I found these chapters and articles to be insightful in their attention to the multifaceted and various ways in which ancient graffiti is/has been defined and materialized. The dialogic nature of these articles, made concrete in the specific occasions of intertextual citation, brings to mind our discussions on discourse and the way in which academic literature respond to, contradict, and build off one another. These articles contradict and complement one another through the definitions they support and discard.
A definition on which the readings seemed to find consensus was loosely based around marks made in unexpected places (Baird and Taylor 4). Deviating from the definition of and assumptions for graffiti within our contemporary social imaginary, this “definition” made room for broad, contextual, holistic study of textual and pictorial imagery in unassuming locations. Nevertheless, while this definition perhaps enabled Frood, Baird and Taylor, and Olton to explore and study the contexts, implications, and interpretations of graffiti in their field-sites, this definition is challenged within the context of Pompeii. As explored in Kellum’s article, the Roman “street was the pivotal performative arena in a visual culture where viewership was active…” (Kellum 283); the performative quality of visual culture and graffiti in the street aided in the construction of and performance of subjectivities. Not only was graffiti expected, but it affirmed individuality and identity within the framework of a performative social “stage” (287).
Among the articles, however, a source of unity appears to be the emphasis on decoding graffiti via a word and image approach that heeds the dialogic relationship among images. Graffiti “can be viewed in dialogue with one another as text and image,” write Baird and Taylor (Baird and Taylor 8). Similarly, Frood writes of the way in which secondary images “activate and enliven” primary (read: official) images (Frood 293).
In emphasizing a context-driven interpretation of graffiti, these texts point toward a key function (whether intentional or in its aftermath) of graffiti-as-event: that by scratching into a surface, its writers-artists engage in actions of place-making (Frood 298). In applying the functional effect of place-making to my own research this semester, I hope to explore the affective experience of place, dynamic and rendered a site of (discontinuous) communication through palimpsests of graffiti.