Thank Christ for something like a an engaged response, first, yes, the posts i saw by grad students looking for input were at 12 oz, a cat from Harvard who has articles on Artcrimes asking about the effects of the internet on graffiti and graffiti culture, and a girl doing research about gender roles,
second, you really don't have any idea at all about where I come from, where I've been, what I've done or who I've known, and can have no idea whatsoever what motivated me to begin posting here, anything that you want to posit about me---i'm an oppurtunist, codescending philanthropist, not a writer, etc--is phantasy projection and remains irrelevant to whatever exchange you might want to have, no matter how combatively, here,
and no, man, its 'not my war'? and its not yours either, what, you want to co-opt the fight to reclaim public space? you think that writers are the only ones that have an investment in the social effects that graffiti works? you think that because you've been writing for however many years that you have a privledged access to some orthodox interpretation of the act? Come on, man, you know that whatever graffiti is to you, its not that for everyone, like any act of meaning production, fuck, like any act of pruduction, graffiti is a cultural phenomenon, decentralized, the result of a partcular alignment and opposition of forces and inputs beyond the scope of the individual, of the way that certain forms of information mesh and collide with each other on a large cultural scale and at the level of the individual artist, and for that reason, it is fair fucking game, its one more text that can be interpreted like anything else, and like any more conventional text, the author does not have any greater understanding of the cultural, economic, sexual or--given the general acceptence of some theory of the unconscious--even the personal forces that contribute to its pruduction,
as for being an opportunist --- what? for having a conversation? what am exploiting here, man? whose getting taken advantage of? what is threatened here? is the very act of speaking about writing already taboo? is questioning meaning, motivation and consequence already to foreclose on something like the authentic aura of graffiti? I don't get it. You've seen the 'justify graffiti' thread, asking or answering the kinds of questions that have been raised here doesn't seem to be the problem, the problem as far as i can tell, seeker, has to do with style, with presentaion, and approach, that i didn't affect the right pose, didn't use the right kind of language, and that just seems like a cop out, the sign of a sham supeficiallity that your last post belies,
and as for thinking that i'm doing writers a favor---man, how? i have some ideas, some feelings about graffiti that i want to involve in some kind of dialect with others, whatever i am doing here, it has far less to do with whatever i may or may not put in my thesis (after all there is more than enough material already written about graffiti to engage, i wouldn't need to 'tresspass' on this or any other site to patch together what you want to believe is my hobbled image of 'the scene') than it does with a personal interst, investment and, like you and everyone else here, a sence of community, even a virtual one,
but you're right about the commodification of graffiti, or punk, or anything that was at one time thought to be subversive or dangerous or oppositional: its not dead once it hits walmart, but i wouldn't argue that it remains robust and viable in spite of its commodification, but rather that all that's happened is that its status as commodity has been made grossly explicit,
what interests me is the way that graffiti even as a form popular protest (intentional or incidental) was always already commodified, from the very beginning, that it effected a feedback loop between the ubiquity of advertisement and the individual whose status as such is threatened by that force, it in many ways can be read as a sign of the effectiveness of late-stage capitalism, of the inividual perfectly merged with what in an earlier day would have been called the mode of production . . .
whose war? war? with a slight shift in perspective and emphasis we can make writers the unwilling, unknowing dupes of the global capitalist monoculture their work at first seems to attack. No in this take on things, all the walmarts in world will not make graffiti obsolete, bc in this version, writers are the van guard of a new post human era in which even the living material body can only re-enact over and over again the feats and features of the commodity object. In this version writers don't get their originality re-packaged and thrown back at them, they only see their own habbits re-produced more clearly. . .
and as far as i can tell its this tension between this idea and the notion of graffiti as subversive that is at the center of the hegemonic struggle for the 'meaning' of graffiti, a struggle which is going on and will go on whether you like it or not seeker, and i'm not just talking about in the academy, which is only one front, but on the streets also, and in pop-culture media and wherever, all the usual superstructural sites---
but whatever, its all just talk, right, piss off into the air if you are going to take it personally.