[M@KP] Pack FM .:. Click, Clack & Spray ; (graffiti essay)

A SAKE bomb, Montreal

Click to listen to “Click, Clack & Spray”

Artist: Pack FM

Album: wutduzFMstand4? ( 2006 )

I think there’s no more of a perfect canvas for art than the street.  Walls, trucks, mailboxes, bus shelters, buses and benches should be rich with designs – no mundane surface should be neglected.  Nothing displays urbanity to me like when I see the whip and flow of tags so free, to be the voice and vision of livin’ as a name, runic arcana, superstition, political statement or ego trippin’ – upon walls, across doors, barroom stalls, subway floors, up-down escalators, a name soars above power lines and cars on the grain elevators.

Graffiti encompasses bravery, brevity, acrobatics, artistic merit and real consequences (plus it’s sexy to commit misdemeanors).  Besides that, there’s all of the intent of other forms of art, and more.  I can’t pass by a piece of graffiti, regardless of its intent, without acknowledging it, analyzing it (if I have the freedom to) and sometimes memorizing the motions of it.

I saw Akira when I was 10.  Besides being the best cartoon I had (and maybe have) seen, I was subconsciously drawn to the detailed graffiti that can be seen in many of the frames.  Other formative media experiences informed a love of one thing and another: urban decay and tagging.  In Final Fantasy VII when you climb up to the Shinra Building in Wall Market you can very clearly see many tags, and in the context of the scene they seem like a very defiant cry against poverty and oppression (something I could relate to,

growing up in a household of 5 on a single paycheck far below the poverty line).  Even in the deceptively innocent 2001 animated film Metropolis uses graffiti in the lower levels of the city.  More and more of what I indulged in carried some sort of inscribed messages on the walls, always reminding me of Egyptian heiroglyphs and runic language.

Unfortunately, Owen Sound never had much of a graffiti scene – just swastikas and bad words thrown up across the Coliseum bleachers – and I didn’t get any exposure (however limited) to real graffiti until I moved to Kitchener.  Now, you have to understand that K-W’s graffiti scene is far from dense, and is mostly bored kids throwing up their name for entertainment, but there was still something magical in seeing that.  My brief time in Toronto entranced me with the impromptu murals, and I decided that at some point in my life I’d like to collect photographs of transient art.

As of last August on the 10th Street Bridge in Pittsburgh was a large scrawl “POVERTY IS THE BIGGEST PRISON THE GOVERNMENT EVER BUILT”.  Disagree with whatever you will – it’s not about the politics – what got me was that somebody felt it enough that they had to put it up.  They needed other people to see it, to feel it.  I felt it and held it close.  Elsewhere in Pittsburgh I saw public art commissioned by the city, or corporate sponsors, or whatever.  Sometimes that’s kind of interesting to look at, but it’s entirely inoffensive and doesn’t really make you think, decipher, or feel. There’s no need behind it beside the malignant desire to gentrify, gentrify, gentrify.

Montreal represented to me a place where art really meets the streets in all of its forms.  Busking, poetry, performance and especially graffiti.  Everywhere in the city you can see tags, political statements, stencils, bombs, and more.  In it was motion, and also the urban scene that I’d been looking for.  Across the cityscape I found comfort in seeing the tags of SAKE and NIXON around every turn.  I remember the sense of wonder I felt when I saw SAKE’s name boldly posted across the very top of silos across the canal.  There was a real thril in going out to real run down, dirty abandon complexes and seeing the full-sized murals – it was like going to an art gallery except you had to jump fences to get in and you didn’t really know who was responsible for any of it.

I saw these eyes everywhere, these eyes and letter envelopes, and I thought to myself “These would trip me out if I were going crazy” – by that time I was going crazy.  The effect the tags had on me was evidently profound, especially looking at the art that I’ve done then and since.  These simple symbols spread across the urban landscape carry a sort of apocalyptic weight to them.  I associate them with very powerful themes (similar to the eyes in the Great Gatsby and all they embodied), a carefully crafted image appearing across the cityscape serving as foreshadowing from those who see it.  Recently around Kitchener I’ve begun to see this dead bee stencil sprayed around, and there’s something in it’s message and construction that’s been emblazoned in my brain.

There’s something cryptic and intimate about this type of graffiti. It’s not a tag really, but it’s like delving into someone’s thoughts and lifelong knowledge. The message flies off the fingertips of “the crazy.”

There’s so many paths and reasons that lead up to it, but you can never truly know why or how it happened.

That, I think is where I’m going with my own graffiti, at least on some level.  With the bus shelter I went entirely postmodern, offering anybody who passed an intimate and perhaps even uncomfortable look into some of my own imagery.  It’s deeper than something than some text waiting to be deciphered, but a code to another human being’s experience – trying to establish intimacy without any actual interaction between two people.  Of course, that is providing the city crews aren’t threatened by my gesture and remove the work within 24 hours.