Are Murals An Endangered Species?
By Judy
Baca
Within the borders of the city of
Los Angeles all murals must receive a permit from the Cultural Affairs
Commission before they can be painted on public or private
property.
This means that if you choose to paint a mural
on the outside of your own property you would need to receive a permit from
Cultural Affairs to do so. If you do not have a permit you could be fined or
jailed and the mural can be removed by the Department of Building and Safety.
This policy is apparently in question at the moment and rightfully so as it
seems to be a blatant violation of first Amendment rights of the public and
individual property rights which are held in higher regard than the interest of
the public in most all debates in our
country.
What seems to be happening is
that some muralists who have been given permission to work on private walls with
full support of building owners for the creation of a fine art work have sought
Cultural Affairs permits and have been told that they cannot apply while the
city sorts out this issue. In one case a mural was removed at Cesar Chavez and
Breed Street in January of this year because it was not permitted even though
they sought and were denied the right to apply for a permit. The beautiful
community mural was destroyed one month after it was painted.
www.icuart.com/com-murals/lml/
Actually
this is not uncommon, there have been many cases in which works that were
controversial perhaps only to one person who complained have been removed
without notification to the artist by the Department of Building and Safety. A
beautiful mural of a Zapatista was removed from a wall in East Los Angeles a
couple of years ago because it did not have a permit while many banal murals
which are used for decorating pizza houses or little markets with purely
advertising intent are not enforced. Has the Department of Building and Safety
become a mind-policing agency?
The City
of Los Angeles has a sign ordinance that is written ambiguously enough to make
it possible to confuse a mural with a sign. Since the percentage of language was
one of the methods the city used to distinguish a sign from fine art (is it
really that hard?) the advertising companies seized the opportunity to reduce
language on supergraphics and declare them fine art. Today every inch of the
public's eye space is being filled with advertising and art is disappearing.
Most Angelenos would advocate for control of advertising particularly
supergraphics as the chosen images to dominate the urban landscape. Who wants to
drive through the city and see a ten-story cell phone or Mickey Mouse as the
definer of the downtown skyline? Sign legislation seems to be controlling only
artists and not the creators of corporate graffiti by advertising agencies who
essentially are ignoring the law and polluting the urban landscape with what
amounts to corporate vandalism.
The
most outrageous acts of permit violations are perpetrated by the super graphic
advertising companies who often do not seek permits at all and simply pay the
fines associated with illegal advertising if they are caught at all. The city
does not seem to have the means or perhaps the will to enforce the law on
advertising agencies consistently. What is occurring as a result is that super
graphics are proliferating and art is
not.
All public funding for murals in
Los Angeles has ended and the SPARC mural program, which existed for 20 years,
is gone. This program through a city and nonprofit partnership provided public
and private monies to produce hundreds of murals in our city. SPARC is working
to reinstate this program.
Is Los Angeles
fast becoming an environment hostile to
murals?
Judith F. Baca is the
Founder and Artistic Director of The Social and Public Art Resource Center
(SPARC).
Posted: Tue - April 1, 2008 at 08:13 PM
