Graffiti

Back in the 1980’s there was a baffling popular series of books by, I think, Nigel Rees, about graffiti. This was not some collection of academic tomes explaining why people feel the urge to daub their thoughts, names or marks on the public landscape, like dogs marking their territory, but rather a collection of amusing thoughts or phrases that had been left on the world in marker pen and spray pen.

So they avoided the sort of low-rent low-brow stuff you might see in urban areas, such as ‘(insert minority group here)s out’ and instead recorded things like ‘beware the dreaded limbo dancer’. The graffiti was shown in a series of cartoons and illustrations, the phrase in question being recorded at the bottom of a toilet door in a gent’s toilet (for those unfamiliar with public loos, in certain styles of toilet the door does not fit flush to the floor, rather a gap of a few inches is left. This is either designed to prevent dossers spending the night curled up on the floor of a cosy cubical or facilitate the easy passage of toilet roll from one stall to another should need press, I never quite worked out which).

With the benefit of hindsight, one can speculate if the entire contents of the book was indeed the result of painstaking research, with Mr Rees wandering the toilets of the land with pad and pen in hand. My recollection of graffiti in public toilets in the 80’s is rather less ‘don’t throw cigarette butts in the urinal, it makes them soggy and difficult to light’ and rather more ‘young cock wanted, be here at three o’clock next Tuesday’.

Graffiti has changed for sure. What used to be a simple message, showing dedication to a football team or fascist cause became a colourful expression of territory with the advent of tagging, and then the use of stencils as vandals restyled (resprayed?) themselves as artists.

At its heart though, graffiti is still about defacing something, changing it and leaving a message. That’s why the endless repetitive tags are so boring, why the self regarding social comment of a tosser with a stencil and a spray can is so bland and why something like this, a speed sign near a school defaced with a stencilled grenade at least genuinely begs the question – why did whoever did this do this and do they know that behaviour like this resulted in paperback books about graffiti moving out of the ‘humour’ section of bookshops and becoming coffee table tomes sitting shrink wrapped in the ‘art’ area?