Graffiti Fall 2018

Curwen Best’s article, “Reading Graffiti in the Caribbean Context,” begins by placing Barbados graffiti in a global context. Best connects his own study of graffiti and the Barbados transport system to the study of graffiti on the subway cars of New York. Best goes on to argue that American culture influences the youth of Barbados. He draws links to Basquiat’s graffiti in New York, the American hip-hop culture, and American popular magazines, such as Vibe. This connection between the graffiti of Barbados and American pop culture illustrates the ways in which graffiti is both local and global. It is important to recognize that the location of graffiti is extremely important. We have read many article that discuss the relationship between graffiti and place. However, this article illustrates the influence of other cultures on the graffiti of a specific culture.

Barbados is an interesting example of the inter play between local and global. Barbados is a small island with a distinct culture. However, Barbados’ economy relies on tourism. Thus, Barbados is exposed to the influence of numerous cultures, primarily the United States. As a result, Barbados’ graffiti artists marry multiple cultures in their work.

***after class thoughts

When initially reading this article, I did not focus on the fact that this is one of the first articles to discuss gender. Best argues that although the majority of the graffiti are done by males, the female voice is still prominent. Best credits the inclusion of female graffiti artists to the “growing dominance of women within contemporary Barbadian society” (Best, 843).  He also discusses the difference in style between male and female graffiti artists. Female artists include more narratives in their art and tend be more collaborative. Graffiti art allows women to have a voice; women’s voices are not “subdued'” or “passive” in their art (Best, 844). This reading of female graffiti art is extremely interesting especially since the reading on subcultures last week discussed the masculine culture of graffiti.

I think most of the time we tend to think of graffiti more on the local level. We look at it with the intention of learning more about the author and their communities, as well as providing cultural and historical context for the time. In his chapter in Understanding Graffiti Lennon argues that “graffiti created geographies of protest that were locally enacted but globally contextualized” (62).  This shows us a slightly different side to graffiti in which we see graffiti being used as a form of protest, rather than just a place for messages. In other readings, especially with the reading discussing Rome, we have discussed the significance of the street as a home and place to messages, street signs, signatures, important town information. However, in Cairo during a time of political turmoil, graffiti is being used as an outlet and tool to give voice to the outraged as well as to show everyone around the world how Cairo’s political, social and geographic structures were being altered by the violence in the streets.

I also thought it was interesting how Lennon connected the street and social media. He mentions that even though graffiti in these city spaces are site specific, they are also a global entity. Meaning that when conflict graffiti in Cairo were shared over the internet, Egyptians abroad were connected with images of home as well as the global public was informed of the unrest and conflict. It was the simplest way for Egyptian protesters to spread their messages and show their anger. I find it so interesting that Lennon quoted Saskia Sassen to mention the significance of the “global street” that has become a home for the powerless. As we have traveled throughout medieval Europe, New York City, and even Barbados in this course studying graffiti, we have examined the various reasons that inspire people to leave a mark behind, and what that means about the world around them at the time. We have seen the common theme of graffiti being used as a way to communicate for those who might not ordinarily have the same tools or access to “higher” communication/art forms. I think graffiti is just such a powerful, yet underrated tool that has the ability to connect so many people together. It literally gives voice to the voiceless, and makes them feel like they are being heard when photographs are posted and shared around the world.

 

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.

Interestingly, this week ties into the topic of my paper quite seamlessly and has provided me different ways to think about graffiti in nature.  Considering the Ralph and Smith article on Contemporary Indigenous graffiti and recent government interventions in Jawoyn Country, I found it interesting how and what the indigenous people are reacting to via graffiti. When brought into the scope of my paper, I see direct ties between some of these political responses and the marks that are left on trails and mountain tops. Both types of graffiti have a special relation to place, and this place is also what gives the academic a means to study the art.

Also interesting, I found myself comparing some of this indigenous graffiti to other forms of solicitation and publication of thought such as political road signs. In a sense, these signs can be a work of “graffiti” although mass produced. Similar to a tag, they occupy public space and also seem to pile up where others have already been put. Thinking about how these tags (or signs) have a physical meaning but also much more of a meta meaning concerning political and social action, it is interesting to compare them to the tags that are spoken about in this article.

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

In “The Graffiti Subculture,” Nancy Macdonald discusses subcultures surrounding graffiti. One part of the essay that I thought was very interesting was the conversation about gender. I never really thought about the relationship between gender and graffiti until reading this essay. However, it is true that I automatically associate graffiti with masculinity. On the top of my head, I cannot think of any famous female graffiti artists. However, this also raises the question of whether Banksy is a man or a woman. Why does everyone assume that Banksy is a man? Does Banksy’s gender matter? I am not sure if gender matters in graffiti unless the graffiti directly addresses concerns of gender. However, the fact that the subculture surrounding graffiti is masculine is important and changes the way we look at graffiti. Is graffiti masculine because it is believed to be dangerous and illicit? Is it masculine because its messy and controversial? I don’t really know how to answer these questions. The Gorilla Girls are an interesting subset of the graffiti world. Although I am not sure they fit directly under the umbrella of graffiti because they don’t work with spray cans as a medium primarily, they do produce “illicit” and “controversial” works. Gender clearly plays an important role in understanding the Gorilla Girls work. However, since they are anonymous like graffiti artists, we don’t actually know that they are all women. Thus, how do we read their work? Does anonymity take away the importance of gender?

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.