By Emily Raine


Images from Clarke Street before the buff. Photograph by Emily Raine

For as long as I’ve lived in Montreal, there has been a long line of complex, multi-colour murals spiked by smaller stencils running down Rue Clarke between Rachel and Duluth. That is, until one day late last summer, when I biked along the street and the whole stretch of wall was blue-grey, flat, uniform: the mark of the buff. “Buffing” is a graffiti term, meaning the painting over or chemical removal of images, so named for the lovely beige “buff” colour selected by early practitioners to enhance and beautify their cities. You’ll know the buff when you see it: a big blotch of flat colour in the middle of a wall, sometimes matching its background, sometimes not.

Montreal’s graffiti writers and street artists have traditionally enjoyed a rather special status, where the ubiquitous brick walls—which are difficult to paint over without spoiling the visual effect—have gone a long way to protect images from widespread buffing. This gives individual pieces a much longer shelf life than in cities where buffing is widespread, a condition that also breeds a greater attention to detail and investment of energy on the part of the artists. There is a piece not far from my house that, using its style to date it, must have been in place since the 70s if not earlier, a longevity unimaginable in many other cities.

The disappearance of the Clarke murals heralds the introduction of the buff to Montreal. Over the last few years, the municipality has begun to launch a series of urban beautification programs, with special emphasis upon graffiti removal. In 2003, the city earmarked almost three million dollars toward graffiti-related issues, including resources for youth education and increased police patrols of areas deemed prone to the desecration of the spray can. This year, spurred on by the virulently anti-graffiti Plateau borough Mayor Helen Fotopoulos, the municipality introduced a generously funded removal program and established the “Brigade de la propreté,” a city-funded clean-up crew. All of these initiatives are a part of the Go! Montreal’s urban beautification program, which forms a critical nucleus of the party’s platform.

Within a week of the city’s erasure of the images lining Rue Clarke, the mottled blue surface of the wall is covered in “throw-ups,” another graffiti term referring to quickly-outlined pieces, usually executed in one colour with no fill. About two weeks after that, the wall is once again blank as a slate after the city makes a second pass. Another week goes by, and lo!, more hastily scrawled throw-ups appear, bigger and uglier and faster than the ones that came before. While both the murals that have vanished and the throw-ups that remain are certainly graffiti, I feel like something is missing.


Photograph by Emily Raine.

This brief anecdote would no doubt sound stale in countless other cities, where residents have watched patches of urban space be incessantly re-painted and re-buffed, proving little more than the fact that writers can put it up as fast as the city can take it down. In particularly saturated cities, the buff almost provides a service to the graffiti community, endowing writers with new spaces to work in rather than compelling them to paint over past masterpieces. However, the buff indexes a more provocative issue, that of the epistemological construction of graffiti and street art in our city, and of who gets to use city spaces at all.

Any “beautification” program that includes the eradication of art—street or otherwise—requires some serious examination. Most graffiti and street art is done illegally, it’s true, but it is other things besides merely illegal: it is political, it is counter-hegemonic, and often, it is moving and beautiful. By excluding graffiti images from urban “beauty,” the city espouses a particular aesthetic agenda that is directly linked to the legitimacy of individual action in the city and which excludes the participation of anyone who wishes to use or decorate or celebrate their neighbourhoods in other ways. The city of Montreal has introduced us all to the buff, coughing up nearly million dollars for graffiti removal in some arrondissements, but at what cost? Clarke street clearly demonstrates that the people will do what they please.

I close with a quote from the current kingpin of British street art, Banksy:
“Imagine a city where graffiti wasn’t illegal, a city where everybody could draw wherever they liked. Where every street was awash with a million colours and little phrases. Where standing at a bus stop was never boring. A city that felt like a living breathing thing which belonged to everybody, not just the real estate agents and barons of big business. Imagine a city like that and stop leaning against the wall—it’s wet.”

Read Craig Noble’s excellent essay on graffiti removal projects in Vancouver here.