I mean it won’t hurt to just look, not like you’d have to go out of your way…
Most people don’t see anything of value in the graffiti they walk by, and i simply cannot abide this.
I understand the stigma around graffiti. Unless you’re particularly fond of it (like myself), most Graffiti seems to add very little to the space which they occupy.
They can even seem to take from a space by plastering an otherwise innocent street sign or wall with “Hank Wuz Here”
But what if i told you that there’s a lot more depth to graffiti than meets the eye.
Personally, I like graffiti, because it comes from within the community. It shows how different people want to express themselves when they have absolutely no guidelines or help on how to do so. To me it’s about people expressing themselves and interacting with their environment.
Let me be clear, i’m not saying you need to remember every middle finger you see drawn on the dumpster near the 7/11 by some bored middle schoolers. I’m talking about the kind of graffiti that’s created with intent. Take the image below for example.
The graffiti pictured above reads “CLAIRE MIDDLETON I LOVE YOU WILL U MARRY ME”. Nobody knows for certain who did it, but it became something of an urban legend. People would gawk at it and try to unravel it’s mysteries. People even protested when a company was awarded the land and bulldozed the abandoned building it was written on.
I’ll admit the handwriting sucks, but don’t let that distract from my point here.
Who did it? Who is Clair Middleton and do they even exist? Did they say yes?
My point is that someone scaled a building and proposed to their girlfriend. That or someone got bored and figured it would be funny. Either way this piece of graffiti marked the city in an unimaginable way.
If you still have lingering questions about the Sheffield piece, you might find some answers in this video.
This is why you need to remember that there’s more to graffiti than writing names, or swear words, or cool pictures, or property damage.
After all, graffiti is just another way of conveying information. Be it a message for someone or just signing your name and letting the world know that; for the brief flicker of time that was your life, you were here.
Now i know i haven’t sold you fully on it yet so let me just put something else out there, let me paint you a picture:
There are also economic factors that can go into graffiti. Which isn’t surprising given the amount of politics that also goes into graffiti as a genre. Like this signature Banksy piece, which brings up issues of environmental catastrophe and pollution by juxtaposing a kid playing in the snow and a dumpster fire.
There’s propaganda stickers that i see on the street lights on my way to and from classes. There’s a graffiti piece near the light on the way to University Station that reads “Girls Give Better Dick”. There are an untold number of markings and stickers on the street signs. There’s this one stop sign i always see on the way back to my dorm where someone wrote the words “EATING MEAT” under the “STOP”.
Imagine if every time you went home you went home you saw a stop sign like that. The first time you see it it might stick out. You might even react to it. But as time goes by you would stop paying it any attention, it would become background noise to you as you walked.
However, so to would the sentiment of vegetarianism/veganism become more normalized in your brain. In that little subtle way, that sign would likely influence you.
My point being that these are examples of how graffiti can be used to both challenge, reinforce, or otherwise change our world views.
To sum everything up, graffiti is art, and just like art, there’s art you get something out of and art that means nothing to you. But in order to engage with art in any capacity, you have to look at it.
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