Notorious: Graffiti and urban youth culture

If you type “graffiti Mallorca” into Google, the second entry that comes up is for “imágenes de graffiti mallorca” (you do incidentally have to use the double-l version, as it won’t work in the same way with the “j”). Click on the link for images and then scroll down to around the fourteenth line of photos and there is one of mine, a photo that is and not, I hasten to add, the graffiti. It’s not graffiti of an artistic style; it is just written. It is “Mallorca tiene un secreto”, variations on which in both Spanish and English have cropped up all over the place.

I was interested in going hunting for information on graffiti in Mallorca, because two graffiti artists are facing prison sentences of three years each for having put their work onto buildings in Palma as well as on trains that run to Inca and Manacor. For anyone familiar with urban street art in London and pretty much any other city or town in the UK, the graffiti is nothing unusual, but the growth of such art in Mallorca has prompted the police to take action against the two, identified, as with other graffiti artists, by their “tags” or signatures, nearly always seemingly obscure combinations of letters. Not that they are always obscure. “WHERE” is a tag of one artist involved with a graffiti project in Porto Cristo. And you can see the work on YouTube.

It isn’t necessarily difficult to find out who the perpetrators are. The internet is full of not just Facebook artists but also blogs and websites to which they contribute or run. One such, and he is very much more on the “established” end of the scene is Torrelló aka Gun_star who has a site which when you go to it tells you that this is his “fucking website”, “wankas”. The site also has a poster for an event at Son Amar on 11 December – “Big Bang”, one element of which is a percussion spectacular which features one … Gun_star.

The threat of prison for the Palma artists is not the first occasion on which the police have moved against graffiti-ists. A few months ago the mayor of Inca initiated action against some school kids who had been defacing walls on their way home from school, initially suggesting that the parents be fined. There is a difference between some scrawling on walls and some street art, but many would argue that there is no difference – both are acts of vandalism.

A curious aspect of street or urban art, call it as you will, is how one reconciles the very nature of the phenomenon – the daubing of public buildings and transport – and the degree to which it is somehow sanctioned. Continue with the search in Google, and you will find references to courses in graffiti art. Workshops are organized during annual fiestas. These take place in Pollensa, for example, and its port is a place that has been blighted, some might say, by an outbreak of graffiti, some of it clearly “tagged”.

A further curiosity, for those inclined to adopt a blinkered and over-romantic view of Mallorca, is how such seemingly anti-social activity can occur on the “beautiful” island. It isn’t curious at all. Much in the same way as alcohol and drugs are part of Mallorcan youth culture, so also is graffiti. This culture is, furthermore, part of a standardisation across cultures and in which there is also the influence of music. I came across Gun_star via a website hhgroups.com (“hh” standing for hip hop). Graffiti has always been a core element of hip hop, and the website says that “el hip hop es nuestra cultura” (our culture). The YouTube video for the Porto Cristo “project” has a hip-hop soundtrack to accompany it.

The point about much urban art is that it is astonishing in its scale and audacity. Whether it’s right is another matter. But graffiti-ists thrive on the thrill of notoriety; it’s all wrapped up with a culture that could have spawned a rap artist who became notorious partly because of his name – The Notorious B.I.G. A three-year stretch might not be what the graffiti-ists of Palma might have wanted, but by leaving their calling cards, it was only a matter of time if the police were minded to pull them in. The stretch might only help in reinforcing the image and the myth and might even propel them into the “established” graffiti world of a Banksy where there is real fame  to be cultivated and money to be made.

Criminal damage, though, is criminal damage. Reconciling the art, and its promotion, and the vandalism will remain an issue, however. And as far Mallorca and its secret is concerned, getting to the bottom of the enigma of some graffiti is another matter. I’m still no nearer knowing what it all means and what the secret is.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Secret: Art and graffiti in Mallorca

Mallorca is an island of artists. It must be something to do with having so much time on their hands.

The great tradition of art, in the north of the island at any rate, grew out of the creation of the Pollensa “school” in the early years of the last century. As with much of the island’s alleged culture, the impetus for this came not from locals but from mainland Spain and Argentina, while the best known pieces of the sculpture branch line of art, such as those on the roundabouts, are the work of an Italian and a Hungarian – the hideous horse of Alcúdia and the knotty conundrum of the Magic area.

It’s hard to avoid art, be it in galleries in Pollensa town or in its port, or in restaurants which, through their own exhibitions, acquire for themselves the canvas of sophistication. The Bennassar gallery in Pollensa is its own white background, grafted onto which is an interior design of minimalism and a rotation of splashes of the abstract or the Fauvist post-impressionism with which Pollensa is sometimes associated. The Llompart gallery in the Seglars square at the foot of the Calvari is a wooden abundance of every bit of space being competed for by prints. It’s a gallery in which you feel you can blow your nose, unlike Bennassar’s where you would fear being quarantined in its starkly pristine clean-room laboratory.

Not a fiesta passes without the programme being brushed with an opening of an exhibition here, another one there, all the work of artists you have never heard of. The fiesta posters are their own works of art, grandly announced in advance of the release of the fiesta schedule itself, like the single promoting a new album. Art is everywhere. In the towns you may stumble across some German ancients on folding camping-chair canvas (of a different variety), sketch pads in hand and an earnestly inquisitive expression as they commit to paper a town house with its green persianas, a tumble of bougainvillaea and a balcony flowerpot or two. The owners should sell image rights or if not, then engage in some surreptitious mooning.

Mallorca has not escaped the artistic vandalism of the modern day, be it the pictorial ramblings of a scrambled abstract creator or the urbanism of street art – graffiti, to you and me. The deceit of street art lies in a connivance by an ultra-liberal, social services movement of expression of one’s inner caveman. Normally I would approve, but when it comes to uninvited decoration of walls or shop shutters, I am less inclined to, irrespective of the merits of what are often astonishing statements. One can at least appreciate the creativity of the Mallorcan Banksys, though quite how citizen dismay at street art squares with another aspect of the fiesta programme – the street art workshop – is a question only the connivers can really answer.

But then there is the graffiti scrawl. It may often have its own signature style, but it ain’t art, except perversely as some kind of Dadaist artistic anarchy. The scrawl is vandalism impure and simple, but occasionally, when it is intelligible as words, an enigma arises. And we have one. Mallorca has a secret. Look around, and you will see that it does. The secret’s out, as in that it’s all over the place; on this wall, on that pillar or utility’s control-box housing. In Puerto Alcúdia one such pillar poses the question “Secreto?” on one side, and answers on the other – “El secreto es sexy Nena”. What is this secret? I have no idea. Maybe there is no secret. Perhaps it is just a conceit. Whatever it is, it’s intriguing. It may have no merit, it may be vandalistic, but it does make you think, which is, after all, a purpose of art. If you can call it that.

Thanks to Ben Grimley for drawing my attention to the “Secreto” graffiti.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.