Seven Red

One of my colleagues sent me this link, which describes the work of “street artist” Jesse Graves, who uses mud and stencils for his “graffiti,” his reasoning being that “it wouldn’t make sense to use spray paint, because it’s a toxic substance.” Graves thus goes around putting up political messages (Stop Torture in Illinois, or Reduce, Reuse, Compost); not surprisingly, when Graves brought his act to Chicago and “volunteers fanned out across the city…[n]one were arrested or spoken to sharply.”

I want to discuss this briefly because it goes to some of the points I’ve been making here. As attentive readers well know, this sort of thing does not fly with me at all. Here’s Graves hitting all the points that I generally dislike:

“I’m trying to break down the negative connotations that people have with graffiti,” he says.  “A lot of people think that graffiti is about damaging property and it’s a destructive act.  I see what I’m doing as street art, it’s about getting a message out there, and also about beautifying a space.  I don’t want to look at an ugly gray wall in a place that I walk by every day.  I’d rather look at something I consider beautiful.”

Graffiti as “art,” graffiti as “getting a message out there, “graffiti as aestheticized.” Yuck, yuck, and yuck. Once again, this is a pretty clear demonstration of how graffiti culture gets normalized for standard consumption. But you start to see the outlines of the transformation, and can therefore note the problem of street graffiti through the negative definition. Both the normalized version and the pathologized version have an aesthetic component, but in the normalized version, aesthetics takes the lead. We’ve already covered that at some length. What’s interesting here is that you see the real transformation of pure asignifying risk economy (street graffiti) into something like a standard politics of representation (normalized graffiti with a “message”). If graffiti is normalized, it is along these two dimensions: the aesthetic aspect is heightened, while asignifying practices (the tag) are reduced to representative messages (Stop Torture!). The twist here is that the medium coincides with the message, so to speak.

Is that an improvement? Sure, I guess. I said I dislike calling this stuff graffiti, but I don’t dislike what Graves is doing. It’s both interesting and not interesting at precisely the point where the medium (mud) itself takes over the evacuation of risk from the practice. Nicolas Lampert, a professor at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who “follows street art very closely” says that “City governments don’t know how to respond” to the mud stencils, since they would ostensibly wash off some surfaces in the rain, etc. On the one hand, this is a transformation of the formal aspects of graffiti that I discussed in terms of REVS iron-worked tags. So, great. And, as a result, Graves establishes some liminal zone that’s seemingly outside the reach of current law. Also great. But what seems most like an escape trajectory on both materials and legal controls might also be where the practice most obviously departs from risk. At the level of the materials and the medium. It’s farthest from a line of flight precisely where it institutes one.  Graves’ work escapes from the toxicity and supposed negativity of street graffiti (it’s always only negative from the viewpoint of property, of capital), but in doing so, loses the element of exit within those practices. This may be good or bad. And maybe I’m just a purist on these matters (and I’m definitely a spray paint and technique purist, and I hate fucking stencils). It’s interesting, but I’ll still take the 15 year old tagger kid over this any day of the week.

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