Category: 11 October

These articles on early modern graffiti continue to show the importance of studying graffiti to give first hand local history (Giles), explain how graffiti can be perceived as a ritual (Plesch), and continue the debate on how to define graffiti (Fleming, Gordon, Sarti).

Plesch makes a perfect comparison between the graffiti in a chapel at Arborio to ritualization. This is done by comparing both the surface of graffiti and the location of the church on the edge of Arborio to liminal spaces, and because the graffiti was written with a constant syntax. This ritual was shown to be a cathartic way of forgetting the past and also making the future predictable. This article prompted me to question if the chapel was built and the frescoes were painted in order to carry out this ritual, or if the ritual was unintended during the chapel’s construction and decoration.

The debate on the context of graffiti continues in these articles; Fleming continues to show how graffiti was accepted and not thought as different from any other form of writing, Gordon shows how the anonymity of graffiti led to an aggressive interpretation, leading to its illicit nature, and Sarti attempted to use binary oppositions to define graffiti relative to formal inscriptions, and proved that a straightforward comparison cannot be made.

In Rafaella Sarti’s essay, she focuses on debunking the idea that binary oppositions (inscriptions/graffiti, institutional/domestic, public/private) do not necessarily apply to the Ducal palace of Urbino. Boundaries are much more complex and blurred than one would think.

A couple of the essays talk about how “chronicle-like notes are, in particular, a genre that is by now virtually extinct (Sarti 68).” In Fleming’s essay, she makes the point that the way we view and wrap our heads around Elizabethan wall-writing is through a contemporary lens; our own biases of what graffiti should be make it difficult to view graffiti of the past “in its own terms (Fleming 34).”

One point that Fleming brings up that I found interesting is the fact that there is no verb to describe the action of creating graffiti. The absence of a verb for the action in the English language really just adds to how individual and secretive the act is. For there not to be a word for this action inflects “the notions of agency that centre on its production (Fleming 39).

Plesch’s essay goes into the reasoning for why graffiti was so popular at Arborio. For the people who came and wrote on the walls of this “liminal” place, the act of recording events is “a means to appropriate them, to claim them (Plesch 142).” For many of these people, graffiti was a way for them to cope with events beyond their control. The act itself is cathartic.

I personally really enjoyed the Horselads essay; it gave insight into an otherwise forgotten group of people. This essay really shows how valuable graffiti can be in teaching us about a significant group of people who have contributed  to society and yet are not given much attention in official histories.