Graffiti and the Obelisk

For those Graffiti Writers who Care: Some Thoughts about Remaking Language.

Graffiti

One of the novelties of electronic text was that it transferred some of its hard coded properties to the interface: suddenly parameters like font type and font size were no longer fixed on a piece of paper but adjustable to individual taste. Many graffiti writers, I have noticed, point out as one of the reasons for doing it that adding three letters of your own can be enough to rewrite the urban script for that particular location. The purpose of each tag is to turn its writer from a spectator of architectonic form into a self professed creator of urban experience. When done properly, a tiny tag can attract more attention than the building it is written on.

Writing on things means claiming them as your own. This has direct consequences for the language used on buildings and monuments and on those overwriting these object illegally. Graffiti writers know this: because what they do is illegal but also because crossing someone's tags is considered a fundamental crime against the code of honour inside the scene.

Language is never just functional, it always communicates certain values and customs that are taken for granted and which have nothing to do with what words mean according to a dictionary or the way grammar dictates their use.

It is my conviction that graffiti, as it has evolved in the last 30 years or so, is not living up to its potential. Instead of aggressively reproducing its own internal code like a machine that has gone out of control and keeps banging its head into the same wall over and over again, the graffiti community should break out of its current deadlock. If graffiti would leave behind the world of custom, convention and fashion and entered a modus operandi in which graffiti was about language first it would be an entire different game and likely much more exiting. The current arsenal of styles, forms and images used by graffiti writers is a limited one. By opening up the frontiers of possibility, by incorporating models and thoughts from all ages, graffiti writers could be entering a field where there is much to discover. Their private graf language would no longer be marginalized and stereotyped by the conservative way things are supposed to be done. In order to achieve this graffiti would need to start communicating with people from outside the scene again, doing so in a smart way and on its own terms.

The Obelisk

Can you imagine the Chinese seizing the Statue of Liberty, dragging it all the way home to Shanghai and re-erect it there after wiping from it all reference to the USA?

Architectonic theft of similar Ozymandian calibre has been committed by a succession of Roman emperors (Augustus, Caligula). From the deep south of the Nile Delta the Romans took back with them the gigantic obelisks that still adorn Rome, removing the hieroglyphs to make them tell the Roman story only. After the Romans, the Christians. In the 16th century Pope Sixtus V got it in his head to once again overwrite the obelisk. What makes this history so relevant to graffiti is not just because it explains how language is being used to shift the symbolic meaning of an architectonic object, but the fact that Sixtus V had designed a special ornamental font-type to be used on it.

Language is magic stuff that needs to be consciously pushed into shape and form to ensure that it works exactly the way you want it to work. Sixtus V understood that it was not enough to overwrite the monument with ordinary letters because these are desecrated by vulgar use in the past. The unique alphabet signified that the obelisk had with its new possessor gained a new spiritual power. Partly overwriting other people's language and properties evokes anger, as we know it does, because it sends mixed messages in languages that clash.

Remaking Language

Futura2000 modified his signature when he changed his territory from the street to the art gallery. It is the right thing to do: different spaces, different area's, different surfaces, different audiences, different contexts, different interfaces, all demand a new language, a new style, a new mythology, a new centre of gravity, a new law of form.

Rammelzee, the inventor of the particular style in graffiti called Wild Style, proposed the CEREBREMIC NEUTRON HARPOON of IKONOKLAST PANZERISM. Moving beyond the egocentrism of zillion*time tagging your name, Rammelzee wanted to take graffiti forward by using it as a tactic in a larger project. By breaking down common linguistic conventions and by inventing new ones, he wanted to disrupt common and lazy modes of understanding through reading/writing. Reminiscent of the cut-up techniques developed by William S. Burrough and Brion Gyson in the early sixties, he wanted to snatch language from walls and books, tear them apart, dissect them, built new syntaxoscopic interfaces around them, to learn what they were really saying. Wild Style was the name for this brain frying / atom splitting communication theory at the intersection between signal, chaos and parasitic gaps.

Tell me the way you write and I tell you what you think and to what group you belong. In a time where everybody is obsessed by Islamic terrorism, reading in the reverse direction is socially suspect. Which is a good but negative example of othergraphy. Halfway the 19th century the Mormons designed the Deseret alphabet with the purpose to unite followers across vast distances: the alphabet as ghetto. The parallel with graffiti is obvious.

The English poet Robert Graves, in the late 1940ties, gave an example of Panzerist Wild Style avant la lettre. In his discussion of the Celtic Ogham script, which is all the more interesting from a Wild Style perspective because it is literally carved in 3 dimensions, each character represents a letter, a tree and a god, making it impossible to draw the line between ideogram and phoneme. The destruction of this script by invading societies was a form of mind control because Ogham mirrors the worldview, the mythology, of those who speak it. The implication is that carving out your own syntactical freespace can profoundly change the way you think. The link is reinforced by the obvious fact that language allows you to share this with others, making it all the more real. The construction of new languages and font-patterns could be one way for progression in graffiti.

But writing from left to right or from right to left are, in essence, equal dead weight to a mind filled with the typographical heresy of Wild Style. The first thing to do is to develop counter-strategies for ordering words and letters that expose and render helpless basic fundamentals of the way linguistic structure equals control. The goal is the absolute elastification of font and outline and the eradication off all typologic, the destruction of every rule of grammar and form. After having rid oneself of conventional read/write directions, the use of the A-Z alphabet, and its conventional sequence ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ, other aspects needs critical evaluation too.

What would happen if all graffiti writers overnight would write their name backwards? It is a cheap paperback cliché of occultism that reading the bible backwards will undo the universe while the devil supposedly can be heard by playing certain records backwards. It is enough to mention Babylon, that ancient dystopia of linguistic diversion, to remind you that messing with the structure of language has always been considered to be dangerous. It is the power of computers to generate all permutations that can made by combining according to different rules a certain range of tokens. It would not be hard to code a small software running on your pocket PC or Mobile phone that would tell you what combinations could be made with words you encounter while out on your game: the man-machine graffiti interface.

Rammelzee made it perfectly clear that graffiti should be an oppositional system of nothing less but knowledge. Or in his own words: "Knowledge knowledge knowledge, the elevation of Wild Style knowledge is concluded as a SYMBOL DESTROYER, ARMORED, MEDIEVAL MECHANISM.". He is not talking about academic knowledge but about the personal need to be curious about the world and incorporate all what fascinates you into the mix.

Talk to Me

There are essentially 3 options for dealing with what you don't understand: you can ignore it, you can destroy it or you can decipher it.

What annoyed the godlike Roman emperor in the Egyptian script on the Obelisk was that they could not read it: it suggested secrets, it suggested valuable information useless, it painstakingly reminded the most powerful man on earth of their limits and that hurts.

The language of graffiti is one of self sustaining code that prevents outsiders from entering the inner circle. Once outsiders learn to decipher the code it turns out there is nothing said at all. Graffiti operates as a strange attractor of public attention and media coverage. It is evident from this that code communicates, that glyphs and calligraphy and syllable glitches fascinate the kind of people who are open to new things: code as social filter for exactly the type of humanoids you want to communicate with. Based on the wrong hypothesis people like Athanasius Kircher (a true hero of Wild Type knowledge acquisition) thought to have deciphered the hieroglyphs only to be found out much later to actually have developed a brand new language by misinterpreting it.  

An Interface is the point, area, or surface along which two substances or other qualitatively different things meet, the graffiti I am talking about here would be a hyperfluid medium of space-specific language of a kind nobody has seen before: it would be an interface between the city and its dwellers, between graffiti writer and public but also between public and his/her own creativity in finding pattern in code they don't understand.  

By: socialfiction.org

* Make sure to share your Wild Style Alphabet-Elephantiasis with the Collaborative Babylon Bonanza of OnlyOneNativeSpeaker. (http://socialfiction.org/onlyone)

* An earlier version of this text was presented at the P.S. street-art exhibition in the NeuroTitan gallery in Berlin. Without the kind invitation of Stak this text would never have been written, his and Influenza's enthusiasm caused me to edit it a bit more into its present shape.