For the majority, of us, graffiti is a ubiquitous and familiar aspect of everyday life. We see names, opinions, calling cards, and artwork scribbled on everything from dumpsters to brick facades to bathroom stalls. Though it is often all lumped together and thought of as the work of bored or rebellious youth, this is not the case; graffiti has a slew of functions, ranging from simple artistic value to gang tags to a mode of communication. The later is very interesting, as “messages written in graffiti are often made without the social constraints that might otherwise limit free expression of political or controversial thought” (Alonso, 1998: 2). Because of the anonymity it presents, graffiti allows for a more honest form of correspondence. As a communication tool, this cross cultural form of representation may serve as a voice to marginalized people, or those that do not agree with dominant ideas, opinions etc.

The artist responsible for the attached Bush the Butcher picture is using graffiti as a form of political communication, posing the general public as an audience to convey his or her less than favourable feelings towards the prior President of the United States. Graffiti may work to push underground political or radical groups, or the viewpoints of dissatisfied individuals. Political graffiti is not uncommon and because of the nature of graffiti as hard to regulate and limit, as well as expandable, flexible, and ever changing, it is a perfect medium through which to announce political views or commentary, be they positive or negative.

By Hannah Kuyek

Alonso, Alex  1998 Urban Graffiti on the Urban Landscape. Western Geography
Graduate Conference  1-25

Graffiti has historically been looked on as the pursuit of lower-class marginalized communities, a social ill (Dickinson 2008:34). It is often seen as ugly, unclean, or just not aesthetically pleasing (Dickinson 2008:40). The work I have chosen to share here speaks as a rebuttal to those presumptions. In this piece, a part of a larger effort entitled The New York Beautification Project, Ellen Harvey has brought elements of higher art forms to graffiti by recreating 18^th-19^th century oval landscapes in oil paints (Honigman & Harvey 2005:105). Harvey chose this style of graffiti because it is a noncontroversial signifier of art, a form understood by the majority as the quintessential artwork. While they were still illegally painted, these ovals were executed in a style that attempted to transcend the urge or need for public outcry that graffiti usually elicits. Harvey is playing with the idea of the idealized landscape brought to the wrong side of town, and found that the aesthetic characteristics of these pieces trumped their illegality, with most passersby legitimizing it by calling it art (Honigman & Harvey 2005:105-106).

Contrary to the lower-class, youth-perpetrated, masculinized picture of graffiti artists noted in Dickinson (2008), Ellen Harvey is a 30-something white female artist with a law degree (Honigman & Harvey 2005:103). This is relevant to her medium of choice – public spaces in New York City. Having studied law gives Harvey a unique appreciation (among artists) of property ownership, who is allowed to do what and where, and how society is structured. These issues consciously shape her work.

– Jessica Craighead

Honigman, Ana Finel, and Ellen Harvey                                                                         2005  Good Artist/Bad Artist: An Interview with Ellen Harvey. Art Journal 64(3):102-118.

Dickinson, Maggie                                                                                                      2008   The Making of Space, Race and Place:New York City’s War on Graffiti, 1970—the Present. Critique of Anthropology 28(1):27-45.

www.ellenharvey.info

This past summer I traveled to Ecuador and the eldest son of my host family, Juan Pablo, was quite the artist. Although he was studying to be a doctor, his passion was visual arts and he showed me pages and pages of his artwork. (above: the first represents his father saying no to “a world of possibilities” 🙂 , and the second is entitled Noche sin Luna or Night without Moon.) Upon seeing Noche sin Luna I told him that his art held a powerful message. In response, he drove me to an ally way just outside the city of Quito that was covered in graffiti.

He believed that something created and displayed in the sanctuary of his bedroom (no matter how beautiful or thought provoking) could never be as powerful as something displayed where it isn’t supposed to be (2008:39).The case of an octopus image (seen below) was particularly interesting. At one time, officials were sent regularly to this ally to erase this piece, only to find it repainted immediately afterwards. Eventually the ‘cleaners’ stopped coming and the artwork has since remained untouched. Every time the image was repainted it became more powerful and once it was finally left intact it represented a victory achieved not by status but by determination. When written on a bedroom wall, Noche sin Luna and whatever meaning it may hold is tamed. However, if Noche sin Luna is written somewhere illegally, then the medium has changed the message (2011:86). The meaning, in a way, is magnified and the piece now carries a message of resistance and defiance, whether the artist means it to or not.

Dickinson, Maggie
2008 The Making of Space, Race, and Place: New York City’s War on Graffiti, 1970 — the Present. Critique of Anthropology 28(1):39.2011

Gastman, Roger

2011 In other words: Graffiti edition.  Foreign policy. 189: 86

This photograph was taken at the end of a dirt road in central BC while waiting at the stop sign for one of the ghostly trains that haunt our vast country. Trains and the Graffiti on them have always been fascinating to me. After learning more about the projected messages behind these images and tags I questioned the motivation behind the creation of graffiti on trains. If a lot of graffiti and tags are meant to engage in an ongoing conversation with fellow writers, artists, and crews, can trains be deemed a form of “long distance graffiti phone call?” Artists know that their graffiti will roll away on the tracks yet they still create it. I think that this attests to a more universal message of graffiti and the various subcultures associated with it.

Jeff Ferrell (1998) discusses the conversation between long distance taggers. He writes that, “Freight train graffiti expands this circulation of subcultural images and identities-and expands it so widely that writers may see, appreciate and learn from eachothers art but in fact may never be able to traverse vast geographic distances and get to know eachother.” (Ferrell 594:1998)

Further, in his research of freight train graffiti Ferrell found that taggers were including their city of origin as well as telephone area code with their graffiti. He asserts that this proves their intent for it to be mobile and visible. There was an evident desire for the graffiti to be recognized and associated with their place of origin. Although this practice is illegal it is innovative and intriguing that the subculture has sourced the train as a platform for communication to circulate messages and styles among the larger graffiti community.

Reference

Ferrell, Jeff.

1998 Train Graffitti: subculture, crime, dislocation. Justice Quarterly 15(4): 587-608

We can consider graffiti in a variety of ways, as cultural communication, artistic expression, or cathartic achievement.  However we consistently seem to do so in the context of the present, in a society with a stigma towards public artistic creativity and amidst a generation of counter-cultural visionaries.  What seems amiss in this perspective though is the appreciation for the antiquated and enigmatic origins of graffiti, such as the famous ‘Chad’ image teamed with the ‘Kilroy Was Here’ line.  This form of graffiti harkens back to the time of World War 2, when soldiers, sailors, and airmen alike would revel at the fantastically obscure localities that the Kilroy graffiti would find itself in.

This iconic image is actually a combination of the ‘Chad’ character, a famous British cartoon, with the infamous American tagline.  The original author of the Kilroy tag has never been discovered, however it has long been thought that a shipyard inspector named J. J. Kilroy started the trend inside the hulls of ships going to sea.  Observed “in virtually every location where U.S. armed forces went” (Brown 2000), this artwork was in no way a political or social statement, but instead a mysterious and unifying phenomena.  What mattered was not the message itself, but instead who got to see it, specifically servicemen across the globe and far from home.  This use of graffiti presents it as a semblance of the familiar, as a means to communicate an idea to those even in the most distant places.  That idea: you are not alone.

Jordan Lin

References

Brown, Jerald E.

2000.  Historical Dictionary of the U.S. Army.  Westport: Greenwood.

Image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kilroy_Was_Here_-_Washington_DC_WWII_Memorial.jpg

These pictures were taken a few days after the Stanley Cup Riots in 2011. In wake of the riots, people gathered outside Vancouver City Centre station and expressed their sentiments by writing in chalk on the pavement. This ‘organized’ form of graffiti was favourably received by the general public present on Granville street. No one scowled or complained that public property was being defaced or that the people gathered there were being a nuisance. The messages themselves centered around the ‘true culture and spirit’ of Vancouver and seemed to be an effort to make up for the events that transpired after the Stanley Cup finals. They also appeared to be a healing process for those viewing the chalk graffiti as well as those drawing it.

Observing the scene the day these pictures were taken, there was a sense of redemption that was trying to be achieved through the graffiti. Vancouver also has a program called, “Restart.” This program aims to take youth involved in graffiti vandalism and make them use their talent towards creating authorized murals (The News Beat). The traditional messages conveyed through graffiti are of territorial marking, artistic expression, political statements et cetera. However, these examples illustrate a somewhat therapeutic or restorative nature of graffiti which is unusual to see in this particular medium. I deduce from the positive reactions that people (viewing as well as participating) have to these works that there is value in the notion that graffiti can be restorative (Koon-Hwee Kan 20).

Works Cited:

Koon-Hwee Kan. Art Education , Vol. 54, No. 1, Focus on Secondary (Jan., 2001), pp. 18-23. National Art Education Association. Web.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3193889

The News Beat. Vancouver: British-Columbia. Grandview-Woodland Community Policing Centre, Winter 2009. Web.
http://www.gwcpc.ca/documents/NewsBeat_Feb2009.pdf

Veera Bhinder

 Banksy’s portrayal of the Gray Ghost.

Graffiti is a very clear form of expression for an individual/group in order to identify themselves and what they believe/think/want etc. in a public manner. An article by Scott-Warren (365: 2010) says that: “[…] today’s graffiti is “a celebration of self. It’s, like, this is me, Claw, this is my name, this is my art, this is me, me, me. It’s a me thing and it’s my identity, this is who I am and it’s a total representation of me.””

The famous England based graffiti artist known as Banksy spent some time in New Orleans in 2008, to ‘do battle’ with a man known as the Gray Ghost – a good-to-do citizen who was (and still is) trying to keep the streets ‘clean’ of graffiti by painting over them with his signature gray paint.

The works by Banksy are well-liked and regarded as socio-political art representing freedom of expression/speech, yet this Gray Ghost viewed them purely as a form of vandalism that needed to be ‘cleaned up’, prompting calls from those who oppose him, saying he is causing more harm than good by actually suppressing freedom of expression, a basic right, simply because it comes in the form of graffiti. What the Gray Ghost is doing, though rather unwittingly, is not only calling attention to graffiti as freedom of expression, but adding his own personal expression in the form of his style of ‘graffiti’ by painting over other peoples’ works; he is saying “I don’t like this, mine is better. This is what I think”.

References

Scott-Warren, Jason. “Reading Graffiti in the Early Modern Book.” Huntington Library Quarterly Vol. 73, No. 3 (September 2010), pp. 363-381. Published by: University of California Press.

Web Urbanist: Local Designs to Global Destinations. “Banksy vs. The Gray Ghost in New Orleans.”
http://www.banksy.co.uk/

Alexandra Logan

Doorway on Drake

Tagging is probably the simplest form of graffiti, it takes, maybe, a second and a half to draw and can be done discretely. What is the reason for tagging though? According to Emma Russell (2008) the functions are as follows…

• A voice against oppression
• Gang related activity
• Being a part of hip hop culture

Generally I agree with this assessment of tagging, but as we will see it fails to convey the entirety of tagging. Here is where we come to my picture, you would think that this was taken somewhere a bit seedier than Yaletown. The neighborhood known for upscale restaurants, salons, and dog jackets is not a place that has a particularly high amount of gang activity, nor are yuppies particularly oppressed. So that leaves one conceivable function, which would be identification with the hip hop culture. Still though, does this really account for the entire remainder of tagging, I think not. What is at work here is the idea of personal identification, usually associated marking territory in some form, be that physical, ideological, or mental space. This is not the marking of ‘turf’ by gangs, but perhaps a more benign feeling of making a personal mark on your neighborhood or the feeling of doing something illegal. Regardless, tagging has become larger than its once simple associations, it has jumped into cultures with little or no association to the original and proliferated.

~ Thomas

Source:

Russell, Emma

2008 Writing on the Wall: The form, function and meaning of tagging. Journal of Occupational Science. Vol. 15(2): 87-97

Graffiti is an outright, spontaneous expression of your inner feelings that are anonymously displayed to a public audience.  It seems as though the public recognition of an expression through graffiti helps individuals cope with their problems better.  In Israel, following the assassination of the Israeli prime minister, the Israeli teenagers found it easier to mourn his death through the use of symbols, with graffiti being the medium outlet (Luzzatto and Jacobson 2001:363). Therefore, can graffiti act as a coping strategy to allow a person to release their anguish and emotions in an anonymous, yet public way?  I think that graffiti effectively provides this outlet because it creates anonymity.  It also allows for the public recognition of a person’s message.

Despite the amount of damage caused by the Stanley Cup rioters, everyday Vancouverites emerged from the dust and debris the next morning to clean up the downtown area.  The Bay windows were extensively damaged, and as a result, they were boarded up with wooden planks.  When the first sign of apology was placed on one of the planks, this created an outburst of emotional messages from various people who took to the wall to express their feelings.  By expressing their individual messages on the wall, it allowed everyone to cope with the riot better.  I think that this allowed people to overcome the emotional shock of the riot by using graffiti to publicly express their feelings.  This “graffiti wall” is the physical representation of the coping strategy employed by the society.

Reference

Luzzatto, D., and Jacobson, Y.

2001 Youth Graffiti as an Existential Coping Device: The Case of Rabin’s Assassination Journal of Youth Studies 4(3):351-365.

This is a picture I took at the site of Ephesus, Turkey. Often called the first example of “modern-style” graffiti, historians believe it is an advertisement for a brothel. Carved into the marble stone is a heart, a foot, a woman’s head, and money. It has been translated as: “turn left at the crossroads where you can buy a woman’s love.” Awesome, right? What really struck me about this is how it disrupts the prevalent viewpoint that graffiti is a modern social ill, affecting inner-city neighborhoods. To the contrary, graffiti is found throughout the ancient world.

J.A. Baird and Claire Taylor note that many archaeologists also project their own negative opinions of graffiti onto ancient groups: “ancient examples are given as evidence of the ‘less educated,’ the ‘subversive,’ or the ‘vulgar’ in ancient societies without much interrogation of the idea” (Baird and Taylor 2011: 1). As I searched for articles on “ancient graffiti” I had trouble because almost all of the ones I found were about modern graffiti defacing prized monuments – from Peruvian ruins to cave art from Utah. Of course this is a huge problem. But how come we don’t hear more about graffiti that was actually created in ancient times? I believe this reflects a bias towards valuing the ancients while devaluing modern graffiti art, no matter how spectacular and artistically creative it is. Banksy anyone? In a couple of thousand years archaeologists might be digging up our own monuments, so lets give them something to look at!

By Luke Griscom Benjamin

References

2011 Baird, J.A. and Claire Taylor. “Introduction.” In Ancient Graffiti in Context, eds. J.A. Baird and Claire Taylor. New York: Routledge.