Monumental Graffiti: Tracing Public Art and Resistance in the City

MONUMENTAL

GRAFFITI

MONUMENTAL

GRAFFITI

TRACING PUBLIC ART AND RESISTANCE IN THE CITY

RAFAEL SCHACTER

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2024 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used to train artificial intelligence systems or reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

The MIT Press would like to thank the anonymous peer reviewers who provided comments on drafts of this book. The generous work of academic experts is essential for establishing the authority and quality of our publications. We acknowledge with gratitude the contributions of these otherwise uncredited readers.

This book was set in Arnhem Pro and Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk by the MIT Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Schacter, Rafael, author.

Title: Monumental graffiti : tracing public art and resistance in the city / Rafael Schacter.

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2024] | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023050268 (print) | LCCN 2023050269 (ebook) | ISBN 9780262049221 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780262379793 (epub) | ISBN 9780262379786 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Graffiti—Social aspects. | Memorialization—Social aspects. | Monuments—Social aspects. | Art and society.

Classification: LCC GT3912 .S33 2024 (print) | LCC GT3912 (ebook) | DDC 751.7/3—dc23/eng/20240224

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023050268

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023050269

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FOR MY PARENTS

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

I: FORM

1: SITE

2: STYLE

3: TIME

II: MESSAGE

4: SPEECH

5: ACTION

6: PARTICIPATION

III: TRACE

7: PUBLICITY AND PRIVACY

8: VISIBILITY AND INVISIBILITY

9: SPECTACULARITY AND TEMPORALITY

CONCLUSION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

REFERENCES

INTRODUCTION

MONUMENTAL GRAFFITI

What if we said graffiti was a monument? What if rather than dirt or vandalism, rather than ornament or even art, it was positioned as monument in the most literal of ways? What would that do to our understanding of graffiti? What, simultaneously, would that do to our understanding of monument? Focusing on the material, communicative, and contextual fundamentals of these two public forms of material culture, Monumental Graffiti uses monument as a lens to understand graffiti and, at the same time, graffiti as a lens to comprehend the contemporary monument. In doing so, this book aims not only to provide a new perspective on graffiti but likewise to provide a new viewpoint on public art, citizenship, and the city today. Moreover, by positioning graffiti in this way, we will unpack the doubly iconoclastic moment that sites across the globe are locked within, clarifying the wars on graffiti as much as those on institutional monuments while simultaneously challenging us to rethink what the appropriate monument for our contemporary world may even be.

FIGURE I.1

Escif, Untitled, 2021, Beirut. Acrylic paint on wall. Courtesy of the artist.

Rather than understanding monument in its most contemporaneously predominant sense, as that which is permanent and large-scale, as that which is set into stone and set upon a pedestal, this book takes the term monument back to its etymological roots to signify a material reminder, advice, or warning (from the Latin monere).¹ Here monument emerges not via a specific style or material but through its status as a publicly positioned artifact reaching out to us on a social scale. As one of the founding fathers of art history, Alois Riegl, explained, the monument can in this way simply be seen as a marker of human deeds or events . . . brought to the viewer's consciousness by means of the visual arts or with the help of inscriptions (Riegl 1982 [1903]: 21). It can be seen, as literary critic John Guillory explained via the seminal iconographic work of Erwin Panofsky, as the artifacts, events, or ideas that have the most urgent meaning for us at any present moment and that most demand our recognition or study (Guillory 2016: 12). Monument here will hence be positioned not just as the institutionally produced forms most commonly imagined—the stony, everlasting, heroic public sculpture—but as an object imposing itself on our bodies and our minds. And monumental, likewise, will here be set as that which is not simply large in scale but large in scope, as an artifact containing an immediacy necessitating our attention no matter its size, material, or position in the hegemonic hierarchy of value.

With that said, the way graffiti is being defined here, as much as what I will here be calling the institutional monument, needs to be clarified too. And rather than the overtly political graffiti recently explored by Campos et al. (2021), for example, or likewise the vernacular gang writing examined by Susan Phillips (1999), the graffiti being discussed here is graffiti as a specific style of public, independently undertaken name-writing first emerging from the East Coast of the United States in the late 1960s.² Broadly associated with the cultural world of hip hop (even though developing almost a decade before the foundation and subsequent explosion of the genre), and a practice at its outset undertaken by cross-class, multicultural, although predominantly male, youths, graffiti has been transplanted throughout the globe during the intervening half-century (via a collection of canonical books, films, and magazines) while developing in stylistically diverse and highly developed ways. Far from a monolithic culture and a practice that has always incorporated a wide range of subcultural influences (from punk and football hooliganism to situationism and heavy metal), graffiti today is one of the world's most popularly practiced art forms and as visible as it ever has been. Still, while it is in many ways hugely celebrated and commercially successful, it remains an equally controversial practice and one, as we will see, often utilized as a visual shorthand for urban decay and danger. While its practitioners are thus portrayed as antisocial criminals and inspired originators alike, the graffiti image itself has become perpetually hurled between the positions of art and vandalism (and back again) with seemingly little hope of repose.

At the other end of the scale, however, the term institutional monument will here act as shorthand for the dominant genre type existent within what is popularly labeled monument today. From the equestrian statue to the triumphal arch, from the figurative memorial to the obelisk, the institutional monument is, broadly, a hangover from the era of statumania in the nineteenth century (Agulhon 1981). This was a period in which Europe's burgeoning nation-states demanded artifacts—not only monuments but likewise flags, anthems, museums, and the like—to give material form to the immaterial state and create national homogeneity out of demographic heterogeneity. While almost always taking on neoclassical form—an artifactual style utilizing the archaeological remnants of antiquity to give these new, often precarious nation-states a temporal validity—the institutional monument does not by definition need to display these overtly classical influences. What is key, instead, is a top-down status in which power (be it political or economic) comes to assert itself publicly so as to reinforce the status quo. What is key, alongside its almost inevitably durable, spectacular, and colossal physicality, is its status as an omnipresent sign of public authority, as a marker of hegemony materialized in monumental form.

GRAFFITI AS FORM, GRAFFITI AS MESSAGE, GRAFFITI AS TRACE

Following Régis Debray's essay on monuments, Trace, forme ou message? (1999), Monumental Graffiti will be structured through an analysis of the way graffiti operates as form, transmits as message, and discloses as trace. While Debray sees these three typological positions as different genres that the traditional monument can take up, here these registers will be used as three specific approaches to the monument itself. These will both align with graffiti's fundamental structure as a material, communicative, and contextual form, as well as link to the etymologic foundations of monument set out above: monument as reminder, monument as advice, and monument as warning.

Part I of the book, Form, questions what graffiti does materially and is directed toward its status as a public art. It positions graffiti as a monument that, following Debray's first monumental archetype, functions through its status as an architectural object that imposes itself by its intrinsic aesthetic or decorative qualities (Debray 1999: 31),³ a monument that creates a visual impact within its environment and that prioritizes a space, breaks a continuum, takes centre stage (p. 31). Sustaining this via specific chapters on Site (exploring graffiti's how or its situational features), on Style (exploring graffiti's what or its graphical characteristics), and on Time (exploring graffiti's when or its durational qualities), it will be graffiti's architectonic, figural, and temporal attributes that will be assessed here. Graffiti as form will thus here be understood through the position of the monument-reminder, as a marginal, corporeal, ephemeral monument formally and sensorially driven into a viewer's mind.

Part II of the book, Message, questions what graffiti says as a communicative act and is directed toward its status as a practice of public citizenship. It explores graffiti as a demonstrative form that, following Debray's second archetype, displays the civic morality of the participant (Debray 1999: 30), a monument measured not simply by its artistic merit but through its ability to stipulate a ceremony, support a ritual, challenge posterity (p. 31). Maintaining this through specific chapters on Speech (unpacking graffiti as discursive act), on Action (unpacking graffiti as bodily act), and on Participation (unpacking graffiti as collective act), it will be graffiti's literal, gestural, and communal modes of production and transmission that will be examined here. Graffiti as message will thus be understood through its placement as the monument-advice, as a monument advising us how we can (or should) appropriate, claim, and participate in the public sphere.

Part III, Trace, questions what graffiti reveals as an ecological form and its status as a particularly public artifact. It examines graffiti as a monument enmeshed in the quotidian, in the field, in ‘life,’ a monument that is part of its environment and thus bears witness in a metonymic manner to the context in which it exists (De-bray 1999: 34). Maintaining this through chapters on Publicity and Privacy (examining graffiti's relationship to architectural and atmospheric walls), Visibility and Invisibility (examining graffiti's relationship to privacy and surveillance), and Spectacularity and Temporality (examining graffiti's relationship to the creative and heritage cities), it will be graffiti's relationship to exclusion, concealment, and the urban spectacle that will be central here. Graffiti as trace not only will be understood as the container in which form and message are able to emerge, but likewise as the monument-warning marking out (and alerting us toward) the transforming conditions of the urban realm today.

Yet just as the final part of the book comes to wrap together the book's first two parts through a progressive argument developing as we advance (just as the third chapter of each section likewise coalesces together its preceding two), there is an equivalently important lateral argument taking place throughout the text. While Form, Message, and Trace split the book materially through dividing graffiti via its status as public art, public act, and public artifact, the lateral approach enables a thematic reading that focuses on space and appearance (in the first chapter of each part, chapters 1, 4, and 7), on the body and visibility (in the central chapter of each part, chapters 2, 5, and 8), and on temporality and sociality (in the final chapter of each part, chapters 3, 6, and 9). As seen in figure I.2, the book can thus be read forward or sideways, materially or conceptually dependent on the choice of the reader. What remains key within both readings, however, is a position placing the production, consumption, and circulation of graffiti at center stage, that examines graffiti not only as monument but as material image, as technique of citizenship, and as urban trace combined.

POSITIONALITY AND SCOPE

Based on nearly twenty years of research⁴ and curation⁵ within graffiti, street art,⁶ intermural art,⁷ and public art more broadly, the data presented in this work has emerged from a long-term ethnographic engagement within the material and social environments that together make up these related aesthetic worlds. Conducting more than two years of embedded fieldwork with graffiti independent public art practitioners in Madrid for my PhD, as well as carrying out multisited research with artists in this field since 2006 (from London to Manila, and Hong Kong to New York), my research has widened out from an initial focus on the image-makers of graffiti to an engagement with the curators, researchers, policymakers, and anti-graffiti activists who contribute to the wider artistic ecology. Moreover, my involvement within this world has itself included professional as well as academic immersions, my own practice working alongside my interlocutors in a collaborative manner (rather than just through extracting data from them), leading to a more developed understanding of their ethics and aesthetics both. The research presented here has thus emerged from both an observational and participatory space of engagement, from thousands of conversations with practicing artists (and thousands more with those based within the wider graffiti milieu), from hundreds of instances of participant observation in both illegal and legal frameworks (and in both institutional and noninstitutional settings), and from observant participation with artists and other practitioners through collaboratively organized events (such as exhibitions, workshops, and public talks).

My position as an anthropologist working both inside and outside the academy has thus led to the empirically centered, ethnographic approach to graffiti that this study takes up. Yet while the evidence incorporated here emerges from a very specific (and subjective) set of data, in an anthropological fashion I will here concentrate on drawing out the (theoretically) general from the (ethnographically) particular, moving from the granularity of a single tag (or a single event) to the macroscopic transformations of the city and back again. In this way, while each chapter will incorporate illustrative examples from the field, it should be made clear that the basic arguments posited here have in fact all come from my interlocutors themselves; while I have developed these into a cohesive narrative and leaned on some of the core theoretical premises of anthropology and material culture studies that I have been trained within, the stances taken are always ethnographically substantiated ones, even if this empirical evidence remains, at points, behind the scenes. Still, this does not mean that graffiti is considered as a universalized or homogenized practice, however, or that the argument is meant to transcend all idiosyncrasies. Rather, the globe-spanning traditions and canonical norms of graffiti have created a practice that, while site-specifically enacted in each and every case, contain generalizable patterns that I will here try to address. As such, although there is a clear geographical bias (yet by no means an exclusivity) toward Anglo-American case studies (which is, as a British author working on a visual practice first established in the United States, unsurprising), the wider dynamics I discuss are aspects that can be seen in cities all over the world today. Moreover, it should also be noted that many of the examples used to sustain core arguments around both the graffiti and institutional monuments I examine come from outside the framework of the traditionally monumental. While each chapter will first focus on our two core forms—presenting case studies and examples that help to elucidate the fundamental nature of both graffiti and the institutional monument—I will also bring in examples from contemporary and ethnographic art that help to sustain or contrast these core practices. What is critical to state, however, is that just as the incorporation of comparative data from contemporary art is not being drawn on to elevate graffiti to the position of capital A Art, neither are the examples drawn from the corpus of ethnographic art being utilized to denigrate it to an art from below. Not only is graffiti a practice set, I argue, at the tension point between these aesthetic paradigms (of both institutional art and ethnographic artifact), but the wider visual examples used are meant simply to provide more immediately appreciable evidence of the wider monumental claims being made.

FIGURE I.2

Breakdown of the chapters as they relate to the major themes of the book materially and thematically.

Before we move to the main body of the book, however, the overall contention I hope to make here—that appreciating graffiti as monument can transform our appreciation of graffiti, of monuments, and of the city itself—is something that is critical to position in relation to one of the fundamental arguments of my doctoral monograph Ornament and Order (2014). Positioning graffiti in that case as ornament, as an object that is both an adjunct to an architectural surface and an embellishment of that same façade, this contention sought not to diminish graffiti as the mere ornament that this term today often denotes (as that which is secondary or superficial) but rather to reassert the uncanny power of ornament (and thus graffiti) to reorder and disturb their surrounds. In this book, however, I will be making an almost exactly inversive move. The conception of monumental graffiti is thus not, I want to reinforce, being undertaken to simply amplify graffiti to the high status of the monument, to that which is set in stone or institutionally upraised. Instead, the positioning of graffiti as monument intends to puncture the hubris of our contemporary understanding of monument while reimagining the very conception of the form itself. Unpacking both graffiti and monument in this way will thus help to clarify the resonances and capacities, affordances and vulnerabilities of these material forms while simultaneously coming to address the contemporary crisis over monuments and public art. It will come to defetishize and vernacularize our monuments—both our institutional and graffiti variants—in order to reexamine what they do and how they work, as much as to reassess the strange power they have over us and our cities today.

I

Form

Part I will focus on graffiti as an architectural, ornamental, and durational artifact. It will address the ways in which graffiti's site, style, and time—elements examined individually but received by a viewer collectively—generate its powerful effects in the world. We will hence examine the way an artifact controls . . . perception and creates the viewer's attention, the relationship, as image theorist Hans Belting has examined, between visibility and mediality (Belting 2005: 304). Chapter 1, Site, will thus focus on the how of graffiti, on the way in which the image is steered by its primary architectural host, before chapter 2, Style, comes to explore graffiti's what, on what it serves or relates as graphic image (Belting 2005: 304). Stitching these two chapters together as the temporal container in which site and style emerge and disappear, chapter 3, Time, will unpack graffiti's when, its standing as a time-based, durational artifact. Graffiti, as with all images, will hence be understood to reside neither on the wall . . . nor in the head alone, and it will instead be the way the images "happen, the way in which they take place" (Belting 2005: 302) that will be the focus of this first part.

Addressing the specific position, relation, location, and dimension that comprise the graffiti monument's site; the canonical, agentive, animative, and distributive factors that structure its style; and the material, cultural, mnemonical, and relational factors that encompass its time, part I will reveal a monument that radically disturbs monumental paradigms, that acts as other to the central, singular, permanent monuments that dominate our urban environments. The graffiti monument, as it emerges through its formal characteristics, will hence be seen as a marginal, distributed, transient monument, a monument set at the border not the center, working through multiplicity not singularity, ephemerality not permanency. It will be understood as a monumental-reminder that is antagonistic not consensual, dependent not independent, absent as much as present, humanely not colossally scaled, a monumental-reminder of a divergent way of understanding space, objects, and the city itself.

FIGURE I.3

Graffiti as form.

1

SITE

Graffiti is a public artifact. It is not an object that exists on the page (a sketch of graffiti in an artist's sketchbook being just that, a sketch) nor on canvas (a painting of graffiti on canvas being just that, a painting) but an image that subsists on and in the city itself, an image physically attached to the fabric of the metropolis. Appearing most commonly on the city's literal boundary points, on its walls and roller shutters that divide public from private, graffiti also exists at its geographical edges, on the tracksides, overpasses, and marginal non-places that lie at our urban perimeters. Moreover, it also attaches itself to other key urban surfaces such as the city's visible forms of public infrastructure, from its street furniture (its billboards and traffic signage, for example) to its transportation systems (its buses and, perhaps most famously, its subway trains). Graffiti thus emerges through the medium of the city or not at all. And in the same way that we can never truly distinguish between the canvas and the image painted upon it (Belting 2005), the graffiti image will here be understood as an artifact that we cannot separate from the city in either conceptual or material terms; the surface and image collapse into a single aesthetic form, graffiti as artifact being inherently entangled amid the carrier in which it exists. Rather than beginning this book with an examination of graffiti's stylistic or temporal qualities, then, it is the specifically spatial attributes of graffiti that we will lead with, the specific qualities of the medium, of the surface, that turns an image into graffiti itself.

This chapter will unpack the how of graffiti through focusing on the four situational elements that collectively encompass it: its integrally attached physical position, its innately antagonistic architectural relation, its distinctively bodily scale, and its essentially peripheral urban locations. These four factors will together be put forward as graffiti's unique mediality, the adjunctive, interruptive, anthropometric, and marginal means through which the image is transmitted through and with its site and onto a viewer's perception. Examining these four medial elements will then help to outline graffiti's equivalently monumental and ornamental way of being, its methods of working both within and against the city, the particularity of its scale and proportions, and the geographic and material peripheries it encounters. Moreover, these critical site-specific elements will also help to resolve key issues related to graffiti's commonly understood illegality as much as to its revelation of the tension between public and private. It will thus be a minor monument that this chapter will explore, yet a monument with the integral ability to dominate and disrupt the architectural environment in which it appears.

POSITION OR THE ADJUNCTIVE

So, what makes up graffiti's how? What elements structure the way it is site-specifically steered, driven to a viewer via its urban medium? Well, first let's examine its primary position, the ornamental, adjunctive quality of graffiti.¹ Take figure 1.1, for example, an image depicting the exterior door of a London telephone box and the series of stickers, pamphlets, and tags that are situated upon it. In the top center of the image we have what is my key focus, a tag² by the writer 10Foot placed upon the glass paneling of the door. Exhibiting a left-leaning slope and drippy style (a purposeful effect achieved through holding the writing tool down upon the surface so as the liquid seeps out at a higher rate), the off-white hue of the name indicates that the image has been produced not with ink but with etching cream. A form of hydrofluoric acid produced and sold as a home craft activity,³ and which is decanted by the writer into a secondary implement such as a shoe-polish dispenser, the acid dissolves the top layer of the glass, permanently inscribing the resultant design into it. Etch thus forms an artifact that both appears to, and actually does, dissolve into the glass on which it is set. The image here has not just been inscribed upon but also impressed into the surface.

FIGURE 1.1

Untitled (10Foot), 2022, London. Photo: Rafael Schacter.

The first question we need ask, therefore, is that of the where, in determining where exactly this graffitied image exists. And this specific image is placed not only in the city, not only on the street, but likewise in and on the glass surround itself. It is on it (etched upon the glass surface), it is in it (the fluorine atoms embedding themselves within the structure of the glass), while it is not it (it is not the surface but the addition). The tag seen in figure 1.1—as with an even drippier 10Foot tag produced on mirrored glass in figure 1.2—has been placed upon an already existent surface, upon the surface of the city, the surface of the street, the wall, the door, the glass. Unlike the autonomy of the institutional monument, the monument that is always and already primary, the self-governing ergon (or the principal work) that takes precedence wherever it is placed, the graffiti we see here is implicitly adjunctive: an addition, an appendage, a supplement to its architectural surrounds. The acid tag doesn't simply subsist on top of the glass. It exists within it, an image that cannot be wiped off or painted over, that can only be removed through grinding down the layers of glass or, more commonly, replacing the entire surface itself. While etch is just one of the many modes of inscription in graffiti, it is a technique acting as the perfect example of the adjunctive mode of all graffiti, the mode through which the graffiti image binds, fuses with its surrounding medium. The bond between ornament and structure, between pigment and wall as much as etch and glass, creates what is the near impossibility of ever truly separating the two. And graffiti (like all ornament) must therefore be understood not as a form occurring on a pristine, untouched medium, but as one implanted within an already extant surface. It is an image integrally embedded within the living body that is the urban realm (Schacter 2014a: 21–22).

FIGURE 1.2

10Foot, 2023, South London. Photo: Alex Ellison.

This deep-rootedness of the addition, as much as the innate porosity of the city's surface, is made most visible through the omnipresence of both ghost tags and abstract graffiti. In the former case, we thus have the commonplace example of erased graffiti that bleeds back into visibility, haunting its site through the failure of the overpainting to entirely hide the original mark (as seen in the morass of overpainted tags and images in figure 1.3); the material permeability of most urban surfaces, as much as the differential qualities of the materials used in both painting and overpainting, thus means that graffiti, like a tattoo, becomes only skin-deep in the most deep-set of ways. In the latter case, however, we have the cubist quadrilaterals in which graffiti has been overpainted with a color different (only subtly so) from its surrounding surface, accidentally creating the appearance of a geometric abstract art (as seen in figure 1.4's multicolored cubism); here the graffiti, even if occluded, remains ever present via its overt absence. Like a palimpsest, the slate is never truly wiped clean, the initial inscription remaining visible as an uncanny trace peering through the surface, repressed yet inescapably present. As such, while all public art can be understood as an imposition, graffiti is especially so. It is not something merely placed upon a resultant surface (from the Latin impōnĕre), but an image emergent through the action of attaching, affixing, or ascribing (OED), an image attached to, affixed to, written into the city itself.

FIGURE 1.3

Maltreated Buff, 2022, London. Photo by Stephen Burke.

The innately adjunctive position of graffiti has two key effects: first, upsetting the distinction between primary and secondary, between wall and image; and second, overwhelming the normative order of site itself. The fear emergent from graffiti's adjunctive location thus emerges through it muddying the border between structure and ornament, intrinsic and extrinsic, figure and ground. The ornament envelops its medium, fastening itself upon it, sullying its originary purity and cohesion. Yet not only does this position situate graffiti as the archetypal pollutant, the matter out of place made famous by Mary Douglas (2000 [1966]), but it likewise situates it as a prime example of the parergon explored by Jacques Derrida (1979), the primary form that can only be understood through its structural relationship to its addition, the primary form whose inseparability to this addition defines it. Like bodily decoration and tattoos (artifacts often placed in a relational continuum with graffiti), to (re)move these ornaments is to destroy them, a destruction in which the primary structure becomes collateral damage. Graffiti, like all site-specific sculpture, like all ornament, must therefore be understood as a child of its surface, to be born of it, to be a product of it, while simultaneously acting as the constituent outsider overcoming its habitat. As such, the tags seen in figures 1.1 and 1.2 (as well as every example of graffiti we will see over the forthcoming pages) come not only to destabilize the notion of primary and secondary but to destabilize structure and milieu combined. The adjunct becomes a threat, confounding and exceeding its structure. The addition becomes a danger, convoluting and displacing its surround. And graffiti's locational attachment thus comes to infect the entire body of its host, spreading to the entire site no matter its location of entry. Like all ornament, it reorders (or disorders) that which is already ordered.

FIGURE 1.4

Conservative Buff, 2022, London. Photo by Stephen Burke.

While the victory column, the equestrian statue, and the triumphal arch are not adjunctive but autonomous, placed in not with their locales, produced purely for themselves rather than responding to their site specifically,⁴ graffiti is an artifact always functioning in relation to and with its site, a monument that cannot physically separate itself from its encompassing surface. This adjunctive modality can be seen in other modes of artistic intervention too. The American artist Brad Downey's work Making Illegal Permanent (2009), for example (see figures 1.5 and 1.6), a work that transformed a graffitied wall into a patterned mosaic depicting the identical scene first encountered, not only played with graffiti's latent ephemerality (as discussed further in chapter 3), but disturbed any clear distinction between ornament and structure. Reproducing the entire façade in what could be considered as a mosaicked trompe-l’oeil, here what is often (and mistakenly) believed to subsist on top of the surface (the graffiti image) becomes unmistakably embedded in its core (the structural foundations). Both pattern and surface simultaneously, not only is the mosaic an image that is structure and a structure that is image, but, like graffiti too, the attempted removal of this ornament inevitably leads to the destruction of the surface itself. In the French artist Olivier Kosta-Théfaine's series of ceiling interventions (as seen in figures 1.7 and 1.8), however, the adjunctive inseparability of graffiti is reinforced through the artist's utilization of a classic writing technique in which one's name is burned into a surface using a cigarette lighter. Creating ornamental embellishments that, as seen in the work's title, reference the classical soffitto of the Italian Renaissance, the resultant works can be seen not simply as placed on the surface but to enmesh themselves within the molecules of the material they are burnt into. Like graffiti, the images Kosta-Théfaine produced are thus surface decorations that intertwine deep within the surface itself.

FIGURE 1.5

Brad Downey, Making Illegal Permanent, 2009. Ceramic tiles and grout. Malmo, Sweden. Courtesy of the artist.

FIGURE 1.6

Brad Downey, Making Illegal Permanent (detail), 2009. Ceramic tiles and grout. Malmo, Sweden. Courtesy of the artist.

FIGURE 1.7

Olivier Kosta-Théfaine, Soffito, 2016. Flame of a cigarette lighter on ceiling. Installation view, Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Courtesy of the artist.

FIGURE 1.8

Olivier Kosta-Théfaine, Soffito (detail), 2016. Flame of a cigarette lighter on ceiling. Installation view, Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Courtesy of the artist.

10Foot's tags, Downey's ceramic graffiti, and Kosta-Théfaine's burnt ceilings thus each act as the foreign disturbance to their site, the secondary form that purposefully overwhelms its structural surrounds. Here we find an ornamental monument (or a monumental ornament) working through a technique of attachment, not separation, through a supplemental rather than archetypal mode. In this way, then, it must be seen to be the city itself, the wall, the glass, the building, the site that becomes of critical importance to us here. What truly constitutes graffiti, as literary theorist Roland Barthes beautifully outlined in his seminal text on the artist Cy Twombly, is thus neither the inscription nor its message but the wall, the background, the surface (Barthes 1991 [1979]: 167). It is graffiti's status as the constitutive addition (whether emergent via acid, fire, or spray) that turns it into that which is "in excess, supernumerary, out of place, as that which will always be an enigmatic surplus" (p. 167). The graffiti image thus appears not via the philosopher's tabula rasa or the artist's pristine canvas but via the dirt and grime of the city. It appears on a site that is unclean but on which an aesthetic overturning can develop, its ornamental positioning and ability to overwhelm the primacy structure being that which is of equally primary importance to us here.

RELATION OR THE INTERRUPTIVE

Graffiti's adjunctive position thus explains its how through its where, yet its relation to site emerges through the antagonistic approach it exhibits to its surrounds. Consider figure 1.9, for example, an image centering on a four-letter, two-color throw-up⁵ by the writer Depo produced using a simple white fill-in and thick black outline. Painted continuously over what I count as twelve