Author: Hannah Springhorn

The article I want to focus on in this response is the study of contemporary Indigenous graffiti and recent government interventions in Jawoyn Country. This article was particularly interesting to me because it is looking at a subculture of people that are already on the margins of society. We often talk about graffiti being an outlet, a place for people to go to voice opinions when they are typically excluded from more mainstream conversations. But this article looked at how the conversations around political topics played out within graffiti. A major point of this article was to see if graffiti was being used as a medium to express resistance. We saw in our other conversation on contemporary graffiti that often graffiti becomes a space for the masculine, dominant voice to be heard. It requires a certain level of confidence to add markings to a space that isn’t supposed to be marked. This lack of graffiti is the material manifestation of a fear of the government.

When thinking about this in the context of the middle east and around political graffiti, where people choose to put markings will tell a lot about where they are comfortable. Where do people choose to claim ownership? Where is the fear at bay? I want to examine how contemporary graffiti fits into a space that is more tightly controlled by the government.

Something I would like to focus on in the post lecture discussion is the concept of gender in graffiti. In “The Graffiti Subculture” Nancy MacDonald discusses the role of gender in graffiti. She opens the article by talking about the division between graffiti life and private life. It is a boundary that is never crossed and because of this division there is space for an entire subculture to form. A person’s tag is their only crossing between the world of public life and the private sphere. This tag can be a facade people hide behind and something that can mask a person’s identity. But for some reason, gender has an ability to slip through. Graffiti by nature is masculine. It is a field that promotes loud and abrasive opinions and commentary. It facilitates a false sense of confidence.

When thinking about the role of the human figure in the context of political graffiti, I am going to have to address the concept of gender. How and when does it come in  to play. Does it even matter? In politically charged areas, it absolutely matters. But in terms of authorship, does this distinction between who you are on the streets versus in real life allow any more leeway for women? When behind a mask can we reconsider how we analyze political graffiti? Is it a more authentic look into the the political climate of the time? I have no idea, but I really would like to think so.

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

“Graffiti in its modern sense is an effect of categorization.” (Fleming) Through the study of graffiti we are really reading into the study of the early modern city.

In early modern times, our perception of graffiti is influenced by the fact that from a legal perspective, the practice of graffiti is considered destruction of property rather than writing. We are then forced to think through a veil of criminal act in order to read the implications of these markings. In thinking about this in the context of my research I am wondering if it changes if the markings are either forms/ images or writing. Are people more likely to be mad about a message on a wall or an image? And then by consequence, what has a more powerful message?

Something Gordon mentioned, that I found very interesting was the idea that we all too often fall into the trap of trying to reconstruct the artist through their work, rather than taking it at face value. We try to imagine the person behind the writing or the markings. Is it that we can’t imagine the work existing without a creator? Anonymity is something I have yet to consider in the context of graffiti. There is no pressure to show the work attached to an artist. Some graffiti artists tag their works with special symbols or initials, but a lot of work exists by itself. We keep talking about the idea of authorship and claiming authorship, but what happens when the author wants to remain unknown? How can we contextualize this in an area where individuality is limited?

“In the absence of an author, then, anxieties over unrest supply the image of popular revolt to fill the void.” (Gordon, Page 389) Without an author, the image becomes open, it becomes a message of the space. It both is more elusive, and more pervasive.

Something that really stuck with me this class was the idea of ‘exposed writing.’ What is so unique about graffiti is it is limitless in its exposure. Once put up on a wall there is no control over who can see it. The choice of where it is placed obviously effects the audience but in practice, graffiti is public. Graffiti is often something personal, something like a diary, but it is exposed. It becomes a way to record the happenings of the community, a public platform for intimate conversations.

We also discussed the idea of the intersection between the devotional and the social. The act of scribing your name is these sacred places is a way to bridge the social and the devotional. The act of putting your name, a visual and audible mark of your identity, within these spaces is a way to engage with the space on a deeper level. It shows a level of dedication to the space, but also is a way to interact with the community at large. We can think of it like tagging a space, you want to show that you have been there. In this way you are acquiring the street cred, but also the religious cred.

Throughout my reading on Medieval Graffiti, I was confronted by the question of who was producing the markings that went up within these sacred spaces. In Jones-Baker’s essay we examine the signatures left in the stone within the churches. Some of the most prominent markings are those by the Clergy. These markings are now some of the only historical record we have of names during this time period. Less noticeable, but of equal historical importance are the signatures of the lay people left in some of the foundational stones. Through this reading I kept asking myself, why is it that names are the most common form of graffiti? Why do we feel the need to write our name over everything? Is it out of vain, out of fear of being forgotten?

I absolutely loved the essay on pilgrimage graffiti. Maybe this is because it is something I never realized I did, but I loved thinking about the idea of movement and motion as described through graffiti. The idea of sacred places being continually used as a means of maintaining its significance. Pilgrims will often leave marks on the walls of these sacred sites and as Professor Plesch states “a holy site similarly must remain in use, and such marks are indeed proof of a site’s continuing importance” (79).

It is also important to note the importance of studying graffiti as a means of closer looking at places of worship. Much of the focus throughout this reading was on graffiti found in churches and temples. Graffiti is often overlooked as a subject, but it can be a very personal and a very intimate look into how an individual interacted with a space. We know churches are spaces that exist outside of their identity as a place of worship. In the end it is a physical space people can interact with in any way that they choose. By looking at graffiti we are able to observe these interactions without a veil.

After our seminar discussion this past Thursday, I have been reflecting on the significance of the space graffiti creates. Before this class, my definition of graffiti was rather rigid. It consisted of spray paint, subways systems, New York City streets,and grungy European vibes. I have never before thought about the space graffiti creates when it is either performed, or placed. Thinking about graffiti as a ritual act we then must consider the space sacred. It is a place that has been selected to invoke conversation and interaction. I think I have often thought of graffiti as illicit because it is put up without permission, but it is in these places of tension that you have the most interesting interactions. We might also be able to think about these spaces as safe places for conversation that may not always be welcomed by a general public. I am very interested in the idea of using graffiti as a messaging board for political or social movements that might not always be welcomed by the general public.

Going forward I want to focus my research on street art and social movements. I know this is an incredibly large topic, but potentially looking towards the connections between the use of graffiti in Paris, South Africa and Nicaragua I might be able to write a paper that isn’t just a book report.

As this is being rewritten after class, I think everything I say is more a reflection of the class discussion and not my original interpretation of the reading. With that being said, I really appreciated this week’s reading because it forced me to think about graffiti out of the context of cement blocks and spray paint. All of the readings outlined the importance of graffiti outside of the physical appearance of the scratches, carvings and paint. We must look at where the graffiti is located, the placements in relation to one another and even general attitudes towards the object. Graffiti can be seen as a performance, a ritual act, and a platform for conversation.

Reflecting on Blaird and Taylor, we can think of the creation of a graffito as a bodily experience. The physical form and the surface it occupies is crucial in the interpretation of a graffito. As graffiti is often images and text, they have contextual specificity and thus allow us to reconstruct the way a person might have interacted with each graffito. Another point that stuck with me from the Blaird reading, was the description of graffiti as both an act and an object. It is important then to consider how to creates a dialogue. When one object is placed, there can become a conversation, grouping different graffitos together to create this full dialogue. Hierarchies are then created by placing graffitos in hard to reach places.

The main focus of this reading was exploring the ways we think about thinking and ultimately asked us to explore how we engage in knowledge and interpretation.

My main focus throughout this reading was on Hermeneutics, which is the theory and practice of interpretation. It developed primarily as a branch of philosophy and theology and was largely concerned with the interpretation of literary texts. Hermeneutic readers of the bible believed that all biblical stories were divinely inspired and therefore contained moral truths and lessons. Since then, Hermeneutics has been applied to all different kinds of written and spoken texts and cultural practices.

Martin Heideggar asked the question “What does it mean to be?” He argued that human beings don’t exist apart from the world. The world isn’t something separate that needs to be analyzed but rather we emerge from and exist in the world and we can only know it by being a part of it. Understanding isn’t an isolated act of cognition, but a part of human existence.

A work of art has a special character, “It is a being in the Open” where the Open is a proper noun. The Open is a cultural space created by an entire new level of understanding of what it means to be a being. Works of art express a shared understanding of the meaning of being. In this way, art can give understanding to any range of different things.

Art has a stubborn “irreducibility” which is why people argue over the meaning of art. When art no longer functions as a cultural paradigm it simply becomes an object of aesthetic contemplation. Art is about experience not about feeling. Heidegger also argues that art is not representational or symbolic, arguing that this approach can’t even being to capture the way that art functions to shape human experience.  

On the topic of contemporary art,this chapter argues that the contemporary interpreter can never perfectly recreate the artist’s original intentions or the original conditions of reception. Both the artists and the hermeneutists are limited by their different social, cultural, and intellectual horizons. The idea of the Hermeneutic circle is that the meaning expressed by a cultural artifact or practice does not emerge only from the creators intentions, but also depends on the whole system of meaning of which it forms part. We can think of interpretation as a loop, or a circle if you will, where you are only ever able to enter into the middle, past experiences feed your interpretation which in change feeds the larger discourse.