Author: ccwebb

The recent visit to the Museum, reading, and discussion with Beth Finch inspired me to reflect on the ways in which graffiti may be used as a framework to study and interpret images (and words) more broadly. Specifically, I connect our discussion to my analysis of the images produced during the 1983 Siluetazo in Buenos Aires. As many of the images of silhouettes in the original Siluetazo were painted on large sheets of paper, then wheat-pasted onto buildings and trees in Buenos Aires, I have clearly adopted an open definition of graffiti (though it is true that the “ripple” effect of the original Siluetazo produced thousands of images of silhouettes throughout the city––many painted directly on to walls, billboards, buildings, monuments, and the ground), just as coding Spero’s mythological goddesses painted on to the walls (and ceilings) of galleries as graffiti requires an open definition.

From the reading, I also draw similarities between my project and the idea that Spero’s paintings used “architectural space” in inventive and intentional ways. As I have perused hundreds of archival images of the Siluetazo, I have looked at the varying ways in which porteño participants used the architecture of the city as their canvas. The historical roots of the architecture of Buenos Aires––and the displacement and idealism of Parisian Enlightenment and modernity that it connotes––provides a truly remarkable underlying message.

The image above is an example of this importance of architectural space; the obelisk, a monument commemorating the founding of Buenos Aires (read: colonialism and Empire), sits in the center of la Avenida 9 de Julio (“la calle más ancha”), a broad boulevard that was constructed to Europeanize and “modernize” BA (that displaced the immigrant communities living in precarious conventillo housing). Already, scholarship often associates obelisks with macho masculinity, violence, and the patriarchy; obelisks take up both physical space and visual space, and, as a state-sponsored monument, frames and constructs an image of nationalism. Thus, by producing graffiti directly on its surface, the artists/activists reclaim the space, at once giving voice to their message of freedom for political prisoners and questioning the construction of Argentine project.

Having recently watched both films about the transferral of Basquiat’s work from exterior walls along the streets of New York into gallery spaces, I was confronted by the tangible reality of this transferral when viewing the retrospective of Andy Warhol’s work at the Whitney this weekend. Below is an image of “Paramount,” one of the collaborative works by Warhol and Basquiat. Basquiat’s aesthetic produced a disruptive element to the gallery in which this piece was located, as it was surrounded by Warhol’s silkscreens of mostly brand logos displayed in repetition. In a manner that prompts me to consider the “uncanny” qualities of the “double,” per Jorge Luis Borges, this dynamic of aesthetic juxtaposition echoes the ways in which one might encounter the work of Basquiat outside––disrupting the advertising cacophony of repetitive images, logos, icons that serve as signifiers for corporations.

Incidentally, just as I was taking this photograph, I found myself standing next to Marta Minujin, the Argentine pop artist who’s work––The Parthenon of Books––I have been studying for my research project. This experience prompted me to consider what it means to study the works of living artists: How is it that we prompt questions for, produce discourse surrounding, and attempt to come to conclusions about works of art made by living artists, (considering that they may never read our undergraduate work)?

Post-Seminar Reflection

I am particularly interested in the Word and Image approach, as developed by WJT Mitchell, and in its applicability to my research project. Mitchell writes of the binary problematic in essentializing communication mechanisms to word or image, and, without providing a concrete solution, Mitchell invites a new way of being in the liminal space between word and image. Mitchell applies this to art history, writing of its contradictory nature:

…if, on the one hand, art history turns the image into a verbal message or a “discourse,” the image disappears from sight. If, on the other hand, art history refuses language, or reduces language to a mere servant of the visual image, the image remains mute and inarticulate, and the art historian is reduced to the repetition of clichés about the ineffability and untranslatability of the visual. The choice is between linguistic imperialism and defensive reflexes of the visual. (Mitchell 60)

In this essay, as is especially evident in this passage, Mitchell invites a new way of looking at, interpreting, thinking and communicating about art that valorizes the border space, the between-ness. In doing so, one might reconcile that “we can live neither with nor without, but must continually reinvent and renegotiate” (60). By mobilizing semiotics, one might see that words themselves, as constructed and accepted as “langue,” are icons––they are images that symbolize thought. In coding the written word (signifier) as image, but understanding the ways in which mental imaging simultaneously produces images of the signified. Thus, we rely on both word and image in our quixotic attempts to fully communicate, to comprehend and to fully imagine the holistic and integral constellations of meaning.

In my research on the Porteño Siluetazo of 1983, I will apply a Word and Image approach to the images themselves, in conjunction and conversation with other approaches surrounding the context/performative qualities of the event. The images provoke liminality: the tension between present/not present, visible/not visible. My questions, through interpreting image as word, as a form of communication, perhaps may reach toward transdisciplinary meanings.

This chapter by Alexandra Duncan prompts deeper inquiry into site-specificity and the ways in which site––as a “problem-idea” (137)––situates and informs interpretations of the graffito. Through the transferral of image from one space to another, the potential meanings, interpretations and primary affective experience of viewing a graffito are transformed.

Duncan, in quoting Michael Glover for The Independent, highlights the important factors of street graffiti: its uncertainty, spontaneity, ephemerality, and urgency (130). These factors are not present when transferred to a gallery space. Duncan writes that “in a gallery context, the imagery remains static and unchanging” (130). Thus, through engaging in a close reading of an image’s situation in space––”smooth” or “striated” (135)––temporality and ephemerality transform the affective qualities of image interpretation.

This week’s readings and discussion invited me to think critically about graffiti in relation to cultural geography. Should we think about production of graffiti in a global context, we are prompted to consider the ways in which space and place are constructed and accessed in differing ways. While the readings for this week brought cases of graffiti in varying contexts into our consciousness, the underlying question of access to space inform my interpretation and comparison of these cases. As Hannah stated in class, decoding the graffiti presented in the text “‘We’ve got better things to do than worry about whitefella politics’: Contemporary Indigenous graffiti and recent government interventions in Jawoyn Country” by Ralph and Smith is telling of the ways certain groups and individuals are able to access and negotiate a relationship to space.

A question that arises for me is: How does infrastructure (or lack of) enable or invite graffiti making? When I consider the ways in which many of the cases we have studied include instances of waiting, I am prompted to consider the words of Carolyn Steedman in Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives, in which she argues that “to wait is to want.” Waiting implies a lack––of agency or control over time and action. When we wait in line, we are at the whim of a system of which we are not actants. In applying this idea to the study of graffiti, I can infer that the graffiti made by the horse-lads was produced when they had no control over the weather. They were literally waiting out the storm. Similarly, the graffiti made in Jawoyn County in the article by Ralph and Smith was produced by those waiting for the bus. With no control over its schedule, frequency, urgency––over the transportation infrastructures offered in Jawoyn County––the graffiti writers enacted agency in their inscriptions.

Steedman writes about “what has been made out on the margins”––in the study of graffiti, we might decode the marks made through the narratives they tell of access to space and control over infrastructures. Margins and tensions of agency/actants exist in a global context. How does this same lens of waiting–wanting lend itself to decoding graffiti in global contexts? How does this lens enable the study of subaltern narratives that expose agency despite and through the margins?

 

These articles and video were insightful in their attention to the social histories that led to and were reciprocally produced by the contemporary graffiti movement.

An interesting juxtaposition to note is the way in which graffiti materializes concerns of the self/the intimate, and concerns about contemporary culture and events. Macdonald attends to the motivations and meanings of name “tags.” Within this framework of “dynamics of friction and dispute” (Macdonald 312), the graffiti artist reifies an alter-ego through marking their pseudonym with attention to style, placement, and content. This process is self-reflexive, and, as such, is a way to state: “I am” (314). Through making marks that represent the self, or the ideal double, tags enable graffiti artists to become more than themselves – to leave ripples and a legacy of their presence – because they can “escape the need to represent yourself” (313).  

In contrast, but also contingent on the same gestural process of appropriation of space and reliance on spectatorship, the article by Phillips addressed the globally-minded graffiti by Keith Haring. Focusing on the influence the Jesus Movement had on Haring, this article illuminated the way in which Haring’s work addressed large-scale issues, were apocalyptic in tone and nature, and made accessible commentary on contemporaneous anxieties and concerns.

The “Desire for possessions, for belonging, for a public name, for property and protection…” (Nandrea 113) are produced by, and perpetuate, the American imaginary. Graffiti artists enact agency and authorship by forming communities, responding to large-scale concerns, representing and defending the self, and leaving a legacy: “They can only watch as it thunders past to its next destination… like the train, the name or virtual self is going places” (Macdonald 319).

By appropriating space in view, the graffiti artist redefines communication. Nandrea argues that “Graffiti might teach a child something about spatial potential, about the ways a margin can become a frontier” (112). Thus, contemporary graffiti at once enables place-making and ideal self-representation while making possible social commentary on contemporary culture and politics. 

 

Following this discussion on early modern graffiti, I wish to focus my reflection on the ways in which sites of graffiti become accepted spontaneous monuments. In discussing the Pasquino in Rome, per Juliet Fleming’s attention to the Roman “talking statues” in her article “Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England,” I was prompted to reconsider what we validate as an “official” site of graffiti. As the political criticism collected around the Pasquino, the practice of inscribing such commentary became normalized to such an extent that it has ascended to hold meaning through language:

In this scenario, the site and surface upon which the commentary is scratched is expected. Through simple logic, should we consider graffiti to be “marks made on a surface not originally intended to hold these marks,” then the pasquinato etchings no longer ought to be classified as graffiti. However, as we have toyed with in discussion, attempting to categorize, classify, and define graffiti–what counts, what doesn’t count–is a distraction from interrogating the cultural work that such writings and marks do.

At what point do sites of graffiti become accepted, normalized, and reified to transcend their “disruptive” status to become simply a part of the landscape? In the cases of the Pasquino, in “tags” on the table at Jorgenson’s, or even 5Pointz, some sites welcome mark-making. In doing so, the graffiti becomes an expected aspect of the space/surface. By asking this question, it is clear that my modern understanding of graffiti as “disruptive” or an “intervention” shines through––our discussions on early modern, medieval, and ancient graffiti enable me to see the ways in which my modern bias informs my line of inquiry.

I was struck by Fleming’s analysis of Elizabethan graffiti for the ways in which this form of graffiti subverts my understanding of graffiti as a form of “self-“expression. She argues that the projection of subjectivity and authorship upon the acting agents who inscribed Elizabethan graffiti is misinformed. Fleming writes that contemporary graffiti is “overdetermined as the medium of the socially disaffected […] within a culture that discounts matter as that which has no meaning, graffiti will always appear to be the mark of a human subjectivity that survives and protests its own radical dispossession” (Fleming 41).

In contrast, Fleming argues for an understanding of early modern English graffiti and wall writing that heeds the contemporaneous popular practices and understandings of writing. I appreciate the way in which Fleming exposes the aphoristic qualities of writing during these times by illuminating the relationship between the proverb and the posy. In the context of “parietal” graffiti, Fleming writes, of posies, that their “defining characteristic is to be written in such a way that its material embodiment forms an important part of its meaning. The posy, in short, is a saying or poem that is pointed by being written on something” (43). Thus, the act of, and art of, sgraffiato in Elizabethan England was about memory-making and “materializing thought” (44). A form of note-taking to assist in remembering, that takes material form, just as I am now doing on this blog?

In regard to the articles read for this class, I was captivated by their underlying (and overt) argument for considering graffiti as a primary source document. This aligns with theoretical approaches of subaltern studies, cultural studies and word and image studies. But of course, as we know, “History” (with a capital H for emphasis) is written by those in power. “Official” documents are controlled by those in positions of power over others, and, considering Foucault and Mbembe’s writings on biopolitics and necropolitics, those in power retain sovereignty by exercising power over “Other” and others’ bodies. Thus, when a marginalized or subordinated group of people are physically vulnerable, the recording of historical events by the powerful is perpetuated through politics of death. Thus, by looking at, decoding, and analyzing graffiti and its contexts, we might come closer to an integral history that values the experiences and histories of those not in power. We might move closer to understanding graffiti as the intimate, the local, or the community collective––that which helps us connect with and understand the conditions of the quotidian.

After reading these essays and articles on medieval graffiti practices and images, I am once again confronted with the contradictions in basic definitions of graffiti. While many of the articles posited medieval graffiti as a normal, encouraged (or tolerated) practice of self-presentation, preservation, documentation, remembrance and communication, the article by Ritsema van Eck exposed the ways in which medieval graffiti was disapproved of by some at the sacro monte of Varallo. Van Eck articulates the challenges at arriving “at any sort of definitive conclusions about graffiti as either authorized or illicit writings in the absence of explicit bans or other types of documented disapproval or approval” (54). This is not to say that I am searching for scholarly consensus on the interpretation and acceptance of medieval graffiti–that is, of course, a preposterous expectation that erases and abstracts a diversity of perspectives, interpretations, and intentions during the Middle Ages. This is simply to point out the rich and thought-provoking nature of diverse scholarly opinions on graffiti.

Graffiti tags serve as a form of constructing immortality––perhaps out of a fear of oblivion. Graves and Rollason argue that “inscribing your name in the fabric of a building is never merely simple, but acts as a way of perpetuating your presence, and identifying with, or in some contexts defying, others associated with that building” (212). In the context of religious spaces, graffiti perhaps served to document pilgrimage, offer prayer, or, as O’Donnell writes, “invigorates intercessional prayer” (82). When inscribed in religious spaces, Matthew Champion argues that studying medieval graffiti enable scholars to infer how ordinary people interacted with the church in a quotidian context. Champion argues that graffiti has the “potential to show us how those ordinary people interacted with the church as an institution and as a building.” In analyzing graffiti locations within a religious space, one may be able to infer the ways in which people engaged with the church, performed and practiced piety, and presented and preserved devotion.

Having never explicitly studied medieval visual and material culture, I am fascinated and captivated by these accounts and cases of graffiti images and writing. I am curious to learn more about different takes on the additive and destructive visions of graffiti.