Graffiti is Dead... Long Live Graffiti!

by Michail Galanakis*

Art or vandalism? Creative expressions or signs of psychotic behaviour? The phenomenon of street art – graffiti, tagging, stencil – challenges our rights to public space. Depending on our social and ontological position, graffiti may be perceived as a creative outlet for those people whose oppressed imagination translates via spray-paint into a “voice.” Or it may be perceived as the visual littering of our public spaces, our walls, our cities. Manolis Andriotakis (2005) presents an equally littering source that has been normalised to the extreme: commercial advertisement.

The activities of bigger and smaller corporate capital, the high-rise of multinationals, the fortified civic buildings, the monstrous squares with surveillance cameras and constant policing, all these are the ideal occurrences of public space, while the modest drawings of a youngster are criminal acts, and decrease our freedom. The fact that there are whole areas inaccessible to citizens, and that our activities are monitored, is not oppressive. Oppressive is the youngster with the spray paint or the marker at hand. (Andriotakis 2005)[1]

We can contemplate on the legitimised and normalised docility that urbanites have to live with and the fact that clean and orderly public spaces still pervade the popular discussion on public participation and the right to the city. In doing so, we blindly disregard the colonisation of our cities by advertisements, pacifying consumerism, and soulless accumulation of wealth.

An interesting interpretation of street art is that the “author,” slave to the primordial instinct to territorialise, leaves his mark, pretty much like a dog. It is interesting how discourses about street art essentialise the masculine nature of urban guerrilla art-fare. “Those youngsters” are almost magically stereotyped as young men. Norman Mailer (1974) [2] in an essay he wrote on New York graffiti, talks of his informants; young men in the ghettos of the big city who wanted to break loose from the socio-spatial restrictions imposed on them by colouring the metallic carcass of subway trains. Mailer talks of a long gone era when graffiti and tagging were “shouts” from the ghetto sub-cultures.

Nowadays, street art in its variety can be seen as an artistic form of urban activism. It can also be seen as a “shout” against the individualism normalised and internalised, against the anonymity and alienation of public space and the public sphere. When only the legitimised rights of the state authorities and market interests define public space, a can of spray-paint, a sticker or a stencil, may be one way of protesting. These expressions litter our clean cityscape, they constitute visual noise and worth punitive measures and zero tolerance, for they are the voices of our dormant conscience, our child-like curiosity and our desire to open up closures. These “voices” may get expelled to virtual space, they may be hunted down for they offend our rights to be peacefully muted and passive; they nevertheless insist on reminding us what public space shouldn’t be: claimable by all (to turn on its head a statement by Erving Goffman) [3].

Helsinki 01.01.2009

* Doctor of Arts (Taik)

References
[1] Andriotakis, M. (2005). City Scethes [Σχέδια ΠÏŒλης ]. Athens: Nefelh. (in Greek)
[2] Mailer, N. (1974). The Faith of Graffiti. New York: Praeger. Also check: http://thefaithofgraffiti.blogspot.com/
[3] Goffman, E. (1972). Relations in Public. Microstudies of the Public Order. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Goffman writes: “[…] public in the sense of being non-claimable.” (Goffman 1972, p.51)

Photo by Michail Galanakis Helsinki, 2009. Photo by Michail Galanakis

Lisbon, 2008. Photo by Michail Galanakis Athens, 2007.

Athens. Photo by Dimitris Theodosis - Menegos, P. & Theodosis, D. (2007). The Street Art in Athens. [Τοιχοδρομίες. Το Street Art στην Αθήνα. Vol.1]. Athens: OΞΥ. (in Greek)

Eindhoven, 2008. Photo by Michail Galanakis

Helsinki, 2009. Photo by Michail Galanakis