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“There’s a style in it all, even if you don’t und
erstand that.” Across Cork Street from Weaver Park on a Friday evening, a stretch of dark blue hoardings was being doused in spray paint by a crew of five graffiti artists. Known as LSD, each had claimed a space of approximately four metres to sketch out their respective pseudonyms: Zerc, Efsie, Gear, Asik and Abdoe. As the sun beat down on them, they smoked rollies, drank bottles of beer, and rattled canisters, before unloading them on the temporary wooden walls. The entire footpath was engulfed in the smell of aerosol paint. “It does have an effect on you,” Gear says. “You’ll be up all night from the fumes.” “What you’re doing is breaking the law,” said a guy on crutches, which he pointed at one of the LSD members. Half joking, the man produced an old Nokia from his pocket, saying he’d call the guards if someone didn’t give him a cigarette. It isn’t graffiti if it’s legal, Gear said later. “People who do legal walls, they’re not graffiti writers. They’re doing murals. That’s its own category of street art. But we’re out on the street and it’s illegal at the end of the day.” A week later, beneath the railway bridge that runs over Townsend Street, the hiss of a spray paint can was mingling with the rumble of trains overhead and the clatter of construction on a nearby site. The artist Efsie quickly went about spraying the outline of his name in black paint, while two members of his other crew DFA stood to the side, observing him at work. He had managed to climb up onto the bridge a while back to get their tag on the side of the iron frame. “It’s addictive,” Efsie says, noting that he had just recently changed his name to dodge the authorities. “I’m after being arrested,” his friend pointed out while laughing. “I’m after paying seven hundred quid, and I’m still wanting to go out and keep doing this. Like, it makes no sense, and even when I say it, I know it makes no sense.” For about two years now, Oriel has been hitting the same power box outside “Gay” Spar on Dame Street. The Smithfield-based artist first postered them, before stencilling in a parody of the Durex logo, with the tagline “For the Dubliner in you.” More recently, he began to up the ante, reimagining the chain store’s green tree logo as a buttplug, with its three points rounded off to better resemble the sex toy. But as quickly as he could put it up, it got “buffed.” “The corporation paint them over within hours,” he says. “Like literally within 12 hours they are gone.” In response, he took to doing what he calls “fast cuts.” These were stencils done in pink, bearing messages that at best were only vaguely explicit. As pedestrians crossed the busy street, they were met by slogans emblazoned across the grey boxes, including “Pure Filth,” “Have You Been A Bold Boy”, “Wanting Chunky Hairy 16 Men” and “Ove Ock”. “Dublin is my playground,” he says. “It’s my living room, and I hate those grey boxes. They are so depressing. For me, I want to create giggles, and have people say ‘he’s really pushing limits’, and sometimes the work is bold and sometimes it’s technically good.” The work is totally and utterly illegal, he says. If there is a code that he abides by, it is the calibre of buildings or structures that he targets. “Hoardings, walls that nobody has cared for, places completely trashed by graffiti, and boxes are game. Some of those have not been painted, sometimes in ten years.” There is a great sense of freedom in creating something provocative, he says. “It’s about going out and wrecking the streets and having a bit of fun.” While not an aspect of the city’s culture that has been fully co-opted yet, street art in the past five years has undergone a certain level of domestication. Around Portobello Harbour, the hoardings for an upmarket hotel are decorated by colourful scenes of wildlife, as if to appease locals who were deprived of a public plaza. In Rathmines, a mural was commissioned to promote a Sex Pistols drama miniseries, with the word “Anarchy” emblazoning the corner of Castlewood Place, beneath which the Disney logo was included. Above: Patricia and Ken, photo: Malcolm McGettigan Left: Patricia and her dad Below: Joe Doherty