Véronique Plesch – Words in Graffiti: A (Mostly) Visual Essay

This might have been the very first time that I photographed graffiti. As a budding art historian, the quote featured in this mural struck me: “Art is anything you / can get away with / Warhol.” Little did I know that, forty-two years later, I would end up using this photo in an article (see reference below). Last year, I found out that it is the work of Fabulous 5, a legendary Brooklyn-based crew, formed by two writers (as graffiti artists are called), Fab 5 Freddy (Fred Brathwaite) and Lee Quiñones. In my photo, we see Fab 5 Freddy’s name rendered as a large number five with “Fabulous” and “Freddy” written inside it; on the right we can distinguish the beginning of a large white letter L for “Lee,” Lee Quiñones’s street name. I found out that, despite what the mural has us believe, the quote is not by Andy Warhol, but instead appears in the 1967 book by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects.

Exactly ten years after photographing the Washington mural, I visited a small chapel in Northern Italy and noticed graffiti scratched on some of the frescoes. One in particular, right on the body of St. Anthony Abbot, drew my attention and struck me as it referred to a plague. A few years later, as I was preparing to teach a seminar on the art of late medieval private devotion, I remembered these inscriptions and thus began a reflection that continues to this day! Since then, a large part of my scholarship has been dedicated to early modern graffiti, especially those made on frescoes, but also to the history of graffiti from Antiquity to today, which I regularly teach at Colby College. (In an essay for the Fall 2021 issue of the MAJ, I shared some ideas on historical graffiti.) Here follow some photographs of contemporary graffiti that I have taken over the years in different locations. Given this issue’s topic, most of the examples I chose involve words.

In this issue’s “Art Historical Musings,” I included a collage of photos of graffiti on a train that I took in the summer of 2023 as I was waiting at a railroad crossing. That day, after posting my photos on social media, I learned from John Harlow that this qualifies me as a “bencher,” or graffiti photographer. John explained that the term originated in New York City in the 1970s when graffiti writers would meet at a bench to watch the passing subway trains and take pictures of the graffiti on them.

This instance encapsulates many fascinating things. It is a perfect illustration of the dialogic nature of graffiti as one writer responds to the other. To the statement of ephemerality, “le temps détruit tout” (“time destroys everything”), someone responded, “C’est vrai ça la vie n’est pas belle” (“that’s true, life is not beautiful”). The first phrase was made famous by Gaspar Noé’s exceedingly violent 2002 movie Irréversible, while the response, also in French, is quite humorous in its irony. The presence of this exchange in French might be surprising on a wall in Brazil. The first writer, who must have seen the movie in its original version, displays a good command of the language: there are no misspellings, and the author went through the trouble of including an acute accent on the E of “détruit” (something that is not even required for capital letters!). The second writer fully engaged in this dialogue, choosing to react in the same language and in a perfectly idiomatic manner. The location helps explain this witty exchange that displays the writers’ linguistic proficiency, with the first statement’s cinematographic reference and philosophical undertones and the clever response: a university. As I like to say, in graffiti, just like in real estate, location is everything.

On the topic of memorable statements, I love this one in Milan that declares: “There is no future without culture.” Above it, the text in smaller font translates to: “Hands off the university. Culture is anti-fascist.”

The University of Minas Gerais is notable for the ubiquity of graffiti, many commissioned by the institution.

Brazil offers a native form of graffiti, pichação (also spelled pixação and abbreviated pixo). The term, which first appeared in the 1960s, derives from the verb pichar, “to cover with tar,” but also “to vandalize,” disclosing the value system associated with this type of graffiti. Pixo’s distinctive letterforms are anchored in the original conditions of its execution, with a roller, often located in far-to-reach but highly visible locations: it is an “in-your-face” form of situated performativity.

At first glance, this Brazilian mural does not contain words other than what might be the signature of its author, but words are implied as the viewer is invited to recognize—and thus name—two buildings by one of the most celebrated Brazilian architects, Oscar Niemeyer: the Ball House and the Church of San Francis of Assisi in the Pampulha district in Belo Horizonte. The idea of reproducing these modernist landmarks, speaks to a local sense of pride (the Pampulha Modern Ensemble, completed in 1944, was designated a UNESCO World Heritage the year before I snapped these photos as I sat in a taxi, speeding along a busy highway that leads from the center of Belo Horizonte to Pampulha).

I have encountered a few notable instances that pay homage to famous artists, such as these two stencils: Albrecht Dürer’s monogram and Caravaggio’s Boy with a Basket of Fruit. The second is the work of French street artist C215 (Christian Guémy), whose signature is cleverly inscribed on a three-dimensional cube, with the C on the top horizontal face, the 2 and the 5 on the vertical faces, and the 1 corresponding to the edge between the two digits. (See Ruth Sylmor’s essay and photos of stencils by Guémy in the Fall 2024 issue of the MAJ, with a note at the end that provides information on Guémy.)

Also in Italy (this time in Rome), I came across the work of another Frenchman, Franck Slama, known as Invader, who has been aiming at a “World Invasion” of pixilated figures from early video games. Since 1998 he has scattered 4342 “invaders” throughout the world, seeking “the neuralgic points of the cities” (he likens his interventions to “urban acupuncture”). The one I photographed appears on a wall opposite the Etruscan National Museum. In his website, Invader explains that his work “is about liberating Art from its usual alienators that museums or institutions can be. But it is also about freeing the Space Invaders from their video games TV screens and to bringing them into our physical world.” Although no words are physically present, Invader’s distinctive subject, style, and technique act as a logo: the image is equal to his name.

Austin’s “Graffiti Park” (HOPE Outdoor Gallery) occupied the foundations of an abandoned construction site and functioned from 2010 until when it was demolished in early 2019 to make room for luxury condos. A new park is planned near Austin’s airport. When I visited it with a group of Colby students, we were greeted at the bottom of the slope (where you see canopies on the photo on the right) and given guidelines. (You can see a photo of our visit in this article.)

References

McLuhan, Marshall and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967. The quote appears over five pages (pp. 132–36), combined with a photo of visitors to Niki de Saint Phalle’s installation She—A Cathedral at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1966.

Munsell, Liz and Greg Tate. “Street Art in the Age of Basquiat: Fab 5 Freddy and Lee Quiñones on Post-Graffiti Pop Soup.” Art News 4 May 2021.

Plesch, Véronique. “Graffiti, Margins, and Palimpsests.” In Writing on the Margins: Graffiti in Italy and Beyond (7th–16th c.). Proceedings of the First International Conference of the European Research Council Project Graff-IT. Ed. Carlo Tedeschi and Marco Mostert. Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy. Turnhout: Brepols. Forthcoming.