'Jesus es mi avion"
“Jesus drinks Evian?”
“No, Jesus wears Avon.”
I’ll say that traditional bathroom scrawls don’t count, depending on the location of the bathroom, but tagging makes me grit my teeth. Punish with mandatory art classes and replacement of the dumbassed crap with something attractive. I’ve seen tagged walls in Austin bloom incredible murals.
Quite the opposite, bathroom scrawls rule. I don’t expect stall walls to be pretty, just functional. Plus, I love seeing people respond back and forth, and I love seeing how poorly the spelling is. There’s one at my school that I keep meaning to memorize and post here. The kid must’ve misspelled at least 3 or 4 very common words, and totally fucked up the meter in the ‘here I sit all broken hearted’ rhyme. This is a college.
I mostly agree with you: I don’t like graffiti.
However. There was this really cool graffiti on a wall on the exit off of the Baltimore Beltway in Towson, Maryland. It abutted a very nice house in a very nice neighborhood.
The graffiti read, “Viking Women Don’t Care”.
Weird and random and none of us growing up had any idea what the hell it meant (we used to say it was a tribute to us fierce scary girls at our fierce scary girls’ school!!!), but it was a landmark. It was so cool. But that’s the only graffiti I have ever liked. It’s gone for good now, as well as the wall I think; more’s the pity!
The funniest graffiti I ever saw in that vein was on the side of an apartment building in Tallinn, Estonia: rap is cool
Hahahah!! Is that what it said? Like, all it said? Like in all lowercase? And no punctuation? That actually honestly IS funny! 
It’s like so low-key. Excellent.
That is exactly what it said. 
My village in Cameroon had exactly one piece of graffiti. It was on the front of someone’s house and read: “Mange moi, Amadou”
I never thought the phrase “eat me” would translate so well across such vast distances.
I hate tags.
However, I like the big murals of art some graffiti artists evolve into creating, they can be quite dazzling and impressive, even if I can’t read what on earth that whacked out lettering is supposedly meant to be saying.
I also can appreciate the stencilled art, like Banksy’s stuff in the UK, though not all of it is especially good.
Ugh. I just posted to my blog this morning about a tagger destroying a historical advertisement in Queens. Pisses me off. Hespos.com
The stuff on bathroom walls is called “latrinalia” and is usually treated differently from graffitti / tagging in my field.
As for the latter, I don’t like it, but I used to be able to deal. But lately ink is not satisfying enough and they have to carve into walls, tables, chairs, mirrors, etc. with knives. That’s a stepped-up, fucked-up level of vandalism.
Retired? Or fell off something? :eek:
Lately? The desks and stall doors were all carved up in my school in the '80s, and it was all old stuff. And out in the sticks; more like farmland than gangland.
My favorite recent odd tag is on the side of a beer distributor’s warehouse.
It’s in the standard urban tag font, and says:
REAGAN!
Yes, the exclamation mark is there.
Maybe I’m being dense here, but what’s the humor in this statement?
On this bridge near my parent’s house there is a fairly new cement bridge that had “I hate potato salad” written in red.
The Save A Lot a minute from my home was tagged by someone named “Spark” a week after the building was painted.
A couple summers ago, some tagger spraypainted a 4-letter word on my garage.
They spelled it wrong.
These taggers are not the brightest bulbs in the bunch.
The humor I saw in his describing that grafitti, was that rap seems to me to be very intense and vibrant.
So, writing “rap is cool” in all lowercase and without punctuation (as in maybe an exclamation point at the end of the sentence and great big letters), is funny because the way the sentence was written is exactly how rap is not.
To my understanding, tagging is the simple, one colour, scrawling of one’s assumed name. You devise a short nom de plume, mess about to find the best way to write it, and then scrawl it everywhere you can. This made up name is now your tag. This is the lowest rung on the graffiti ladder, and every spotty little wanna-be in creation will write their stupid tag on any likely surface. Most tags suck arse, even from the point of view of the larger graffiti community.
Tagging like this is not art, in my opinion. Some argue that any form of expression is art, that tagging is a legitimate form of expression, the little man sticking it to the system by forcing it to acknowledge his mark, or some such bullshit. To me, it’s just lame and selfish, make up a name that isn’t yours and write it on someone else’s property = lame. It’s purely a little ego trip for a little mind, with no respect for anyone else, and is only carried out for the consumption of like minded idiots. There’s no message, political or social. Writing “fuck the system” would be more valid, because at least the supposedly oppressive forces could read the fucking thing.
The tagging I see is mostly in texta (with highly modified felt pens, filled with home made ink, intended to be as difficult to remove as possible), or to a lesser extent, spray paint. Waxy crayons are becoming more popular now too. The whole thing with tagging is that you only need a single, easily concealed writing implement, you can do it quickly, and disappear.
From tagging, the letterform obsession escalates through various levels of sophistication. Larger, single colour efforts (easier and faster), then with two or three colours, finally the rainbow gamut spanning efforts. We’re talking paint now, mostly aerosol cans (intermixed for custom colours in some cases), but anything goes, rollers, mops, you name it. The larger and more sophisticated the effort, the greater the risk, the planning, the possible desirability of collaboration, and the greater the kudos from the vandal’s peers.
The speed with which a large piece can be executed is surprising. The fuckers wouldn’t work that fast if you were paying them to paint your house, that’s for sure. As to what they depict, it’s usually just an exercise in letterform, and probably has little meaning outside their narrow community. It doesn’t matter that you or I can’t make heads or tails of it. They often sign their masterpieces with their individual tags, or the name of their crew. Some of this stuff is probably art in it’s own right. It’s still self indulgent wankery though.
The problem as I see it is, without the annoying tagging, you won’t get the higher end artsy stuff. It’s a continuum of practice and perfection, played out for the public’s displeasure on our built environment. If I had to choose, I’d say they can all get fucked. The ones will actual artistic talent would find another outlet anyway, and we don’t need the contributions of the rest of the try hard losers.
