Troy R. Lovata - Understanding Graffiti : Multidisciplinary Studies from Prehistory to the Present.

UNDERSTANDING
GRAFFITI

MULTIDISCIPLINARY STUDIES FROM PREHISTORY TO THE PRESENT

EDITED BY

TROY LOVATA & ELIZABETH OLTON

First published 2015 by Left Coast Press, Inc.

Published 2016 by Routledge
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Copyright 2015 Taylor & Francis

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Understanding graffiti: multidisciplinary studies from prehistory to the present / edited by Troy Lovata and Elizabeth Olton.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-61132-867-7 (hardback)
ISBN 978-1-61132-868-4 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-61132-869-1 (institutional eBook)
ISBN 978-1-61132-870-7 (consumer eBook)
1. GraffitiHistory. I. Lovata, Troy, 1972- II. Olton, Elizabeth.
GT3912.U53 2015
o8odc23

2015008320

ISBN 978-1-61132-868-4 paperback
ISBN 978-1-61132-867-7 hardback

Elizabeth Olton and Troy Lovata

ELIZABETH OLTON & TROY LOVATA

W e, the editors of this volume, share an interest in the varied functions and contexts of graffiti. We come from differing training and experience: Lovata is an anthropologist/archaeologist; Olton is an art historian. When we began to formulate this book, we found ourselves separately teaching about images, culture, and graffiti in the explicitly interdisciplinary Honors College at the University of New Mexico. The Honors College asks faculty to generate their own curricula based on individual experience. No specific text lists are required, nor are specific courses taught unless faculty in the College proposes them. We were asked to be experts and use our expertise as we saw fit. Weas our own entries in this volume showwere separately interested in understanding the practice and function of graffiti. Our individual circumstances also showed us that the topic was much larger than any single field or methodological approach. In our ensuing conversations, it became clear that each of us was synthesizing diverse resources, diverse data, and diverse approaches to the study of graffiti, and pushing our students to do the same. Juxtapositions of graffiti, images, and texts stirred multiple questions, research projects, and understandings. Separately, we concluded that graffiti a form of expression both ancient and modern, public and privateis a medium of communication that crosses boundaries among academics, cultural theorists, public policy experts, and laymen. Understanding graffiti requires a broader perspective of the contexts of this expression, as well as more inclusive working definitions of its forms, both in research and in teaching.

Much of the extant literature on graffiti is centered on the history of the form or a typology of inscriptions or art styles. Work based around problems or themes that highlight diverse contexts, histories, and styles of graffiti is rare in the prevailing literature. We found these chronologies, descriptions, and hagiographic artist/writer biographies insufficient to teach this topic in an interdisciplinary setting. Against this backdrop, we proposed this volume. Our aim is to show how insightful scholars from different disciplines and perspectives approach and understand graffiti. Rather than defining what graffiti is or is not, the following 15 chapters demonstrate the varieties of contemporary practice in analyzing the expression (known as graffiti). This introduction and the brief guides that precede each section are intended to help the reader synthesize the varied case studies included in the volume.

Graffiti by its nature is cross-disciplinary; a breadth of research underlies its universal appeal and its efficacy as a form of communication. Expressing oneself through visual narrative, symbolic languages, or iconic marks is a tool in our quest as humans to make sense of the world and ourselves. Today, the act of scrawling phrases in spray paint over a surface does not always engender praise. Nonetheless, these unsanctioned messages have become embedded in the visual culture of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Scholars know that erasing graffiti with swaths of white paint will not stop this expression; graffiti writers will merely adapt their texts and morph their imagery to new contexts and other surfaces. Incising an image or phrase on a wall, tree trunk, or fresco; painting a billboard or a train; and reshaping stone are socially embedded acts that invite the viewer to engage in a dialogue (Baird and Taylor 2011). Experiencing these texts changes viewers; it asks them to see differently.

The concept of vandalism in the form of spray can markings and contemporary ordinances banning the practice evolved in New York City in the late 1970s. Contrasts between brash colors, black contour lines, and compressed scripts were hallmarks of the wildstyle from almost 40 years ago, a style that continues to this day. The rapid proliferation of this aggressive style of writing appearing on the walls of urban centers all over the world has become an international signifier of rebellion.

In 1993, cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard described the graffiti of New York City as a positive, if not revolutionary, act, calling it the symbolic destruction of social relations (Baudrillard 1993, 77). Baudrillard took pleasure in the leveling effect on social mores induced by the tags and wildstyle calligraphy he saw in subway tunnels. He cheered their subversion of official signs and the chaos that ensued. The pervasive, repeated marks that he found aggressively painted on walls and trains were largely unintelligible to Baudrillard. Thus, they became empty signifiers and, for a poststructural semiotician, they symbolized an act of war that bombarded the banality and excess of late twentieth-century life.

By its very nature, graffiti is subversive because it is applied to a surface where it technically does not belong, changing the built environment (Frood 2013, 287). Daniell ( of this volume for a study of graffiti on trees in wilderness settings). This universality makes it hard to define. Like quicksilver, it is not easily contained. Its malleability is both its strength and its weakness. The very presence of graffiti on a wall or on a train, incised on architecture or inside a church, scrawled on a bathroom stall, displayed in a gallery, or seen among ancient ruins, allows it to become a catalyst for dialogue and controversy. When graffiti in these many contexts are juxtaposed, as they are in this book, graffiti becomes a complex expression that can be explored as a cultural document and as a witness to human experience that rarely coincides with dominant cultural narratives. Instead, it tends to run parallel to or intersect at hard perpendiculars to such narratives.