Crew

 

Seminar on Street Art 1: Crew. ‘World’ and ‘Cola’ are names 20 feet high applied to large billboards and warehouse walls, paint dribbling at time to affect haze or Pollock, throughout the inner city. The actual World and Cola constitute a crew, their crew name the well-nigh universal WLS. The meaning of this set of letters is elusive to the uninitiated, which is most of the Melbourne population. Travellers who leave their phones in their pockets may spend quality reading time following the fortunes of World and Cola through cuttings, along vacant lots, under overpasses for miles. Or other crews that have taken a grip of available spaces with their nominated handle. Crews become recognisable as such by the sheer diversity of their art, WLS for example being presented in everything from ornate variegated two-storey calligraphy to inscrutable hardline block bubbles to irascible underlined logo bombs and dumb old badges of largely indifferent quality. Whoever they are on the Australian Census papers, World and Cola are amongst the most prolific and immediate artists that Melburnians get to see every day of the week. They enjoy the same notoriety as Pam the Bird, a graphic figure with beak and large eyes that adorns freeway signs, industrial estates and disused railway carriages across the western suburbs. Pam the Bird is often accompanied by the bold letters MP, which stand for the enigmatic message ‘Milk Please’. This in-joke hints at the idea Pam the Bird is a crew, that and the immense variety of art styles in which she is made manifest, however graf blogs still believe she is the product of one (very overworked) single-line roller grafittist, a lone hand, a rare bird. The term for this kind of romantic visionary is a king. Kings are happy to do their own thing with their lettered identity. They are only rarely lone wolves, because kings are in the business of making spraycan statements to get the attention of other street artists. Kings send coded messages using their distinctive acronyms or sets of initials to other kings, using the public surfaces of Melbourne as their writing paper. Pam the Bird possibly started out as a king but is now feral, or at the very least out of her/their tree. Seeing and being seen is one of the driving characteristics of kings, the crown frequently being a feature of their wild emblems, paint whirling through time to affect regal haloes or Basquiat. Crews and kings make the running, tending to regard newcomers to badging by the patronising term toy. Toys are okay, but they are like schoolboys who cut their initials in a desktop, leaving a mark. Toys deliver low grade product, poorly formed and not thought through. Chances are most toys are chancers who ruin a good fence with their inferior tags. They lower the standard of the neighbourhood and give a bad name to the real thing.