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The Reverse Graffiti Project

Written by Miranda Marcus
Tuesday, 11 August 2009 00:00

Since the inimitable rise of Banksy, the ever-contemporary stencil artist, graffiti subculture has come to the forefront of public interest. While graffiti artists might be convicted as criminals, hipsters and art critics sit with their coffee and poppy seed bagels debating the moral and artistic implications of these “crimes”. Is it mindless vandalism or great art freed from the trappings and pretensions of gallery opening times?

Either way, regardless of aesthetics, graffiti is the application of paint on a surface that belongs to someone else.

Paint is not the only way to make a mark, however. In 1999, a man named Moose, who was working as a kitchen porter, found another way. The relentless churning of fumes and soot from countless machines and modes of transport has turned our dwindling supply of fossil fuels into thick layers of dirt. We don’t even notice it any more. One day, Moose diligently went to clean a mark off a wall and found he’d made a bigger one than had been there originally. And so, the idea for The Reverse Graffiti Project was born.

The concept is simple: it is negative graffiti. Instead of applying an image, it is taken away, carved, wiped or power washed out of the omnipotent dirt. The viewer is greeted by a quality piece of street art while simultaneously realising just how filthy the area actually is. People all over the world from Brazil to Vienna are now adopting the idea, attacking traffic-filled tunnels with balls of socks and pavements with scrubbing brushes.

Unlike traditional street art, the truth about reverse graffiti is that essentially it’s cleaning our public spaces, verging on community service. It is crime and its punishment in perfect symbiosis. Try as you might, it cannot be interpreted as a crime - a lovely loophole of the legal system. While cleaning away a petition to save the soon-to-be-demolished building of Pimlico School, Moose was accused of perpetrating criminal damage, which was then reduced to “leaving a mark”. To the argument that nothing was being damaged, the only response can be to either replace the dirt or clean the whole wall.

Using collected rainwater and environmentally-friendly cleaning products, Moose and company are as green as you can get. They also work with moss and lichen and other weapons that nature’s arsenal has to offer. This avoids the trap set by the majority of environmentally friendly products: giving green credentials and playing to the public’s desire to save the planet, but in doing so, in order to shift more products off the shelves, polluting in a different, slightly more subtle way.

The idea behind The Reverse Graffiti Project is such a potent one that the money makers are starting to latch onto its communicative power. Every day we are bombarded by information, signs and slogans through every available media, all vying for our attention. Few, however, rival the simplicity and originality of this project which takes its messages to places otherwise ignored.

Though he has been employed by some companies to “write their names in the dirt”, Moose tries to work only for the “good guys”. He has completed jobs for an incredibly broad and diverse range of institutions from Greenpeace to the government, on topics from benefit fraud to record promotions. His work has taken the form of everything from 140ft murals in San Francisco’s tunnels depicting extinct native plant life to shoals of fish on East London’s Shoreditch High Street for Mr Scruff’s latest record. Moose has even worked for the police.

Despite this, the powers that be just can’t make up their minds about how to take reverse graffiti. The obvious associations with illegal graffiti lead to constant bureaucratic hypocrisies. To minimise this, Moose favours the terms “clean tagging” or “negative painting”. Because of his previous employment with the police, Moose still receives regular notifications of new policies declaring all street art vandalism. He has been told to lay down his cleaning tools and mind his own business on the basis of spurious grounds such as the damage caused by the high power water jets he uses (which actually operate at lower pressure than the standard equipment used remove graffiti). Soon after being removed from the incredibly successful initiative for the Department of Work and Pensions in Edinburgh because of complaints, another department asked him to be an advisor. In his own words, he is both “employed and shunned”.

The hypocrisy doesn’t end there. People who tell him to stop cleaning their walls and actively remove his work, are the very same who protect and restore that of Banksy. A restaurant owner in Bristol sued the council for loss of earnings when they removed the Banksy piece that had adorned his walls and New York City has recently introduced an initiative to restore and save classic graffiti. It is a problem of economics. Graffiti is becoming more institutionalised, taken into the heart of the mainstream as it has become more lucrative, but it still remains illegal. However, to some extent, that is part of the allure.

The Reverse Graffiti Project is symptomatic of a much needed attitude change, its genius lying in the fact that it works with the world rather than against it.

Up and coming reverse graffiti projects include a celebration of the 60th anniversary of the UN Human Rights Act coming into action with Pants to Poverty, another company taking a traditional issue and turning it on its head to great affect: selling pants to raise money for global poverty; everyone needs pants and nobody wants to be poor - simple but effective. Moose does not claim to be a great artist or even a great environmentalist, but his work makes people look at the world around them a bit differently.