Category: 25 October

These articles looked at graffiti in a global context and discussed themes regarding race, ethnicity, class, and gender. In the article “We’ve got better things to do than worry about whitefella politics” by Jordan Ralph and Claire Smith, I found it interesting that the key points of the graffiti research were made by looking at where graffiti was not present. This reinstates the importance of location, because the fact that graffiti was not present on the NTER signs showed that the aboriginal people did not concern themselves with the government policy. Another key point made by the article is in the difference in point of view to show a difference in perspective regarding community; the aboriginal graffiti was made in the first-person plural, but outside graffiti was in first-person singular.

In “Reading Graffiti in the Caribbean Context” by Curwen Best, we saw some of the first instances of gender in graffiti, where the women outwit the men’s sexist graffiti and have large amounts of discourse. I was also intrigued by how American graffiti impacted the Barbados graffiti in such a way that graffiti in Barbados had an opposite progression then graffiti in New York. In Barbados, graffiti began as an act of resistance, because they had seen it have that affect in America, and then developed communities of taggers and the graffiti subculture.

One big takeaway from John Lennon’s article “Writing with a Global Accent: Cairo and the Roots/Routes of Conflict Graffiti” was how English was used in communities that didn’t speak English because the resistance graffiti was purposefully being made for a global audience, accessed through social media and the internet.

The story told about graffiti in the article “A Wall in Mexico City’s Historic Center: Calle Regina 56” by Pamela Scheinman was very thought-provoking and prompted discussion of the positive outcomes possible from graffiti and street art. I thought it interesting how disliked murals were bombed regularly and not repaired, while popular murals that were defaced were very quickly restored. One question that this article prompted was whether we can consider this graffiti since it is commissioned and sanctioned.

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?