Graffiti is a phenomenon present in all modern day urban spaces. It can be considered both an art form and a political statement. Graffiti can also be seen as the expression of the individual in a marginal society. Julie Peteet sees Graffiti as a form of “cultural production”. Additionally, Amardo Rodriquez and Robin Patric Clair analyze the content of graffiti, finding that marginalizing factors of sex and racial identity are most often at play. Simply put, graffiti is a force for the liminal society, which occupies liminal spaces in the urban landscape. However, can this understanding of graffiti be applied to Vancouver? In a city know for clean streets and flashy glass buildings, where does graffiti occur and what does it mean?
In Vancouver, the graffiti usually is located in East Vancouver, known as the run down neighborhood in the city. It is also known for its diversity and rich community. Considering graffiti as a translation of identity, then this location makes sense. But the graffiti in this area is usually playful, portraying young children and singing groups, not concerning issues of race and sex. Furthermore, as cultural production, graffiti should inhabit more than one neighborhood of a city. Can graffiti be found anywhere else in the city?
Graffiti elsewhere in Vancouver is quite scarce. One of the more fascinating locations of graffiti in Vancouver is the piece located on the back of store security door in the heart of the city, Granville Skytrain Station. An Image is shown at the beginning of this post.
This graffiti mainly consists of tags that can be understood as graffiti signature. These tags are all about identity, but they are about identity of the individual. And because culture deals with a group of people, this individualistic graffiti cannot be considered culture production. Furthermore, tags are not readable by others, so the meaning behind a tag is lost on a society. Thus this graffiti is not unifying.
The location graffiti is interesting because it is both completely liminal and incorporated within consumerism society. The work is only visible at night, when the store closes the security door. However, it is located at the upper-class store The Bay, and it looks as if this door was originally positioned as an ad for the Hbc Rewards. The ad is visible underneath the graffiti with “Earn Hbc Rewards points with every purchase” scrolled over the top and images of credit cards on the bottom. This dual nature of location can be seen as an analogy for the state of graffiti in Vancouver, which is allowed to occupy the liminal, but must inhabit mainstream and non-political statements, either politically correct statements, or tags about the individual.
So is the graffiti in Vancouver unique? Or is it impossible to lump all graffiti together? The contradictory nature of graffiti in Vancouver reminds us that while there may be universal aspects to a concept, one unified understanding cannot be determined.
References Cited:
Julie Peteet
2009 The Writing on the Walls: The Graffiti of the Intifada. Cultural Antropology 11(2):139-159.
Rodriguez, Amardo and Robin Patric Clair
1999 Graffiti as Communication: Exploring the Discursive Tensions of Anonymous Texts. Southern Communication Journal (65)1:1-15.
Details of the Graffiti Mentioned:
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