In the city of Chicago, there’s no escaping a visual interaction with the typography so familiar to most urban spaces… I call it free art, but most know it as Graffiti.
And like any other widespread human creation, it exists on a vastly diverse spectrum. To provide a thorough dissection of graffiti, I would have to undergo some pretty extensive research into its politics, its legalities/‘illegalities’, and its historical/cultural influences. Although tempting, in the interest of time, I’m not going to do that. What I am going to do is reflect on graffiti as a typographic element of Chicago, and relate it back to Gunther Kress’s analysis of rhetoric, design, and production from his book, Multimodality.
First, a disclaimer: I am using the term “Graffiti” to refer to public markings from very simple forms of written letters and words, all the way up to elaborate wall murals.
Kress defines production as, “the implementation of design with the resources available in the world in which the communication takes place”(27).
Kress’s definition implies that the kinds of public markings in a given public space is indicative of the culture in which they exist, and could also be said to be a reflection of the resources that are available in that particular community. It must be acknowledged that there are countless exceptions to this ‘rule of thumb’. Keeping that in mind, I will proceed. Kress’s idea of production would suggest that an elaborate graffiti’d wall mural, which is an obvious investments of time and resources, conveys a certain message of community resourcefulness, while sloppy ‘taggings’ might indicate the opposite. Because unapproved graffiti is considered vandalism, it can also be used as a reaction against social spaces. This can be an effect of the interlinked and often conflicting elements of ‘society’ and ‘culture’ as described by Kress. He asserts that the social is marked by power (difference), while culture is marked by values, which itself is the effect of social power. To break it down further, he defines culture as “the domain of socially made values; tools; meanings; knowledge; resources of all kinds,” while society “is the field of human (inter)action in groups, always; of ‘work’; of practices; of the use and effects of power”(14). Graffiti can be a sign of values and power commingling, or reacting against one another.
The textual message of public markings provides further evidence of a communities’ culture. Just like any other usage of the alphabet, the limits of language are endless. Sometimes graffiti is used to communicate social or political messages, while often times it’s gang related and used to mark territory. It can also be employed by a business for artistic purposes, while a lot of the time it’s difficult to know what it’s about unless an insider because the message is purposefully unclear to the lay viewer. Kress relates that design rests on the possibility of choice, and in essence, creates all aspects of style (28).
“Style is the politics of choice”(28).
To further his analysis of rhetoric, design, and production, Kress breaks down the phenomenon of sites. I believe his main objective is in reference to virtual sites, using facebook and youtube as examples, but his analysis can be easily applied to physical sites as well. He describes sites as being “associated with specific characteristics of distributions of power and agency in communication” (27). Asserting that graffiti is a form of communication, the kind of graffiti being displayed brings both power and agency of physical spaces into question. Because graffiti does exist within many forms, one end of the spectrum could be subjectively defined as “vandalism” while the other equally subjectively defined as “art”, graffiti becomes an interesting way to measure a community and it’s power and authority dynamic.
With all of that said, amongst Gunther Kress’s oh so technical breakdown of multimodality, I find this, so far, to be his most valuable sentence: “No degree of power can act against the socially transformative force of interaction.”
Graffiti can provide this social interaction on both the end of production (social collaboration to design and create) and on the end of interpretation. The more dynamic our visual space, the more we crave social interaction to undergo opportunities to reflect and interpret. I find that in our ‘new media’ world so heavily laden in socially isolating technologies, there is something nostalgic and almost comforting in the shortening of the process inherent in Graffiti art. There is no technological tool between the artist(s) and his/her public “canvas.” No fancy digitally enhanced graphics or stock imagery, and as I roam the streets of Chicago, I find graffiti to be one of the few forms of ‘authentic’ public typography, and a clear indication of urban space.
for vision's sake 