Graffiti as Sign

Themes

• ownership
• anarchy/freedom
• subversion
• assertion of identity

Graffiti provides a free mode of communication - writing being potentially anonymous. Therefore if the writer is unidentified, its message transcends the authorship of one individual; anyone could have written it, and everyone can see it. Mass communication at street level.

Prohibited sign-making - unauthorised, vandalism, the public/anarchic seizing of a space that isn't sanctioned for marking.

Subversion - culture jamming [Naomi Klein - No Logo] - reclamation of paid-for media outlets/ad spaces to sabotage/subvert a commercial message - "screwing up the system from the inside" as Courtney Love might put it.

• Sony - walls paid for and adorned with fake graffiti to sell a product - shown up for what it was by disgusted locals who scrawled "stop hawking corporate products on our neighbourhood" across the "graffiti".
• Occupational culture jammers - sabotage advertisements, online and across city billboards, turning slogans and brand ideologies on their heads, often humorously... seek to make people cynical about advertising
  
  [click to enlarge]
  http://www.adbusters.org/
  http://www.abrupt.org/CJ/CJ.html
  http://www.sniggle.net/ ("Hacking, Slashing and Sniping in the Empire of Signs. The culture jammer's encyclopedia.")

Graffiti as identifier - a tag individualises, asserts the author's existence, but nevertheless maintains distances. Tells you nothing more than the assertion of existence and that the author is himself, rather than someone else. It's not a work of art in that sense; it seeks not to communicate meaning or express an idea/reaction; merely to be, and to be noticed for being. Little more than an "I wuz ere"; individualises only to a differential degree - doesn't express anything unique. To this end it's much like a brand assertion - i.e. a modern advertisement. Brandable commodities aren't and needn't be unique - they just need to be more instantly identifiable than their competitors. Thus the adman's work goes into the brand, not description of the product. The brand IS the product.

Ad campaigns sometimes adopt a graffiti technique - images and words without explanation to spark attention. You get used to seeing an image/slogan without meaning or explanation, just like graffiti; the confusion lodges the image in your psyche,so the image itself, not the product (among millions of other competing products) sticks. Then the campaign unfurls its mysteries, everyone "gets" it and exhales, and the product is launched on a public already primed for it.

Graffiti humour - graffiti on the Old Kent Road - "Joey C is innocent" followed by "So is Arthur Fowler" [written at the time of the Eastenders character's wrongful incarceration]. Knowing irony based around the credence we give to the events in fictional soapland.