my first art project when I moved to San Francisco was to spend two years photographing bathroom graffiti with cheap disposable cameras. This culminated, obviously, in an installation (very small), in which vellum maps of the (unlabeled) locations of the grafitti were layered over tranparencies of photographs of the graffiti, each layered over a self-conscious graffito I had written directly on the wall. Of course, this was installed in the art gallery's bathroom. It was silly, and not a particularly aesthetic (or well thought-out) project, but everyone needs an obsession. This was a fun obsession, while it lasted.
The bathroom graffiti project also had an interesting side effect: like being a tour guide in Berlin had done years before, obsessively seeking out cool latrinalia gave me a way in: a way into the 'scape of the new city, and a particular---and peculiar---perspective on it.
It was also my way of engaging with, and accepting the new terms of graffiti-as-art. Growing up in the 80's, graffiti was a long-standing, low-class, tribal custom that was being updated by the Top 40 success of some of its proponents. Like tattoos to rock 'n' roll, so graffiti to hip hop. Tattoos were a way to claim or reclaim the body, and became popular among middle class whites whose hold on the landscape of America was either absolute, or---by virtue of strip-mall-ruination and the alienation of the suburbs---permanently revoked. Their final frontier was the body, the de-elitization of the body. Of course, that only lasted for about five minutes.
Simultaneously, young, working-class, urban kids, kids 'o' color, were re/claiming "public" space, demonstrably for everyone's use but theirs, by tattooing their names in increasingly elaborate forms on the skin of the city. That also lasted about five minutes. It didn't take long to start calling it art ... i.e. it didn't take long for the suburban white kids to start wanting the city back.
When I came back to the States in the late nineties, the ascendency of hip hop was a fait accompli, everybody and the nerd next door had a tattoo, and five-figure-paying students of the San Francisco Art Institute (glaarrrgh) were going on nighttime tagging runs as part of their art practice. (My first SF boyfriend, an artist, sprayed his tag in XXL on the street outside my bedroom window. Thus, romance, and territorial pissing, in the new economy.) San Francisco---the crash site of the low-riding, Latino Mission, the internet bubble, Asian manga imports, and a bunch-a white art students looking for low-rent spaces to gentrify---invented a school of art: the locally infamous "Mission School", that turned graffiti art into "muralism", cute into hard, and a good drawing hand into the height of skills acquisition.
In 1998, you could take this all in at a glance, so, finally, bathroom graffiti for me was a retreat from the obey-giantization of public wallspace back to the original value of graffiti. Back to its origin in obscene rhymes, ugly orthography, and undesigned aesthetic chaos. Naturally, I couldn't leave this barbaric yawp in peace. Naturally, I had to (attempt to) aestheticize it, diagram it, contain it within a description of "culture". Thus, once I had used my photos in the project described above, I completely and entirely lost interest in bathroom graffiti. I'd broken it.
What is it about lassoing and gelding these ... things ... these phenomena we find along the borders of human use and human philosophy? Obviously, I'm not the only one. At the second (and last) exhibition of my latrinalia photos, I met Mark Ferem, perpetrator of the website It's All in the Head, dedicated to bathroom graffiti. Mark has been all over the world photographing latrinalia. The site has photo galleries, links, and two essays, both cut off (whether fortunately or unfortunately) by my browsers' inability to use the scrolling arrows.
Latrinalia (by Mark) from San Francisco's Cafe International, one of my favorite bathroom sites, too.
Mark treads lightly, however, unleashing himself in the technologically unreadable essays alone. The photos in the galleries are captioned only to identify space and time. He doesn't feel the need to diagram, or order, or categorize. It's enough to capture.
Not so with Evan Roth, designer and executor of the still in-progress Graffiti Taxonomy project (images at top and below.) (My source was a New York Times article about Roth's Graffiti Research Lab in New York City, run with project partner James Powderly, exploring new technology-based forms of graffiti.)
Graffiti Taxonomy presents isolated letters from various graffiti tags, reproduced in similar scales and at close proximity. The intent of these studies is to show the diversity of styles as expressed in a single character. In these photographs, the ‘S' is reproduced from photographs of tags taken in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, while the 'A' is reproduced from tags from Central Park North to 125th St. in Harlem.
Roth intends to complete a similar typographic chart of each letter of the alphabet. Talk about gelding! Removing a graffito not merely from its spatial context but also one part from its component parts renders a tag into nothing more than a font. In fact, when he's completed the entire alphabet, there will be nothing (aside from a possibly prickly copyright issue) preventing him or anyone else from turning the diagrammed taggery into an actual font.
This is the heart of mapping, of taxonomy, of diagramming things across fixed space: control. Graffiti seems to beg for control. It is the first expression of human culture, and the last expression in our surveillance society that hasn't yet been entirely controlled. This is, quite simply, because graffiti is so low tech it is nearly impossible to keep people from doing. In San Francisco, a comprehensive swath of anti-gang laws have made it difficult for minors to purchase spray paint and markers, but so what? They can use their house keys to scratch it in, or pens, or paint and brushes. There's no way to prevent people from making marks, additively, or subtractively.
You see those of us privileged kids, who grew up on a suburban lot owned and maintained by our parents, getting glassy-eyed, bright-eyed, at the sight of all that "destruction", all that "vandalism". We want to eat it, to be it. We want that raw city energy to punch away our prefab enervation. We want to go back to the beginning and start over less privileged, for the sake of being that anarchic, that powerful. We want, we want, we want. And so we take, and try to encircle it with both hands.
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