Street art, that reasonably appropriate, yet volatile signifier, has experienced a rather explosive growth in the past decade, particularly in such cities as Berlin, Paris, and Los Angeles. In Echo Park, which is on the border of LA’s downtown, the artist Shepard Fairey has established Studio One, which houses his corporate design and advertising offices as well as a first floor gallery space. Soon after Studio One was opened, a neighborhood blog published a story revealing the various anti-graffiti technologies the company has employed to prevent tagging, such as a graffiti-resistant coating on the building exterior up to a series of cameras that are emblazoned with Fairey’s trademark ‘Obey’ insignia. With obvious relish, the article noted the irony of a world-famous graffiti/street artist endeavoring to protect his private property from the vandalism of tagging. The insinuation that Fairey was a corporate NIMBY drew a scathing response from the artist, who accused the blog of trite sensationalism, arguing that if he wanted to keep his building free of graffiti ‘writing,’ such was his business. Furthermore, as Fairey asserted that he had been arrested all over the world for vandalism, he acknowledged that erasure, defacement, and transgression were essential aspects of the practice and ethos of street art. If his building were ‘bombed,’ then he (or presumably one of his employees) would merely paint over the writing, such is the ephemeral, marginalized aspect of the art form.
This exchange illustrates the rather twisted and contentious nature of the phenomenon of graffiti/street art. Whether we examine the practice at the corporate, professional level of Fairey and other such proper ‘street artists’ such as Banksy, or whether we merely turn our gaze upon the countless, anonymous tags that are etched upon our lived environment, the practice consistently involves a dialectical exchange of obscenity and illicitness. That is to say, the various practices of street art are typically illegal, and thus the form derives so much of its ideological power from the idea of transgression. Yet, as much recent work in Cultural Studies has shown, transgression is an over-determined concept, one easily seduced by the platitudes of resistance. Indeed, much published work on graffiti and street art reproduces the tired clichés of resistance and subversion of the ‘mainstream’ through the guerilla practices of tagging and bombing. The line here between hagiographic self-promotion and the articulation of relevant aesthetic principles is rather thin. At its worst, it recedes into a destructive boy’s club of dumb antics and nihilistic coolness.
As such, this essay attempts to move beyond the accepted terms of the practice, and to examine the phenomena of graffiti from a philosophically-inflected perspective. For all of the volatility of the practice, and its issues of legitimacy and profit, issues that truly amount to a critical aporia in regards to defining, sorting out, and stabilizing the major players, there is a multitude of unknown, anonymous writers that are tagging the everyday spaces of their own worlds. This sense of property is the animus of youth as it extends ever outward in its attempts to define the boundaries of its prerogative. Pissing on fences, tearing down trees, skateboarding over stairs, spray-painting one’s tag on the walls of everything reachable, all this ecstatic synergy of the hormonal mind upon the wraught world is spent like so many games of domination and territory. This world of shit, of bizarre sub/urban rituals, the world merely multiplies the surface of what can be defaced, of the interface of the public and the private. Tagging antagonizes this interface, pulling the flat surface of the environment into an abysmal point of singularity. A hieroglyphic signature, a writing of scratched, pigeon translation that speaks to a dialogic economy of waste, excess, and dissemination: trees, curbs, trash cans, windows, doors, sidewalks, walls. What reading can be culled from these encounters? What kind of metaphysics arises from such a rigid formalism nearly devoid of content? Baudrillard suggested that our last chance for transcendence in a saturated, over-signified world is the Pure (fatal) Object, which seduces by virtue of its ‘fatal’ unintelligibility or meaninglessness, but its total resistance to interpretation and representation. Through graffiti, we encounter a metaphysics revived as a thinking pertaining to impersonal forces much more than to the subject, a thinking concerned with pure memory, imagination, event, origin, time, destiny, fatality, with the conditions of possibility for subjectivity (the pre-reflective, the pure, the impersonal, the inhuman) rather than with subjectivity itself.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete