ATHENS
— The young man climbed a 30-foot scaffold on a building in central
Athens and dipped a brush into a tray of gray paint. With rapid flicks
of his wrist, he outlined a haunting image: a baby with two faces,
looking simultaneously into an abyss and toward the sky, its vacant eyes
searching for a future that was not there.The mural, by a Greek street artist known as iNO,
was delicate, stylized and clever, stopping passers-by in their tracks.
Fundamentally, though, it was a raw message of protest, the latest in a
wave of socially and politically conscious artwork spreading over the
walls of Athens.“People
in Greece are under increasing pressure,” said iNO, a soft-spoken man
who aims to draw attention to the social situation in this crisis-hit
country, where even the youngest in society are grappling with the
perception of a bleak future. As a result, he said, “they feel the need
to act, resist and express themselves.”Graffiti
in Athens, as in other cities the world over, has flourished for
decades. But in a country where the adversity of wars and military
dictatorship already has shaped the national psyche, the five-year
economic collapse has spawned a new burst of creative energy that has
turned Athens into a contemporary mecca for street art in Europe.
Denounced
as thuggish vandalism by some observers, but hailed by others as
artistic and innovative, tags, bubble letters and stylized paint work
long have blanketed this city’s walls, trains, cars, banks, kiosks,
crumbling buildings — and even some ruins of the Acropolis. But in the
past several years, the anguish of the times has increasingly crept into
the elaborate stencil work and multitude of large, colorful murals
found all over the city, as Greece’s throngs of unemployed and
underemployed young people have ample time to express their malaise.“If
you want to learn about a city, look at its walls,” said iNO, who used
to spray graffiti on trains but recently started using buildings as a
canvas for murals with a social message. “Take a walk in the center of
Athens, and you will get it.”The
Athens police rarely arrest graffiti artists, unless they are suspected
of belonging to anarchist groups or the extreme-right Golden Dawn
party. The two-faced baby was painted by iNO on a recent morning without
interference. Still, many artists work discreetly at night, donning
masks and declining to give their names for fear of running afoul of the
authorities. Their messages are often rebellious, verging on
revolutionary.Recently,
under cover of darkness, a Greek dentist whose business has been all
but wiped out by the crisis reached into a tote bag and grabbed a can of
spray paint and a stencil he had cut in his spare time using a cavity
drill. Stopping at a crumbling wall, he quickly painted an image not
typically associated with his profession: a masked man hurling a
firebomb.“The middle class and the working class in Greece have been ruined,” said the dentist, who goes by the street handle Mapet, declining to give his real name. “My goal is to deliver social and political counterpropaganda, and make people think.”In
the gritty neighborhood of Exarcheia, a stronghold of anarchists, more
than a decade’s worth of tags and graffiti have been leavened with a
catalog of Mapet’s stencils and the work of other street artists, who
paint violent yet graceful anti-Fascist images, grotesque caricatures of
bankers and politicians, and intricate sticker work on street after
street.Such
work has spread to the nearby working-class neighborhoods of
Metaxourgeio and Kerameikos, where a growing number of so-called hipster
artists, despised by hard-core graffiti artists, also have been leaving
their mark. Many of the newcomers are trained at the Athens School of Fine Arts,
which gives courses in street painting that have spawned edgy new
outdoor works addressing racism, capitalism and exploitation.Recently,
even city authorities have gotten in on the act, as they have sought to
capitalize on graffiti’s more artistic offshoots by handing out permits
to encourage street artists to paint murals in blighted public spaces.In Metaxourgeio and Kerameikos, a big real estate developer, Oliaros, is also working to gentrify the areas, partly by giving commercial building space to mural artists handpicked by the company.Ideally,
parts of Athens eventually would be transformed into a vast outdoor
gallery, said Amalia Zeppou, an adviser to the mayor who helps oversee
the permit program.“When
a city collapses, and has been tagged everywhere, we have an obligation
to stop it,” Ms. Zeppou said. But there is another message behind the
campaign. “Once graffiti becomes commissioned art,” she added, “it is a
signal of the beginning of the end of the financial or social crisis
that a city has gone through.”Such
thinking is rejected by many of the 2,000 or so graffiti and street
artists who paint around Athens. They believe city authorities and
developers are commissioning works as a way to quietly suppress artistic
political and social expression. Effectively, they say, authorities are
hijacking street art in order to whitewash its message.“Make
no mistake: Graffiti is a weapon of influence because it’s so apparent
in the city,” said Charitonas Tsamantakis, an imposing, black-clad
graffitist who is publishing a book, “Hellenic Graffiti History,” in the
autumn. “The authorities want to embrace it so they can neutralize it
and control it. It’s a way of breaking our spirit.”INO,
the mural artist, said there was still room to convey social messages
through commissioned work. He recently painted a large outdoor mural for
an exhibition at the Onassis Cultural Center in Athens, depicting a
woman’s face on paper being crushed with a hand. “The message is that
man has become a slave of his creators,” he said.On the streets of Athens, the city’s hard-core outdoor artists push similarly lofty themes.“There are a lot of bad things happening in Greece,” said a longtime graffiti artist who goes by the handle Cacao Rocks. He taught French literature until the crisis wiped out his job, leaving him time to prowl the walls of Athens.He and his partner, the artist Thisisopium, donned face masks one recent night and painted a single large word on a blighted wall: “lathos,” the Greek term for “wrong.”“The whole system is working in the wrong way,” he said. “We’re here to change the rules.”
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