Writing on the Wall

Graffiti personifies the concept that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Some see it as a symbol of urban decay, some as art, some as vandalism. Its spontaneity and unsavoriness attract me.

Cave drawings are not considered graffiti; they are assumed to be "societally approved." But the troublemaker is part of our collective unconscious. I know that some paleolithic prankster drew an arrow to the backside of a cave-drawn beast showing the other dwellers that Atok was an ass.

Graffiti disconcerted the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans. From Napoleon's troops to WWII dog faces, soldiers' names and/or obscene bon mots marked the military global presence. During the 1968 French student revolution, graffiti functioned as a political call-to-arms.

By 1977,  New York artists like Jean-Michael Basquiat brought media attention to graffiti. Ten years before that, a Philadelphia kid named Darryl McCray began what is considered modern graffiti.  Cornbread (McCray's tagger name) became a legend in the City of Brotherly Love. Known not only for his art, but for his unique placement of graffiti, Cornbread tagged the side of an elephant at the zoo and Jackson 5 airplane.


The dorm bathrooms at Siena College provided my first, and only, canvas for graffiti. Always more garrulous than graphic, my scribblings tended to be more literary. No dirty limericks, or "Here I sit broken-hearted..." ditties, my stall scrawls gravitated toward the satiric and sardonic.

A favorite work was the on-going poem. During a morning meditation, one would write a single line. As more guys dropped in, other lines were added. By the next morning an entire verse was composed. A new day would bring a new oeuvre - as ever BB

Soyez réalistes, demandez l'impossible. (Be realistic, ask the impossible.) - graffiti in Paris during the 1968 student protests