street aht, or "of course it's art, but is it any good?"

[rmd]

so, i don't dislike graffiti. in fact, some of it is, i think, pretty frickin awesome. it's ephemeral art. and yes, it's art. a lot of it isn't any *good*, but it's art in the same way that painting on cave walls is art. it's the same urge that put graffiti on walls in pompeii.

i find most plain old scrawled tags kind of boring. some stickers are interesting, although i haven't seen a lot around locally that rock my world. but i actually like big colorful well done sign-ins on places like highway underpasses that are otherwise dingy and boring. (also, i love twisted things like graffiti by using cleaning products to make "negative space" graffiti. a guy who tags as "SYM" looks to have done this along the southeast expressway, and i laugh every time i drive by it.) i keep resisting the urge to print up and paste up a bunch of the graffiti report cards that someone made up to critique graffiti and pasting them on walls around town.

i dislike vandalism, and i think it's wrong, but i have to admit there's something hypocritical in me if i think that someone painting their name in 6 foot high letters on a railroad bridge over a highway is bad, but think it's hilarious when someone paints "SURRENDER DOROTHY" on the railroad bridge over the highway overlooking the mormon temple along the DC beltway.

some of this comes out of considering turning my truck into an art car. some of it comes from stencilling some t-shirts i did a while back. and some of it comes from reading posterchild's blade diary with his stencils.

anyways.

this spring, i noticed a lot more very colorful graffiti showing up than i remember in past years. so i've started photographing it and putting the photos up on flickr. i'm also using the geotagging to map where, roughly, it's located.

the photos are here. i suspect there's a way to tell flickr to give you an rss feed of it if you're curious about when i upload more of them.

my favorite bit of graffiti is actually located around the corner from my house, on the side of a building that faces the railroad tracks. here's a shot of it, and here is a closer view. i'm conflicted -- on the one hand, it's on private property, but on the other hand, it's bright and colorful and as pleasing to my eye as some of the local mural art pieces i've seen around.

Comments

[koshmom.livejournal.com]

You ought to drive up to my house sometime. last summer I drew keith herring type pictures on my foundation.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

i remember you mentioned that! so cool.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

aha. looks like the guys who did the piece i like around the corner from my house also did one in a trainyard somewhere. photograph from a couple of years ago is here (http://outdoors.webshots.com/photo/1130282287054614070ZIgHul)

[wren13.livejournal.com]

This was neat, thanks for sharing.

[whipartist.livejournal.com]

You might enjoy Misk's artwork-- a fair bit of it was hanging in my old office building. www.misk1.com Ignore the crappy-assed flash site and hunt for the art.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

niiiiice.

[lil-brown-bat.livejournal.com]

I thought about this a lot, and finally came to this conclusion about the intersection of graffiti and art. Graffiti is no different from standing up on a streetcorner or a park or someone else's living room or anywhere, anywhere at all, that isn't your space or a space where you have permission to do your thing, and playing music. Your music could be a loud, ear-hurting blare of auditory shit, or it could be a quiet, subtle jewel of artistic brilliance, but that's not what's important. What's important is that you have appropriated a space that wasn't yours to express your "art". You have done so without consent, and in so doing, you have made the merit of your own art somewhat irrelevant.

Something for artists to think about when choosing their venue...

[frotz.livejournal.com]

I see a big difference between "streetcorner" and "someone else's living room". In the former case of public space, I really don't care whether some arbitrary person who has claimed authority has given permission, I care about whether it's a blare of auditory shit or a subtle jewel of artistic brilliance. What is public space? Whose consent is required to use it? From what does this claimed authority arise, and is it legitimate? (These are mostly rhetorical questions, but they're mostly what I think about when this subject comes up...)

[lil-brown-bat.livejournal.com]

Well, they're useful questions, but in answer to the second, a fair answer might be, "I don't know, but it requires more than the consent of a single individual or small group." Thus the graffiti "artist" who decides all on his-or-her-ownsome that a certain public space would best be used to showcase his/her "art" is grossly overstepping his/her bounds. And that, in fact, is exactly how graffiti works. Ain't no gettin' around that one.

[johnromkey.livejournal.com]

I feel the same way about graffiti. Did Corwin ever tell you about "Death Scrod" (or do you just know about it anyway)?

BTW, Flickr will happily give you a feed of photos you tag with 'graffiti' (http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=62691725@N00&tags=graffiti&lang=en-us&format=rss_200) but it doesn't look like it will give a feed from a set, at least I don't know how to get that from it.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

i drive by that building at the corner of park st and beacon st that had death scrod graffiti'd on a wall several times a week, actually. it's been painted over, but i still think of it as where the death scrod was.

is there a death scrod story?

[johnromkey.livejournal.com]

I didn't know there was more than one Death Scrod!

Um. Okay. I should Google things (http://www.deathscrod.net/) before talking (and I'll find myself mentioning Death Scrod in a survey created by palmwiz (http://surveycentral.org/survey/4207.html) seven years ago).

I have no idea what it means.

There was Death Scrod graffiti on a garage in the Wine & Cheese Cask parking lot. It got painted over. It came back... maybe more than once... Corwin was very amused by it... he was the one who knew that it kept coming back.

At least I think that's the story...

[johnromkey.livejournal.com]

Oh wait - maybe that's the same place :-)

[rmd.livejournal.com]

oop. hit post before i meant to. yeah, this is the dodkin (sp?) place a block or two down from the wine and cheese cask. i think it's the same place, as I think corwin and I have mentioned it to each other. It no longer has the Death Scrod graff on it, tho.

[tb]

If nothing gets broken or ruined, the line between vandalism and enhancement is subjective (like what do I mean by "ruined"). I don't like it when people tag beautiful "natural" things, like rocks and trees, but it's been going on for as long as there have been humans (a lot of the pictographs/petroglyphs people admire and attempt to interpret today were probably just graffiti back then). I also don't like it when people damage another individual person's work or property. I do like it when something funny is added to public human spaces. I feel there's a difference between tagging and humor, and public vs. private, but it's hard to define. This needs more thought.

I remember noticing lots of graffiti/murals the last time I was in St. John's, and now there's even more. Apparently some folks decided to channel all that energy instead of repressing it. I've got a few street art pictures from there which I'll eventually get around to posting.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

i love the idea of free walls. if they're not concerned with getting in and out before they risk getting busted, the general quality of art is going to go up. :-)