An enormous graffiti bird in Melbourne, Australia, has stirred considerable controversy as the public and officials contend with the artwork’s future.
Days after police arrested a man who had scaled and tagged a prominent Melbourne bridge with a cartoon bird dubbed “Pam the Bird,” thousands have called upon the city to preserve the graffiti artwork.
The Victoria Police have cast 22-year-old graffiti artist Jack Gibson-Burrell as a “notorious vandal” whose tactics have recently escalated into alleged violence, and charged him with multiple offenses for his most recent stunt. Meanwhile, nearly 9,000 petitioners have defended his “Pam the Bird” display as a work of “spontaneous urban culture” that ought to be preserved.
On July 7, Gibson-Burrell surrendered to police following a tense standoff during which the artist sat perched atop a 140-foot tower on Melbourne’s Bolte Bridge. The artist allegedly forced a door to a staircase that led to the top of the landmark tower, where he abseiled to tag an enormous upside-down bird and the text “Fuck You.”
Gibson-Burrell currently faces over 200 charges, the majority of which are related to his prolific graffiti work around Melbourne. The artist has allegedly tagged “Pam the Bird” on other major buildings in the city over the past couple of years, including the clock tower of the Flinders Street railway station. He also faces separate charges related to allegedly assaulting a retail worker.
He was reportedly out on bail at the time of the Bolte Bridge incident and living with his grandmother.
On the Australian petition-building website GetUp, signatories called upon Melbourne officials to preserve — rather than remove — Bolte Bridge’s “Pam the Bird,” citing its wide popularity. Removing the tag from the tower would cost the city tens of thousands of Australian dollars, according to local news outlets.
The petition states that its advocacy for the embattled avian caricature is not intended to encourage similar illegal stunts in the future.
“When [something like this] happens, perhaps the best response isn’t to immediately paint over it,” reads the petition, authored by Eric Giordmaina. “But to acknowledge that public art sometimes appears in unexpected ways.”
Police responded to the incident at Bolte Bridge after 2am on July 7. In photographs of the scene, Gibson-Burrell can be seen delivering a black-gloved middle finger to the police waiting for him at the bottom of the concrete structure. Around 11 am, he surrendered with his hands up on a nearby embankment.
On a now-deleted Instagram account believed to belong to Gibson-Burrell, entitled “pambirdofficial,” a masked man says, “I’m not coming down until they lower the taxes. I’m fucking sick of paying that shit.”
Hyperallergic attempted to contact Gibson-Burrell, Giordmaina, and the city of Melbourne for comment.
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