Thursday, September 6, 2012

A Succinct Look At Graffiti And Marketing

By Rashad Brown


When we are in an urban environment, our spaces are largely defined by walls, regardless of whether they're the inside walls of our private dwellings or the outside walls that delimit and divide our public space. Before they are painted on by grafitti artists or claimed by commercial advertising, these walls are blank canvasses, generally white, ready for images to be created by those who dwell inside or about them.

Once marked with images and the meanings they recommend, these walls are 'consumed' by a population that interprets them. The craft of interior decorating, by way of example, is practiced by all of us to an extent when we put posters, photographs, and paintings upon our bedroom and living room walls. We physical exercise our capacity to arrange images and create meanings on the walls of our private dwellings.

We're prevented from individually decorating public walls as pleases us. Though we do live and function in public spaces as considerably as we do in our private houses, we are restricted from exercising exactly the same artistic freedom in the public areas.

These public walls of which we have limited energy over, are controlled by a capitalist state and its' wants. Our restriction over our public spaces is indicative of the capitalist society in which we live. It can be an illustration of the wantonness of our societies under capitalist systems.

Only people who are wealthy are not restricted from these public walls. For those who do have the funds to have the ability to adorn these walls, their images are normally only advertising something. They do not decorate the walls for the sake of the aesthetic of it. It's a indicates of making a lot more capital by way of selling and advertising something on these walls.

However, people who do not have the cash, or straightforward seek to fight against this capitalistic technique, are typically faced with punishment from the state. They receive fines or time in jail. Regardless of how loudly media claim their objectivity relating to the state, media the truth is work together using the state. Together, they function to limit graffiti and other forms of public art that do not meet the commercial standards of the state.

Evidence of this complicity on the component of the media is not difficult to find. A series of articles on the problem of grafitti that have appeared within the San Francisco Chronicle with within the last two years are typical. The underlying assumptions which motivate these articles betray what I will call an exterminationist logic, quite much like the 1 described by philsopherPhilipeLacoue-Labarthe in his current book Heidegger, Art and Politics.

Labarthe claims that Auschwitz and also the unspeakable exterminations that took place there revealed the deepest contradictions of the 'civilized' West, manifesting probably the most brutal functionalism latent in the desire to achieve perfection by eliminating all traces of the undesirable Other. He writes that 'nowhere else in history has the will to clean, to completely eradicate a 'stain' been so compulsively enacted without the least ritual.' The rhetoric of the articles inside the San Francisco Chronicle reveals this same 'will-to-clean', though for ends which are admittedly not really so extreme!

Still, the compulsion to eradicate undesirable traces of the Other's presence is clearly related to the compulsion to eradicate the Other people themselves (a compulsion recently attested to by the spate of anti-immigration campaigns around the globe, which includes the 1 that gave California Proposition 187).




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