colorful considerations

This is a rough style I hadn't seen before that screams out with color, provocative expressions and exclamation points. These are long gone, but were the most colorful I have found on the Northbank Park stairway.

It is ironic that the painter is ostensibly exercising the very free speech that is dismissed but the invitation to free thought gives pause. We assume we have both and most often fight for freedom of speech, but most people do not stray too far from the narrow fold of approved cerebral activity.



For those who have and continue to venture beyond, to explore and experience, to think and imagine, to revise and remake, the celebrated "real world" is little more than a....







And more colorful play...cheerful grapes?

have you been "borfed" lately?

This is not the original that I saw years ago on the walkway over to Belle Isle, but I think this is one of the most brilliant questions I've come across. It took me about half an hour to figure out what it means - and it couldn't be a more relevant message. Even, or perhaps especially, in times of chaos and crisis, creativity and play are essential for healthy living and fresh solutions. This version of the proverb, also on the walkway, ascribes it to "borf" but the first one I saw did not. I wonder whether he is indeed the originator of this penetrating query?

This name reminded me of the 1987 nomination by President Regan of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, when concerns about his ideology, constitutional fundamentalism, caused him to be rejected and led to a new verb in our language: to be "borked". Maybe if Bork had read the graffito above and heeded its insight, he'd have been less rigid in his approach, who knows? Nevertheless, playing upon this event, perhaps we can add another new term to English, something more positive: to be "borfed", or reminded of the importance of playfulness in life.
(but come to think of it, it does have unpleasant echoes of 'barfed'....)

Also seen on the walkway, this stencil:
a pirate Pipi?

mark & countermark, or peeing on the other guy's pee

In the post previous to this below, I featured some North Bank Park images I liked and this week I present the follow-up markings of another person expressing a rude disapproval of these images and demonstrating the intensity of passion involved in these exchanges.

This one is more of a local tag than an image, but "TOY GO HOME" is written over the name, perhaps making a play on 'goest'.




The spiral-eyed blue-man is an image I like but the magic-marker critic disagrees...

...isn't hate a bit of a strong response?

And for those who doubt the importance of punctuation and of the trivial mark, behold the dismissive power of quotation marks around "ART" for which we even have imitative hand gestures for use when we wish to dismiss something while speaking.

the text above cryptically reads:

ESVA 4/30/05
you'll never take me alive 5/1/08
GRAFT


Have the graffiti wars in Richmond gotten that bad???

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!