Social Analysis of Graffiti
To date, many of the articles and projects have studied the thematic content of graffiti to posit certain motivational hypotheses about the individuals…the approach to this article is by problem testing. This is trying to be a diachronic study devoted to problem testing.
The graffiti was not collected evenly. It was collected over a two year time period. The women’s was all collected in 1971 whereas the mens was over 1970 and 1971. The data was stratified.
The graffiti was then categorized, all of it could only go under one category unless it was a response graffito, then it was put also under the response category. Further subdivisions were then made.
In regard to the first problem the authors felt that in a liberal community accusations of homosexuality would have a low frequency because it would have a smaller impact. On the flip side, a high number of accusations were expected in a conservative community. These suppasations were correct. Same goes for the political and the philosophical categories.
Most difficult category was racism:
SIU, the most liberal campus had the highest amount of racist graffiti
- Campus is 30 miles north of Cairo Illinois (Heavy racial strife)
- Highest enrollment of blacks of all three schools
- Frequent encounters between blacks and law enforcement agencies
There was a decline in social satire, philosophical, and political graffiti.
The frustration-aggression hypothesis: Suggests that an increase in aggressive responses derives from an increase in frustrating conditions. When an attack cannot be directed against the frustrating agent, aggression may be transferred to another more accessible target. The use of the building had very little effect on the type of graffiti written there. Sampling methods may have skewed results a little bit. The results show a great fluctuation of political graffiti. The longitudinal study is slowly bearing out a curvilinear function explanation for the fluctuation of political graffiti, thus this study supports the idea that graffiti are an accurate indicator of the social attitude of a community. Through all of the studies completed, they concluded that homosexual graffiti are produced by societal conflict. That being said, they really concluded that the decrease through time of homosexual graffiti is a result of more liberal attitudes toward homosexual behavior. Homosexual graffiti are written by “Normal males” and it is the societal conflict over homosexual behavior that is the causal factor for its being used as an insulating device. They predict that in five to ten years, the presence of homosexual graffiti will be almost nonexistent.
Conclusions surrounding humor of elimination category. They concluded that when there is a lill in local and national socio political events such that they do not exist to be parodied in political graffiti, then there will be an accompanying increase in humor-of-elimination graffiti which entails the breaking of a taboo, discussing defecation.
Learning from Graffiti:
A space in Chicago that made the author question what graffiti did to define space and teach lessons. The setting is a borderline neighborhood in Chicago, the border between the good and the bad, the proper and the improper. A painted wall caught her attention “Graffiti Taught me Everything I know about Space” The rest of the square was decorated with multicolored prints of children’s hands.
The authors childhood was surrounded by the Rocky Mountains. A persistent figure for the romance of the frontier in the American Imagination To see mountains on the horizon provides formative experiences of space as expansive and exhilarating. The horizon as a beyond that invites one to venture into gigantic places that dwarf the human and render absurd the verb “to claim”.
- It is a frontier that puts the concept of border into questions, having no ends or edges that one can reach or touch
- Urban spaces have an entirely different concept of borders.
- Chicago is both incredibly flat and incredibly vertical, the visual limit is always a wall, these walls are not simple horizontal border lines dividing up space, they are vertical planes that through inscription can be transformed into unexplored and multidimensional spaces.
- Beckon with a sense of limitless possibilities.
Okay so then the space of writing, the page. How does graffiti map or remap the formal space of inscription? The page is a space of logic, a very scripted and constructed space with lines and margins. Same as all of the bulk material we encounter.
In contrast is what Deleuze and Guattari would call a rhizomatic space: Inscriptions can begin and end anywhere, can process unpredictably in any direction, can provide surprising juxtapositions, layering, ad diagonal relations.
- In this way, graffiti can teach us about the free space of the margin in which the significance of the form can be discovered, experimented, explored.
- Graffiti plays on the material remainders of graffiti
- The shape of the letter, curves, and colors
- ***First conclusion: Graffiti might teach a child something about spatial potential, about the ways a margin might become a frontier.
This conclusion was then questioned when the author viewed the larger context and general location of this work. It was on the edge of a cemetery.
- The potential of the margins became miniscule, the freehand graffiti faces mocked by the austere violence of the barbed wire border.
- Children growing up on the wrong side of the barbed wire are at risk in so many ways, on the edge of everything, almost doomed.
The mural then begin to decay and she watched this very fragile and vulnerable surface begin to vanish.
The Subcultures Reader
Concept of anonymity
- With graffiti you have an alter ego, there is a line between graffiti life and real life. You cant overstep the boundaries of personal behavior with your street behavior.
- You can do so and so (Use their tag name) isn’t any good blah blah blah but you cant be like and also his sister is ugly
- Stylo says “You care only based on that, you’re based on what your actions are under that name”
- You are what you write
- You can become more than yourself in this subculture
- When artists leave their names “Like if you paint somewhere and you go back there, you feel like you belong…..there’s a bit of you there”
- Knowing you without knowing who you are
When you tag a work you lose a lot of the pieces of your identity, but then on the last page it says “Although they have a choice over what they can say about themselves with this identity, masculine narratives of strength, power and control appear to prevail. The virtual self is clearly used as a masculine resource and an immensely powerful one at last
Book Readings:
It is important that it is not legible, the dynamic nature of the graffiti is what is important. It was a diverse group of people in the 1980s that were doing graffiti.
How we have been analyzing, it is decorative, it is not about the meaning, a lot of the time it is just about it being there, or the process of putting it up is also important. It is kind of clubish, only other artists can understand what they are saying, it is supposed to be exclusive. If it is exclusive, then how does it fit into the larger public space?
- Ornament as Armament
- They talk about how Wildstyle graffiti is purposely illegible, what is the purpose of this?
- What is the significance of graffiti being “kinetic” (mobile)?
- “Getting up to Getting Over”
- In what ways was being “harder” on graffiti artists by the NYC transportation/police department unproductive?
- Made graffiti subculture into a counterculture
- In what ways was being “harder” on graffiti artists by the NYC transportation/police department unproductive?