viz. - graffiti

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.

Jeremiah the Innocent Icon

Sarah G. Sussman — Sat, 21 Sep 2013 19:03:03 +0000

Image credit: Flickriver

Daniel Johnston’s “Jeremiah the Innocent,” also known as the “Hi, How Are You” frog, is arguably the single-most iconic piece of street art in Austin. Though many who pass it by everyday assume that it is graffiti which has been preserved, Austin news station KXAN reports that the “Hi, How Are you” frog is actually a commissioned mural for which Johnston was reportedly paid a sum of $100 by Sound Exchange, a popular music store. To the dismay of Austinites, Sound Exchange closed down in 2004 and was replaced by a Baja Fresh. At the time of Sound Exchange’s closing, customers rallied to protect the mural, and won. “Jeremiah the Innocent” was the cover of Daniel Johnston’s 1983 album Hi, How Are You: the unfinished album. Throughout the years, various vandals have tried to deface the mural, but time and again it has been salvaged by popular demand.

Most often, the term "iconic" is the province of photographs like Alfred Eisenstadt’s “The V-J Day Kiss” or Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother.” These are the kinds of photos which appear on t-shirts, tote bags, advertisements, and other unexpected and sometimes ill-fitting places. It’s so rare to think of art created with spray paint as iconic, but if any place pays homage to a select few vagabond artists and artworks -- it’s Austin. Along the lines of Jenn Shapland’s post about graffiti and advertising, one reason we memorialize these select murals is because they are a part of Austin’s unique “Keep Austin Weird” franchise.

The 1990s, when the iconizing of Jeremiah began, was characterized by an exaltation of the underdog celebrity. Wielded as a symbol of subcultural coolness, “Jeremiah the Innocent” was first introduced to the mainstream through Kurt Cobain, who frequently wore the image on a t-shirt during the 1991 promotion of Nirvana's album, Nevermind.

Image credit: collapseboard.com

In many ways, “Jeremiah the Innocent” encapsulates everything the ironically elite of the grunge era came to hate about their own fame. Originally designed as an artifact of the underground music scene, by the oughts the iconic Austin graffiti could be seen worn by sorority sisters, babies in onesies, soccer moms, and soccer dads.

Image credit: austinrockstexas.com

The latest addition to the “Hi, How Are You” wall is perhaps, the most ill-fitting and puzzling yet: St. Austin's Catholic Church has aped the style of Jeremiah to spawn a new creature. The tadpole-esque cartoon is on a vinyl poster (can a vinyl poster be graffiti?) across the street from the iconic frog, in order to capitalize on the cultural cache of Johnston’s icon, thus making the church seem a little more hip. This seems the ultimate twist of irony. What was once a record cover and mural associated with the indie music scene has been appropriated to tell students to come to Jesus.

Photo credit: Stellatex's Instagram, with permission

As with internet memes, and all images truly iconic, “Jeremiah the Innocent” has been unmoored from his context. My impulse was to preserve and protect this context. Searching for more information, however, I found that Daniel Johnston’s own site hihowareyou.com actually sells a number of their own “Hi, How Are You” onesies and other products. I’m uncertain of copyright laws here, but it seems best that if someone is going to profit off of “Jeremiah the Innocent,” that it should be Johnston himself. Whether Johnston would have opted to sell the onesies on his own, or simply needed the income and saw no reason for the Weird Austin franchise opportunists to be the only ones profiting off of his art is unclear. I emailed Daniel Johnston’s brother who manages questions from the press, specifically about the Catholic Church’s poster, but have had no response so far. Still, as far as Jeremiah’s new Catholic neighbor is involved, I’d love to know: What Would Daniel Johnston do?

For more on graffiti, see this week's other contributions:

What is graffiti and who does it belong to?

Graffiti? I'll know it when I see it. Or not.

Graffiti as Advertisement

Jenn Shapland — Thu, 19 Sep 2013 15:00:00 +0000

Photo credit: Flickr user elizaO

It’s nice to think about graffiti as a free, democratic art form. Anyone can participate—all you risk is a fine or possibly jail time! But in Austin, lately, graffiti has been taken over by the big green capitalist monster (a monster, some might say, who’s slowly but surely encroaching on the town with heinous condos and hip, remodeled convenience stores that stock only local beer and kombucha).

A lot of Austin graffiti and mural painting has an explicitly commercial focus. Take, for example, the newest addition to my visual neighborhood at Tyson’s Tacos on Airport. On one side of the building’s facade you find the saccharine maxim, “A kiss blown is a kiss wasted.” Heading south, you get a view of their knit-bombed fence that asks in six-foot neon pink letters, “IF NOT NOW, WHEN?” Well, that's one question. Here are my questions: why has this business taken it upon itself to cheese up the gentrifying neighborhood? What is the point of ads like this? What do they have to do with tacos? Bonus question: is knit bombing graffiti?

Photos from Yelp, modified by author using DipTic

They aren’t the only place in town using the sweet, the inspirational, and the irrelevant as guiding principles for their street art. Over at the United Way Austin building on MLK, a mural went up this spring with a piece of bread, a melty yellow pat, and the sappy tag line, “You’re My Butter Half.” While this is a mural for a non-profit, there’s no question that it went up as an effort to rebrand the organization’s Austin branch. And, just like Liz Lambert’s “I love you so much” at Jo’s on South Congress, this graffiti is ripe for engagement photos. In a word: barf. A quick internet search led me to a post on a site called Hipstercrite titled "MOST ROMANTIC PLACES IN AUSTIN TO INSTAGRAM ON VALENTINE’S DAY." Double barf, y’all.

Photo credit: Hipstercrite

Not all advertising graffiti is lame or nausea-inducing, though. In fact, some of my favorite Austin street art can be found in faded advertisements on the exposed brick of remaining early Austin buildings downtown, like the Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum facade (though I suspect the new Marriott building has covered it up by now). Graffiti ads like these provide some of the few visuals that remain of a prior Austin; they give a mostly new city some visual history. So, is graffiti advertising all that bad?

Austin’s Ian Dille would say yes.* His wife’s framing studio was recently graffiti bombed by the Arcade Fire’s guerilla marketing strategy for their new album. Graffiti versions of the album cover for Reflektor appeared overnight.

Photo credit: Ian Dille

In an op-ed on Slate’s “Browbeat” blog, Dille writes,

If you’re a talented young artist who considers the urban environment your canvas, by all means, spray-paint a building. If you’ve got a radical social agenda and you think spray-painting property is the best way to convey your message? Go ahead...But if you’re an internationally renowned band that’s defacing public and private property for promotional purposes, maybe go back to the drawing board, and think some more about how you want to let people know about your music.

If you haven’t read about it yet, it’s worth a mull. Especially because Win Butler replied to Dille in a handwritten note, now published below the article. Cute handwriting, Win, but lame excuses.

*Shoutout to Rhiannon Goad, who pointed me to this mini scandal.

For more on graffiti, see this week's other contributions:

What is graffiti and who does it belong to?

Graffiti? I'll know it when I see it. Or not.

Jeremiah the Innocent Icon

Graffiti? I'll Know It When I See It. Or Not.

clsloan — Tue, 17 Sep 2013 14:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: Personal Photograph

When approaching a situation from a place of unfamiliarity or doubt, long-standing habit takes me to the Oxford English Dictionary. According to this semi-sacred text, graffiti (noun), means “words or images marked (illegally) in a public place, esp. using aerosol paint.” I etched this definition onto a spare wall in my brain and set out, quite purposefully, to find some street art. I knew from casual observation that some fences outside my apartment complex, the bus stations along my street, some building walls and even the backs of some signs sport small splashes of graffiti. All that remained was determining and documenting which offerings qualified as real graffiti (once again, “words or images marked (illegally) in a public place, esp. using aerosol paint”). Simple, right?

Oh, so wrong.

A friend tagging along, wielding our camera, first pointed to some text stretched along a newspaper stand.

Image Credit: Personal Photograph

“Want me to get that?” He asked, good naturedly.

“Yeah! That's...Hang on.” Uncertainty immediately clouded my mind. I was pretty sure the bold red letters weren't exactly sanctioned by the government, but they bore little to no relation to the elaborate sketches I'd seen decorating other walls in the city. This was just...a name? Maybe? I leaned closer. I couldn't even make out the letters properly, but it certainly meant something to someone. Perhaps even several someones. But could it be called street art in any sense of the term? And here my OED training sort of fell apart.

What, exactly, is the nature of graffiti? Is it a type, a definable item? That didn't seem likely, given that tagging, text, names, splashes of color, images and designs all seem to qualify as graffiti. Or is it an artistic style? That seemed a little more promising, given that each example we passed as we trekked down Cameron road bore a distinct family resemblance, but that didn't seem fair, either. Is it defined by its illegality, then? Can we safely say that any display erected against the law qualifies as graffiti? Well, then, what about art done anonymously on sanctioned public walls? The OED itself includes (illegally) parenthetically, an additional, smirking bit of the denotation added, almost as an afterthought superimposed upon (and altering) the baseline definition. Maybe legality wasn't the way to go.

Is graffiti, then, none of the above? Better yet, can graffiti, by its very nature, be properly codified? Classified? Defined? Graffiti has always been one of those words I associated with rebellion, heroic individualism and youthful risk. Was it fair of me to go to a dictionary in an attempt to understand the phenomenon better? Maybe not. Perhaps graffiti was more about an ambiance instead of a definition. Perhaps I needed to trust my gut, not a rationalist approach. Surely, now I would fare better.

Oh, so wrong.

Image Credit: Personal Photograph

As I turned from example to example, I found myself snapping multiple pictures but disregarding any highly personal messages with some embarrassment. If I could make out a legible name, I avoided a photo. If the message was hateful, I passed it by. I was drawn to samples I could a) decipher and b) appreciate. But was that fair? How can we discuss graffiti in toto without accounting for, well, every mark on every brick on every corner? At the end of an afternoon of searching, I was left with more questions than answers.

Is that the nature of graffiti?

For more on graffiti, see this week's other contributions:

What is graffiti and who does it belong to?

Graffiti as Advertisement

Jeremiah the Innocent Icon

Interactive Google Map: Austin Graffiti

Laura Thain — Tue, 17 Sep 2013 04:37:31 +0000

Find below our ongoing graffiti mapping project for the city of Austin. Feel free ot contribute to this map--we ask that you take the following simple steps:

1) Place a marker as close as you can to where the graffiti currently exists or has existed.

2) Write a brief description of the graffiti.

3) Photograph the graffiti and upload it with your description. You can do this in rich-text mode.

Enjoy this growing archive of Austin graffiti!

View Interactive Austin Graffiti Map in a larger map

What is graffiti and who does it belong to?

Laura Thain — Mon, 16 Sep 2013 20:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: Geoff Hargadon

This week on viz. we'll be exploring graffiti culture in Austin and beyond, beginning with an interactive graffiti map that we'll use to begin archiving graffiti in and around the community in which we live. Please visit and contribute!

In this post, I'd like to introduce some issues central to reading graffiti as both a performative and political act. I take as my primary examples the HOPE Outdoor Gallery on 11th St. and Baylor in Austin's Clarksville neighborhood and graffiti from inside a now-demolished bicycle shop that once operated in West Campus. Using these examples, I'd like to explore definitions of graffiti and raise questions of property and ownership in public spaces. Join our interactive mapping project and follow our posts this week as we take a closer look at Austin graffiti.

The HOPE Outdoor gallery was founded 2011 on the site of an abandoned condominium construction site. At 2011’s SXSW festival, Shepard Fairey, renowned street artist and creator of the iconic HOPE poster for the Obama campaign, contributed the first murals, pictured above. The project hopes “to provide muralists, graffiti artists and community groups the opportunity to display large scale art pieces driven by inspirational, positive and educational messaging.”

Most people in Austin, however, refer to the installation as the “free wall” or the “Baylor street art wall.” Within weeks, Fairey’s mural was tagged by local graffiti artists, and the HOPE foundation began to lose control of the mural. Although both the property owners and HOPE make consistent attempts to control contributions to the site, its current façade is a constantly-rotating parade of vibrant Austin graffiti culture alongside (and often, on top of) commissioned art.

The remains of Fairey's mural, late 2011 Image Credit: Super Sonic Electronic

Such political battles represent a larger discussion of “street art” vs. graffiti. “Street artists” often cite their desire to escape the negative connotations attached to graffiti and those who create graffiti, who go by a variety of names (tagger, bomber, writer, or simply artist). The editor of a LA street art blog Melrose & Farfax represents this point of view. She explains, "Both graffiti and street art use the re-appropriation of public space. But with graffiti you are limited to what you can do with a spray can on the spot. Street art might employ some of the application techniques, but most often, it is a finished product that is brought ready-made to the location, so the artist's message is much more developed. Street art is not so much about making a name and leaving a mark as it is getting people to interact with and view something in a new way, and that is a big difference."

Current state of Fairey's mural as of Sept. 2013. Image Source: Personal photograph. Click to enlarge.

Street art, at least, in the case of the "free wall," represents the commissioned, publicly-sanctioned offspring of graffiti culture. And the battle between graffiti and street art on Austin's Baylor St. represents a larger battle over ownership of public spaces. That conversation often revolves around aesthetic value--that is, that public art is of higher value to the community (and, less abstractly, the surrounding property) if it comes from a commissioned artist. Differences in quality are difficult to determine and always rely on subjective aesthetic criteria, though attempting to set out those criteria clearly demonstrates that the aesthetic and the political go hand-and-hand in public spaces. Often, the "quality" of an art installation relies heavily on our ability to name the artist. It is anonymous or psuedonymous art that holds less aesthetic value. Graffiti shows us in clear and interesting ways the connection between art and power.

Issues of ownership influence indoor spaces as much as outdoor ones. I'd like to close by raising some questions about ownership as well as definition. The images below come from the shop bathroom and workspace of one of the oldest bicycle shops in Austin which closed in May of 2013, citing high property taxes in West Campus. The building that once housed the shop was demolished within days to make room for a student-housing high rise.

Image Credit: RED

Unlike most photographs of graffiti, this documentation represents not a stage of graffiti production on a particular architectural object but the final stage of graffiti in this place. Rather than reminding us only of the ephemeral nature of street art, it points to the temporality of urban landscapes, as well.

As far as I know, this is the only surviving photograph of this graffiti--a lone entry in an archive. Bathroom graffiti is a peculiar example of public art. It holds a particular type of captive audience, but exists in a private space within the public (that is, the public space of the restroom itself.) This particular graffiti came from a bathroom that was used exclusively by bike mechanics and perhaps a few special regulars, but like most bathroom graffiti, still functions on some level as an insider text.

Image Credit: RED

I'd like to close with this image in the hopes that it can help us both expand and refine a definition of graffiti. This is the mechanics' bathroom door, heavily decorated with objects removed from punctured tires over the course of many years. Like the bathroom wall, it is an ever-changing landscape that documents specific events and experiences to a larger audience. If graffiti is collaborative, largely anonymous or pseudonymous inscription geared toward communicating presence and experience in a public space, the nail wall certainly qualifies--it in fact goes beyond the experience of the mechanics and additionally documents the experience (and presence!) of the cycling community of which they are a part.

For more on graffiti, see this week's other contributions:

Graffiti? I'll Know It When I See It. Or Not.

Graffiti as Advertisement

Jeremiah the Innocent Icon

The Impermanent Art of Graffiti

Michael Widner — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 12:30:00 +0000

Graffiti by Banksy, Image via Holy Taco

As many of Banksy's works show, graffiti can convey social commentary. For example, the painting above, which shows a city worker sandblasting the famous Lascaux cave paintings just as he would modern day graffiti, wittily laments the blindness of local governments to public art.

The antagonism between government and graffiti artists is understandable; we cannot expect government officials to determine what is art and what is vandalism. At the same time, graffiti is public art to be encouraged, not suppressed. The longstanding criminality of the form makes it ideal for subsersive and counter-cultural messages. Even so, alongside simple, unappealing tags or wall-sized, astoundingly intricate paintings of pseudonyms, graffiti that bears an explicit message stands out. While Banksy's skillful works transmit these messages with a vigorous and unique style that accounts for much of his popularity, this type of work is seen elsewhere.

I discover such didactic art throughout Austin. The guiding philosophy rejects consumerism and conformity. I came across two particularly nice examples yesterday, while walking along the Pfluger pedestrian bridge over Town Lake:

"Breathe" is a call for mindfulness and focus within a series of images seemingly unconnected by anything other than style and color. "Robots" playfully suggests that we already act like robots without realizing it.

As Nate Kreuter notes in his post on graffiti, a key element is the audacity of the artist. Painting this train bridge surely counts as daring. A KXAN news report about the water rescue required for a tagger who jumped from it after being caught in broad daylight exemplifies the dangers. The reporter calls the artist a "graffiti vandal" and notes his bongos were also found; she thus makes it clear that this individual and, by extension, the art form in which he was engaged, is deviant and deserving of mockery.

But note the height of the bridge from which he jumped:

Why would someone take such a risk to create public art that many consider mere vandalism, art that the city will surely blast away within weeks if not days? The transitory nature of this form has led websites like Art Crimes to try and preserve via photographs the various pieces, including some in Austin. Here are two paintings by the same artist (Gomer) in the same place:

"Gomer" images via Art Crimes

The impermanence of the medium is, itself, part of the meaning. Not only must we reflect on the formal characteristics and the explicit or implicit messages, but also the effort put forth by an artist who knows the work will disappear. The result is an anonymous, altruistic art that momentarily beautifies and provokes before its inevitable destruction.

Ways of looking at a bird: Paper anniversary edition

John Jones — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 21:03:47 +0000

A year ago today, the city of Boston was brought to a standstill by led advertisements for the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie. Here’s how I described the incident way-back-when in viz.’s first blog post:

on Jan. 31, 2007, some members of the the Boston police force interpreted some electronic, guerrilla marketing devices for the movie Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters as bombs. The city closed down bridges and shut down the river to boat traffic. In the ensuing fallout, video artists Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens were arrested and the president of Adult Swim resigned over the incident.

Today, graffiti artists and other pranksters have commemorated the incident by posting similar LED art all over Beantown:

Some of the installations included special warnings:

Apparently, Berdovsky and Stevens ended up receiving a slap on the wrist—they had to do some community service—but the incident has become infamous among technology-types as an example of the wonderful things we can accomplish as a society through a steadfast reliance on our vast reserves of ignorance and fear.

Happy Aqua Teen Day.

Getting the Most Out of Your Graffiti (and the first bounty offered on our blog)

Nate Kreuter — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 16:37:05 +0000

I've always thought that the best graffiti is on train cars. Maybe it's not always the best graphically, but I like the statement--not only has the tagger tagged, but the canvas is mobile and likely to get pulled all over the country, set forth into the world. It's bold. Not as bold as the graffiti on interstate signs where some kid crawled out on a metal pole over 80 mile-an-hour traffic, but bold nonetheless.

On the other hand, I've always looked down my nose at graffiti I find in places that aren't readily visible. For example, when I walk to my local grocery store I cut through some trees on the side of the building. There's a lot of graffiti on that side of the building, I guess because the trees offer protection to the artists, but no one ever sees their work, since relatively few people take the footpath through dumpsters and trees to get to the store. This seems to me to defeat the purpose of graffiti, which at least has its roots in thumbing one's nose at The Man, and above all, is meant to be seen.

Mojo's, a now defunct Austin coffee shop near UT, used to have a policy of allowing artists to graffiti their building. It struck me as smart because, graffiti is hard and expensive to fight in some areas, and they got some free art out of it, as well as a lot of, I'm sure very lucrative, cred with the hipster crowd. But it does seem to defeat the purpose of graffiti, which is all about, in addition to a possible larger statement, doing something illegal, often just for the sake of it. Interestingly, I never saw an artist at Mojo's working in the daylight. Did they only paint there at night so they could kinda sorta maybe pretend they were still getting away with something?

Bottom Line: Graffiti is best when bold. I'm offering a $100 bounty to anyone who can prove they tagged Air Force 1, and I don't care what you write or who's president when you do it. Bounty will remain available until claimed. I reserve the right to seek verification.