The Full Picture

Our cities conspire. Sidewalks bear witness to stories of survival, subjugation... sedition. Abandoned roofs chronicle the souls of city-dwellers. Through a spray-can, we witness the lived multiplicities of the urban subversive. Graffiti, both ‘ideology and practice’, is an embodiment of urban heterodoxy (Lefebvre 1968, 3)Source excerptGraffiti as ideology and practice embodies urban heterodoxy within the city.. With the aims of understanding this heterodoxy, it becomes imperative to examine the fabric of urban existence: the city serves as both canvas and stage for the subversive narratives that graffiti encapsulates. This urbanist view of the city as a dynamic social framework within which graffiti integrates itself into, will provide a roadmap and vernacular to examine the dialectics of the subculture, and formulate our problem statement more clearly.

Lefebvre’s seminal ‘The Right To the City’ provides a definitional grasp on urbanism, but perhaps more integrally, a lens with which to analyze the city as a social entity. He describes the city as a codified social structure, not delineable through any particular functions of ‘habitat’ or ‘institution’, but representable as a multi-levelled spatial schema with teleological rooting in (libertarian Marxist conceptions of) social need (Lefebvre 1968, 34)Source excerptThe city is a multi-levelled spatial schema rooted in social need.. He presents several outlooks which will prove useful to foreground this paper’s analysis.

Lefevbre’s notional formulation of urbanism contravenes antecedent approaches to classify cities through stratagems of form, structure and function[alism] (declaring them incapable of ‘attain[ing] rigorous purity’) (Lefebvre 1968, 33)Source excerptFormal and functional definitions of the city cannot attain rigorous purity.. Specifically, by purity, he disclaims how these approaches adopt an outsider viewership of urban development centered around consumptive, ‘individual needs’ (Lefebvre 1968, 57)Source excerptOutsider views centered on consumptive individual needs miss lived experience., which fails to capture the constituting perspectives, lived experiences and ‘oeuvre’ of those who inhabit (Lefebvre 1968, 57)Source excerptOutsider views centered on consumptive individual needs miss lived experience.. By treating our cities as habitats borne of managed commercialized need, we lose feeling. Lefebvre’s solution is a positioning of a city as a ‘virtual object’ - a social entity where our theoretical constructs are recognised as projections of a ‘warmer’ reality lacking objectivity. With fiéde, Lefebvre’s construct should be painted against the argumentative stakes of The Right To The City - an argument more concerned with the justification of the necessity of urban life, probably in response to contemporaneous anti-urbanist movements like the source-acknowledged ‘right to nature’ (Lefebvre 1968, 63)Source excerptUrban life is defended against contemporaneous anti-urbanist “right to nature” arguments.. But even when distanced from this goal (and from the politically-provenanced context of Marxism that proves too unwieldly for this paper’s scope), his ideas resonate - the viewership of the urban entity as one that’s materialised in response to consumerism appears dull in face of a reality of groupings demarcated by culturally-distinctive art, creativity and qualia - in fact, a posteriori this perhaps bears most affinity with what the general public tends to conceptualise as urban culture. It follows that as a basally creative subculture that occupies this subgrouping, we can hope to best understand the social underpinnings of the graffiti subculture by heeding Lefevbre’s caution, and avoid unwarranted assignage of the subculture’s social origination following from an inadequate projection of reality.

Lefebvre speaks to certain levels of ‘spatial opposition’ which characterise a city (Lefebvre 1968, 34)Source excerptThe city is a multi-levelled spatial schema rooted in social need., albeit with the vaguery that comes with his self-recognised (but unjustified broad-sweeping) ‘cavalier’ attitude towards strict definition. He enumerates ‘uninhabited and even uninhabitable spaces: public buildings, monuments, squares, streets, large or small voids’ to 1) draw contrast between their ostensible interstitiality (ambivalently relational to his notion of ‘heteropy’ to and the institutionalism beset by normative consumerist institutions (‘isotopy’) and 2) posit that a relationship between ‘heteropy’ and ‘isotopy’ is adherent to an urbanist vantage (Lefebvre 1968, 34)Source excerptThe city is a multi-levelled spatial schema rooted in social need.. The essence of his abstraction is illustrated more clearly by (his proposed) comparison between ‘social and owner-occupied housing’ - in light of this, we then find it ostensible for graffiti, in some way, to occupy this ‘spatial opposition’. Through the course of this paper, we will hope to assert that graffiti intrinsicizes this spatial opposition - that (loosely), just as social, ‘oeuvre’-based need shapes urban structure through mechanisms of spatial opposition, the materiality of graffiti (a realisation of spatial opposition) conduces thus completes a bijective relation, implicating a distinct social structure within the urban subculture it is tied to. Remarking the salience of the ‘virtual object’, it is critical for graffiti not to solely secede to this interbridging social function - our Lefebvre-inspired abstraction serves more to underscore the salience of the notion of materiality. Our abstraction does come with tied assumptions, that we will choose to inherit from Lefebvre to allow a (relatively) contained focus on the graffiti subculture (rather than analysis that sits more to position the subculture within broader social contexts). Particularly, we will co-opt Lefebvre’s notion of cultural hegemony. That there is an ‘established order’ that a working class aims to strategically reform against does underlie the notion of subversion (Lefebvre 1968, 61)Source excerptUrban renewal becomes revolutionary against an established order., and whilst perhaps (more) reductive (than optimal), it allows for our analysis to explore those notions of subversion within the contained context of graffiti subculture, (relatively) unburdened by convoluting (albeit extrinsically relevant) factors like reformism and proletarianism.

Equipped with an urbanist lens adapted from Lefebvre, we will also briefly introduce another lensing source, less formal in nature. Beautiful Losers is a 2018 documentary that glimpses the psychology of art within urban subculture. Bridging mimetic interviews with graffiti artists (‘writers’) with interludes of urban art and music, the documentary offers a lasting feel for the ‘oeuvre’ of the graffiti community, which we will imitate as anecdotal guidance in the development of our arguments. Our references to this source are, unless otherwise specified, intended not solely to evidence, but also (perhaps primarily) to explicate. Whilst addressing topics with a nature of acadamé, it is easy to lose the ‘warmth’ of virtuality that Lefebvre emphasised to be so dear.

“In itself reformist, the strategy of urban renewal becomes ‘inevitably’ revolutionary, not by force of circumstance, but against the established order”

(Lefebvre 1968, 61)Source excerptUrban renewal becomes revolutionary against an established order.

As aforementioned, heterodoxy - the conception of otherness, only makes sense with a (Lefebvre’s) assumption of some normative cultural hegemony. But this also confers a dimension of ideology to his viewership of social need. Seeing emergent social structures as a product of the need for social defiance has both an aesthetic allure to the subversive, as well as a more grounded, heterodox ideological foundation (in the elements of Marxist theory which Lefebvre’s text acquires notoriety for). This ideological component forms a component of our broadscoping argument, where, in establishing the significance of materiality, we will also aim to make clear social features of the graffiti subculture which deem it consistent with a heterodox belief system.

Writers are disillusioned with society as evidenced by the sentiments expressed in Beautiful Losers. In one interview, a participant reflects ‘When I was young I thought art was something for rich people’, highlighting a perception of exclusivity surrounding artistic expression (Leonard, Rose 2008, 0:16)Video clip00:00:16 — “When I was young I thought art was something for rich people.”. This sentiment is one stationed at a grassroots level – one subculture member reminisces, ‘All you had to do was have a heart and that was enough’, not only insinuating that in domains of life outside of the subculture, they somehow felt that they were not enough, but also speaking to a felt disillusionment that emerges quite naturally on the part of the individual. Whilst Lefebvre adequately opines a standard of political subversion, Beautiful Losers places emphasis on communicating this disillusionment as multimodal, not solely as a compulsion to (politically) reform, but comprising a more holistic sense of disaffinity with the mainstream. Members of the community recognise this explicitly, self-describing as ‘subcultural’ (Leonard, Rose 2008, 15:49)Video clip00:15:49 — “Subcultural.”. When asked questions pertaining to their introduction to the community, there is an unprompted focus on communicating a sense of ‘struggle’ that has populated their backgrounds. One response, ‘All my friends [within the community] came from broken homes’, is coupled with scenes of kids playing amongst urban dereliction - alongside re-echoing the representation of an urban environment as not solely geographical but contextual, it conveys the idea that a feeling of struggle within the mainstream is a shared community experience. Established as a commonality, it invites consideration of whether this experience of struggle plays a requisitory role for community induction.

Notably, there is no formal induction process for the graffiti subculture. Lannert (2015) deconstructs the practice into gang graffiti (representative of gang affiliations), immediate graffiti (frequently ‘spontaneous’ and indifferent to ‘aesthetic criteria’) and graffiti art (‘representative of an individual’s identity’) - of these, gang graffiti possesses the only inductive prerequisite (associated with joining the gang), but even then, the transition between a gang member and a ‘tagger’ (an individual who sprays ‘tags’, markers of pseudonymised graffiti identities) is not something that takes place with any particular stringency (Lannert 2015, 48)Source excerptGraffiti spans gang, immediate, and art forms with fluid transitions and minimal induction.. Within Beautiful Losers, which depicts a representation of graffiti art (which is what our analysis will focus on, bearing most affinity with a graffiti subculture), this still holds: I cite, ‘All you had to do was have a heart and that was enough’ (Leonard, Rose 2008, 0:56)Video clip00:00:56 — “All you had to do was have a heart and that was enough.”, speaking to possible preconditions of character, individuality, of personal ideology, but not of induction. I would posit that this absence is attributable to the blooms of an ideological fundamentalism based within heterodoxy, one which shuns establishment. Notions of structure, formalisation and regimentation within the community are frowned upon as the community’s existence derives from a felt need to defy those very social relations.

This precondition of personal ideology does not solely consist of disaffinity with the mainstream, or a feeling of struggle when living within that context; there is also a discernible sense of attraction towards the subversive. There is a mode of thought that claims ‘doing graffiti is ultimately a form of hedonism’ (Dar 2013, 26)Source excerptGraffiti as hedonism and attraction to the subversive.. Whilst Dar (citing Halsey and Young (2006) in this statement) does little to justify this statement, nor does it specify whether this hedonist vantage encloses both the act and the art of graffiti, we do observe some (more moderate) hedonist consistencies expressed by Beautiful Losers interviewees; one states that they are ‘attracted to those places that don’t seem important… that seem off the grid’ (Leonard, Rose 2008, 7:28)Video clip00:07:28 — “Attracted to those places that don’t seem important… off the grid.”. Another speaks to a notional absence felt ‘when you become an adult) (Leonard, Rose 2008, 6:10)Video clip00:06:10 — “When you become an adult.” that graffiti seems to fill. It revalidates our theoretic conception of interstitiality - that graffiti occupies these Lefebvre-esque ‘off the grid’ spaces which exhibit material, spatial opposition, and inextricably, enables expression of a ‘do it yourself, no rules’ creativity not (as perceived to be by members of the subculture) manifestable within the mainstream (Leonard, Rose 2008, 34:58)Video clip00:34:58 — “Do it yourself, no rules.”.

This personal ideology (which comprises relatedly-yet-distinct disaffinities for the mainstream and affinities for the subversive) is more than a litmus for community entrance (which we have already discerned to be relatively open). Perhaps more significantly (or at least, more detectably), it is a condition for remaining in the community. An ex-writer, when speaking about an art gallery he was commissioned for, decries with sardonicity: ‘Uh they’re off the streets finally, and in the gallery finally, now I’m doing canvases and making a living,...like it’s controlled and there’s something about that that I do have problems with’ (Leonard, Rose 2008, 58:56)Video clip00:58:56 — “Now I’m doing canvases… it’s controlled and I do have problems with that.”. The rejection of modalities of life apposite to the ideological norms of the subculture stands in support of an ideological fundamentalism, specifically elucidating the fundamental, ideologically-rooted (‘there’s something..I do have problems with’) non-subversive attitude within the community. His isolated attitudes speak to a community-upheld sustained requisite for heterodox ideology, and is echoed by lauded subcultural icons like BANKSY (‘There is no elitism or hype’ (Waclawek 2008, 278)). There is a notion of being ‘not-for-profit’, contravening which can induce community disavowal. Lefebvre’s lens has particular salience to this point - when the dominant social entity is viewed as ‘consumerist’, subversion as being not-for-profit follows naturally - in response to ‘the companies that scrawl their giant slogans across buildings and buses’ is an ideological fundamentalism where sustained ‘defiance against the control of public space’ is quintessential (Waclawek 2008, 278)Source excerptBanksy: “There is no elitism or hype.” Defiance against corporate control of public space.). The significance of materiality rings resonantly - the propensity for graffiti to populate physical (interstitial) space with artwork borne of subversive ideology intrinsicizes the defiance of Lefebvre’s described cultural hegemony.

Married to this ideological fundamentalism, graffiti, as an art form, has a subversive fundamentalism to its practice. The illegality of the act is critical to its existence. In readdressing the hedonistic counter, the feeling of pleasure felt from the act of breaking the law is inseparable from the attraction to subversion as a whole. Writers ‘experience an adrenaline rush in resisting social control’ (Dar 2013, 23)Source excerptAdrenaline rush in resisting social control.. Whilst public (extrinsic) debates regarding graffiti often pertain to whether the illegality of graffiti is suitable/lawful, we are more concerned with, and indeed emphasise, the thrill of the act. The notion of materiality - the tangible, clear-cut (as delineated through law) physicality of the hegemonic breach achieved through tagging a wall is (part of) what provides a mechanism of gratuity for the subversive ideology. The act is an embrace of illegality that transforms activity into symbolic (re)action, and so a belief system of heterodoxy is reinforced.

“Closing for good meant… death of my identity”

(Leonard, Rose 2008, 1:19:46)Video clip01:19:46 — “Closing for good meant… death of my identity.”

The above quotes an interviewee from Beautiful Losers speaking on his reaction to the closure of his graffiti gallery. Without context, his referred-to identity could be interpreted as some form of creative identity, or perhaps some hyperbolism signifying his attachment to his gallery. We will hope to clarify the nature of this identity more clearly, as one borne of graffiti subculture. In a manner drawn extensively from Dar’s 2013 dissertation on the social identities of graffiti writers, we will unite her subcultural ascriptions of social identity theory with our broader view of urbanism, in doing so revealing both graffiti as a performance of identity, and the graffiti subculture as a social entity uniquely primed to provide the operandum for that performance. We will also provide foregrounding for our posited positioning of materiality to the heterodoxy of graffiti subculture, which, after a tandem treatment of semiotics, will invite concluding argumentation.

It is particularly illuminating to recount Dar’s posited arguments of self-categorization and depersonalisation. Dar separates identity into ‘personal identity’ - a self-conceptualised positioning of identity within the scope of interpersonal relationships one has with others, and ‘social identity’, which ‘represents group membership’ (Dar 2013, 5)Source excerptPersonal identity vs social identity in the graffiti subculture.. Dar focuses on building formalisms for ‘social identity’, rationalising by noting that ‘writers assume a social identity that is conducive to the norms, standards and values of the graffiti subculture’. Within the purview of social identity, she propounds two formalisms drawn from Social Identity Theory when considering the conception of social identities within the graffiti subculture - self-categorization (identifying with those who ‘share similar identity traits’ (e.g. artistic, daring), and depersonalisation (which comprises of features like pseudonymity) (Dar 2013, 7-8)Source excerptSelf-categorization and depersonalisation as social identity mechanisms.. Whilst heeding Lefebvre’s cautions against formalisms, we will adopt these domains in order to decompose our analysis, admitting that these are by no means complete pictures of a person’s many social identities; indeed, we accede that we do not attempt to strive for full pictures, recognising that identity is a flux that draws from a multiplicity of environmental contexts.

Self-categorization is a mechanism of social unification. To identify with those sharing similar identity traits, subversive identities are encoded and negotiated through tagging. Dar describes the tag as a ‘graffiti writer’s signature’, namely in the way in which it enables distinguishability between individuals (Dar 2013, 29)Source excerptTags as signatures and the faith of graffiti.. ‘Similar to someone introducing themselves by stating their name, writers introduce themselves by painting their name’ (Dar 2013, 30)Source excerptWriters introduce themselves by painting their name.. However, whilst these descriptions underscore the primacy of tagging to the declaration of an identity within graffiti, we recognise that tagging administers an oeuvre-esque purpose beyond this. Citing Mailer, Dar remarks that ‘Without the constituent of a symbolic tag, the subcultural essence of a writer is lost’ (Dar 2013, 29)Source excerptTags as signatures and the faith of graffiti.. Dar, inheriting Mailer’s description, refers to the tag name as ‘the faith of graffiti’. Tagging is more than the labelling of identity - it is formative, and development of a tag directly embodies the development of a distinctive social identity within the graffiti subculture. Via mechanisms of the tagger’s ‘rites of passage’ foundationally centered around a material mastery of the tagging style, ‘a young individual enter[ing] as a nobody… emerge[s] as a somebody’ (de Carvalho, Sandaker, Ree 2017, 68)Source excerptRites of passage: from nobody to somebody through tagging style.. ‘Graffiti writers begin tagging at a crucial age, the age at which individuals normally begin searching for their identity and associating themselves with others who are likeminded’ (Dar 2013, 32)Source excerptTagging arises from social need to be heard and to organize group values.. Tagging seems to exist as a cultural outlet; how, borne from the social need ‘to be heard, to be autonomous, to establish a community and to organise group values’, the ‘social structure’ of tagging arises (Dar 2013, 32)Source excerptTagging arises from social need to be heard and to organize group values.. Ergo, tagging as function aligns directly with Lefevbre’s lens, facilitating the acclimation of a heterodox belief system within incoming writers. Moreso, the ‘continual flux’ of identity that Dar attends to (Dar 2013, 8) possesses a variability adeptly encodable through tagging, due to the nature of tagging as a ‘calligraphic writing of one’s name’ (de Carvalho, Sandaker, Ree 2017, 67)Source excerptTagging as calligraphic writing of one’s name. - the relative semantic intransigence of a name is outmoded by the flexibility accessible through style (as in Hebdige’s sense). Indeed, a writer is someone recognised to be ‘extremely dedicated and committed to the advancement and development of their… style’. (Dar 2013, 86)Source excerptCommitment to advancing one’s style.. We will return to this point of style again, in consideration of semiotics.

Identities are depersonalised within the graffiti subculture - specifically, they are psuedoonymised. A functionalist lens is useful here - pseudonymisation is necessary as a means of evasion from the mainstream, ‘protecting [writers] from law enforcement and societal judgement’ (Dar 2013, 34)Source excerptPseudonymity protects writers and enables a virtual co-presence.. Operationally, as a form of subversion that’s intrinsically explicit, graffiti would struggle to persist without pseudonymisation of identities. Functionally, inheritance of preexisting foci on pseudonymity (that arose due to similar functionalist considerations of evasion) also helps to explain its existence. There is a cultural notion of bad practice associated with non-pseudonymity as it diverges from the ‘tradition’ of good graffiti style.

Pseudonymous identities manifest materially, chiefly as aliases or alter egos used in tags, which in turn become learnt and recognised by other subculture members. These identities, which become ‘active’ (i.e. displayed and interpreted) by other members of the urban subculture, are consistent with notions of social identity outlined by Dar (Dar 2013, 5)Source excerptPersonal identity vs social identity in the graffiti subculture.. Tags ‘offer a virtual ‘co-presence’ between writers that unites pseudonymous individuals’ (Dar 2013, 34)Source excerptPseudonymity protects writers and enables a virtual co-presence., creating a material cultural milieu where one’s identity, despite being pseudonymous, can still be commonly discerned, interpreted and positioned within a broader social backdrop.

At first, there does seem to be ostensible contradictions, or at least exceptions, to this blanket of pseudonymity. The existence of graffiti crews implies that at some level, individuals within the graffiti subculture are known to others, not solely through tags, but through direct embodied interactions. However, it is not clear that individuals within crews can be considered as distinct social agents when placed in light of graffiti subculture’s Lefebvre-esque urbanist context. Lannert describes the ‘artist’s identity [as being] completely immersed into the gang to which he or she belongs, and is not represented in the graffiti’ (Lannert 2015, 47)Source excerptCrew identity can subsume individual identity; graffiti may not represent the individual.. Tags and styles are often transposed between members of the crew (indeed, this sharing is perhaps what demarcates a particular crew from others); particularly, nuance lies in how the lack of material representation of individuality (i.e. a lack of individual-level representation within the crew-painted graffiti artwork itself) attests to the existence and salience of depersonalisation. Accordingly, crews can be viewed as single agents within the graffiti subculture because they exhibit a distinct, atomic manifold of identity within their artwork, rendering this discussion largely orthogonal to contemplations on the presence of pseudonymity – pseudonymity still holds.

When elucidating the specific social needs that give rise to spatial opposition, Lefebvre refers to a need for ‘particular expressions and moments, which can more or less overcome the fragmentary division of tasks’ (Lefebvre 1968, 147)Source excerptA need for particular expressions and moments can overcome fragmentary tasks.. This is of particular note: he speaks to a need for escapism: a need that, whilst felt individually by those who align their ideologies with the subversive, has a fundamentally social incumbency in its nature. The mechanism of pseudonymity accessible through graffiti works to enable escapism. By escapism, we refer to the positioning of one’s identity in a context one views as provisional alternative to their standard. Dar posits that ‘within the graffiti subculture, a writer escapes their real life to enter the American Dream by making their true identity pseudonymous’ (Dar 2013, 33)Source excerptPseudonymous identity as escape and entry into an alternative life.. This is consistent with the aforementioned hedonistic draw towards the subversive achieved through graffiti. But further than the pseudonymisation of one’s own identity, immersing oneself in a cultural milieu filled with other pseudonymised identities adds an element of heterodox world-view. When we don’t just possess pseudonymous identities, but we operate in a world where this holds true for all agents, we achieve the notional ‘experimental utopia’ that we (choose to) associate escapism with (Lefebvre 1968, 151)Source excerptAn experimental utopia emerges through alternative modes of inhabiting space.. The immersive, material nature of artwork is integral to achieving this. Approximately, ‘when we ‘see’ a landscape, we situate ourselves in it’ (Berger 1972, 1)Source excerptProvenance and possession transform the way an image is seen.. A wall speaks to the influences of the graffiti subculture that dignify it. And because graffiti art exhibits on ‘some of the best walls a town has to offer’ (Waclawek 2008, 278)Source excerptBanksy: “There is no elitism or hype.” Defiance against corporate control of public space., members of the subculture are able to easily access an outlet of escapism whenever so required, allowing Lefebvre’s social need to be fulfilled.

“Graffiti is…communication at its simplest form”

(Leonard, Rose 2008, 13:45)Video clip00:13:45 — “Graffiti is…communication at its simplest form.”

Lefebvre claims ‘a space is an inter-linkage of geographic form, built environment, symbolic meaning, and routines of life’ (Molotch 1993, 888)Source excerptSpace as an inter-linkage of form, environment, symbolic meaning, and routines.. Within the spatial opposition that graffiti subculture occupies, we should evaluate how graffiti encodes symbolic meaning. Notionally, the viewership of art as a method of communication is not radical - much of art appreciation centers around uncovering explicit and subliminal messaging within artwork, which can often reveal etymological information regarding the artwork, or alternatively perhaps serving as a intrinsic act of appreciation itself (without ulterior motives for investigation). Waclawek, following in the direction of Lefebvre, posits that the accumulation, responsive relations and revision of graffiti is a ‘communication of socially meaningful messages within the urban environment’ (Waclawek 2008, 263)Source excerptGraffiti as communication of socially meaningful messages in the city.. We will hope to provide more granularity to this claim, characterising what graffiti actually communicates, how this is consistent with our urbanist lens, and underscore the salience of materiality in mediating the subculture’s nuanced modes of communication. Ultimately however, we will find the above statement incomplete - that this ‘symbolic meaning’ does more than enable communication, but acts to directly reaffirm an implicit heterodox social structure, which when united with the society’s conceptions of identity, formulates a distinct social entity which reinforces the internalisation of heterodox belief to one’s personal identity.

John Berger’s Ways of Seeing is a seminal piece on how we see art. Drawing on the body of thought accumulated by Levi-Strauss, he remarks on a ‘relationship between possessing and the way of seeing’ - that a conception of art’s ownership and provenance can reillustrate artwork. For example, he provides the example of Wheatfield with Crows by Vincent Van Gogh (1853), highlighting the radical shift in onlooker viewership when we learn that this piece of art was the last piece Van Gogh painted before he killed himself. ‘The image now illustrates the sentence’ (with the sentence being the caption of the artwork which denotes the context of the painting) (Berger 1972, 1)Source excerptProvenance and possession transform the way an image is seen.. Ways of Seeing manages to embrace the subjectivity of art, whilst didactically verbalising a lens to analyse the notion of materiality with; it bears significance for our argumentation as it possesses a means of decovering symbolic meaning as a variable of social context, critical if we are to analyse graffiti with an urbanist lens.

Berger posits that urban dwellers ‘accept the total system of publicity images as [they] accept an element of climate’ (Berger 1972, 7)Source excerptPublicity images are accepted like climate; images continually speak to viewers.. This statement is succeeded by an argument positing publicity as a ‘competitive medium’ (which exhibits elements of Durkheimian thinking that, like Lefebvre’s notions of Marxism, lie outside this essay’s scope). Nonetheless, we can extract useful insights; in his statement, he communicates a role of mutuality, consisting of both of the artwork (‘publicity images’) possessing an exigency to communicate messages, and an assumed social role to receive them. This relationship provides a hinted-at feeling for this latent social mechanism of signalling. Members of the graffiti subculture produce artwork that communicates, and look for the messages of others within the subculture’s embodied cultural milieu (the structure of which is still as described within our treatment of escapism).

Hebdige, whose book Subculture: The Meaning of Style aims to characterise unique culturally-affixed notions of style as seen within (urban) subcultures, presents a more formalised description of this hinted-at signalling mechanism. Speaking to the reception of messages, he posits that ‘social relations and process are then appropriated by individuals only through the forms in which they’re represented to those individuals,....[these forms] are shrouded in a ‘common sense’ which simultaneously validates and mystifies them’ (Hebdige 1979, 13)Source excerptSocial relations are appropriated through forms shrouded in common sense.. Within our context of the graffiti subculture, adopting his posit would reason that these forms - graffiti artwork itself - communicate information pertaining to the social relations of the graffiti subculture itself. This does indeed seem to hold - alongside canvassing a range of social identities belonging to members of the community, we see shared communal rudiments (like subversive fundamentalism) arising in pieces of graffiti artwork. It should be noted that Hebdige’s posit relies on a number of basal formalisms. Of note, by characterising culture as a ‘second-order semiological system’ (Hebdige 1979, 9)Source excerptCulture as a second-order semiological system., a function which, while bearing prospective potency to our argument, fails to pass Lefebvre’s oeuvre litmus. Whilst social entities may resemble or appear to adhere to rules semblant of particular formalisms, to say they are those abstractions is inadequate. Fortunately, drawing inferences from Beautiful Losers can help us resolve this inconsistency. An interviewee, when appreciating a graffitied shop sign, remarks how it is ‘beautiful what they did and that they did it themselves… [that it] keeps you in touch with where they’re from… and where I’m from’ (Leonard, Rose 2008, 1:00:10)Video clip01:00:10 — “They did it themselves… keeps you in touch with where they’re from.”. His appreciation of the message isn’t solely tied to its display of aesthetic skill or denotative meaning, but also the process, the social context. Another interviewee remarks how ‘there’s no difference between commercial art and finer art in terms of aesthetics, it’s just intent’, echoing a similar valuation invested into the graffiti individual who produced the created message (Leonard, Rose 2008, 1:03:23)Video clip01:03:23 — “There’s no difference between commercial art and finer art… it’s just intent.”. We have no need to formalise culture as some structured semiological system, as we instead establish the signalling mechanism to comprise a transfer of semiotic knowledge that extends beyond pure denotative meaning. Moreover, subculture members, upon regarding graffiti, establish an appreciation for the artist, confirming the priorly posited transmission of identity alongside message.

It is not evidently clear as to why valuation of deeper semiotic knowledge (e.g. ‘intent’) doesn’t seem to relatively devalue the information graffiti encodes through its material qualities (e.g. ‘aesthetics’), which is especially concerning given the ad-hoc-usque paper-wide focus on advocating the salience of materiality (Leonard, Rose 2008, 1:03:23)Video clip01:03:23 — “There’s no difference between commercial art and finer art… it’s just intent.”. It should be reemphasised that all insights drawn from graffiti, aesthetic or deeply semiotic, ultimately derive from a Berger-esque situating of the physical artwork within the broader content of graffiti subculture. Particularly, semiotic information is encoded through the material qualities of graffiti, and imbued with social meaning extemporaneously by virtue of its existence within the graffiti subculture - this is possible principally because graffiti is art, and therefore we (have the capacity to) view and situate it as such. For completeness, in the encoding of semiotic information, we specifically draw focus to what an interviewee describes as ‘vague messaging’ (Leonard, Rose 2008, 20:00)Video clip00:20:00 — “Vague messaging.”, a certain interpretive ambiguity that arises through the stylistic features of graffiti, and indeed acts to reinforce heterodoxy. As Hebdige discerningly remarks, ‘signification need not be intentional’ (Hebdige 1979, 101)Source excerptSignification need not be intentional., in which case the interpretation of messaging defaults to vaguery. But when taken as ‘intentional communicat[ion]’, that graffiti style acts as ‘bricolage’ - that ‘it’s the way[s] commodities are used in subculture’ which delineate semiotic meaning (Hebdige 1979, 103)Source excerptSubcultural style as bricolage of commodities.. In our context, commodities refer to vague aesthetic forms used within graffiti style; ‘forms shrouded in a ‘common sense’’. Ergo, these stylistic commodities, equipped with a certain commonality of interpretation that arises out of their vaguery, cumulatively form a semiotic language for the community. An interviewee, who importantly describes the subculture as a ‘culture made by kids for kids’ (Leonard, Rose 2008, 36:05)Video clip00:36:05 — “A culture made by kids for kids.”, goes onto describe graffiti styles as a ‘vernacular of speaking in the way we spoke as youth’ - this intimation of style as symbolic communication, in the context of a subculture that has arisen from social need, pinpoints our viewership of graffiti as communication.

Our prior examinations of identity and communication have revealed a direct interactive barrier inherent to the structuring of graffiti subculture. As priorly established, individuals do not interact one-on-one with other members of the community. Communication with other individuals takes place through a semiotic medium encoded into graffiti style, and whilst we have shown social identities to be communicated, it is not clear that Dar-formulated notions of personal identities can pass through the barrier of inherent pseudonymity. However, interviewees from Beautiful Losers describe being ‘super wary of how [they] fit into [the subcultures] whole scheme of things’ - there is a sense of self-positionality that, at least definitionally, clues at an element of personal identity being relativised to the graffiti subculture. This is significant - whilst the subculture is heterodox, a chain of causality that allows graffiti to impress upon personal identity evidences a consequent internalisation of heterodoxy to one’s personal belief system, in turn completing the bijective relation we outlined at the paper’s start.

Not only is communication transmitted through mediums of graffiti, but the social structure of the subculture also embeds itself into artwork. Viewing tagging as a form of symbolic interactionism evinces a distinct hierarchical structure that provides a scaffold for individuals to relativize their identities against - by symbolic interactionism (in our context), we refer to a sociological view that sees our semiotic language as a shaper of social structure and personal identity. Alongside intrinsicizing social identities, tags also possess an inter-measurable quality of artistic expression. Writers involved in a qualitative study conducted by Dar claim that ‘bragging rights must remain silently demonstrated on the walls’, that there is ‘an unspoken status’ tied to the quality of one’s artwork that positions itself through the quality of said artwork (Dar 2013, 89)Source excerptBragging rights remain silently demonstrated on walls; status is unspoken., rather than any other particular extrinsic ‘elitism or hype’ (Waclawek 2008, 278)Source excerptBanksy: “There is no elitism or hype.” Defiance against corporate control of public space.. Hierarchies of status embed themselves into the material environment for all subculture members to see, replacing the need for formal, covert interactive hierarchies that take place in communities with non-pseudonymized interactions. Taking the same material representation, it follows that the set of learned, ‘common sense’ schema for interpreting these hierarchies (e.g., what artwork classifies better than what) comes packaged with the same set of schema used by subculture members for interpreting graffiti (the aforementioned ‘semiotic language’). For debates on hierarchical interpretation, the material representation of graffiti benefits from a quality of transience. A Beautiful Losers interviewee remarks on how whilst ‘the act [of graffiti] itself is antagonizing’ — reaffirming what was established about the inherent subversion of the act — the artwork isn’t intrinsically antagonizing, as ‘you can get rid of it’ (Leonard, Rose 2008, 13:20)Video clip00:13:20 — “The act itself is antagonizing… you can get rid of it.”. Graffiti can be, and is frequently drawn over, if not by authorities, then by other artists, allowing for the reestablishment of ‘unspoken’ subcultural standards. Pieces of art deemed by the subculture to be artistically stronger are more likely to be preserved and not written over.

Some, like BANKSY, acquire repute within the mainstream as well, where preservation of material representations are taken to extraordinary lengths like removing entire sections of wall from the physical space. Our viewership of graffiti seems to center pieces as unique physical manifolds of cultural memory. It is from this vantage that materiality acquires significance: with a culture and hierarchy of status to situate oneself in (in a Berger sense), intrinsically manifestable due to the features of materiality that characterize graffiti, one can reason about the nature of their own identity, subversion, and artistic capacity relative to other members without ever needing to meet them, enforcing the shared subcultural ideologies to a level of personal identity. The resilience of graffiti in the face of attempts at erasure underscores its power as both an art form and a means of communication, as it continues to persist and evolve, carrying with it the stories, struggles, and aspirations of its creators and the communities they inhabit. In essence, graffiti transcends its physicality to become a living testament to the complexities of urban life and the resilience of human expression.