The Art of the Question
Recently, The Times-Picayune’s Doug MacCash recorded a video that considered the questions posed by the “READ” graffiti that has popped up recently around town. The open-ended nature of graffiti is part of what makes it so provocative and controversial. Is a mark on a wall a private expression, a threat to others, or something else entirely? What does a stenciled angry cat or pope mean when it shows up on a wall? Does it mean anything, or is it a form of urban surrealism, throwing a visual non-sequitur into an otherwise-defined environment?
One of the things I find most engaging about graffiti is its designed impermanence. The artist/tagger – I don’t assume all graffiti-makers are artists – has to know the work won’t last, and that they’re a temporary part of an environment. Earlier this summer, someone pasted up what looked like a Charles Burns portrait of Elton John on a Tchoupitoulas warehouse, and its stark, graphic look and logo – “icon” – gave a banal urban space a note of whimsy and low-grade mystery. Before a month was out, it had been scraped off. When Banksy came to town after Hurricane Gustav, much of his work was gone within the month, painted over by property owners, marred by other graffiti artists, and perhaps painted over by Fred Radke (though Radke may have been framed in the partially successful paint-over of the piece across Clio Street from the Big Top). Some, however, remain.
My current favorite is already in danger. Someone has pasted up pages with the lyrics to Big Star’s “Thirteen” on a Tchoupitoulas Street warehouse a few blocks Uptown from the convention center. The poster-maker ran together part of the first verse and part of the second, but the series of signs is a charming mystery. Why Big Star in 2009? Why “Thirteen” – hardly a song charged with some sort of subterranean buzz? In fact, the song’s evocation of youth and young love seems even sweeter posted on a wall as a series of signs you can sing along to. But even the signs come with an additional mystery. Next to them is a stenciled woman. Was she put there by the same person? Or did someone see the Big Star lyrics and think that a more mature, grim presence might add some needed gravity? Whatever the case, a long white wall that was once a banal part of an industrial roadway is now alive with possibilities, and it’s only made more interesting by the realization that those possibilities won’t be there forever. You’ve got to see them before rain or do-gooders wash them away.
