Monday, August 03, 2009

Graffiti is "...a pathetic attempt to emerge, to be visible..." said one of the talking heads during a short video clip on the problem of urban doodling and scribbling in Rome.

I'm fifty-fifty here. Part of me enjoys seeing splashes of exuberant hieroglyphics lighting up odd nooks and crannies, those niches of city places that lay forgotten, until the street artist turns up and then they shimmer brightly in to life. Tropical colours in a wan, mid-Atlantic setting in that respect.

At the same time, you would be able to hear my teeth gnashing on another planet if I went outside and found a giant, randomly shaped tag, zig-zagging across the sides of the building I live in. Remember I'm a Brit, and all of us carries a strain of nimbyism. Mine might be detectable only at trace levels, nevertheless it's still there.

Where I do stand back and wonder is just what do some slogans mean. Is there a meaning even?

Let's get the common ones out of the way first. Applying the first law of Rumsfeld, then we know what we know, which is: political are easily understood; same goes for territorial boundary marking - W10 posse rulz this 'hood, for instance; love and heartbreak, straightforward enough, maybe too much in cases; and finally, the public address to the football team is as direct and explicable as the rest.

But it's the other category, the head-scratching, the arcane, the mysterious. What for instance, just what, did this graffiti artist in Doncaster, have in mind when they were spraying " Albert, the kid is ghosting" ?

Who's Albert and should his kid be ghosting, whatever that is? Answers, please, on a postcard. I've tried already back in May, when I first spotted it. I've no idea

2 comments:

chris said...

I saw that today (The "Albert, the kid is ghosting" graffiti), and a google sadly only directed me here, to someone else who was looking to see what it was!

Archimedes Principle said...

Chris, this piece of graffiti is set to be the Rosetta Stone of our times. No one other than whoever painted it has the faintest idea what it means.