Graffiti: Art and Praxis
On Fediverse, we have a few writing prompt tags. I often make long posts on it. However, today's prompt for ScribesAndMakers is long enough that I'm making a blog post about it here instead.
The March 20 prompt asks:
Do you like graffiti? Do you have an example?
Our lives are filled with advertisements from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep. Most of them are trying to get us to buy something or buy into something. (“What have you bought into? What is it going to cost to buy you out?” — Penny For A Thought by Saul Williams) Public spaces where ads are limited or prohibited are spaces where the ad is the place itself. The illusion of a pristine community is selling a different kind of conformity. One where your true self isn't welcome in public spaces.
On a fundamental level, graffiti takes back the public space. It can't sell you anything. What it asks you to buy into is often the community itself. The way that someone saw the bland ugliness of the hellscape we built and decided to add some art or message to it.
Some of the paintings in Cueva de las Manos are about 9000 years old. That predates what we would consider Sumer. It predates what we call the first dynasty in Egypt. They're markings in what would have been public spaces to the people living there at the time. Each person who held their hand to the walls of those caves and had pigment sprayed against it was fundamentally saying “I was here” and “I was a part of this community”.
The reason they're not considered graffiti to us today is that we recognize them as art. If I put on a nitrile glove (safety, y'all) and use spray can to paint the outline of my hand on a sidewalk or building, I'm participating in an artistic tradition that predates our earliest records of written language.
I don't have a particular piece of graffiti that's a favorite. All art exists in a context. Even if I had an example to share, it would exist out of the context it was meant to exist in.
There are anti-examples, though. Things that tear the community down or make people feel unwelcome because of who or what they are. We have more than enough of that coming from every commercialized angle of our lives.