{"id":580,"date":"2018-10-23T12:58:31","date_gmt":"2018-10-23T16:58:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/graffiti-fall2018\/?p=580"},"modified":"2018-10-23T12:58:31","modified_gmt":"2018-10-23T16:58:31","slug":"contemporary-graffiti-lecture-notes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/graffiti-fall2018\/2018\/10\/23\/contemporary-graffiti-lecture-notes\/","title":{"rendered":"Contemporary Graffiti Lecture Notes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><b> Social Analysis of Graffiti<\/b><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">To date, many of the articles and projects have studied the thematic content of graffiti to posit certain motivational hypotheses about the individuals\u2026the approach to this article is by problem testing. This is trying to be a diachronic study devoted to problem testing.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The graffiti was not collected evenly. It was collected over a two year time period. The women&#8217;s was all collected in 1971 whereas the mens was over 1970 and 1971. The data was stratified.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">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.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">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.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Most difficult category was racism:<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">SIU, the most liberal campus had the highest amount of racist graffiti<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Campus is 30 miles north of Cairo Illinois (Heavy racial strife)<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Highest enrollment of blacks of all three schools<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Frequent encounters between blacks and law enforcement agencies<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">There was a decline in social satire, philosophical, and political graffiti.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span> <span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The frustration-aggression hypothesis: Suggests that an increase in aggressive responses derives from an increase in frustrating conditions.\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">When an attack cannot be directed against the frustrating agent, aggression may be transferred to another more accessible target.\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">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.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u00a0The results show a great fluctuation of political graffiti.\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">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.\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Through all of the studies completed, they concluded that homosexual graffiti are produced by societal conflict.\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">That being said, they really concluded that the decrease through time of homosexual graffiti is a result of more liberal attitudes toward homosexual behavior.\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Homosexual graffiti are written by \u201cNormal males\u201d 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.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">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.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Learning from Graffiti:<\/b><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">A space in Chicago that made the author question what graffiti did to define space and teach lessons.\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">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 \u201cGraffiti Taught me Everything I know about Space\u201d The rest of the square was decorated with multicolored prints of children\u2019s hands.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">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 \u201cto claim\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0It is a frontier that puts the concept of border into questions, having no ends or edges that one can reach or touch<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Urban spaces have an entirely different concept of borders.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Chicago 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.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Beckon with a sense of limitless possibilities.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay so then the space of writing, the page. How does graffiti map or remap the formal space of inscription?\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">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.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">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.<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In 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.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Graffiti plays on the material remainders of graffiti<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The shape of the letter, curves, and colors<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0***First conclusion: Graffiti might teach a child something about spatial potential, about the ways a margin might become a frontier.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">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. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The potential of the margins became miniscule, the freehand graffiti faces mocked by the austere violence of the barbed wire border.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Children growing up on the wrong side of the barbed wire are at risk in so many ways, on the edge of everything, almost doomed.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The mural then begin to decay and she watched this very fragile and vulnerable surface begin to vanish.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>The Subcultures Reader<\/b><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Concept of anonymity<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">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.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">You can do so and so (Use their tag name) isn\u2019t any good blah blah blah but you cant be like and also his sister is ugly<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Stylo says \u201cYou care only based on that, you\u2019re based on what your actions are under that name\u201d<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">You are what you write<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">You can become more than yourself in this subculture<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">When artists leave their names \u201cLike if you paint somewhere and you go back there, you feel like you belong\u2026..there\u2019s a bit of you there\u201d <\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Knowing you without knowing who you are <\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">When you tag a work you lose a lot of the pieces of your identity, but then on the last page it says \u201cAlthough 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 <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Book Readings: <\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">It is important that it is not legible, the dynamic nature of the graffiti is what is important. It was a d<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">iverse group of people in the 1980s that were doing graffiti. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">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. <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">It is kind of clubish, only other artists can understand what they are saying, it is supposed to be exclusive. <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">If it is exclusive, then how does it fit into the larger public space?<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ornament as Armament<\/span>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">They talk about how Wildstyle graffiti is purposely illegible, what is the purpose of this?<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">What is the significance of graffiti being \u201ckinetic\u201d (mobile)?<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u201cGetting up to Getting Over\u201d<\/span>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">In what ways was being \u201charder\u201d on graffiti artists by the NYC transportation\/police department unproductive?<\/span>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Made graffiti subculture into a counterculture<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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\u2026the 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 &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/graffiti-fall2018\/2018\/10\/23\/contemporary-graffiti-lecture-notes\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Contemporary Graffiti Lecture Notes&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7465,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/graffiti-fall2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/580"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/graffiti-fall2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/graffiti-fall2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/graffiti-fall2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7465"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/graffiti-fall2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=580"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/graffiti-fall2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/580\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":581,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/graffiti-fall2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/580\/revisions\/581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/graffiti-fall2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/graffiti-fall2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/graffiti-fall2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}