Certainly click image for larger.The Yankee Federation is the independent breakaway nation of New England consisting of the former USA states of Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire. The capital is Burlington, Vermont, on the shore of Lake Champlain.
I would like to write a few words about graffiti, but why bother? It's not like anything I say is going to make taggers ashamed of themselves and stop tagging. In the documentary "Style Wars," a teen tagger explained that they tag to show the community who really runs the city. It's an illusion that the mayor and the police run and control the city. Every night the taggers come out and prove that they control the city. In large American cities, the degree of tagging, the neighborhoods where most of it appears, and its blunt and clear statements that this neighborhood belongs to a particular violent gang is the primary reality the residents must acknowledge. Messages, laws, rules from the city government are an afterthought and can be ignored. But half of urban tagging is not gang-related but is the spontaneous public explosion of individual outlaw artists who did not wait for conditions to improve in their lives so they could attend art academy and have gallery shows. They bought spraypaint and declared a wall to be their canvas. Tagging is Art without a government License.
In southern France a Boy Scout troop was tasked with cleaning up grafitti and erased some unlicensed public art they found on the walls of a cave. The grafitti was about 30,000 years old.
5 comments:
I'm going to disagree here. Tagging in my neighborhood is a criminal offence. It is generally not artistic, though a few, very few instances of actual artistic tagging have appeared.
No, usually, it is some rude punk with nothing to do who scrawls an illegible mark in permanent marker onto the side of a building, the bus, my car, my house, the T. There is nothing artistic about it. It is, as you suggest, resistance against the conventions of society. Occasionally, one sees single-colour spray paint tags. Again, there is nothing particularly artistic about these marks, they are the signs of the frayed edges of our society attempting to establish in a very impermanent way the boundaries of their imagined influence.
I caught a kid 'tagging' my car about a month ago. He might have been 14. When I caught him, he tried to run away but he tripped when his too-large jeans fell around his ankles and he couldn't get up. Rather than call the police, I made a deal with him. I drove him uptown, bought paint remover, and made him clean the paint off my car and off of several other things he had tagged. I am sure he did not need my help to be involved in the juvenile 'justice' system. While talking to him, I asked him why he felt the need to 'tag'. He really had no real answer, and realised it when I asked him about it. I don't think that he had ever thought that other people might not appreciate his illegible scrawl all over their neighborhood. "What would you do if I came and wrote all over your house and your car?" I was afraid of the answer. Frankly, I'm lucky the kid wasn't carrying a knife or a gun and try to injure me.
I think I made a difference. I've seen the kid since then, and he has been nothing but polite. Meanwhile, the Mayor here funds three travelling graffiti abatement trucks and they have since been through my neighborhood. It is actually a fineable offence to not remove graffiti from your building in the city of Boston. It has made a huge difference.
Hmmm this is probably not going to work very well, I just woke up 10 minutes ago and have only had 1 sip of coffee.
It's complicated. It's a very tortuous and ancient struggle between Youth and Adult Authority.
I love it when somebody takes an empty wall and fills it with a blunt and crude message about Bush's Iraq War.
But 99 percent of the time, graffiti concerns itself with far less important statements. A great deal of urban graffiti, in fact, is in code and I'm not even supposed to know what the statement is or means. It's like a billboard written in Nepali in Jersey City.
But if you have the right ideas about good civic behavior and the cleanliness and attractiveness of the city -- then the whole point of most teenage graffiti is specifically to drive you crazy and drive you insane. Nothing more profound than a way to piss you off.
That's horrible, isn't it? It's hostile, it's irrational, it makes guerrilla warfare seem thoughtful and sensible by comparison.
But how much of your adult life have you dedicated to making a 15-year-old's life less boring? Or to demanding that all parents provide unsupervised middle-of-the-night thrills for their 13-year-old boys?
See? The "message" of grafitti can be that stoopid. You can pass by a high school or junior high school and think that it's an institution pumping wonderful, necessary things into the world.
To Stray (an actual addicted tagger I knew, drove his rents insane), the wonderful school is just The House of Daily Pain and Excruciating Boredom.
Down with Boredom! Piss off all Adults!
And half the fun is that they know you're right and they're wrong. Freud said it best: Civilization and Its Discontents. The safer you make city life for kids, the better you make their schools (and the longer you stretch the school year), the more sincerely concerned you are about their welfare -- understanding that as an adult, you call all the official shots, your votes and participation in urban life makes all the decisions, and kids are powerless and know it -- the more Todd wants to poop on your eyeballs.
I don't disagree that 'tagging' is a reaction to what some people consider authoritarian control of their environment.
I am disagreeing with your assertion that tagging is unbridled artistic expression, or that it is some sort of unknown code. Mostly it is neither. Sometimes it is just vandalism, and in the City of Boston, it is a misdemeanor criminal offence. Should it be? Probably not. But I have to tell you that if I catch the kid who tagged my car doing it again, after I took the kind, interested interventionist tactic that I did with him the first time, I'll call the police.
Recently, there was a case of an actual 'artist' who was going around tagging very ornate stencils on flat surfaces. The city estimated that they have spent $50,000 removing her work from public places, and that countless more tens of thousands of dollars have been spent by private individuals to have it removed off of private property. Between here and where I walk to the T station, no fewer than 12 examples of her work decorate sidewalks, trash cans and the sides of private houses.
Tagging on public property costs tax dollars. Tagging private property is criminal trespassing.
Well, again -- you are absolutely right about everything, including your determination to call the cops the next time you catch one of these spraypaint weasels in the act.
Congratulations! You have just made tagging more exciting and desirable for the little weasel! If cops weren't chasing them around in the middle of the night, it wouldn't be half as much fun.
For more than a decade, maybe to this day, in one of the big slummy New Jersey cities across the Hudson from NYC, the favorite hobby of the kids was to steal cars and *hope* they'd end up in a high-speed police chase. They weren't selling or stripping the cars or profitting from car theft in any way. It was all about the potentially fatal midnight thrill (and many of the chases did indeed prove fatal).
Fight that, Mister Adult!
I'm not advocating for taggers or teenage car thiefs. Why not? Because they don't care whether I approve of their behavior or not. They don't care whether you condemn them and sic the cops on them or not.
Our correspondents from Mitteleuropa mention a long-standing crime in Germany -- großer unfug -- translates to something like "violation of public order" or maybe the Geist is more: Goofy Senseless Public Actions That Annoy Responsible People and Authorities. The act of making it a crime (apparently it isn't a crime anymore) always guaranteed that there'd be more großer unfug.
Ah, here, my Translator Robot translates Großer Unfug as "Large Nonsense." For many years Large Nonsense was a criminal offence.
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