City moves to create policy wall art

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Whether the painting on the wall of the Concorde Cafe on Bloor Street West is a mural or just graffiti will be decided early next year when the city has developed the criteria to make such a distinction, the Toronto and East York Community Council decided this week.

In the meantime, local Ward 19 (Trinity-Spadina) Councillor Joe Pantalone and the owner of the cafe, Genoveva Silva, are having an artistic difference of opinion about the painting that Silva permitted to be painted on the wall of her cafe.

Pantalone said the Bloorcourt-area cafe is in the middle of a neighbourhood that's been "under stress," and that images like the one on the Concorde only encourage other graffiti artists.

"There's been a lot of antisocial activities who I presume think an alternative lifestyle is fine," said Pantalone at the Tuesday meeting. "I suppose doing drugs is fine - it's your own body you're harming - and prostitution is fine too because it's happening with consent. So if you go and do graffiti on your property that's fine too because it's an expression. But when people did graffiti in these locations, all of a sudden graffiti started appearing all over the place."

Pantalone wanted council to go along with city staff's recommendation and have the painting removed. But Silva said the artwork was put on her wall by young people in the community who had first asked permission, after holding seminars in the cafe. The elaborate image runs along a wall and fence, and includes figures and stylized lettering.

Silva said she considered long and hard before allowing the work to be done.

"After two or three months I said okay, I will allow you to come to the Concord Cafe and give a seminar in spoken works, music and art, and one was to show people how to paint murals," she said. "I apologize for not asking permission to the city. In my ignorance I didn't think about it. We were all neighbours and it was all on our walls. The kids came and did their jobs and they finished it, it's been over a year. Since that time the murals have been a source of joy for a lot of people, especially in the winter. These colorful murals really adorned the community."

Silva was persuasive with the community council, which voted to defer any decision until after city staff had come up with a policy.

Ward 14 (Parkdale-High Park) Councillor Gord Perks compared the current reaction to graffiti art to the general public's reaction to the jazz music of Miles Davis in the 1950s.

"When it was first released, it was the music of illegal drugs and bad behaviour," said Perks, who told the committee he and his mother had listened to Davis' album Kind of Blue on the weekend. "How wonderful that we can now enjoy it across a generation."

Ward 20 (Trinity-Spadina) Councillor Adam Vaughan pointed out that the motifs of graffiti have been adopted by many corporations for advertising purposes - and that the city was being hypocritical not going after those too.

"We all deal with the problem of tagging and of vandalism, and we deal with corporations who have taken up this style of presentation," he said. "Corporations are using the techniques of muralists to take advantage of the street credibility that's dared using this medium. There's an extraordinary tradition of muralism in this country that dates back hundreds of years in all sorts of communities. We have to come up with a way to allow people to paint buildings the way they want to paint them."