a modest proposal

Picture this...
Sitting in an urban borough, one can look out into the night and witness a world of activity. There is perhaps more energy in the scene viewed than exhibited in the same space during the daylight hours. To be certain, even on the coldest midnights, and even in the most dangerous streets taggers, political artists or vandals - depending on your own lineage – are hard at work. They illuminate hypocrisy, condemn corporate whoring, tell jokes and colour landscapes. These are the contemporary avant-gardes. With new technologies and techno-literacy growing faster than conventional literacy we are seeing a dramatic shift in the way these underground artists communicate. Is there such thing as globalized style? First one must consider if there is a standard form of graffiti at all. As one of the most diverse tangible forms of artistic expression, this political act is marked by a vast array of styles, uses and appropriations. Is this act a step in the move towards a new universal language and its fragmentation a rejection of the technological convergence in the same direction? I believe that graffiti is a departure from what I describe as upper case Art, something that has degenerated to a thin abstraction of disinterest and capital gain. At times it is represented by hate, qualified by misunderstanding and presented as teenage angst manifested on the walls of the public domain. However even these, albeit premature, rejections of the dominant state of affairs is something to be considered. Graffiti, even on the lowest level may house subtle nuances of oppression to extremely politicized arguments – and this high/low distinction perhaps has no place in quantifying this form.


Jumping Imagined Borders

Graffiti works across and against nation states, tearing away the mask of the concept itself and those who represent it. It gives legitimacy and recognition to groups and cultures washed over by imagined borders who form pockets of breath in each community. Graffiti helps to subvert the restrictions of nationalism and subverts the entire notion. From the earliest days of graffiti etched into the walls of the roman Pantheon to the modern streets of Toronto these activists, artists and freethinkers have etched out their own communities. Communities that know no geographical boundaries, for one traveling through the streets of London may recognize a style or signature that they had passed by in the West Bank. There are two reasons this phenomenon may occur (1) certain styles resonate worldwide; and (2) artists and peoples will relocate themselves to cover endless ground or announce their presence as fluid.

Communities Represent

As older technologies trickled down to the masses, and cultural forms disseminated into the favela there was a cross-pollination. It would be naive to assume that graffiti is a western thing, and that subordinate cultures picked up what our street legends began. However there was definitely an influence. C. Best describes how graffiti in the Caribbean was heavily developed in response to the struggling conditions of the people, but was impacted by the exposure to North American styles and forms. It is interesting to see how graffiti is used as a political tool in many countries around the world, and Best delivers an analysis of this South American style beyond its aesthetic features. […]
Transnational in style and technique, this lower case art is spread through diasporas, creolized and developed across borders. One of the strongest voices of the creolization movement has been Ulf Hannerz who discuses the counter-currents of culture blending in with the waves of globalization. This natural blending generates a birth of new styles without claim to region or nation, but to a mindset, a universal collective.

The Styling on the Wall

The written word has long been a strong tool of integration proliferation and the development of nations. When Guttenburg invented the printing press it gave birth to a revolution not only of knowledge for the common man, but for the spreading of ideas, of culture. Interestingly enough the press, first used for the spread of one dominant religious teaching, quickly gave way to the development of not only other dogmatic ambitions, but also pockets of dissent. Transient ideas, local concepts, and individual freedoms became widespread as people shared their own views through this new medium, through this common technology of the printed word. As literacy grew, so too did criticisms of the dominant culture. Not because the proletariat freshly began to develop dissenting and critical views, but that they finally had a way to communicate them. Indeed the spread of literacy aided the spread of culture, the ability to pass on, to share and to develop, but it also aided in a new form of this critique, one not bound by structure, by bourgeois policy or by dogmatic principle.