Reverse graffiti

TaggingG or spraying a signature onto public property, to my mind, is a creatively hollow pastime practised by bored middle-class kids operating under the hoodied guise of "urban anarchists".

While (sub)urban hip-hoppers consider it to be an "innocuous" or even "subversive" act, one must pity the grouchy local residents digging weekly into pensions for the buckets of paint to erase the offending marks.

It's perhaps for this reason that these residents are applauding the efforts of a group of ex-Durban Vega Brand and Communications students, known as Dutch Ink, who have for the past year been putting a unique environmental spin on the contentious art form.

They draw inspiration from the work of British street artist Paul Curtis (AKA Moose), who pioneered what has become known as "green" or "reverse graffiti". Curtis, legend has it, hit upon his idea while working as a kitchen porter in a restaurant, scrubbing mountains of pots and pans. One evening, trying to get rid of a grease stain on a wall, he scrubbed out a large white patch.

It didn't take long before the aspirant street-artist started applying his selective scrubbing technique to walls and bridges around London.

"I'm not the world's biggest environmentalist," he says in a documentary. "But it's impossible for me not to toe the environmental line. The whole core of what I do is based around drawing in pollution and writing in nature. Cities are really dirty places and I think my type of art draws attention to that."

Curtis gradually scrubbed his way to fame using giant stencils and high-pressure water hoses to wash reverse images - mostly of trees and nature - onto soiled city surfaces.

It was an idea that Durbanite Martin Pace (24) borrowed while rushing to meet a deadline for a final second-year creative project at Vega.

Sighting a polluted freeway wall in Essex Terrace, Westville, as an ideal experimental canvas, and armed with a metal scrubbing brush, Pace proceeded to hand-scrub the 17m wall with a pictorial time-line of Westville's architecture.

It was an impressive debut that saw kraals and tents subsiding into Cape Dutch style houses and colonial cathedrals.

Encouraged by the mostly positive responses that greeted his efforts, Pace united with fellow Vega students Stathi Kongianos, JP Jordaan and Nick Ferreira to tackle more city canvases.

Over the next few months, the Dutch Ink clan had etched a florid design of trees into a Durban North wall and, more recently, a mammoth Sardine Run, featuring a school of stencilled fish darting across the surface of a downtown freeway wall.

It would, of course, defeat the object to employ such benign artistic methods to scrawl agro-urban city typography across sullied surfaces, which is why the Dutch Ink artists have wisely eschewed angsty expletives in favour of more organic imagery.

Further encouraging aspects of this particular technique is that, unlike graffiti, such etchings are ephemeral, gradually fading from the effects of time, sunshine and carbon grime.

While this is often referred to as "green graffiti", when I mention the term, Pace and his cronies shift uncomfortably in their chairs.

"It's more of an etching," he corrects me. "Or green tagging, but even tagging comes with its own set of territorial connotations, which we'd like to avoid."

There is nothing, it seems, unlawful about the technique. Can one be legitimately accused of vandalism when all they have done is set out to wash (albeit selectively) a mucky city wall?

I suddenly find myself imagining a Monty Pythonesque trial in which the judge declares: "I hereby sentence you scrubbers for, er, the unlawful selective-cleaning of city property."

"That's the beauty of our project," says Pace chuckling wildly at the thought. "Our work merely highlights how siff (a derivative of the word syphilis and popular Durban colloquialism for 'disgusting') these city walls are."

While law enforcers and municipalities have no legal grounds to stop reverse graffiti, they are, it appears, overly eager to eliminate evidence of their neglect by swiftly painting over the murals - ironically, an action that makes the walls ideal targets for taggers to leave more permanent stains.

"The art on the walls draws attention to the state of them," confirms Pace.

"Municipalities don't recognise their worth and simply paint over them. A concrete wall is porous, so the enamel of spray paint doesn't take so well, but white paint, on the other hand, just seals it perfectly for them. So they're just shooting themselves in the foot."