Graffiti & the Great Recession

I was browsing through the Huffington Post's "capture the recession" photo feature, where they have asked the public to post images in it's flickr pool. While many evocative images have been submitted, I am most struck by the pervasive sense of absence in so many of them; empty wheelchairs, empty shopping cart, and row upon row of empty homes and boarded up businesses. Loss can be found everywhere, but it seems like this Great Recession has stripped the streets of people.

It's common to see graffiti used as shorthand for "economically depressed," so I wasn't surprised to find the two photos below. In fact, both ranked in the top five when I found them earlier today. What is unusual is seeing graffiti used as the visual voice of Main Street.

Taken near the intersection of Bell, Eagle and Dallas Dr. in Denton, TX.
(Flickr/Rich Anderson)

These scrawled messages seem to be coming directly from the American people. The word "recession" is meaningless for the unemployed, uninsured people of this country; it doesn't begin to describe the street level challenges they face every day.

Corner of Canal And Greenwich , NYC NY (Flickr/Mark Smith)

The stencil in the image above makes the tagger step into action for all Americans. And with Goldman Sachs Group Inc. posting record earnings today and reaching all-time highs less than a year after the firm took $10 billion in U.S. rescue funds, that tagger is asking a question we would all like to know.

-- Post From PWS, the Public Square.

Fireworks: Global Celebration

Most entertainment technologies invented over the past 800 years have failed to stand the test of time. We may be momentarily charmed by a clockwork or shadow play, but they pale quickly against rapid-fire visual stimulation we consume daily in the 21st century. Fireworks, however, remain as arresting and thrilling as they were when the Chinese invented them in 12th century. Tonight the American people will stare up into skies bursting into color in celebration of our Independence. Part of me will be thinking about a much longer tradition, one in which people around the world over the last 800 years ooohh and aaahh over the beauty and magic of fireworks.


Nightime festivities with fireworks attending the rise of the Nile
Published in Sandy's "Relation of a Journey begun An Dom. 1610..."
second edition, 1621. Copper engraved print


Celebrating with Fireworks
Hashim II (Mughal, Delhi)
Opaque watercolor and gold on paper, ca. 1635
6 3/32 in. x 8 13/16 in. (15.5 cm x 22.4 cm)
San Diego Museum of Art Edwin Binney 3d Collection


Fireworks Display in London as the Nation Rejoices in 1763
Chez Mondhare, Paris: c. 1763
Hand-colored engraving, 9.25 x 15.25 inches, image


'Boating and Fireworks on the Sumida River', 1770s
Utagawa Toyoharu (1735-1814)
Uki-e ('floating picture' or 'perspective print'), nishiki-e (brocade print)
Signature: Utagawa Toyoharu ga, Publisher: Nishimuraya Yohachi
V&A, Museum no. E.652-1901


'Projet du feu d'artifice tiré à Versailles en présence de sa majesté Louis XV, le 15 mai 1771, à l'occasion du mariage de Monseigneur le comte de Provence et de Marie-Joséphine de Savoie' (or: Fireworks Display at the Palace of Versailles), 1771
Centre de recherche du château de Versailles


'Plan du feu d'artifice projeté à l'occasion du passage de Napoléon
Bonaparte à Marseillle en l'an 13. Trouvé en 1M528 du Cabinet du Préfet'
Archives Départementales des Bouches-du-Rhône

UPDATE:
I spent the evening of this 4th of July on a hilltop in Echo Park. While it has a perfect view of fireworks shot off from Dodger Stadium, no large coordinated display seemed to be going on there this year. Instead we were treated to a cacaphony of independence, surrounded by small bands of people shooting off contraband fireworks.They came from all directions, much larger and elaborate then I would have expected. A few red flares went up as well, beautiful in their slow descent from the sky. At some point the police helipcopters arrived using both megaphone and spotlight to say "no fireworks." But their independence of spirit would not be tamed.

Planting Things That Grow

The girl scout in me could not help but respond to Obama's call to Renew America Together on the MLK holiday. I signed up early to help renew a 60's built library in the Valley. We arrived at ten this morning with tools and plants in hand. The library was closed and we all milled around the sign in table out front. I successfully avoided the box of donuts. The grass out front was buried beneath dead leaves, fallen acorns and random litter. Despite evidence of a sprinkler system, the garden box that hugged the side of the library was as hard, dry and cracked.

More people arrived; people from the neighborhood, families with little kids, teenagers, an elderly couple with advanced gardening (they came with all sorts of tools, potting soil, garbage bags...all I had was a trowel). We stood in a ragged circle for the pledge of allegiance. That said, we were told where the sun hit the building and to arrange our plants were they would best thrive. I entrusted the perennials I had brought to an alert little boy to plant. The garden box was full of people trying to dig dead roots out of the baked dry earth. I looked up from my rake when I heard the garden box cheer; a neighbor had brought a water hose from across the street. The afternoon hummed along interrupted by occasional honks of encouragement and support from the passing motorists. I got a blister on my hand and raked up great piles of leaves.

The kids I was working with spent part of the time jumping into the piles and the other part gathering the leaves into trash bags. As we worked told me how Obama was going to be president tomorrow. When I left, the library had been transformed. It was now tidy, and cheerful. Bright flowers dotted the deep brown of the tilled garden box soil.

I hope we planted more than just flowers today; I hope we planted the seed of public service in the hearts and minds of all of those kids.

UPDATE 02.01.09
A special thanks to Councilmember Weiss, who has secured water for the Sherman Oaks Library garden!

The Public Square was a Derelict Place

Well, here I am at the beginning of a new year, facing many of the same systemic challenges as I was last year. In many ways I feel like a reflection of the nation, 30 years of deferred maintenance. If something is built quickly and on the cheap, the whole structure may collapse. That sort of building process is not sustainable, but then, I have never known anything different.

The public square of civil society was a derelict place when I came of age. The civility having been drained from the very concrete. I have grown up entirely post-Watergate; old enough to witness the end of the cold war, but far too young to have experienced the hope of Kennedy, or MLK. Too young even for Regan, really. I am part of a generation that has never known a segregated classroom and grew up watching Sesame Street. And that has made a great difference. But as the petty cultural divisions of baby-boomers consumed them, my generation has been out on the streets. In L.A., I grew up with wildstyle graffiti down in the river and above the freeways, and the internet took it global. The artists hit high profile spots controlled by business shoveling advertising, or the government (that labeled the artists criminals for violating property rights). Without having any of the capital to buy in, graffiti artists took space. They demanded a place in the visual discourse of the city, so successfully in fact, that marketing companies would mimic their techniques. Graffiti art seems to me to reflect a seemingly harsh reality of life; you must participate and participation will be hard. However, with that time you can choose to create something of beauty and meaning.

Tomorrow will witness the swearing in of Barak Obama. I know that this is a momentous occasion for millions of people across the globe. A wealth of layered meaning has been composed for the inauguration. I will try to take in the whole of its parts soon. But tonight, I am thinking about the strains that resonate with my own better angels: the focus and the discipline to change.

The Public Square/s

I have been thinking about starting a blog for quite some time. For the most part, it seemed to be the best way to break the writer's block I have developed. Committing to a blog also seemed to fit in to my current 5 year plan of Focus and Discipline. Naturally a day-dreaming idealist, I have spent much of my life in my head, but that is not the right place to be if any of my ambitions are to be accomplished. I need to engage with the world, and find ways of communicating.

As a student, I was enthralled my the work of Kasmir Malevich. It was more than the starkly simple beauty of abstract composition; it was the understanding that context (physical, ideological, etc.) can create/transform the meaning of a work of art. Malevich's Black Square (1915) is one of his "zero forms," the first building block in a new way of creating meaning. I see the same potential to create meaning in the "Public Square," which encompasses the plaza of the urban environment and the digital screen of information technology. And, of course, creating a blog ultimately makes me the Public Square!