Pihema Cameron

By Michael Griffith (who would love to hear from you)

Recently Pihema Cameron who was 15, was murdered by a 50 year old businessman who found him tagging fences near his home. This was in New Zealand.

According to Daniel Oliver Tucker, who is completing a PHD in sociology at the University of Berkeley, "There are many reasons as to why people do graffiti. For some it is to get back at a world that they see as corrupt and unjust. For others it is for the pleasure of creation, for the art form. And for others it's a game: the object: see how much you can paint and get away with."

But could all these reasons stem from one common drive?

A term bandied around when we discuss taggers is their lack of respect. But what have we done to earn this respect? Daily they are informed about the grave possibilities of their climatic future, we expect them to pay for their education for years after they've qualified, we've bought all the houses (some inner suburbs are more than 50% investor owned) and made it so expensive to live that just the thought of trying to support a family would leave them cold, and finally we're expecting them, once they start paying taxes, to support us in our retirement.

Instead of respect, the logical emotional response to this would be anger. And the common drive of an angry youth rebelling against its conservative parents is to be heard. A want to be valued.

In the fifties the social rebels were encapsulated by Brando who, after being asked, "What are you rebelling against, Johnny?" replied "What have you got?"

In the seventies the equivalent rebels were The Sex Pistols who sparked a punk revolution.

Jello Biafra, from the band The Dead Kennedys, said "Punk will only die when corporations can exploit and mass produce it."
So our corporations did. You can now pay through the nose for carefully torn jeans, and your grubby T-shirt with your anti-establishment logo is made in China.

We've exploited Brando's rebels as well. Our Wild Ones are now our fathers who, panicking through their mid-life crisis's, buy $30000 Harleys before squeezing their sofa-softened bellies into thick Italian leathers. But in our time, when our markets have perfected the art of exploiting anything that will produce a buck, we have a graffiti problem. And although a few paint shop owners have been caught selling reject spray cans out of the back door, and graffiti removalists are raking it in, big business has failed to exploit these outlaws slash artists. Instead, the taggers actually cost them money.

In fact every time a tagger tags a commercial property, a bus stop or your fence, they challenge our entire value system and disturb the Status Quo. And someone who threatens the Status Quo is a criminal in their time and, since history so often repeats itself, they will be a revered rebel in retrospect.

Dislike them or simply hate them, the true punks of our time are the taggers.

So much so that by cleaning that tag off your fence you are probably depreciating its long term value. Who knows, one day local councils might start heritage listing fences that are being tagged now.