Artists park public expressions inside garage

Source: JEN GRAVES; The News Tribune
I keep drifting back to the parking garage on Broadway, between South Seventh and South Ninth streets in Tacoma, because it is a mystery and a marvel, and, hey, free art. The place is covered in graffiti, for lack of a better word. Much of it is so sophisticated that the building owner, Seattle developer Lorig & Associates, gave permission to the spray-can wielders because "we thought it was better than having graffiti," a spokesperson named Connie told me. Graffiti artists these days - or "aerosol artists," as some prefer to be called - aren't necessarily the territory-marking gangland taggers of the 1980s, whose mission was to rush around indiscriminately conquering street zones with sprawling signatures. When artists spray monikers now, they're often so exaggerated and abstracted to be unreadable to the casual passerby. The baroque public art that results has an encrypted, very private side. I wanted to catch the Broadway sprayers can-handed. I found a phone number for one, but the line rings and rings, and there's no voice mail. A tipster told me to go nights and Sunday afternoons. But a month of drive-bys was fruitless. I gave up on the missing persons and instead took to what was there. It felt like hanging out inside a house when the owners aren't there. The garage has three long bays, and its constant inhabitants are pigeons who flap startlingly from nooks in the ceiling. Graffiti crawls the walls of the bays, climbs their support posts and lounges on their dilapidated floors. Drippy paint on the windows blocks the view over Thea Foss Waterway and stains the daylight that squeezes inside. The best time to visit is weekends, when cars aren't parked in front of the art. A giant green surplus truck sits, unmoving, in the back of the southernmost bay, which is next to the undersized thrift store Junior Bizarre. What is painted on the truck's vast side reminds me of Joseph Stella's gothic-robotic homages to the engineering of the Brooklyn Bridge from the early 20th century. Here, gleaming, futuristic swoops and fat arrows that jab in all directions tangle in a red, pink and orange pile like a scrambled roller coaster. I love this southern bay. It doubles as a memorial shrine to someone called Plus. He haunts the place. His name is painted in various calligraphies - as a fat bubbly cartoon, as an elongated cityscape of skyscrapers. My tipster says that Plus died of cancer. Out of respect, the other artists haven't covered up Plus' tags, and they've added tributes, signing "Time is too short," "We Miss U," "In Loving Memory." One piece, a red and white upward rush of many-fingered energy in the shape of an upside-down tornado, reads "R.I.P." It is a kind of tombstone. Single pieces add up to whole productions in the other bays. A barbed-wire monster with a great green eye roars under the inscription "No rest for the wicked." He stalks Halloween, rising above a twisted pumpkin patch where the scarecrows have been stabbed, next to a towering black and silver signature as broad-shouldered as a cartoon Transformer. The mutilated scarecrows are pictured inside traditional art frames, like a punch-drunk protest from a teenage sketchbook: Go hang this in your parlor. This is hardly subtle. But it suits a rundown garage with creaky floors that has become a high-spirited affront to bourgeois living just by being one big place where the normal rules don't apply. Not all the art here is good, but some of it is - check out the calligraphic leopard ready to pounce from the northern bay - and it all belongs for as long as it's up, according to the will of the group. Eventually, someone will come along and paint over the bad stuff with a new, overstated, illicit fantasy, applying flamboyant code to turn a nickname into a maze. Using stripes and stencils, one artist has created a wallpapered domestic interior on which are hung two formally framed portraits of a shadowy young man in a backwards baseball cap. But the scene is interrupted. A turquoise octopus-like creature - possibly an exaggerated signature - stretches between the portraits like an irrepressible cartoon character in a live-action film. Domesticated self, meet wild self. What is out of place in the world, here is right at home.
-Jen Graves The New Tribune 2004
<-BACK-