a battle of wills between his smiling cat faces and the dull beige abatement paint—between art and a fight against what is alleged to be an urban blight. That day, we found the cover buffed, clean, and erased. I felt heavy in the pit of my stomach. I’ve never painted on a wall—mural, graffiti, or otherwise. I am not sure how it would feel to make something only to see it vanish into nothing, layer upon layer of paint marking the complex and conflicted interplay between law enforcement and the person who might be labelled either artist or vandal, depending how you see the world. I imagined how I would feel if the words I crafted were erased, or a garden I built was destroyed. I looked to Leo. He was not crestfallen, as I imagine I would be. He is used to this: “Yep, see the sterilization crew has arrived … yep, once again.” When I asked how he feels, he was quick to answer that it’s a good thing, “wonderful, it’s fresh canvas, it’s fresh canvas,” he reassured me.
The river is many shades of grey. There is the grey concrete, of course, then layered over it is a palimpsest, layers and layers of graffiti, and the grey abatement paint that typically follows. It depresses Man One: just gray, gray paint over everything. That to me is like, that’s the moment that I feel the most helpless, the most hopeless, the most despair, because it’s such a waste, you know. Gray makes you feel gray, you know? It intrigues me. I always wonder what lies beneath and also why, with all the technology of color matching, graffiti abatement paint never, ever actually matches the color of the concrete. The abatement, the massive patches that prompted Leo Limon to call Los Angeles “blotch city,” are as visually prominent as the tags and pieces they seek to disappear from the city’s landscape. Ghosts of art, culture, anger, love, and displacement all languish at the confluence, gathering at the river.
Joe Linton has been watching, drawing, walking, and biking the river since the early 1990s. Of Joe, Lewis MacAdams said, “he has come to know more about the Los Angeles River than almost anyone else alive today.” When Joe thinks about graffiti, it is as a marker of jurisdictional borders. He recalled the period when the County would abate graffiti but the Army Corps would leave it be. This changed when then-Supervisor Molina lobbied for the Corps to be more militant about removing graffiti and, now, an annual federal allocation of $6 million funds the Army Corps’ graffiti abatement program. Joe thought out loud about where else that quantum of funds might be spent. It seemed to him like a waste; he “would rather they did habitat restoration.” Compton Creek, Joe told me, was a prime example of these jurisdictional switches, because it moves several times between federal and county jurisdiction. Abatement would stop abruptly every time a boundary switched into federal territory and resume once back within county lines. Abatement is appreciated by many, of course. Jim Burns associated his initial fear of the river back to graffiti. He readily described his emotional reaction to it as one of hatred. Murals are okay, he told me, but graffiti is “an exclusionary thing and a threat [of] violence.” For him, as for many, graffiti is the broken window referred to in the criminology principle that, if a neighborhood looks disheveled, unruly behavior will quickly follow. Joe Edmiston—head of an agency that endlessly removes graffiti within their park facilities—was also frustrated by it. He was quick to tell me that it is “a horrible problem” that must be eradicated “one hundred per cent.”
In contrast, kayaker George Wolfe misses the graffiti; for him, it is a signature that gives the river character:
The LA River, if it has a signature, it’s this weird mix now of things. Like graffiti juxtaposed to sycamores and willows and whatnot in a kind of crazy combination of manmade wildlife and natural, or nonhuman, wildlife. To me, that’s always been something that’s kind of peculiarly LA-like. That’s one of the reasons I like the river sort of, as it is because it is like no other river and it brings forth things you’d never find elsewhere. That’s sort of the twisted fun of it.
One of the pieces that George Wolfe remembers is an enormous MTA tag that stretched for almost a kilometre along the channel wall of the river in Downtown Los Angeles. It, along with Saber’s renowned wildstyle graffiti piece on the river, were abated by the Army Corps in 2009 in a large-scale “clean up … of urban blight” along the river and its tributaries. The process took almost $1 million of federal stimulus funds. It was launched with a media opportunity, a kind of reverse ribbon-cutting ceremony in the bed of the river right by the MTA tag. Sergeant major Jeffrey Koontz stumbled over his words a little when he described it as an “awards ceremony or presentation ceremony.” It was an unconventional ceremony because nothing was being launched or recognized, except absence. The only thing officials attending the ceremony could do was don a chemical safety mask for a moment and wave a spray-paint hose around, weapon-like, in promise of the forthcoming abatement program. Smiling officials gathered for the launch to speak heavy-handedly about the criminality of graffiti, praise the Sherriff’s Department for prosecuting graffiti writers, seek further funding, and make promises about the returned hope for the city and the river brought about by graffiti abatement.
The mechanisms by which graffiti is abated are themselves impactful, and they rarely entirely disappear the marks that were originally made. The more extensive the work, the more extensively its traces remain and persist. Saber told me how the War on Graffiti program added:
I don’t know, eight thousand more gallons of paint to the surface of the LA River, I don’t know, ten thousand more gallons. I don’t know how much fucking, how many gallons you guys used, I mean, come on.
The paint color used for buffing graffiti in Los Angeles is called Palomino Beige. It is drab. As Joe Mozingo wrote in the Los Angeles Times:
even [graffiti abatement] success is not always pretty. Once-scenic brick storefronts are now lacquer-smooth with dozens of coats of palomino beige. Freeway signs are ringed with ominous loops of razor wire to discourage would-be taggers. Windows are shuttered with steel curtains and stucco walls are splotched with haphazard rectangles of mismatched paint.
Saber has called it “the color of suppression.” The artist statement for one of his gallery exhibitions, a 2012 show at the Known Gallery in Los Angeles, tells us that:
Saber sees beauty in the chaos of the streets. The beautification of a city instead of the depreciation of a city. The constant fight against as Saber puts it “the struggle and innovation that is covered in 1,800 layers of ‘Palomino Beige’.” The constant fight against the city’s attempts to white wash over the beauty of graffiti.
Abatement comes quick and often, by design, to minimize the exposure of graffiti and to keep things clean. For Man One, the normality of abatement never counters his desire for work to be long lasting:
To be honest, whenever I paint I want it to last forever, you know. I know the reality is it probably won’t. But I do paint with the intention that it’s going to last forever.
For Leo Limon, there is excitement in the fresh canvas provided by a lick of abatement paint. Towards the end of our interview, I watched him carefully as we walked together to the Oros Street stormwater drain cover that Leo has been painting and repainting for decades now. It is a battle of wills between his smiling cat faces and the dull beige abatement paint—between art and a fight against what is alleged to be an urban blight. That day, we found the cover buffed, clean, and erased. I felt heavy in the pit of my stomach. I’ve never painted on a wall—mural, graffiti, or otherwise. I am not sure how it would feel to make something only to see it vanish into nothing, layer upon layer of paint marking the complex and conflicted interplay between law enforcement and the person who might be labelled either artist or vandal, depending how you see the world. I imagined how I would feel if the words I crafted were erased, or a garden I built was destroyed. I looked to Leo. He was not crestfallen, as I imagine I would be. He is used to this: “Yep, see the sterilization crew has arrived … yep, once again.” When I asked how he feels, he was quick to answer that it’s a good thing, “wonderful, it’s fresh canvas, it’s fresh canvas,” he reassured me.
The river is many shades of grey. There is the grey concrete, of course, then layered over it is a palimpsest, layers and layers of graffiti, and the grey abatement paint that typically follows. It depresses Man One:
just gray, gray paint over everything. That to me is like, that’s the moment that I feel the most helpless, the most hopeless, the most despair, because it’s such a waste, you know. Gray makes you feel gray, you know?
It intrigues me. I always wonder what lies beneath and also why, with all the technology of color matching, graffiti abatement paint never, ever actually matches the color of the concrete. The abatement, the massive patches that prompted Leo Limon to call Los Angeles “blotch city,” are as visually prominent as the tags and pieces they seek to disappear from the city’s landscape.