The war on billboards has begun. A month ago a legal notice was published that introduced tighter enforcement and higher fines for the illegal variety. The new legislation targets both fixed billboards and the parked trucks that are often used to display advertising. All billboards now have to be registered with Transport Malta against an annual fee of €1,500.
Last week, two political billboards that belonged to the usual suspects were removed from St James Ditch outside Valletta. No less a heritage guru than Jason Micallef called them an “act of heritage pollution”, and out they went – kicking and screaming in court in the case of the Nationalist one that said, funnily enough, ‘Barra’.
Now my first reaction to the declaration of this particular war was to rejoice and pack my bags for a pilgrimage of eternal gratitude. My take on billboards has been roughly that of the much-missed Jeremy Boissevain, who once said that they gave Malta “the image of a nation of hucksters”.
Only I’ve changed my mind. I now see (no choice there) billboards as a kind of visual relief, a much-needed antidote to a general ugliness and bad taste. The trouble with billboards is not that they exist or that there are too many of them, but that they are too few and too unimaginative. It follows that I would like to see more of them, especially in certain strategic locations.
My affection for billboards has two sources. The first is 19th century Paris and its affiches (posters, usually colour lithographs). Poster design occupied a good chunk of the time of some of the best artists of the Belle Epoque, including Bonnard, Vuillard, and above all, Toulouse-Lautrec. The posters they produced included some of the more memorable art of the period, and yet the point all along was commercial.
The Belle Epoque posters advertised anything from soap to kerosene lamps. Posting was regulated and there were laws that established where one could and could not post. Laws or no laws, the affiches transformed the streets of Paris into one big open-air museum of design and innovation.
My second source of inspiration is India, and especially Mumbai, where I once lived and worked.
In India, billboards are called ‘hoardings’. A useful word it is too, because the place is full of them. The street and roads of Mumbai are lined with gigantic and colourful hoardings, many of which advertise Bollywood films.
No matter how much tuna and pepperoni they peddle, in many cases billboards are far nicer than whatever’s behind them
Until recently, the hoardings sustained a whole industry of painters who would individually handpaint every single eyelash. It would not be unnecessarily poetic to say that billboards lend Mumbai a good part of its colour and charm.
Now I am not for a minute suggesting that the canvases on the Birkirkara Bypass are beacons of contemporary art. I had a good look at them just this morning and saw little that reminded me of Toulouse-Lautrec or a caste of artisans doing oversized renditions of Bipasha Basu’s glorious assets. I did, however, find myself aesthetically edified by a special offer for a free can of tuna and a new topping for oven-ready pizzas.
At which point my argument for more billboards begins to seem somewhat wobbly. Except there is something that comes to my rescue.
No matter how much tuna and pepperoni they peddle, in many cases billboards are far nicer than whatever’s behind them. In this sense they act as a kind of mammoth-sized concealer or, at the very least, a much-needed visual distraction.
Take my chosen case study. I remember walking to university on the Birkirkara Bypass 20 years ago. The road cut through some splendid fields dotted with carob trees. It was an absolute pleasure to walk there and look around. The carob trees have now given way to the most hideous buildings and contraptions imaginable. I no longer walk to university but if I did, I’d choose to keep my eyes riveted on the billboards at all times.
Not that the ironically named Triq Dun Karm (certainly the man could recite nature) is an exception.
I have great plans for a whole forest of billboards around that grotesque blot on the landscape known as Ta’ Pinu, for example. Hoardings would also be in order on Castille Place, given the mass of knots and bollards and paddling pools it has become. The horrible statue of La Valette round the corner, too, would look really good hidden away behind an advert for a new model of burger with an extra slice of cheese. And so on.
By far the most deserving of this national concealer treatment are the various confections of the Environmental Landscapes Consortium, easily the worst thing to have happened to public landscaping in Malta in the past 100 years. The list is long, but the point is the rehabilitation of billboards as a means to cover up the insufferable.
There’s a second reason why it would be a good idea to have more billboards. Hand on heart, the present state of the art is not too encouraging – most of the images that line our roads are pretty miserable. Only they needn’t be. I am therefore recommending a complete revamp and revaluation of the billboarder’s art that would usher in a 21st century Mediterranean Belle Epoque. I mean, there must be something at which we could play at being the best in Europe.
Like the so-called weeds that grow on rubble and building sites, billboards do a great job at masking visual sins and looking rather good in the process. My plea is for us to think again about a much-maligned species that is, in fact, of great benefit to humanity.
mafalzon@hotmail.com