May 17, Here I Come!

Reprint - As I get closer and closer to graduating from UT with my masters degree, I find myself looking back over the last two years for what sticks out. I read dozens of books, hundreds of articles, brazillions of papers (slightly exaggerating here), participated in many discussions, listened to lectures, took notes, did research, etc, etc, etc. I know how privileged I am to have done this. So I think as far as my own products, the stuff that I wanted to get into and designed myself, I'm most proud of my graffiti project, my blog as a whole, and my research on juvenile correction facility curriculum. Because I've been a bit of a slacker lately as far as writing new stuff, I reprint for you below my graffiti project.

This project is about graffiti. I've been working on it since about the middle of the semester, recognizing early on that graffiti was an exception to the regular rules and theories about literacy, writing, art, and communicating. Despite its power in sending political and social messages, it's a crime. Regardless of what is written, the physical act is defacing "public" property, intellectual shared space set in the widest cultural context possible--people and life. The message has to be short and powerful, in a certain place. I got my pictures from a fantastic website which contains 500 images of graffiti photographed from all over the world, updated weekly. This site is a publishing house/record label type of thing, very cool.


Other thoughts--technically, cave drawings were graffiti.... it has existed since at least ancient Greek times. This is an ancient Pompeiian caricature of a politician. Tell me that doesn't look like Mr. Magoo. Here's an example of some vintage Roman tagging:

Quisquis amat. veniat. Veneri volo frangere costas fustibus et lumbos debilitare deae.

Si potest illa mihi tenerum pertundere pectus

quit ego non possim caput illae frangere fuste?

Whoever loves, go to hell. I want to break Venus's ribs with a club and deform her hips.

If she can break my tender heart

why can't I hit her over the head?

-CIL IV, 1284.

There's graffiti on the Great Wall of China, and on the Coliseum wall ("Suspirium puellarum Celadus thraex: "Celadus the Thracian makes the girls sigh"). It's on Signature Rock along the Oregon Trail, and has continued to evolve. Now closely entwined with hip hop culture, it can be found on subway cars, buildings, walls, bridges, and at the death cites of Princess Di, Biggy, Tupac, Jim Morrison, and many others, as well as in modern art galleries and museums. A portion of graffiti is considering tagging, known for its gangsta influence and territorial nature--taggers go by nicknames and have unique styles.

For these reasons and public fear of vandalism and high crime rates, penalties for public defacing are stiff. You might remember Michael Fay, the kid who got caned in Singapore in 1994. He got caught tagging. Here in the states, Giuliani and Daley passed laws in the early nineties as part of their Anti-Graffiti Task Force (NY) and Graffiti Blasters (Chicago) that resulted in $350 fines, regulations as to the locked-upness of spray paint in stores, and speedy graffiti removal when phoned in. But like all forms of expression when repressed by government, it continues to speak. Loudly.

Here's what I wanted to accomplish with this project:
1) To show how the messages evoke a particular emotion, a triggered memory, a communal agreement/disagreement, humor, sadness, self-reflection, etc.
2) To pay attention to the materials used--paint, props, scenery, etc, and notice how they are part of the message
3) To examine graffiti as both social action and art.
4) To explore the themes in graffiti messages I saw repeated with little variation--love/heartbreak, anger/revenge, anarchy/politics, religion/living, pop culture/materialism.

There were a lot of considerations in making this movie, my first. First, learning how to use Windows Movie Maker, importing sorted pictures, setting the timing, choosing the accompanying music, etc. Especially after our last class meeting when semiotics was discussed, there was a feeling of interconnectedness through all these decisions, and I realized making movies was harder than just yelling "cut!" and "print!" and dealing with movie stars. Each independent element is a sign--I didn't want the music to change or offer interpretation to the messages, but I wanted it to somehow fit the discordant moods that would result from viewing themed messages. I had originally used "Psychobabble" by Frou Frou, as the timing of the beats fit well with the slide transitions, but the words imposed a coherent mood that couldn't contain the rampant emotional changes from viewing the message. I settled on a classical piece by Philip Glass which was in the movie The Hours, from a particular scene that featured walking down the streets of NYC, where there is a huge graffiti movement. I also wanted some slides to be held longer than others for reflection. I didn't arrange them in any order within their categories, which were love/heartbreak, religion/living, politics/anarchy, anger/revenge, materialism/pop culture, and (part two) those that incorporated the physicality of the surface or tool in the message itself. I chose to use my blog to explain all this, as I can include even more pictures and ideas than I could in a traditional paper.

Here 'tis, please enjoy (turn off my playlist first):

Sign, sign, everywhere a sign. blockin out the scenery, breakin my mind.

I am having a hard time reading Faigley's website, because it's a website. Too much textbooky type stuff to read and scroll through on a screen, although the pictures are nice. As portable as laptops are, I cannot underline things, flip to see how many pages I have left to read, or jot notes in the margin. It's interesting stuff, but it's not getting through to me as clearly as a neatly stapled packet. Anyone else? I guess the materiality does matter...

Speaking of which, the internet is apparently at risk of being clean-slated. See the newest link to your right for more details. I wonder if this is a step forward in the Digital Age or a step back. We evolve all the time. Just this morning I found this website, so who needs TV, really?

Ahead of its time:

Art in its various forms has been weighing heavily on my mind lately, between frequent discussions of Grindhouse, watching Entourage, trying to re-form my poetry habit, somehow getting signed up for the four posters-a-month club, and just trying to express myself in a way that is both effective and stylistically me. I wish I could paint or draw or do something artistic, although writing is definitely an art form as well, and I can make decent things out of clay...I'm working on a video for my final project about art in the form of graffiti. It's interesting to me because it's the only writing I can think of (besides slander I guess) that's automatically a crime. Berger's quote about the loss of authority over art that came with the means of reproduction reminded me of graffiti: "For the first time ever, images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free. They surround us in the same way as a language surrounds us. They have entered the mainstream of life over which they no longer, in themselves, have power." Aside from wanna-be gangsta tagging, the words themselves along with the surface they were painted, etched, or carved on create a meaning that's bigger and stronger than most textbooks I read. The message is short and powerful, sometimes incorrectly spelled, but contextualized in life. We all live the context, and I found that most of the messages in graffiti (found on this website and taken from all over the world) dealt with themes of love, politics, religion, the economy, etc...

non-sequitur:

In addition, Literacy in American Lives contains a chapter about the nature of early writing as secretive, rebellious. I think about notes passed back in forth in class, from my own schooldays. I once wrote the naughtiest words I knew on a chalkboard in the church basement (I don't know exactly why), knowing they'd be discovered and I'd probably go to hell for it.

I was excited to see that Faigley included information about Adbusters, I've used that site in conjunction with teaching a media awareness unit with high school kids. Other than the nonstop stupidity charade that is our current governmental regime, the hyper-consumerism of this country makes me itchy in unmentionable places. I always thought I could do well in advertising but never pursued it for the same reason I'm not a smarmy lawyer (not that all lawyers are bad, some of my best friends are lawyers): I don't think it's right to intentionally manipulate people and words, and people/words are obviously easily manipulated. Here's a few more pictures they didn't include:

I'll give you a moment to find your brain-sanitizer and acknowledge that reality is not as fun as the high-gloss air-brushed world we are continually fed.

Given what Siegel's article says about multimodality transformations and literacy, it makes sense that this is where we're at: we're a bunch of sign-reading mofos.