Author: Sarah Rossien

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Models and Approaches

I found Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential to be very interesting. It is not like anything I am used to reading in an art history course. This of course created the question of why we read it. I felt that there can be parallels made between chefs and graffiti artists. Bourdain’s scars were a form of semiotic and the layering of his scars and marks mimics the layering of paint on a wall. The connections between chefs forms a community similar to the communities of graffiti artists. This brings in the topic of identity. The class presentation began with showing Ugly Delicious. This related through the cultural acceptance and blending of cultures. This transitioned nicely to art brut.

All of the pieces we read discuss the idea of beauty and the ideal. There is an importance in giving people something aesthetically pleasing. People react well to appearance and question things when they are not beautiful. This is seen in both ugly delicious and with art brut as a movement. Like food, art does not need to be beautiful to be meaningful. Standards of beauty are determined by the elite. Art brut is an authentic form of art which ignores the authorities which dictate art. Ugly food is a form of art brut. Art brut then relates back to graffiti in  culture. Graffiti artists are removed from culture in the same way that outside artists are. Their artwork is a way of sharing culture, but it is not meant to be shown in the way that the elite and beauty standard makers think of art.

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Graffiti and The Art World

‘From the Street to the Gallery: A Critical Analysis of the Inseparable Nature of Graffiti and Context’ discusses the rise of graffiti in the art world. Graffiti in urban settings has a different meaning than graffiti in a gallery. Is showing graffiti in a gallery okay? The elimination of the wall and the public spaces gets rid of a crucial part of the definition of graffiti. Illustrations within a city create a story and also a community. Museums create a structured environment, which imposes a certain conversation. This structure highlights the privilege of artists. In the street, graffiti is by fellow citizens and in galleried, we must follow the rules of the gallery and maintain a distance from the graffiti. Streets have no rules. We can touch, interact with, and interpret the graffiti freely. Geographical location is a crucial part of the meaning of graffiti. This article also brings up the idea of a fine artist. Graffiti artists who are shown in a gallery are considered fine artists, yet graffiti artists in the street are not. This highlights the inconsistency in privilege of graffiti artists. When a dealer becomes involved in the showing of graffiti, it loses its meaning. Graffiti can be exhibited, but it must be shown in its original context in order to maintain authenticity.

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Contemporary Graffiti in the World

These articles discussed graffiti as a gateway to accessing culture and the female representations in art and culture. Ralph and Smith begin by discussing how graffiti brings community together through rejecting aspects of culture, such as hate speech. Aboriginal graffiti is the same as all other subgroups of graffiti. People still create it out of boredom and use it as a marking of presence. Graffiti is a public documenter. It is universally common to write “i was here”. This is a marking of culture. I also thought about this a lot when thinking about my capstone. Marking presence on a wall turns that wall into a social object. Graffiti also serves as a distraction. Inserting a textual message into plain sight forces you to read it. In a modern context, this is similar to billboard on a highway or political posters in front of houses. John Lennon begins to criticize the popularity of contemporary graffiti artists, especially the rise of Banksy and the way his work is interpreted. Is Banksy’s work only interpreted differently because Banksy is famous, or is there something different about his work?

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Contemporary Graffiti

These articles discuss the trends in graffiti artists. Is there a stereotypical graffiti artist and a typical place in which graffiti is created? These chapters point out gender, political, and religious themes in both graffiti subjects and artists. There is an idea that all graffiti artists are male. This is because many of the graffiti artists who are famous are male, so we assume that anonymous ones are also male. Sotheby’s did this on an instagram comment following their sold Banksy print by declaring that the print was renamed “by the artist himself”. Why do we make this male assumption and is it true? While there is a trend in gender, there was also a trend in political leanings on which college campuses have graffiti on campus. Both liberal and conservative schools may include graffiti on campus, but the subject of the graffiti varies in the same way that student political opinions vary. The articles also discuss religious themes in graffiti by using Keith Haring as an example.

The role of the wall is something that has been discussed regularly in this seminar. The last point of these articles is declaring walls as both positive and negative. Walls serve as barriers and as protection, they make us feel safe through closure and also make us feel separated. The connotation that comes with a wall continues when that wall has graffiti on it.

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Early Modern Graffiti

These articles work to define graffiti. We have been battling to find a definition in class for the past weeks. Does graffiti need to be permanent? Are street signs graffiti? Can graffiti only be writing? These authors contribute to this topic and determine that there is no cohesive definition in the context of early modern graffiti.

Juliet Fleming begins by discussing how our modern biases affect how we interpret Elizabethan graffiti. She uses the posey ring and post-it notes as a comparison or a modern form of graffiti off of walls. She points out that the wall was designed to be written on and this makes us question if graffiti can then only be created on a wall. Kate and Melanie Giles discuss the concealed communities of the yorkshire horse lads. They make an important point that graffiti is often created out of boredom. Veronique brings up this same idea by pointing out that graffiti is an activity that is ritual like. Rituals are committed for a number of reasons just as graffiti is created for a number of reasons.

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Medieval Graffiti

These articles discussed the significance of placement for graffiti. There is an idea that graffiti attracts graffiti. Many walls are either blank or covered in graffiti, with little room in between.

Van Eck discusses the differences between devotional and social location. Devotional leaves a mark that doesn’t self identify, while social connects the artist and leaves part of their identity. Graffiti is public and permanent in placement, and viewers are therefore forced to see it. This can be compared to a billboard on a highway. Both graffiti and signs are forms of exposed writing. The contemporary view of graffiti is vandalism. Van Eck argues that graffiti was not always accepted and today sometimes is vandalism and sometimes is not. This introduces the question of if commissioned murals are graffiti. If graffiti is intentional and planned, is it graffiti?

Baker says that the way we dedicated buildings to families and benefactors is to write names on an outside of a building as a label. This was the same during the medieval times. There was a large emphasis on labeling with names, and this points to why names are the most common form of graffiti today. With that, medieval history is very much international, and this shows in the graffiti. Graffiti is very specific to place and individual.

Graves asks why people write on walls of religious buildings. The answer is likely out of boredom. Many people would have been waiting outside to enter these buildings during the medieval times. Many people also cross out names, rather than erase or transform them. These people want viewers to be able to see what was there before, but also change its meaning by crossing it out. Lastly, the Christodoulou and Satraki article uses graffiti to understand changes in the power and history of space. I think this is an important takeaway. While graffiti is dependent on the space it is in, the space is also dependent on graffiti for shaping its cultural history.

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Ancient Graffiti

Each of the articles read discuss the performative effect of making and experiencing graffiti. This is a similar idea to what we discussed in the tattoo seminar. The process of creating and viewing graffiti is equally if not more important  the graffiti itself. How does this relationship change when graffiti is displayed inside of a museum or not on a wall?

These articles also attempt to define what graffiti is and then break down the meaning based on class, location, and space. The “Spectacle of the Street” does this through discussing the graffiti of Pompeii. The relationship between interior and the exterior street art becomes an important distinction. This relationship forms a fluid boundary, someone like a secret garden. The Baird and Taylor book focuses on the truisms of graffiti and its use as a way to mark ownership. Today we think of graffiti as an illicit medium, but in reality, it has not always been illicit. Graffiti may be viewed as illicit in urban environments, but in a temple or sacred place, ancient graffiti is accepted. This is an idea that Frood explores as well. Egypt seems to be an exception in the way that we think about graffiti because it is already covered in hieroglyphs and inscriptions. Graffiti in Egypt is writing on top of writing.

A question that I had while doing the reading is can graffiti be temporary? Is chalk art considered graffiti? How does a material  change the meaning and experience of graffiti?

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Look Again! Chapters 4-6

I found chapter 5 the most interesting of these chapters. I had never heard of hermeneutics before. Hermeneutics focuses on the theory and practice of interpretation. Modern hermeneutics includes both verbal and non-verbal communication,  as well as semiotics, presuppositions, and pre-understandings. Hermeneutics has been broadly applied in the humanities, especially in law, history and theology. This concept goes back to semiotics and focuses on Peirce’s construction of the sign.

The idea that the viewer completes a work of art can be attributed to hermeneutics. This is important in art theory. The practice of displaying art and having viewers interpret it completes the piece. Art is a process rather than an object. Art historians who engage with hermeneutic theory shift their attention away from iconography and towards the experience of the work of art. The relationship between the viewer and the art helps us interpret an object.

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Look Again! chapters 1-3

I find chapter 2 of Look Again! especially important in understanding how to read art and what constitutes as art. The analysis of form, symbol, and sign greatly influence the interpretation of any piece of art as well as define pieces that may not typically be considered art. The idea of reading art comes from semiotic theory. Semiotics is the theory of signs. Signs can take the form of words, images, sounds, gestures, objects, and even ideas. The theory says that these signs can only function if they are interpreted and recognized. Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure has a two-part theory of the composition of signs. Saussure believes that there is a signifier and a signified. The signifier is the form that the sign takes and the signified is the concept it represents.

“In semiotics, a text is an assemblage of signs constructed (and interpreted) according to the rules or conventions of a particular medium or form of communication” (D’Alleva 39). By this definition, novels, poems, and symbols in graffiti can all be categorized as texts. The process of interpreting these texts through the system of rules is called reading. Art historians: Mieke Bal, Louis Marin, and Norman Bryson have developed the “idea of reading as a very specific semiotic methodology for interpreting visual images” (D’Alleva 39). The English word “tree” is a signifier for a signified living tree that you see when you look out your window. American philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce has said, “a sign…is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign”(D’Alleva 33).

This idea of semiotics applies to graffiti when we consider gang graffiti. Just as when people see a tree, they often think of the word tree in their head, when members of a gang see a piece of graffiti with a gang’s mark/symbol, they too think of the signified because that is the meaning that it has in their mind. This idea could also be applied when looking at signature handwritings and styles of graffiti that are specific to a signified person or group.