viz. - urban space

Graffiti that Annotates (Where_do_we_grow_from_here.jpg)

Jenn Shapland — Thu, 03 Oct 2013 18:58:00 +0000

This image was uploaded with the post Graffiti that Annotates.

Graffiti that Annotates (Dont_open_dead_inside.jpg)

Jenn Shapland — Thu, 03 Oct 2013 18:58:00 +0000

This image was uploaded with the post Graffiti that Annotates.

Graffiti that Annotates (Cat_piss.jpg)

Jenn Shapland — Thu, 03 Oct 2013 18:55:00 +0000

This image was uploaded with the post Graffiti that Annotates.

Graffiti that Annotates

Jenn Shapland — Thu, 03 Oct 2013 14:55:39 +0000

My favorite genre of graffiti is work that comments on its immediate surroundings. In east Austin, this type of graffiti tends to refer to the seemingly unending gentrification of neighborhoods further and further out. Remember the fancy convenience stores I mentioned last time? Ones where you can buy $6 ice cream sandwiches? The image above is a defunct gas station that appears to have been purchased recently, so I think we can all imagine what's coming next. This graffiti artist—in their own, special, nostalgia-soaked way—wants to encourage visitors to the area to be critical of this expansion. See also: the time Hillside Farmacy's sign was edited to read "Hipster Farmacy."

As effective and important as it is to point out the community-destroying tendencies of new developments, it can get a little old: it's certainly a lament we hear often enough in this town. So I'm also drawn to graffiti that points out something unexpected or unnoticed in its particular locale. Take, for example, the gem above from the alley at 21st and Guad. I pass by this most days, and it makes me laugh pretty much every time. It refers to something a) palpable, b) not usually mentioned, c) gross, and d) ubiquitous in this central Texas roaming feline-palooza. It's also a comment on the ephemerality and dynamic quality of urban environments that graffiti is conscious of and participates in. Of course, like most things, it could also refer to a strain of weed. But I say the arrow suggests otherwise.

Image courtesy of Rhiannon Goad

Here, finally, is an image that appeared on my Instagram feed last week. It's another version of annotative graffiti, but one with a bit more depth than "Cat piss." "Dont open / dead inside" is cryptic, poetic, and kind of hilarious. It's also (as a friend had to point out to me) taken from The Walking Dead, which makes it all the more referential, but slightly less creative.

Love For The Ruins?

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 23:32:22 +0000

Image Credit: Vice Magazine

I couldn’t resist covering this piece that Tim brought to my attention. NPR did a segment covering the evolving phenomenon of “ruin porn” by interviewing a writer, Thomas Morton, who wrote an attack on this phenomenon for Vice Magazine. Morton argues against these images because he says they mislead audiences about the actual economic state of Detroit.

I think Morton makes a really interesting point about the nature of visual rhetoric, and how easily it can be abused, to his interviewer, Bob Garfield, in the NPR piece: “I think when you’re presented with a photo and then a little bit of description of it, the image stands so strongly that it’s almost hard to argue it; you’re throwing what seem like minor quibbles at this shot of utter desolation.” He’s specifically addressing photographers illustrating stories about contemporary urban blight with photos of buildings abandoned in the 1950s, but he also raises the larger ethics of photographing urban blight for aesthetic purposes.

When pictures like these from Vice Magazine, which are included in a story about abandoned schools in Detroit, work to argue for the reader to move beyond the pictures to agitate on behalf of Detroit’s schoolchildren, this seems to be non-exploitative. Morton points at articles and photo series like these from Time Magazine as examples of stories that edit out positive developments in favor of focusing on the bad. However, this isn't the only example of the phenomenon. Websites like Abandoned focus on ruined buildings exclusively for aesthetic purposes. What are the ethics of enjoying looking at ruins for the sake of looking at ruins?

I’m particularly interested in this question as a student of eighteenth-century British literature, as ruins came up again and again as a trope for arguments about lost religious values (focusing on ruined abbeys), and for arguments about rural redevelopment as discussed in Raymond Williams’ Country and the City (epitomized by Oliver Goldsmith’s 1770 poem, “The Deserted Village”), but also as a trope for aesthetic enjoyment. Lord Elgin argued that he had the right to take the Elgin Marbles to Britain because Greece could not care for them appropriately, but this was at the service of cultural appropriation. Ruins seem to serve certain cultural purposes both in England and America today, but for what ends?

The Wire and Cities That Matter

erinhurt — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 19:19:29 +0000

I just finished reading an article in The New Yorker about HBO's The Wire, a gritty drama set in the city of Baltimore. Each season the show focuses on a different aspect of the city, beginning with drug dealers on the streets and gradually moving outwards to include the labor unions at the docks, the politicans, and in its fifth and final season, the news and those who cover it. More often than not, the shows paints an image of the city that is grim and hopeless.

At the end of the article, David Simon, the show's creator, explains a new show he is working on that will be set in New Orleans. He says, "This [new] show will be a way of making a visual argument that cities matter. ‘The Wire’ has not really done that. I certainly never said or wanted to say that Baltimore is not worth saving, or that it can’t be saved. But I think some people watching the show think, Why don’t they just move away?” The article' author adds, "Indeed, the City Council of Baltimore once nearly passed a resolution that proposed steps to counter the bad image of Baltimore propagated by “The Wire.” In 2005, the Sun quoted a report by an image-consulting company that the city had hired. 'Baltimore is plagued by negative press and harmful characterizations in the media, resulting in an inferiority complex,' it said. 'The perception of Baltimore is ‘The Wire,’ ‘The Corner,’ ‘Homicide’ . . . a hopeless, depressed, unemployed, crackaddicted city.' And, under the headline “NO WAY TO TREAT A TOWN,” a reviewer for the New York Post quipped, “I don’t know this Simon guy, but he doesn’t seem to like Baltimore very much, although he makes a very good living writing about it.”

The whole point of the show, however, is to demonstrate not only that Baltimore and its residents are frequently shortchanged by those with the power to do so, but to show the terrible results. Therefore, I find Simon's statement confusing because, in fact, his show does seem to make an argument that cities matter.

One Way to See the State

Brett Ommen — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 02:30:30 +0000

I live on a one way street so I’ve always viewed the “One Way” signs in my neighborhood as good information for motorists and visitors. They are excellent reminders to people that cars should only face east on Washington Street. But this altered image (actually from one block over on Madison Street, where cars travel west) reminds us that street signs are not merely about expressing information about traffic patterns; they are also the banal markers that inform us about the presence of the state’s authority.

In my visual citizenship course last year, the students spent plenty of time talking about the images of state power. Flags, monuments, buildings all serve as powerful reminders of the relationship between citizens and authority. But as I discovered while walking yesterday, the most powerful markers of the state are likely the ones we have casually internalized as the routine images of our everyday lives. I wonder if this isn’t true of visual images generally: that the images we focus on with great attention are not nearly as important as the images we process and dismiss with great ease. When we process visual images with the swiftness of the glance, it may not necessarily mean we are inattentive or dismissive. We may actually be relying on an internalized reading strategy that is predicated on a particular relationship to power. Glancing, under this treatment, suggests a great deal of the rhetorical force of an image can be concealed in its ability to be processed quickly instead of inviting deep contemplation. And this image shows that sometimes it only takes a flippant bit of graffiti to uncover some of the more substantive operations that are implied by the visual markers of our everyday lives.

Of course, the stakes of this particular concealment aren’t terribly disconcerting. I don’t mind that obedience to the state means I don’t have to dodge other cars as I go down the road. And the concealment isn’t terribly tricky in this case either. Most of us would easily identify that the source of street signs is the government. But it still took the little bit of graffiti to spark even this minor bit of contemplation (for me at least—if other readers of Viz. contemplate their relationship to state power every time they encounter public signage, consider me duly impressed, and sympathetic for how overwhelming a drive to the grocery store must be).

Eugene de Salignac’s photos of New York

John Jones — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 14:17:29 +0000

This Smithsonian Magazine article describes the discovery of the identity of the municipal photographer who captured many iconic shots of turn-of-the-century New York, Eugene de Salignac. The Museum of the City of New York will be hosting a show of his work that coincides with the release of a new book of his photographs. The article is accompanied by a gallery of some of de Salignac’s most well-known images.

via Boing Boing