For the past two weeks my posts have centered around the topic of graffiti – I wrote in reaction to a particular piece of graffiti, and I shared a collection of graffiti-images from around the city. The theme wasn’t deliberate, but now that I’ve realized that it exists, I feel like I should write one more thing on the topic to round it out.
So, graffiti.
Though I’ve never been a graffiteur myself, I must confess, I am attracted to the art – that is, when it’s actually art. I’m not a fan of tagging, as it has more of a cluttering effect on the cityscape, as opposed to the brightening and enlivening feeling that good graffiti, well-placed, can bring. But when graffiti is artistic, I think it begins to give the city a language of its own – a language that the streets can speak, one that everybody hears.
I like the natural juxtapositions that are created when you place art on a concrete face – you cannot remove the art from its environment, because the environment is part of the art. Likewise, graffiti interacts with other graffiti – I’ve often wanted to piece together some story or poem using only the words and images of graffiteurs, and to find, between the words of so many hands, some city story.
I wonder what that story would say. I would hope that there would be more than just the illegible, unpronounceable names of casual spray-can wielders. I would hope that there would be some bit of concrete wisdom, or maybe a string of words just confusing enough to reveal their own clarity.
