Wild Signs: An Introduction

Wild signs: an inTroduCTion Jeff Oliver and Tim Neal The Grafiti Story? inspire their work has elevated the status of grafiti from sidewalk ‘vandalism’ to a subject worthy of consumption (for recent offerings see Amqvist and Hagelin 2006; Banksy 2006; Cooper and Chalfant 1988; Gantz 2004; Gastman et al 2006; Manco et al 2005). Indeed, the power of the internet has done much to popularize the mass consumption of Grafiti well beyond its metropolitan heartlands. Innovative web sites such as Art Crimes and Grafiti Archaeology, among others, have elevated it from the relative obscurity of freeway underpasses and car parks to a digital centre stage consumed by artists and aicionados alike. Love it or loathe it, popular culture provides the lens through which grafiti should be understood. But is the story of grafiti as straightforward as this? The story of grafiti begins in the battered subways and urine-stained alleys of New York and Philadelphia; at least this is the received wisdom traded on by popular culture. In the 1970’s New York was sliding towards iscal rock bottom: much of the city’s infrastructure was crumbling and the knock-on effects were felt particularly by the urban poor, especially among ethnic minorities. It was during this period of uncertainty that a counterculture of daubed and spray painted afirmations began to appear on the city streets with increasing regularity (Addley 2006; Cresswell 1996: 31-32; Hammond 2006). By the mid 1980s most sizable North American and European cities had their own clandestine street art movements, with hybrid ‘indigenous’ scenes - inluenced initially by American and European styles - soon echoed in cities as far away as Brazil and southeast Asia (Addley 2006: 41-42; Manco et al 2005). At the same time that spray-painted tags, throw ups, pieces and murals began to deine a new ‘low’ art of the streets, the post-modern turn ensured that grafiti was also consumed within public and private galleries of ‘high’ art circles. It was in such surroundings that the likes of Jean Michael Basquiat, aka SAMO, walked a tightrope between the social tensions of the hood and the crass consumerism of the art business (Emmerling 2003). Wild Signs Even a hurried survey of the historiography of grafiti reveals a far more complex picture. From Classical Greece and Rome (Lang 1976; Lindsay 1960; Lawrence 1994) to post-Revolutionary France (Sheon 1976) to nineteenth century Puerto Rico (Rivera-Collazo 2006), grafiti adorned the walls of public places. Analysis of the context and form of historical examples is on one level reassuring: their authors dealt in themes not unfamiliar to the ‘latrinalia’ that have adorned bathroom walls during our own times (Beck 1982), ranging from love and loss to vulgar character assassination. And yet, if the past can at times be curiously familiar, we are also reminded of its ability to surprise. As Fleming (2001: 30) argues, the prohibition against wall writing broadly accepted today was not necessarily shared in Elizabethan England: in this context the line between texts attached to interior walls and texts inscribed on them, was not a hard and fast distinction. Judging by the way in which grafiti has been continually appropriated and redeployed, the range of its global diversity betrays its so-called east coast ‘roots’. And yet, distinctiveness of form and message continues to stem from a fairly restricted range of social and cultural contexts. Sociological attention has tended to focus on grafiti ‘artists’ and ‘crews’ as a narrow interest group of disenfranchised street dwellers or gangs who seek to challenge the political order of the city (Adams and Winter 1997; Grider 1975; Lachmann; 1988; Ley and Cybriwsky 1974; Pray and Gastman 2005). In a similar vein, such lines of questioning have also helped to legitimate an appropriate geographical context in which grafiti is to be expected, that is, a phenomenon almost exclusively tied to socially divisive geography of the modern capitalist city. It is in this context of uncertainty – where the past, even the very recent past, has the potential to challenge our expectations – that the current volume takes its impetus. If popular culture has unintentionally tamed grafiti, atomizing the contexts in which it is to be expected, the following chapters provide new forms of evidence and new points of view that both challenge and destabilize received wisdom. Drawing broadly on approaches from anthropology and material culture studies to human geography and cultural history, this book tells the history of people, places and issues through wild signs. Largely ignored by archaeologists and historians, the purpose and meaning of wild signs can vary as much as their geographical context. They may mark territory, in an attempt to exclude outsiders, or be invitations If grafiti’s colonization of the streets has conirmed its establishment as an artistic tradition among urban ‘activists’ then the now extensive body of popular literature, both in print and on the internet, has helped to reinforce this claim. The recent trend in glossy coffee table expositions on the lives of contemporary artists and the cause célèbres that 1 Jeff Oliver and Tim Neal the Atlantic, Oliver and Neal tackle a similar form of intervention, this time in the heartlands of England. Based on tree surveys conducted at number of sites in Yorkshire and the midlands, they argue that the practice of tree carving can potentially play a central role to our understanding of rural place making. Moving beyond interpretations that see tree carving as a trivial sideline to the way that woodlands and other treed places are used, they suggest an approach that allows us to appreciate the way that tree carving can bring new information to light on the different ways that places and landscape are valued over time. to dialogue. They can be subversive public statements, while others form a closed language for insiders. Depending on their context, wild signs can enshrine a challenge to law and order, while from certain perspectives they may constitute natural law itself. Frequently they operate as signiiers of memory and identity, acknowledging a wider range of actors, times, spaces and concerns, which may not ordinarily brought into dialogue other than through such inscriptive materializations. This collection assembles contributions to Scrawl and Scribe: Writing in the Margins, a session held the annual meeting of Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG) hosted at the University of Shefield in 2005. Together, the papers presented here represent a series of original case studies that place grafiti in a range of different historical and cultural contexts: from rural barn yards of North Yorkshire to twenty-irst century London and from the seedy sailor s haunts of Malta to the upland pastures of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Nevada. In this introduction, we provide an overview of some of the more salient themes that are raised across the chapters that follow. These include, but are not necessarily restricted to Grafiti in the ‘natural’ world, issues of identity and memory, heritage concerns and performance and practice. Of course, even where the evidence of improvement and environmental impact tends to dominate our plotlines, wild signs can have their place in unravelling tensions surrounding access to resources and property rights. In an argument that challenges the very notion that carvings in seemingly ‘inappropriate’ places should necessarily provide a window upon the voices of the dispossessed, McGuire makes a convincing case for stone inscriptions that speak more about authority, and the status and identity of land owners. Her assessment also provides a sounding board for thinking through such issues as power in relation to the production of forms of ‘oficial grafiti’ and the way that compliance can be instigated through forms of governance that operate at a distance to their source (Hermer and Hunt 1996). Wild Signs out of Town The degree to which humans have modiied and or harnessed the ‘natural’ world for productive exploits has established itself as an important interdisciplinary focus within the historiography of the modern world (Cronon 1983; Mzozowski 1999; Rackham 2000; Smout et al 2005; Williams 1989). However, not all western engagements with the natural world can be simply deined in terms of ‘improvement’. Inscriptive acts can take place in a wide range of environments and serve as reminders that social tensions permeated rural landscapes and ‘wilderness’ spaces as well. Chapters by Mallea-Olaetxe; McGuire and Oliver and Neal show how people have used ‘natural’ landscapes in ways that are more concerned with telling stories, a practice that has more comfortably been associated with non-western peoples. Object Agency and Practice The recognition that meaning cannot be simply reduced to content is a central issue of a number of the chapters presented here. While no longer a contentious position among a majority within the arts and social sciences (e.g. Appadurai 1986; Chilton 1999; Miller 2005; Thrift 2000) it is nevertheless interesting that for many years, social analysis of grafiti was largely limited to treating it as a code to be deciphered (e.g. Gonos et al 1976; Stocker et al 1972). Such positions no longer seem tenable in the context of more recent research that emphasizes the social eficacy of participating in the creation of wild signs: an awareness of whom and what is at stake in its production. At the same time, its corollary, writing (or carving or painting), with, and in, the world of objects, is in itself, creative of material meanings that are socially consequential (e.g. Orengo and Robinson 2008; Peteet 1996). This is a position addressed, albeit with varying forms of emphasis, in chapters by Owen, Giles and Giles, and Parno. Mallea-Olaetxe investigates the history Basque sheep herders, not through diaries or other historical texts, but through the thousands of messages, pictures and symbols carved into the bark of aspen forests in the upland areas of Nevada and California. Bringing to light the cultural history of a group almost unknown within the annals of the American West, he not only adds a counterbalance to more simplistic narratives of the ‘opening up’ of the western interior, but provides a lens through which we are able to sense the aspirations, concerns, loneliness and humour (see also Stein 1989) that partly deined the experience of young Basque men who sought their fortune in one of Americas’ most rugged environments. Drawing on evidence from Tewkesbury cathedral and comparative observations from other English sites, Owen argues that the commonly observed scratched graphical and textual ‘grafiti’ appearing within these sacred spaces, should not be seen as grafiti at all in the modern sense of the term. Rather, she argues that such inscriptive acts are much more likely to be unsanctioned devotional offerings, tokens or ‘souvenirs’ that served to highlight and actively ix the identities of those whose relationships with the church, unlike its powerful patrons, were otherwise leeting and insubstantial. The centrality of grafiti to the social experience of more marginal actors is also a focus of Giles Archaeologies of tree carving, however, are not simply the product of interactions in ‘exotic’ landscapes on the periphery of the western gaze. On the other side of 2 Wild Signs: An Introduction a peace camp in Nevada, Schoield argues that although others may deem it to be little more than criminal activity, wild signs can help to lesh out both ‘oficial’ and ‘unoficial’ histories, a point well worth remembering if we are to bridge both local narratives and grander discourses. and Giles. They persuasively illustrate how writing on the wall of various agricultural out-buildings was absolutely central to the social construction and realization of a particular group of farm labourers – the horselads. Their study focuses on the Yorkshire Wolds during the early twentieth century, a period of signiicant agrarian change. Their analysis touches on a range of issues from gender, social status, and spatial relationships. A central argument forms around the idea that the ability to engage in particular forms of wall painting, often in front of an audience, was a critical means through which the horselads expressed relational identities within the group but also issues such as what it meant to be a young male in a time of transformation in rural England. A concern with the local within the context of broader social processes is also an important issue for Silva’s contribution, where he touches on the way that grafiti practice in Portugal is embedded within the historical contours of Portuguese history. Silva makes the eloquent point that grafiti has been an inextricable part of political conlicts from the reign of Salazar in the mid twentieth century to the triumphalism of globalization. He argues that while recent content is inluenced by North American styles and themes, he shows how grafiti has been taken up by a range of actors, not all of which can be easily pigeon-holed as the work of the usual suspects. If this is indeed the case, then there is a strong argument for what these features contribute to mainstream history, a viewpoint that chimes in well with Schoield’s belief that the heritage sector needs to focus more attention to what others may see as an ‘ephemeral’ category of material culture. Working with the understanding that material culture has both an original intended meaning and a life of its own is a critical element of post-modern historical and archaeological research. The paradox of the static form being both a representation and active participant has become a central tenet in contemporary material culture studies. In Parno’s chapter, these ideas are developed around a number of different themes. In particular his discussion of social space is particularly pertinent. In this context, surveys of Grafiti at a number of sites in Bristol is seen to be both heaping public space with particular meanings, while at the same time eroding it of others, providing the public gaze with different forms of mnemonic potency. How grafiti provides a prompt for understanding different attitudes in society is also a central concern of for Cowdell. Rather than focusing exclusively on the materiality of grafiti, he uses the grafiti artist Banksy’s rat depictions as a prism to explore the contours of rat lore in British history. While certain perceptions of the rat seem to hold across time and space, he draws attention to a signiicant amount ambiguity in how rats are perceived. As symbols of urban life with dominant themes of degradation but also resistance, Cowdell inds a metaphorical quality in the rat that all urban dwellers can both celebrate and mock. Unlike the individualism expressed by much grafiti, Banksy’s graphic representations of the rat act as touchstones of urban experience, which resonate broadly through urban experience (see also Klingman and Shalev 2001). Heritage and Temporality Another important theme is the issue of wild signs as heritage; signs of past social action that may gain new forms of resonance in the present world. ‘Wild signs’ can be said to exist within a spectrum, from acts that deliberately set out to recreate the meaning of places, such as public works of art, to acts where intention is less formalized and improvisational. But at what point does an act often associated with criminality and the defacement of private property become a legitimate focus of historical enquiry? Furthermore how should such acts, which we prefer to forget in more sanctioned narratives, be used to inform and assess popular perceptions? These are dificult questions, but with the widening of deinitions of heritage in recent years it is nevertheless something that we need to take seriously (e.g. Palus and Matthews 2007). As Schoield’s and Silva’s chapters show, these questions are particularly poignant when dealing with marginalized groups, such as prostitutes, immigrants or the rural working poor. But at the same time, as argued by Cowdell, grafiti can also provide a sounding board for thinking about changes in broader attitudes to more abstract issues. **** Addressing some of the common themes touched on throughout, Buchli provides an afterword that argues for an emphasis on the materiality of grafiti and other wild signs as a central component of any research endeavour attempting to come to grips with the social dynamics and impact of such activity. However, he also notes that archaeological and heritage interventions are not themselves detached from the social eficacy of wild signs; indeed they tend to have something of an incongruous effect. The goals of documentation and preservation can, paradoxically, have a limiting effect on the luid and dialogical dimensions of inscriptive practices, and yet, such valorisations also play an important role in highlighting and legitimizing wild signs, enabling and amplifying their power within previously unimagined social arenas. Querying attitudes towards street art, Schoield asks the question: what precisely distinguishes prehistoric cave paintings and similar forms of ancient ‘art’ from contemporary grafiti? And why should the archaeological investigation of such activity, be any less legitimate than the study of prehistoric ‘art’ forms? 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