Artists reclaiming the streets
By Bruce White
SYDNEY — "Reclaim the streets" is a striking phrase. It implies that some activities are now wrongfully excluded from the streets. It implies that someone imposed and maintains the exclusion, and it asks the question: what has been excluded?
New York City is the western front of the battle for the streets. In New York, despite the congestion, street activities continue which have long disappeared in Sydney. They are fighting now in New York to preserve what we have already lost.
You will have heard of "zero tolerance" in New York and the political myth that it successful. What you have not heard is that "zero tolerance" is not really about crime. Zero tolerance is about redefining well-established street activities as criminal. Zero tolerance makes criminals of ordinary people doing ordinary life-sustaining things.
New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has now closed 500 streets to the thousands of New Yorkers who earn a living on the streets. When the streets are closed, Mayor Giuliani then franchises them to the large corporations. One of the first sites went to a corporate food vendor for $500,000.
Robert Lederman, president of ARTIST (Artists' Response To Illegal State Tactics) leads the fight against Mayor Giuliani.
The New York battle is now in its 10th year. There have been huge demonstrations, bashings of artists by police, many wrongful arrests and much smashing of art by the police on the street.
The story remains unreported in the Sydney press. You can read about the defence of the New York streets on the ARTIST web site at <www.openair.org/alerts/artist/nyc.html>. The site is a must read if you want to see the battlelines and the forces opposed in the fight for the streets.
The hot subject on the ARTIST site at the moment is the continuous aerial spraying of concentrated Malathion all over New York.
Before they started spraying, birds were falling dead from the trees all over New York. There is rumour that a bird escaped from a government laboratory on Plum Island carrying a modified Nile River virus. The heavy spraying is to eliminate carrier mosquitoes, but all insects in New York are now dead and many New Yorkers are not feeling very well either.
Giuliani insists the spraying is absolutely safe and arguably good for New Yorkers.
New York is the big scene, but the battle for the streets goes on all around the world. For example, traditional street sellers of home-grown corn are fighting a recent ban on street sales in Mexico City. In Vietnam barbers clip hair in the street, but barber and customer flee with half clipped hair when a uniform comes around the corner.
This type of street activity is called the informal economy, and it is being stamped out everywhere by the formal economy, using the public authorities controlled by those in the formal economy. Reclaiming the streets for modern peasant activities is what reclaiming the streets is about for me.
Street artists in Sydney are fighting a ban on street art. Sydney Council says artists may not show and sell pictures in the street. For three years, artists petitioned against the ban and collected 30,000 signatures at the front of Sydney Town Hall Square.
Last year Sydney Council was also saying that making art in the street is banned. To emphasis these points, Sydney Council impounded our paintings one day at the front of the Town Hall and returned the next day to impound our painting and drawing equipment as we worked.
After the impounding, I began researching the powers that local governments have to control street activity. I was surprised to discover that Sydney Council asserts powers it does not have and misapplies the powers it does have. The wrongful ban on street artists is now being investigated by the Ombudsman's Office, and it is hoped that restrictions will substantially ease for street artists when the ombudsman has reported.
The contents of the complaint to the ombudsman are relevant to street users other than street artists. The complaint and other material will soon be available on a Sydney Street Artist web site. Until the web site is established, a copy of the complaint is available by e-mail request to <bwhite@mail.usyd.edu.au>.