Graffiti: One Person's Art Is Another's Annoyance -- Battles Erupt Between Young Urban Spray-Painters And The Merchants Whose Walls Become Their Canvas

Graffiti, like termites, are signs of urban decay.

That sentiment can be heard throughout Seattle these days as more and more walls, signs and freeway spans are blasted with the squiggly spray-paint lines of would-be urban artists.

"At first we didn't mind too much," said Brian Faker, an open-minded kind of guy who works at New City Theater on Capitol Hill, where graffiti rings the building.

"The initial work had artistic merit," Faker said. "But after those went up, we started getting bombed by maniacs."

That Faker is using the language of war is no mistake. Battles are erupting citywide between the youthful graffiti sprayers and their bombing targets - merchants, residents and even motorists.

In the past year, the amount of graffiti has soared in Seattle.

And contrary to common belief, only 2 percent of it is attributed to gangs. City officials say the vast majority is hip-hop, a form of aerosol art performed by a subculture of youth who carry spray cans instead of pagers.

Their work is distinctive. Behind Cafe Paradiso on Capitol Hill, for example, the parking lot is ringed with bright, shouting murals that suggest chaos and beauty and rebellion and angst.

Brick walls have given way to contorted figures and wild lettering, above a moat of old, crumpled spray cans.

Even doubters concede that this is art in some form - although for some, it is art run amok.

About two weeks ago, someone broke an unspoken rule and spray-painted a van parked in the lot.

"They hit all four sides, all the windows, a little bit of the roof and two tires," says the van owner, Lauris Bitner. "I couldn't believe it."

The damage cost $1,500 to repair. That was on top of the $2,000 Bitner had just paid for a new paint job. That after parking his van in the lot for three years with no problems.

No arrest has been made, even though police think they know who did it. The vandal left his painting nickname, also known as a "tag," on the van.

Citywide, "tagging" has become the bane of businesses and police.

An evolutionary notch below muralists, taggers are hit-and-run artists who spray their nicknames on buildings, signs or on top of existing murals. "Core" or "Coro," for example, has left his mark all over Seattle's freeway signs, making him the Evel Knievel of the aerosol set.

His high-wire spray stunts might be impressive to some, but critics liken it to the juvenile impulse to carve initials in trees or scratch names into a school desk.

"Nobody wants that - nobody," says James Sorenson, an Aurora Avenue North businessman who let a graffiti artist paint a large, colorful mural on the wall of his Travelers III Tavern - only to see it hit by taggers.

"It's not art" when someone spray-paints his name over everything, Sorenson says. "What kind of ability does it take to use a black pen to scribble on a building?"

Sorenson feels passionately about this. He bought $80 worth of paint for the original mural and doesn't like what's been done to it since.

His anger is shared by police. They must respond to increasing complaints about graffiti but rarely catch the spray-can wielders. The penalty for defacing property is a $3,000 fine or a year in jail.

"Seattle is becoming a mecca for hip-hop, but it stretches all the way from California to Vancouver, B.C.," says Seattle police Officer Daniel Enriquez. "It's all a subculture: You go from grunge music, to skateboarders, to the art."

Indeed, most skateboards are illustrated with graffiti, and at least one skateboarder, Josh Stanton, has tattoos of three spray cans etched into his right forearm.

The connection between skateboarding and tagging isn't surprising. Rick Olguin, an ethnic-studies professor at North Seattle Community College, says both activities are a form of rebellion.

"How far back do we have to go to find a generation that didn't want to be rebellious?" he asks. "Getting rid of graffiti would be like getting rid of rock 'n' roll in the '60s. Watch any commercial designed to sell stuff to young people today - most of them include shots or cutaways with urban graffiti."

Graffiti art got a big boost here last summer when it was featured in a show at the Seattle Center called "Artists Against the Wall."

Since then, scrawlings have surged. There are some "legal" walls where building owners have OK'd graffiti, among them the Vogue and RKCNDY nightclubs and the Comet Tavern. But lay down a tag on a building where it's not wanted, and that's where the trouble begins.

The city estimates the cleanup cost to itself and businesses at millions of dollars each year.

The problem isn't restricted to the city, however, with suburbs such as Federal Way reporting recent plagues of taggers.

From large jobs to small ones, the cost of paint and labor adds up. At SJW Studio, which faces the parking lot where the van was tagged, the shop owner keeps a 5-gallon bucket under a table near the door to paint over graffiti on the building's brick wall.

Most painters will honor walls that business owners have asked them to avoid. But some kids will tag anything, particularly if they don't live in the area.

Officer Enriquez says a lot of kids come in from the suburbs to tag in Seattle: "One girl from Kirkland, who was all decked out in her Doc Martens shoes and her little waif clothing, told me she's not into the 'burbs . . . because it's not the thing to do there."

So, she tags in Seattle, painting her nickname on the brick and mortar here. It's not only visually annoying to some, but intimidating to others.

Despite the low incidence of gang graffiti in Seattle, many people still associate gang violence with every scrawl sprayed on a wall.

"Frankly, it started to intimidate our patrons," says Faker of New City Theater. "People were avoiding our parking lot."

Gang graffiti does exist, usually to mark turf in gang-ravaged pockets of the city. But if anything, it's dying off.

As Olguin noted, most gangs have other things to do.