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Max Pearl aka Kat Fyte
The regulation and containment of public art is not a question of "defacement," a question of aesthetic displeasure controlled through the erasure of unsightly letters scrawled along the urban wall and through the arrest of its authors. What is at stake in the regulation and containment of illegal art, graffiti, is an attempt on the part of the dominant to ensure that the urban cityscape, a postmodern text to be read and interpreted, reflects their likeness, their desires. Illegal art is typically (with important exceptions) produced by urban denizens disadvantaged by race, ethnicity, class, and gender, by Americans that do not fit nicely into the pure community that constitutes the national imaginary. Just as with a literal text, as Rosemary Coombe would put it, many of the urban pedestrians that are excluded from the reality reflected by the urban text with which they are most familiar will "...engage in meaning-making [by adapting] signs, texts, and images to their own agendas." (1)
I employ a Baudrillardian analysis that understands the urban ambience of "official graffiti," signs, "architecture and town planning... since they are mass-media themselves" to "...reproduce mass social relations, which is to say that collectively they allow people no response," and graffiti as an “…attack by means of difference, dismantling the network of codes, attacking coded differences by means of an uncodeable absolute difference, over which the system will stumble and disintegrate.” (2)
Where Baudrillard’s analysis falls short is in recognizing that (and perhaps this is due to the fact his single work directly on the subject of graffiti was published early in the movement’s development) there is also a battle for the singular, Romantic authorship that has been denied certain disempowered groups by the portrayal of their culture as "collectivized," as a "folk" culture, in domestic popular discourse. (3)
The Cityscape as Co-Authored Text
The book, Riding the Train, while primarily a historical synthesis painstakingly detailing the arc of the American graffiti movement- a seminal one at that- builds upon foundational theory that describes the ways in which, for the average pedestrian, the city is a text to be read based on its appearance. Following in the trend of postmodern analysis, the author briefly touches on the ways in which there can different interpretations of the city based on who is reading and what performative elements constitute the city’s aesthetic in that reader’s subjective experience. (4)
Joe Austin understands that “In this formulation, vandalism is represented as a disruption (an un-authorized writing) in the ‘text’ of the city’s officially sanctioned order.” The “broken windows” theory that informed much of public policy with regards to graffiti, and was integral in justifying the money and time spent on the eradication and regulation of graffiti throughout the United States indeed rides on this assumption.
“It posits that crime in a neighborhood will continue to increase as the visual evidence of minor infractions is left unattended. This implies that civic order is a fragile text indeed, but one that nonetheless containts a powerful ‘preffered reading’… What is unique about this line of logic is the fact that despite its extremely conservative implications… it is most assuredly postmodern in its emphatic attention to the surface appearance of social order. It implies that the basis, the foundation, indeed the cause of collective social order is a matter of appearances, a matter of aesthetics.” (5)
As is made evident by this author’s analysis, the city can be understood as a postmodern text, one that is shaped by cooperative (and often conflicting) influence, one that can be differently interpreted by the things with which the reader, in navigating the spatial text, comes in contact, and by the unique existential composition that the reader, or pedestrian, brings into her interpretation.
The Official Graffiti of the Everyday
The article, "Official Graffiti of the Everyday," discusses the ways in which the visual system of regulatory signs that clutter the urban landscape, "...the signs displayed on buildings of public access, Entry and Exit (or In and Out)... the prohibition circle with its diagonal red slash... [are] an endemic feature of the present." (6) The authors, however, neglect to implicate the visual clutter of advertisement that regulates consumption and participates in positioning subjects in relation to eachother in the public sphere, and by extension manifests the ideal, purified community that constitutes the national imaginary.
According to these authors’ analysis of literal, physical street signs such as “no U-turn” signs or “stop” signs, "official graffiti" is used to create a "syntax of nextness," (7) and can be understood on a more profound level as a means of regulating the movement of subjects in social relation to eachother. A "no loitering" message is presumably directed to those undesirables that are disadvantaged by their bodies, and therefore serves to limit the mobility of those groups, especially in relation to those groups that, by virtue of their privilege, are granted unlimited mobility in public space. The author is presumed to be "author-itative," while the intended reader is the racialized or classed Other whose congregation supposedly makes their immediate public space a less safe place. By virtue of his right to display regulatory and disciplinary messages (not to mention erect buildings, to impose linguistic norms, to design urban layout), this "author-ized" agent, the well-off, white citizen, is reflected in this spatial text, even if he has never set foot in this territory. (8)
Tagging and the Body
Chastanet, in his book Pixaçao: Sao Paulo Signature, asserts, “The writer, in perpetual graphic knocking together of his identity, also presents a body, only apparent from the trace left by the writing, also presents a body, only apparent from the trace left by the writing. But what is of prime interest here is the definition of the signature as the ‘visible trace of a corporal gesture…’” (9)
[Brazil-indigenous graffiti typeface known as "pixação." Photo from sykeology101.]
The urban ambience of signs, architecture, town planning, as well as the “official graffiti” (10) of regulatory and disciplinary signs, do not carry within them this mark, because, as Rosemary Coombe explains, the normative, ideal bodies that produced it, are not marked by their alterity. (11)One of her passages describing the theoretical politics of marked and unmarked bodies in the public sphere is worth quoting at length. She argues,
“To be a subject in the bourgeois public sphere required identification with a disembodied public subject. Embedded in this possibility of the public was a promise, ‘a utopian universality that would allow people to transcend the given realities of their bodies and their status.’: ‘No matter what particularities of culture, race, gender, or class we bring to bear on public discourse, the moment of apprehending something as public is one in which we imagine- if imperfectly- indifference to those particularities, to ourselves.’ The promise of transcendence has never been fulfilled: ‘For the ability to abstract oneself in public discussion has always been an unequally available resource. Individuals have specific rhetorics of disincorporation; they are not simply rendered bodily by exercising reason. The subject who could master this rhetoric in the bourgeois public sphere was implicitly- even explicitly- white, male, literate and propertied. These traits could go unmarked, while other features of bodies could only be acknowledged as the humiliating positivity of the particular.” (12)
In some ways, the deployment of one’s painted name, which carries traces of the marked body that produced it, onto the walls of one’s environment can be seen as an act of circulating alternative textual interpretations of city life using the convenient mass-media of the city itself, ultimately revealing the exclusionary practices that lie at the heart of the process of nation-building. As Michael Keith says, “…what is at stake in these forms of urban graphology is an emergent struggle over inclusion, citizenship, entitlement and belonging.” (13) This strategy may not stem from a desire to impose one’s own textual interpretation on others, but is effective in showing the absurdity of one interpretation, one worldview, and thus one type of body, being privileged over another.
And, due to the popular characterization of black and latino forms of creative expression as “folk” culture, a phenomenon described succinctly by Susana Loza, the bodily trace that can be read in the textual intervention of tagging represents at once the likeness of a corporeally marked collective community, and the likeness of an individual that is trying to transcend that collectivization. (14)
Therefore, When a pedestrian sees a piece of graffiti that they can read as having been produced by a marginalized body, that piece is read as the product of a culture, of a group, as a hoard of undesirable bodies invading the public space that they traverse day-to-day. What they perceive is in fact the undercutting of the “author-itativeness” placed on codes and signs produced and circulated by bodies that conform to the profile that belongs in the normative national imaginary.
The rhetoric that has historically been used to justify differential treatment in the regulation of some public art in relation to others has been a purely aesthetic one, and I intend to show how this is rhetoric has been used to veil a discomfort with a loss of sovereignty over meaning-making in the public sphere. Patrick Hagopian agrees:
“The question of whether graffiti constitutes an ‘enhancement’ or ‘defacement’ seems… to depend on whose property is being written on, and who is doing the writing and who judges the result… Thus, the question of whose world will be ‘written over’ and whose writing will prevail, is never a pure aesthetic question.” (15)
Baudrillard and The Insurrection of Signs
To briefly summarize, Baudrillard asserts that the riots, tensions, and tragedies at the genesis of the earliest 1970s graffiti movements, encouraged a split in revolutionary approaches within the black community
As he understands it, some of the disempowered reverted to a traditional sort of revolutionary activism, while others adopted new strategies more appropriate to the times. This new activism, disobedience without "goal, ideology, or content..." is a "...radicalization of revolt on the real strategic terrain of the total manipulation of codes and significations." (16)
Graffiti, especially the simple signature-tag, intervenes in the public sphere with signs and codes that are not implicated in the regulatory control system that imposes “proper political regulation… and particular kinds of sociality…” (17) onto the subjects that traverse it.
The fact that these illegally circulated arbitrary codes and signs, when read and interpreted by pedestrian passerby, signify a level of authorship in the urban spatial text, serves to call into question the legitimacy of dominant bodies’ sovereignty over processes of creating knowledge, challenging the “author-itativeness” of the subjects behind “official” graffiti. As Baudrillard says, “Whatever attacks contemporary semiocracy, this new form of value, is politically essential…” (18)
So, while I do intend to problematize the dichotomy between territorial and aesthetic graffiti, one could understand that graffiti with a strong element of territorial assertion to it could indeed be a reaction to the fact that the people living in these urban landscapes have no control over whose interests are represented in the the world around them. "Un-author-ized" signs are, according to Hebdige and Hall, a "symbolic form of resistance," (19) that, in Baudrillardian terms, "...scramble signals of urbania and dismantle the order of signs. Graffiti covers every subway map in New York, just as the Czechs changed the names of the streets in Prague to disconcert the Russians: guerilla action." (20)
In fact, the average middle-class, relatively privileged pedestrian's notions of safety are destabilized upon passing a "neighborhood watch" sign that is covered in illegal graffiti, for the spatial text that was once authored by those that support and benefit from the maintenance of that privilege have been supplanted by those that, whether consciously or not, wish to dismantle it.
When “outsider” urban pedestrians witness Black or Latino creative expression, and it is recognized as the work of a marginalized group, the perception of what bodies produced it is part of the decoding process that accompanies the interpretation of spatial text. What some pedestrians then dislike about graffiti is not necessarily its unsightliness, but rather the fact that it disrupts and destabilizes how the city is defined, and forces them to acknowledge the encroaching presence of those humans whom they have attempted to exclude from the narrative of their spatial reality.
The Search for Authorship Amidst Cultural Collectivization
In fact, the motivations for the act of graffiti can not simply be accounted for by subconscious collective attempts to rewire the hegemonic order of the urban landscape. It would seem to be, as well, an attempt on the part of the disempowered to conjure individuality by contributing to the authorship of the cityscape, leaving their unique bodily trace in the form of names, numbers, shapes, and colors. For these graffiti artists, their vandalism is not simple part of a collective attempt to reconfigure the urban textual system of signs, but more and more, as style became an element of the graffiti game, an attempt to create an author function for oneself, to rise above a a population whose "...forms of creativity have always been collectivized and seen as culture with a little c. Thus, their assertion of individual authorship is not (simply) about wanting to become a form of Culture," with a big 'c' "but about the exercise of agency. It's about forcing Western society to revalue its aesthetic borders, and about destabilizing its identity borders from within." (21)
As Baudrillard understood it -and yes, since then the world of art vandalism has changed hugely- the deployment of illegal graffiti in the 70's was never meant to circulate and defend an individualist, Romantic representations of a subject in the ghetto, but rather the image of an under-represented community with limited access to discursive space. Despite the emphasis on individual names, he says that this misunderstanding is a result of our own “…bourgeois-existentialist romanticism that speaks like that, the unique and incomparable being that each of us is, but who gets ground down by the city. Black youths themselves have no personality to defend, from the outset they are defending the community. Their revolt challenges bourgeois identity and anonymity at the same time.” (22)
Indeed, the subversive power of graffiti is neutralized by applying this Romantic analysis alone, implyingthat the act is merely a grasp for non-conformity, "a reclamation of identity and personal freedom," and in fact neglects to implicate the ways in which systemic racism and classism, and not just urban malaise and feelings of anonymity common to most urban denizens, were the catalysts responsible for the genesis of graffiti. (23) Keith elaborates, arguing, “It is not just the case that the inner cities provide surfaces of inscription through which identity is mediated. Graffiti is reducible neither to articulations of a priori natural areas nor to projections of territorial claims… Paradoxically, in the contest to control the spaces of the urban, a shared reality creates a contested but nevertheless shared territory.” (24)
As Hal Foster notes, "Subcultural practice differs from the countercultural (e.g., '60's student movements) in that it recodes cultural signs rather than poses [sic] a revolutionary program of its own . . . . [T]he subcultural must be grasped as a textual activity. Plural and symbolic, its resistance is performed through a 'spectacular transformation of a whole range of commodities, values, common-sense attitudes, etc.' " (25)
This difference in approach to the re-shaping of the public sphere to better represent the reality and the desires of marginalized peoples, subcultural vs. countercultural, is elaborated by Baudrillard in his book, Symbolic Exchange and Death.
A similar distinction is also made in Christine Harold's discussion of how the "prankster's" approach to "culture jamming,” while it may have some decentralized revolutionary agenda, may be more effective than more overt dissent, despite having less obvious, less focused political aims. This “prankster” approach simply exaggerates the messages contained within hegemonic ideology to expose their own shortcomings and ultimately, the absurdity and the arbitrariness of the social constructs that govern the position of certain subjects in relation to others. (26)
While Harold constructed this distinction around the overt activism of groups like "Adbusters" in comparison to the almost comical visual détournement of Sputnik (27 (see above)) and the likes, it is certainly analogous to the ways in which openly political work such as that of Shepard Fairey possesses a less subtle and a potentially less effective approach to destabilizing ideology than perhaps that of SUPERSEX and SUPERKOOL, who, "by tattooing walls... free them from architecture and turn them once again into living, social matter, into the moving body of the city before it has been branded with functions and institutions." (28)
Why Murals? Why Banksy? The Containment of Difference in a Multiculturalist Urban Setting
Why murals? Because the subversive potential of the message is contained by the restrictions and the necessary approval of the dominant. Murals are typically contained social commentary. They are usually caught in the sanitizing space created by the liberal, multiculturalist desire for a non-threatening illusion of diversity and equal access to discursive space. The sharp edges are smoothed over.
[The unmistakably Cantibridgian multiculturalist mural adorning the Middle East Restaurant & Club in Central Square]
Why Banksy? Is stenciling and character-piecing less territorial, less a claim of public space by the private citizen, than signature graffiti? Or perhaps this is part of the façade maintained to regulate what bodies are allowed representation, and what discursive systems of meaning-making are privileged in public space.
Art critic cum full-time caveman Jonathan Jones articulates, in one article in the UK Guardian, exactly the kind of middle-class fear that certain types of racialized and classed works of graffiti provoke in pedestrians. (29)
He firmly reproduces and reinforces the dichotomy between illegal art that can not transcend its status as the product of “folk” culture- supposedly without conceptual or political agenda- and “intelligent,” supposedly studied street-art that resembles high-art enough to be included in a canon. All the while, he seems completely unaware of the ways in which the specifically classed and racialized affect that is carried in the low-tech “tags” and “throw-ups” that he derides as neither asthetically pleasing nor political, is exactly what is unappealing to him. He says,
“Anyway, I believe in education. The reason I don't like street art is that it's not aesthetic, it's social. To celebrate it is to celebrate ignorance, aggression, all the things our society excels at. For middle class people to find artistic excitement in something that scares old people on estates is a bit sick.” (30)
One reader comments in return that Banksy’s work is exactly the kind of illegal art that is easily swallowed and completely non-threatening to those whose authorial dominance is at stake. They say,
“I'd hazard that even old people on estates would enjoy a lot of his audacious work even if they also tutted about it as well, whereas they may well feel threatened by some of the ugly and pointless scrawl that is championed by some as graffiti art.” (31)
The choice of the word “threatened” as opposed to “annoyed,” or “perturbed,” shows how this is not simply a matter of taking aesthetic offense at some ugly blemish scarring one’s town or even one’s property. It is a matter of how the affect that these marginalized, marked bodies carry, as Coombe would say, can be read in the textual interventions for which they are responsible.
Art that features character-piecing, relatively high-tech mechanisms like stenciling or wheat-pasting, discernable shading or 3-D dimensioning, or didactic political messages, doesn’t carry this mark, for it resembles closely enough what is accepted in pre-established criteria for high-art. For that reason, not only is it neutral and unthreatening in that it doesn’t signify the presence of an Other in a previously White, Middle-class space, (despite whatever supposedly revolutionary message it may contain), but work like this can transcend a “folk” classification and, as we can see in this one writer’s observations, can be seen as the work of a distinct author with a style and a message with which he is associated.
In the same way, overtly political street-art is not read, interpreted, and reacted to with the same disgust and fear as signature-graffiti, which Baudrillard believes may in fact be a more effective, more appropriate form of resistance to domination in the time and place in which these subjects live. He calls political organization in the legacy of Marxism “…a regression into traditional political activism,” and goes on to say, “There is no need for organized masses, nor for a political consciousness to do this- a thousand youths armed with marker pens and cans of spray-paint are enough…” (32)
In the same way, overtly political street-art is not read, interpreted, and reacted to with the same disgust and fear as signature-graffiti, which Baudrillard believes may in fact be a more effective, more appropriate form of resistance to domination in the time and place in which these subjects live. He calls political organization in the legacy of Marxism “…a regression into traditional political activism,” and goes on to say, “There is no need for organized masses, nor for a political consciousness to do this- a thousand youths armed with marker pens and cans of spray-paint are enough…” (32)
What is ironic here is the idea that the graffiti which is meant to be subversive, which is meant to incite dissent and engender a critical attitude towards political and social hierarchies, is in fact less threatening to those hierarchies than the signature-art that for a decade had New York city in perpetual fear of downfall.
Perhaps those subjects responsible for the tags, throw-ups, and hollows that “…most folks now associate with the ‘graffiti problem,’” (33) have repeatedly come up against the futility of organized political resistance, and have sought, if subconsciously, to resist in a potentially more effective, yet less centralized and less public fashion. Perhaps it is because of what bodies are assumed to be responsible for the production and circulation of didactically political street-art. Whereas political art is read as the product of educated, minimally marginalized subjects, the appearance of signature-based interventions in the urban text signals an inability on the part of the dominant to maintain the inequalities in visibility and access to discursive space that ultimately uphold their privilege.
This is why Banksy’s art can be nominated for a Turner prize, and the work of the anonymous tagger (no matter how talented) will not. Banksy’s work is tokenized because of its associations with the edgy, exciting world of street-art, and yet it is not so different as to encourage fear over the toppling of the precariously balanced disparities in access to discursive space. It is a matter of contained difference; Banksy’s work is edgy, but not too edgy.
Perhaps those subjects responsible for the tags, throw-ups, and hollows that “…most folks now associate with the ‘graffiti problem,’” (33) have repeatedly come up against the futility of organized political resistance, and have sought, if subconsciously, to resist in a potentially more effective, yet less centralized and less public fashion. Perhaps it is because of what bodies are assumed to be responsible for the production and circulation of didactically political street-art. Whereas political art is read as the product of educated, minimally marginalized subjects, the appearance of signature-based interventions in the urban text signals an inability on the part of the dominant to maintain the inequalities in visibility and access to discursive space that ultimately uphold their privilege.
This is why Banksy’s art can be nominated for a Turner prize, and the work of the anonymous tagger (no matter how talented) will not. Banksy’s work is tokenized because of its associations with the edgy, exciting world of street-art, and yet it is not so different as to encourage fear over the toppling of the precariously balanced disparities in access to discursive space. It is a matter of contained difference; Banksy’s work is edgy, but not too edgy.
Conclusion
Pedestrians rarely notice the pervasive presence of "official graffiti," (34) (street signs, advertisements, architecture) the reason being that the unmarked bodies of the agents that produced it (agents that are assumed to be white men, or are simply not assumed at all) leave no trace in the text. (35) Whereas, the marked body that is responsible for most illegal graffiti, especially the "tags," "throw-ups," and "hollows" that most well-off pedestrians lament as ugly, unimaginative, and base, contain their corporeal mark.
In addition, as is true with many subcultures, the system of identifications, insider-references, tools, skills, and accumulated knowledge that characterizes the literally underground world of graffiti writers constitutes a “…a hidden semiological realm and a kind of alternative public sphere which operates beyond the understanding of both liberal and radical commentators.” (36) This self-segregated space, where a specific type of sociality is developed according to the world-views of the marginalized subjects that make up the graffiti subculture, is undoubtedly another empowering aspect of graffiti life, even beyond the “signal jamming” discussed by Baudrillard and Harold, or the grasps at Romantic individuality described by Susana Loza.
When "official graffiti" is employed in our vicinity, is it that the bodily trace of the agents responsible for its placement is invisible to us? Or is it that, by virtue of their corporeal proximity to the national ideal, those "official graffiti artists," urban planners, senators, local representatives, federal bureaus, and their bodies, go unnoticed?
This is perhaps the source of objection to that low-tech, seemingly apolitical graffiti which simply deploys a name, an "empty signifigant," (37) as Chastanet says, in that embodied within it are traces of that marked body, and by extension, potential for the subversion of racist and classist normativities that are contained within a spatial text authored by the dominant.
(1) Coombe, Rosemary. The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Print. (P. 57)
(2) Jean Baudrillard, “KOOL KILLER, or The Insurrection of Signs” in Symbolic Exchange and Death (London: Sage, 1993) (P. 80)
(3) Loza, Susana. Email to the author. April 2009.
(4) Austin, Joe. Taking the Train. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Print. (P. 145)
(5) Ibid. (P. 146)
(6) Turner, Joe. Hunt, Allen. "Official Graffiti of the Everyday." Law and Society Review 30(1996): 455-480. Electronic Resource.
(7) Thomas Markus (1995) cited in: Turner, Joe. Hunt, Allen. "Official Graffiti of the Everyday." Law and Society Review 30(1996): 455-480. Electronic Resource. (P. 476)
(7) Jean Baudrillard, “KOOL KILLER, or The Insurrection of Signs” in Symbolic Exchange and Death (London: Sage, 1993) (P. 80)
(8) Chastanet, François. Pixação: São Paulo Signature. 1st ed. Toulouse, FR: XGPress, 2007. Print. (P. 233)
(10) Turner, Joe. Hunt, Allen. "Official Graffiti of the Everyday." Law and Society Review 30(1996): 455-480. Electronic Resource. (P. 475)
(11) Coombe, Rosemary. The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Print. (P. 170- 177)
(12) Ibid. (P. 171)
(13) Keith, Michael. After the Cosmopolitan?. New York: Routledge, 2005. Print. (P. 137)
(14) Loza, Susana. Email to the author. April 2009.
(15) Cited in: Keith, Michael. After the Cosmopolitan?. New York: Routledge, 2005. Print. (P. 137)
(16) Jean Baudrillard, “KOOL KILLER, or The Insurrection of Signs” in Symbolic Exchange and Death (London: Sage, 1993) (P. 80)
(17) Ibid. (P. 80)
(18) Ibid. (P. 78)
(19) Hebdige, Dick. “The Function of Subculture.” From The Cultural Studies Reader. ed. Simon During, 2nd ed.. New York: Routledge, 1999. 441-50. (P. 444)
(20) Jean Baudrillard, “KOOL KILLER, or The Insurrection of Signs” in Symbolic Exchange and Death (London: Sage, 1993) (P. 80/81)
(21) Loza, Susana. Email to the author. April 2009.
(22) Jean Baudrillard, “KOOL KILLER, or The Insurrection of Signs” in Symbolic Exchange and Death (London: Sage, 1993) (P. 84)
(23) Ibid. (P. 84)
(24) Keith, Michael. After the Cosmopolitan?. New York: Routledge, 2005. Print. (P. 143)
(25) Foster, Hal. Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (1985).
(26) Harold, Christine. “Pranking Rhetoric: ‘Culture Jamming’ as Media Activism.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 21(2004): 189-211
(27) Schiller, Marc. “UPDATED: Nike The Ripper - Seen On The Streets of Munich .” [Weblog Wooster Collective] 1/26/2007. Web. 20 Mar 2009.
(28) Jean Baudrillard, “KOOL KILLER, or The Insurrection of Signs” in Symbolic Exchange and Death (London: Sage, 1993) (P. 82)
(29) Jones, Jonathan. [Weblog Jonathan Jones on Art] 4/15/2009. Uk Guardian.Web.19 Apr 2009..
(30) Ibid.
(31) Ibid. Comment section. Comment by Polymorph on 15 Apr ‘09, 4:31pm.
(32) Jean Baudrillard, “KOOL KILLER, or The Insurrection of Signs” in Symbolic Exchange and Death (London: Sage, 1993) (P. 80)
(33) Austin, Joe. Taking the Train. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Print. (P. 115)
(34) Turner, Joe. Hunt, Allen. "Official Graffiti of the Everyday." Law and Society Review 30(1996): 455-480. Electronic Resource. (P. 472)
(35) Coombe, Rosemary. The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Print. (P. 170- 177)
(36) Keith, Michael. After the Cosmopolitan?. New York: Routledge, 2005. Print. (P. 140)
(37) Chastanet, François. Pixação: São Paulo Signature. 1st ed. Toulouse, FR: XGPress, 2007. Print. (P. 242)
Works referenced:
- Jones, Jonathan. [Weblog Jonathan Jones on Art] 4/15/2009. Uk Guardian.Web.19 Apr 2009.
- Loza, Susana. Email to the author. April 2009.
- Schiller, Marc. “UPDATED: Nike The Ripper - Seen On The Streets of Munich .” [Weblog Wooster Collective] 1/26/2007. Web. 20 Mar 2009.
- Chastanet, François. Pixação: São Paulo Signature. 1st ed. Toulouse, FR: XGPress, 2007. Print.
- Keith, Michael. After the Cosmopolitan?. New York: Routledge, 2005. Print.
- Harold, Christine. “Pranking Rhetoric: ‘Culture Jamming’ as Media Activism.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 21(2004): 189-211
- Austin, Joe. Taking the Train. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Print.
- Hebdige, Dick. “The Function of Subculture.” From The Cultural Studies Reader. ed. Simon During, 2nd ed.. New York: Routledge, 1999. 441-50.
- Coombe, Rosemary. The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Print.
- Turner, Joe. Hunt, Allen. "Official Graffiti of the Everyday." Law and Society Review 30(1996): 455-480. Electronic Resource.
- Jean Baudrillard, “KOOL KILLER, or The Insurrection of Signs” in Symbolic Exchange and Death (London: Sage, 1993)
- Foster, Hal. Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (1985).
In addition, as is true with many subcultures, the system of identifications, insider-references, tools, skills, and accumulated knowledge that characterizes the literally underground world of graffiti writers constitutes a “…a hidden semiological realm and a kind of alternative public sphere which operates beyond the understanding of both liberal and radical commentators.” (36) This self-segregated space, where a specific type of sociality is developed according to the world-views of the marginalized subjects that make up the graffiti subculture, is undoubtedly another empowering aspect of graffiti life, even beyond the “signal jamming” discussed by Baudrillard and Harold, or the grasps at Romantic individuality described by Susana Loza.
When "official graffiti" is employed in our vicinity, is it that the bodily trace of the agents responsible for its placement is invisible to us? Or is it that, by virtue of their corporeal proximity to the national ideal, those "official graffiti artists," urban planners, senators, local representatives, federal bureaus, and their bodies, go unnoticed?
This is perhaps the source of objection to that low-tech, seemingly apolitical graffiti which simply deploys a name, an "empty signifigant," (37) as Chastanet says, in that embodied within it are traces of that marked body, and by extension, potential for the subversion of racist and classist normativities that are contained within a spatial text authored by the dominant.
(1) Coombe, Rosemary. The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Print. (P. 57)
(2) Jean Baudrillard, “KOOL KILLER, or The Insurrection of Signs” in Symbolic Exchange and Death (London: Sage, 1993) (P. 80)
(3) Loza, Susana. Email to the author. April 2009.
(4) Austin, Joe. Taking the Train. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Print. (P. 145)
(5) Ibid. (P. 146)
(6) Turner, Joe. Hunt, Allen. "Official Graffiti of the Everyday." Law and Society Review 30(1996): 455-480. Electronic Resource.
(7) Thomas Markus (1995) cited in: Turner, Joe. Hunt, Allen. "Official Graffiti of the Everyday." Law and Society Review 30(1996): 455-480. Electronic Resource. (P. 476)
(7) Jean Baudrillard, “KOOL KILLER, or The Insurrection of Signs” in Symbolic Exchange and Death (London: Sage, 1993) (P. 80)
(8) Chastanet, François. Pixação: São Paulo Signature. 1st ed. Toulouse, FR: XGPress, 2007. Print. (P. 233)
(10) Turner, Joe. Hunt, Allen. "Official Graffiti of the Everyday." Law and Society Review 30(1996): 455-480. Electronic Resource. (P. 475)
(11) Coombe, Rosemary. The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Print. (P. 170- 177)
(12) Ibid. (P. 171)
(13) Keith, Michael. After the Cosmopolitan?. New York: Routledge, 2005. Print. (P. 137)
(14) Loza, Susana. Email to the author. April 2009.
(15) Cited in: Keith, Michael. After the Cosmopolitan?. New York: Routledge, 2005. Print. (P. 137)
(16) Jean Baudrillard, “KOOL KILLER, or The Insurrection of Signs” in Symbolic Exchange and Death (London: Sage, 1993) (P. 80)
(17) Ibid. (P. 80)
(18) Ibid. (P. 78)
(19) Hebdige, Dick. “The Function of Subculture.” From The Cultural Studies Reader. ed. Simon During, 2nd ed.. New York: Routledge, 1999. 441-50. (P. 444)
(20) Jean Baudrillard, “KOOL KILLER, or The Insurrection of Signs” in Symbolic Exchange and Death (London: Sage, 1993) (P. 80/81)
(21) Loza, Susana. Email to the author. April 2009.
(22) Jean Baudrillard, “KOOL KILLER, or The Insurrection of Signs” in Symbolic Exchange and Death (London: Sage, 1993) (P. 84)
(23) Ibid. (P. 84)
(24) Keith, Michael. After the Cosmopolitan?. New York: Routledge, 2005. Print. (P. 143)
(25) Foster, Hal. Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (1985).
(26) Harold, Christine. “Pranking Rhetoric: ‘Culture Jamming’ as Media Activism.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 21(2004): 189-211
(27) Schiller, Marc. “UPDATED: Nike The Ripper - Seen On The Streets of Munich .” [Weblog Wooster Collective] 1/26/2007. Web. 20 Mar 2009.
(28) Jean Baudrillard, “KOOL KILLER, or The Insurrection of Signs” in Symbolic Exchange and Death (London: Sage, 1993) (P. 82)
(29) Jones, Jonathan. [Weblog Jonathan Jones on Art] 4/15/2009. Uk Guardian.Web.19 Apr 2009.
