If You Can’t Beat Them, Allow Them to Redecorate Your Apartment

Graffiti apologist Hugo Martinez is having his apartment redecorated by graffitists:

This year, at least since late January, he’s been living amid graffiti designed to be part of a studio apartment that has been spruced up by two Dutch designers (who call themselves Kaptein Roodnat) and decorated by 13 graffitists. The graffitists range in age from 19 to 48, Mr. Martinez said, “and what links them is the clarity of their vision and the fact that they’ve all passed the threshold of criminality.”

Some, he said, have been arrested as many as 30 times, for everything from vandalism – for their graffiti – to selling crack.

The apartment decoration is part art prank, part reality show – there are plans for a Webcam – and part public service. Mr. Martinez would like to see city housing agencies deploy similar decorative strategies in their buildings – not that he’ll be knocking on any doors, mind you.

“I just put stuff out there,” he said. “I’m not going to call the mayor and beg.” “The Project in the Projects,” as this dressed-up apartment is called, is the ultimate act of graffiti. By painting and altering the regulation colors of an apartment in a 1960’s-era low-income housing project, Mr. Martinez’s team has done what graffitists the world over do – which is to mark up private property. Whether the result is enhancement or defacement is up to the beholder.

So what does it look like? From the slide show, it looks like someone basically tagged his refrigerator. But the Times finds a curiously post-modern parallel — Pottery Barn:

Inside this apartment, grim references become festive. There’s police-style tape laid down in a kind of mod plaid on the floor, and yellow utility lights strung from the ceiling – one assumes in an attempt to “quote” from the environment of your basic graffitist. In other words, here are things you’d find in a subway, or a crime scene. The effect is both colorful and goofy, like the rooms in Pottery Barn’s teen catalog.

Instead of shades, rolls of paper hang from dowels over the window and are decorated by a few graffitists. Others have made plexiglass boxes that can be stacked and used as a headboard for the bed, as supports for the bed and desk, and, when covered with a pistachio-colored square of foam, remarkably comfortable seating. One graffitist, Nato, filled plexiglass boxes with old spray cans gathered from the subway tracks, like a time capsule of his art – making it seem distant, almost forgotten. You can see the old Rustoleum cans – the 70’s-era paint of choice, Mr. Martinez said – and American Accent cans, a 90’s brand.

But since the proof is in the smooth, glossy rust-proof finish, that existential question of all art eventually nagged at Martinez:

Mr. Martinez said he’d awakened that morning worrying “that none of this was any good.”

In the end, he decided it was good. Which is why soon many of us will have graffitists redecorate our homes — and then graffitists will either have to discover new avenues of self-expression or be forced to give away their craft for free. I feel an Ayn Rand novel coming on.