excretions & territorial marking

Yesterday I went to North Bank Park and found some of the graffiti represented below to have been covered with commentary or response. Though I did not have my camera at the time, I will feature the altered images in an upcoming post whenI get the pictures.

Though I do not know the gender of the writers of the graffiti I find, studies have shown young males to be the most frequent authors. Government and academic authorities often express condescension and scorn for such youthful delinquencies, as Robert Anton Wilson reminds us in Prometheus Rising, primitive territorial marking is also a practice of the authorities: "Most mammals mark their territories with excretions. Domesticated primates mark their territories with ink excretions on paper."

Here we have this dialogic process beginning...the underlying word is "writing" in black over which the blue text replies "stop haten!" - certainly food for thought...

some categories

This is a tag that was painted on my fence in Oregon Hill about a year ago. I have always been interested in graffiti, but this interest was increased when I noticed the power of graffiti to motivate the City of Richmond to uncharacteristic swift action.
Though the City is often slow, if not unresponsive to citizen complaints or requests for services, this tag was immediately removed the day after I posted my request/complaint on the City website.

This rapid response got me to thinking about graffiti in terms of a dialog of power, or with power that is so intense or important or threatening that it motivates significant action and expenditure in the authorities - an action and expense that seems disproportionate somehow. Excessive response to a threat often enhances the power of that threat. Maybe William S. Burroughs was right when he told us that "control is controlled by the need to control."

I find myself loosely categorizing types of graffiti ranging from bathroom-stall sex-oriented graffiti and basic territorial tags to handwritten poetry and complex murals as well as many other forms. Graffiti also range in terms of their intelligence, or the level of literacy they express. Though I never got a picture of it, one of the most brilliant graffiti texts I have read was the question casually spray-painted on to the footbridge going to Belle Isle:
"Why don't we say 'just adulting'?"

Here are a few different samples from Richmond:


near south side of Lee Bridge - at first this appeared to be a mural on an abandoned building, a closer look revealed a signature and date, making me wonder if it was commissioned by the business that used to inhabit the building - but I don't know for sure.
Details of this one will be featured in later posts.





I love to find graffiti that is reflective, philosophical, enigmatic...things that make me think like this one written on the city-painted wall with a Sharpie inside the abandoned Vepco plant Belle Isle....I know what a Kraken is, but, WTF?

it all started in grad school...

I have been an observer of graffiti in Richmond, Virginia for about fifteen years, but it wasn't until grad school in VCU's new Media, Art and Text program that I began to write about it. Initially, my interest was captured by some amazing murals painted on the walls of the empty Vepco plant on Belle Isle. Though this space is still used for graffiti, I have not seen anything recently to rival the artistry of the old murals I saw there so long ago. Aside from their aesthetic appeal, graffiti often represent one half of a dialog with authority - and a powerful half at that.

The nearly ten foot Grateful Dead "Steal Your Face" image painted on the riverside rocks facing Hollywood rapids is a good example. Originally painted in protest when Richmond City Council banned the Dead from playing back in the early 1970's, this image has been painted over by the city and re-painted by a series of anonymous artists for over thirty years!

Since graffiti is an ephemeral art form, subject as it is to weather and being painted over by the authorities, I thought it might be worth capturing some of the images in Richmond that catch my eye to compile them in a blog before they disappear forever. Though I include some of my more academic observations about the graffiti I've seen, you can skip all that and just enjoy the images if you like. If you recognize an image as one of your own, or that of someone you know, I would welcome your comments on that posting. I am especially interested in any information about graffiti images on the sides of transient train cars since they make a stark contrast to work done on local unmoving surfaces.

I'm not a professional photographer and most of these images are captured with a Nikon Coolpix digital camera so I make no claims to the artistry of these digital images but I do hope you enjoy them.

If you know of any other Richmond graffiti I should include here, please post a comment and let me know!