The big story in Chicago this week—apart from the fact that Illinois Democrats elected for Lieutenant Governor a pawnbroker who once held a knife to his girlfriend (who happened to be a masseuse/prostitute, and by “once,” I mean five years ago)—is the major service cut for the CTA. Buses, trains, everything will have fewer runs, and therefore more time between runs, and the whole machinery of public transportation will therefore be more crowded. A thousand CTA workers lost their jobs. This all went into effect yesterday. So I get on the train this morning at around 7:20, and see this. I don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve seen a live paint tag on the inside of a running train, but I’d guess twenty years. It’s like that “Life After People” show, where everything collapses in 36 hours. Tuesday morning, the second day of the service cuts, and they’re running rush hour trains with effin’ paint tags on the inside doors? Is it gonna be a free-for-all?
MEALZ, Brown Line
Oh, and it appears that my obnoxious chuckling over southern snowstorms has come back at me, as we’ve doubled the season total in like the last six hours.
Looks like NINE is at it again, hitting the Montrose rooftop for what must be the fourth or fifth time this year. This time he’s using a completely new style, which is a relief, since the old one was getting a little stale. I’ll have to get more pics, since the Brown Line rooftops are getting just infected; must be the recession.
NINE H20, Brown Line off Montrose
NINE detail: SPRAY IT, DON’T SAY IT. (Couldn’t agree more…)
So she shows me a copy of Time Out Chicago that features the web site bombchicago, billed as “perhaps the only website dedicated to documenting the local street-art scene.” Er, excuse me. Of course, my readers well know that I don’t document so-called “street art;” I document graffiti. So I guess that’s semi-accurate. The proprietor of the site, operating in full resentment mode, gets all pissed off that the state thought doing business as “Bomb Chicago” was in poor taste, and he says the following:
The graffiti artists that [the site is] following encounter the same attitude. They’re fighting censorship, and we’re documenting their process. In doing that, we became a victim of the same censorship.
I never met a graffiti writer in my life who was “battling censorship,” but then, they didn’t go around calling themselves “street artists” either, so there it is. But she pointed out the funny part of the article:
Last week, we followed up with the DBS, explaining Lee’s situation and asking if it was aware that bomb is a graffiti term. “Until you said what you said, I didn’t know what it was,” said Marilyn, a communications supervisor who didn’t give her last name. She explained that the process of determining whether an assumed name qualifies as offensive is subjective. “The final determination is made by our specialists,” she said. “It’s up to, basically, the office.”
So we asked Marilyn to reconsider Bomb Chicago. She put us on hold, talked for several minutes to her supervisor, Robert Durchholz, then got back on the line: “He doesn’t see any reason it shouldn’t go through,” she reported. “He said it’s not really distasteful.”
So for all Lee’s sniffiness about “censorship,” it turns out that the state bureaucrats really don’t give a flying fuck about “street art,” and figure it’s A-OK if it’s only about, like, bombing and not, you know, bombing. I should note here that any graffiti can be prosecuted as a felony in the State of Illinois. In any case, here are some felonies, since I’m not really “dedicated to documenting the local street art scene.” Harrumph.
NOTEEF fill-in, off Diversey stop, Brown Line, August 2009.
TYPER, XMEN Crew, Off Diversey stop, Brown Line, August 2009.
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.
OK, not Goethe, but F&N Matt of Former Graduate Education Institution sent me the following images of graffiti in Roma, so I thought I’d post them here. A few notes first.
1. Global Diffusion – I still think it’s curious that graffiti would have caught on. As we know, it’s a global phenomenon, but isn’t that strange. So, coming out of New York in the 1970′s, you get three distinct phenomena that basically cover the globe in about 30 years: economic neoliberalism / financialization, hip hop culture, and street graffiti. And you get the sense that these are all connected in some way, whether it be through the transformations in language and public space or other vectors.
2. On Trains – I’m always amazed to see operating commuter train lines with graffiti on them. In the US, various transportation and security agencies have already solved the problem of keeping the trains clean, so you almost never see these trains leave a yard like this. Maybe freight trains, which nobody cares about anyway, but not commuter lines. So to see stuff dated “09″ from Rome is still kind of jarring and funny; these trains aren’t just hit, they’re killed. I remember being on a train going from Brooklyn to Manhattan – maybe the old B line, since I was probably coming back from Borough Park. It stopped for a while in the tunnel between Brooklyn and Manhattan (did the B take a tunnel? I don’t remember), and when it came out on the other side, the conductor sent us all off the train. While it was stopped in the tunnel, some writers had killed it front to back with quick outlines; there was nothing on it when I got on at Fort Hamilton Parkway. A pretty ballsy move, all told. But they were sending it back to the yard immediately. The MTA wouldn’t let the train run for even one stop looking like that, and they’d toss out all the riders to get it buffed. And this was back in ’93 or ’94. So to see these running is still amazing. Trains haven’t run with graffiti on the New York subway for twenty years already.
Anyway, thanks to Matt for the flicks. And feel free to send your own – with one proviso. Don’t send me any of that Banksy stencil shit from London (which people seem to think I’d enjoy), or any other “politically transgressive street art,” or whatever the eff they’re calling it. As you well know, I don’t care about it, and I won’t post it.
NEUTRO and THE, Rome, Italy
KO duster, Rome, Italy – I like this one especially, because KO either got chased off and perhaps caught, or he was rocking these quick fill-ins on an operating train (i.e., when the train was in service). As you can see from the quick black of the fill color, he did these in a big rush. This is what we call a duster. But you’ll also notice that he didn’t have time to complete the outline on the second fill in: he left the “O” without an outline, and you can see how the outline trails off and gets shakey at the bottom of the second “K.” There are only two reasons why you will see an incomplete outline: either the writer had to move, or the surface did. I think our friend KO here got a little greedy, and tried to do two quick fills when he probably only had time to do one. Given the rushed character of the fill-in and the way the second K gets shaky at the bottom, I think he jumped on the tracks and did these fills while the train was stopped at a station. KO also missed his outline target on the first K. He couldn’t finish because the train was pulling out. Which is a big thumbs up for fucking nuts, of course.
In perhaps the best graffiti story of the year, genius Chicago Alderman James Balcer called up the Department of Streets and Sanitation to have an unsightly graffiti mural removed. This mural was even more outrageous for being mysteriously signifying: it portrayed the system of cameras being installed all around the city in a somewhat less than positive light, and the CPD along with them. The Alderman, annoyed by this urban blight and double-outraged by the insult cast by these vandals at the police department, made the call, and out came the Graffiti Blasters program with their buckets of dark brown paint to beautify the Bridgeport neighborhood. There’s just one problem: it was a completely legal painting. From the Chicago Public Radio story:
Villa did the work as part of a local art festival. The mural itself was on private property, on a wall owned by the mother of a festival organizer. Villa says several Chicago Police officers approached him about the work while he painted. He thinks they may have been offended but he says the painting doesn’t have an anti-police message.
Oops.
Now the Alderman is stuttering and stammering about having received complaints and the like. What a buffoon. I don’t, however, buy the story that the Alderman was trying to “censor” a message. Rather, the thing just looks like street graffiti because it has the same aesthetic, and it was clearly done with spray paint. So you get this whole jumping-the-gun complex based almost solely on appearance. But consider the default: the city doesn’t even enquire about the ownership of the wall itself, the property! They just go ahead and paint over it. So you get this hilarious reversal whereby the Chicago Alderman and the Graffiti Blaster task force of the Department of Streets and Sanitation is actually vandalizing the property by painting over the graffiti! Shouldn’t somebody arrest the Alderman for criminal conspiracy of some sort? Wasn’t the Alderman damaging somebody’s property for the sake of some aesthetic sensibility?
I want to file this under “Shit that Makes Graffiti Writers Laugh.” My favorite line from the radio story? “What the mural is supposed to mean is anyone’s guess.” Heh heh heh. That’s the cherry on top.
The last post deals with one high tech means for killing graffiti culture, the Wii spraypaint controller. It’s fitting that the very next day I should hear of another. NPR’s All Things Considered had a story titled “Cities Rely on High-Tech Method to Stop Graffiti” (you can listen here) on some new high tech sensor that nabs those little tagging punks in the act, son. In the last post, I mentioned in an off-hand way that the human sense organs could detect the chemical make-up of even different colors of spray paint, given enough exposure. Apparently, this newfangled graffiti bustin’ implement works the same way, detecting the chemical trace of aerosol paint, and immediately alerting cops to the location of spraying. The story is very hush hush about how the thing actually works, no doubt because there are easy work-arounds, or because the sensor is too expensive for widespread deployment, or because they generally want to create a panoptic effect of some kind by implying its presence, or (likely) a combination of these reasons. The sensor, in any case, is the flip-side of the dual control strategy, where one side brings graffiti into the fold by aestheticizing it, while the other side brings it into the fold through legal controls, even including chemical detection. And indeed, the interview (I think with Melissa Block) plays out the dynamic I’ve been describing here fairly well. After a discussion of the cost of graffiti on communities followed by an elusive description of the technology, you get to the real meat of it. Block, playing out the liberal line, at some point asks, “Do you think there’s any artistic merit to what they do?” This is the rescue operation on the poor inner city kids with no legitimate “creative outlet.” It’s the moment of aestheticization that separates graffiti (for good reason) from other forms of “vandalism.”
But the police chief she’s interviewing, named Manny Solano, actually knows what he’s talking about. His answer goes something like this: “Listen, sure there’s artistic merit, and we’ve put up ‘free walls’ for them to do their murals on, but they just don’t take to it. And if you actually talk to the graffiti writers, they seem to hate the free legal walls. The murals are very beautiful, some of them, but these kids don’t want to do the legal pieces. They want the adrenaline rush.” It’s pretty clear, in other words, that Solano actually listens to writers, like any good cop, and hears what they’re saying . Now, I think this easy answer about “adrenaline” is probably right, and certainly works with the argument I’ve been making here, but it is itself too isolated, too medicalized, as if the whole complex economy boils down that. Adrenaline is an effect rather than a cause; it explains little on its own. But it’s a hundred times more correct than this business of the legal walls and creative outlets. In any case, if you want a better sense of how this stuff actually works, listen to Solano’s response. He’s dead on accurate, and demonstrates real knowledge of the culture.
Thanks to Unnamed Work Colleague for this video, which displays a Nintendo Wii controller turned into a can of spraypaint:
A few thoughts on this technology. While I think stuff like this is really cool from a technological perspective, and I think bagging on virtual toys for not being “real” just ends up resentful and silly, I do think this version of graffiti reinforces the point I’ve been making here: graffiti is most comfortable to people when it is aestheticized and therefore removed from the realm of social conflict. On the face of it, this should be a fairly obvious point: a dominant culture would prefer if graffiti writers engaged in legal, “beautiful artwork” rather than mucking up the public surfaces. Right. Duh. But the stakes of it, as I’ve said here before, have everything to do with the exit value of graffiti as a non-signifying sign. It’s not just vandalism. It’s a signature system (with all that implies for identity and control) that operates in a completely opaque alternative economy. That graffiti communities also have well-developed aesthetic systems and values only complicates the problem, since the aesthetics – especially where they don’t jibe with dominant aesthetics (i.e., the tag rather than the mural) – further emphasizes the non-familiarity of the practices. Conversely, aesthetics then becomes the vehicle to normalize graffiti practices and include them within a framework of dominant cultural understanding. The graffiti mural – and especially the legal mural (at the community center or similar authorized location) – eliminates exit, makes graffiti familiar, domesticates it: Oh, those kids do some beautiful artwork…I just hate when they write that chicken-scratch on the store gates. As soon as you hear that, you’re dealing with somebody who doesn’t get it, at all.
So, how might that relate to our Wii controller here. As I said, it’s trivial to note that a virtual activity is not the same as a real activity. Wii tennis is not tennis. We all know this, and repeating it is not particularly interesting. It’s easy enough, in other words, to bemoan the loss of materiality involved in such virtualizations, and no small number of “philosophers of technology” had made tenure braying the same argument. Yes, when you’re writing graffiti the weather counts, the wind counts, the surface counts, the way you’re balanced on a two foot ledge with a fifty foot drop beneath you counts, your caps clog, your paint freezes, and your finger gets numb, and you can smell, yes smell, the colors. (Some guys in college tested me on this claim. They sprayed one of three colors, I think they were Cherry Red, True Blue, and Ultra Flat Black Krylons, the test being whether I could identify the color based on the smell. Of course I did; I can identify the scent of Ultra Flat Black at 50 yards). So, yes, materiality counts, but that’s not really the issue. For the Wii controller, it’s the specific mode of deviating or abstracting from the “real” or material activity that’s important. The spraypaint controller implies that graffiti is merely the act of using spraypaint on a wall or surface, as if that act can be isolated from all the social forces that actually shape graffiti practices. That is, it reduces the activity to an aesthetic operation. I’d suggest that this virtualization is, in fact, very different from the one that occurs when baseball or tennis are translated into Wii. In the case of the Wii spraypaint, the technology actually removes the key elements that function as value within graffiti cultures, with the primary element being risk. Graffiti practices mean nothing if they are separated from the cultural value of risk that drives the whole graffiti enterprise. In this sense, the technology perfectly mirrors the dominant cultural response toward graffiti, when its not simply raging and throwing kids in jail. That is, it strips the practices of the one thing that makes them socially interesting.
One final note: I said earlier that I think this thing is cool, and I do. I have no doubt that it will spur many creative uses, and I suspect graffiti writers may even use it for new and unforeseen things. As I noted in this post, graffiti is best when its transforming itself, and so is technology. It’s not a question of being a purist. More connections, then, more! But it’s also useful to be very specific about how and what transformations take place, and what they do. So…
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