Gushy Promises In The Sunshine
Form and content are the bookends of all evaluation. As is the case with
other seductive tendencies, in modern graff, one must separate the two
components. What you say matters much less than how you say it. If
"KING SHIT" invades the surrounding walls of your community how important is
the surface versus the accent, and savoir-faire of the intrusion? Studying
the dilapidated billboards in my community, I find the tobacco and alcoholic
products posted as beautiful organic visions complimenting the texture of
the city.
The lessons of butchering stock images and false paradises are socially
inherent. Picasso embraced this as did Chuck Berry. There's a tradition.
The chain of analogies that are aroused in any given work represent the
polychromatic, polyphonic and polymorphous energy of existence. Frequently
the product is condensed and gathered into a single word, typically with the
full expenditure of exhaustion.
The pop-rock collision of graffiti and cubism refuses the static silence and
embraces the dynamism of sound and noise. When one gazes upon local
graffiti we see it not only as creation itself but an accumulation of
knowledge. One doesn't write about anything — one simply writes. Graffiti
theory is the first class coach on the freight train of graffiti history.
One good journalist is worth more than a hundred great painters. If it is
not multi-leveled than the graffiti is nothing.
It is all the anti-signature. The signature that refuses. Graffiti stands
to deny all the gushy promises made in the sunshine. Technical production
is not the highest priority on the train tracks. The experience of art is
cemented in the excitement of peering at inaccessible capital, whereas
graffiti provides the viewer with the presentation of the city as the great
condenser of moral chaos.
So we spin circles and forever dance on the ballroom floor of bathos and
compromise wielding the power of subversive graffiti and the graffiti of
subversive power, the reaction of product and the product of reaction.
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