Tribal Expressions
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Graffiti: More than just property destruction?
When I’m waiting at the bus stop, I pass time by reading the obscenities and initials carved into the sides of the shelter. When riding the elevator in my building, or using a public bathroom stall, it’s the same thing. I don’t really appreciate knowing the number of a high-school girl to call for “a good time”, or who loves whom this week. This type of graffiti is simply vandalism. It adds nothing to the view, sometimes causes structural damage, and makes it impossible to go through a day without the visual assault of swear words. However, there is a saying: “90% of any art form is worthless”. That leaves 10% that is not only good, but often transcendent. If we assume that graffiti is, or can be, an art form, then the bus-stop etchings are part of the 90%. But what of the 10%? Sometimes common spray-paint rebellion goes beyond the crude and pointless, and achieves a certain timelessness. Graffiti can, indeed, be more than property destruction: it can be high art, cultural expression, and a major improvement of the scenery.
Imagine riding a train into Brussels. Glance out the window, and a mural will catch your eye: the word “SONG” painted in letters nine feet high. As you approach the city center, more elaborate murals appear- some words in French, some names like DR7 and sloT written in bright colors, all artistically distorted and reconfigured. At one point, a painted skeleton of a dog covers earlier entries. The dog appears to be running alongside the train, and is repeated, like frames on a film storyboard, a few feet later. The skeleton image reappears a total of 26 times, consecutively. Each “frame” is exactly the same, each incredibly detailed and lifelike, but in a slightly different position. The effect of a living creature running and leaping is like a flipbook such as one finds in toy stores and tourist gift shops- but on a breathtakingly large scale.
Weeks of work must have gone into this piece of “vandalism”; several, perhaps dozens of people working after dark to avoid the transit authorities, taking painstaking care to get the scale and proportions right every time- and for what purpose? Not for money. Not for fame either, except amongst the limited subculture that knows the meaning of “Bonom Lork” (the artist who tagged* it). Simply, this is what art needs to be: valuable in itself, not for some dollar value that the world attaches to it. The fact that painting on train-track walls is illegal is hardly relevant. The mural is more important than the law.
Drawing on walls is not a new idea. For instance, cave paintings in Lascaux, France, are estimated to be 32,000 years old. The reason for the existence of the pictures remains a mystery, but when compared to the images beside the train to Brussels, one possible reason comes to mind. Every culture in history has expressed itself artistically in some way, from Egyptian pyramids to Maori body art to Haida totem poles. It’s necessary, psychologically, for some people to create works of art that say something about their lives and cultures. It gives a sense of permanence and place in a fragile world. It allows people in the margins a voice. In prehistoric times, all humans lived in the margins of life, at the edge of starvation. In the modern world, the margins are the realm of social misfits and outcasts, and “tagging” gives them a place to make their names known and remembered.
The only problem seems to be that graffiti is, in fact, illegal. But why should it be so? Set aside for a moment the ugly carvings at bus stops. When a building has a huge, blank, white wall that’s not used for anything else, why shouldn’t it be filled up with art? With bright bubble letters, 10 feet high and lovingly detailed? This can only be an improvement. Good graffiti is one of the greatest things about living in the city: all of downtown becomes an art gallery, with exhibits tucked into pokey little corners, displayed on otherwise ugly warehouses, and sometimes written right on the cobblestones. Archaeologists of the distant future will see it all and wonder what was so important about an old fish cannery, that it should have such an amazing mural on it. They’ll speculate about our religions and customs, and, most likely, marvel at the beauty- just as we marvel at the Lascaux paintings.
Well, we all understand that there must be laws to hold society together, and there has to be a law to prevent people from defacing property that does not belong to them. It’s possible though, that governments and police forces could consider whether some vandalism is more constructive than destructive. Not all graffiti needs to be painted over right away. The good ones- the ones that have a message more important than “F*** off”†, the ones that passerby stop to stare at, the ones that fill up blank ugliness with joyous creativity- those ones should be left alone.
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I wont take a cookie from you, because I have really bad heartburn.
But I did like this piece. I haven't had much sleep, and it was kind of hard to focus, but it came together nicely.
i read this before and for some reason didn't comment. but it deserves comment and a vote if i had one to give. perhaps ill come back later. but good job. you really made a point of something that most people think nothing of.