clean taggers

I was reading articles online a while back about art and on Hauque's site applegeeeks. He had mentioned an artist who took a new approach to building art, which is usually is as illegal as it is beautiful. Instead of painting, Alexandre Orion an artist from brazil took cleaners and started to remove soot, and grim from a traffic tunnel in Sao Paolo in a running skull design, the piece was made to express the death emissions is causing. When police officials arrived they where amazed and a bit peeved at the act, but in all the law books could find nothing to charge him with, so the city decided just to clean the whole tunnel.

Another artist who pioneered the art form living in the UK calling himself moose was quoted as saying "once you do this, you make people confront whether or not they like cleaning walls or if they really have a problem with personal expression." Moose himself was given a harsher charge of cleaning his own work off the wall... even if the work was technically cleaner than the wall itself. he city felt that his artwork was illegally advertising and was not in the image of a clean city with, ironically no graffiti.

while graffiti is defined as any marking on property that is creating an image or wording, and the main concern with traditional graffiti is it's potential damage to property; It's hard to say whether it can be considered illegal since the artists are not actually marking any of the places they work on. Also the results of the pieces so far where to clean the walls, so it really can't be considered bad in that the artist are cleaning up the city the reverse affect of graffiti I'd say. I'd like to see more of this come state side, and Moose himself has already done a piece in san Francisco with green works (a brand of all natural cleaners) of a forest scene with large stencils of plants native to the california area that grew where the road is now.

article on Orion

article on the sanfran project

video of sanfran project