Graffiti is grouse. I delight in the chunky overlaps of New York decoration applied to the surfaces of my city. I enjoy the Escher-like detail that artists exhibit when, cans in hand, they are confronted with a developer's bland exterior. I marvel at the ornate hieroglyphic badging left on underpasses and bus stops by black marker pens. I moon over expressions of love brushed hastily onto corrugated fences beside railway lines, or sun my thoughts with the bizarre slogans left in bluestone backlanes by nimble youths in search of meaning.
Not all graffiti is of the same calibre, a swathe of it slapdash at best, or as excessive as a eucalyptus, but it never ceases to catch the eye and prompt feelings of companionship with anonymous makers. This is both protest and celebration, signifier and signified, public evidence and popular artform.
Luckily I live in one of the great graffiti cities of the world, though not all city councils in Melbourne look upon it benignly. In my local area of Heidelberg the council has had some of the most restrictive and punitive attitudes toward graffitists or, as the authorities call them uncharitably, vandals. Unsurprisingly, this seems only to encourage the graffitists to greater heights of daring and expression.
We know why they do it: to resist boredom, to challenge conformity, to strike out at a world that is not listening, to leave a mark when all other avenues are closed.
Illegal it may be, but I harbour a quiet pleasure at seeing dull square buildings of grey concrete slabs, all this post-modern philistinism, scintillatingly covered with outlandish swirls of colour and a signature resembling a space probe. These members of the new Heidelberg School bring life to the neighbourhood: they are aching to be seen and to be known through their work.
Occasionally I find myself on the squashy Johnston Street bus through Collingwood and in heavy traffic have sat stationary gazing at the 1984 wall mural on the Old Tech Building. The image conjures all sorts of ideas. A centipede with a computer head is being ridden by a couple of cowboys, prophetic of the American last frontier of the digital revolution. This beast has the two forepaws of a sphinx: the dumb gaze of the