Viva Grafitti!

One thing i haven't liked much about Baku is the near total absence of graffiti; what little exists are website addresses and an occasional love note, 'Ershad + Sevinc forever' scrawled inside an imbalanced heart. One night some rebellious types managed to ‘decorate’ a couple walls in the upscale shopping district with ‘Fuck Aliyev’ (in English), other not-so-random words like SOCIALISM and FREEDOM – trying to photograph this the next morning as it was being quickly painted over, i got into a verbal tussle with a fur-hatted policeman, ended with me shouting ‘Freedom!?’ at him as i finally put the camera away. (That’s what living in a media dictatorship means: people aren’t supposed to know these things happen, might give them IDEAS.) After much hiking about town, i did eventually find some decent graffiti covering the walls of a crumbling, semi-underground Soviet-era theatre. Dark place, out of public view, guess the thought police decided to let this site slip under their radar.

Yes, i'm well aware governments and many individuals (especially business owners) consider it a form of vandalism and yes, i understand that, but... cities with too many blank walls are simply begging for flash commentary or premeditated (sketched or stenciled) designs - for COLOR at the very least. Compare the typical Baku graffiti site to this very non-gray work in Bangalore:

San Francisco, where i’m from, is among other things renown as a city of exquisite public murals, going back to the 1930s when the US government put artists to work painting them (government sponsoring rank and file artists – what a concept!) The line between mural painting and the finer, e.g. Banksy, graffiti seems to exist only in its sanctity. Outdoor murals like the great works by Diego Rivera are understood to be sanctioned, permanent paintings (themselves often the targets of spray paint freestylers), whereas graffiti is impermanent, artists fully aware that what they lay down may not be visible for very long. How many layers of graffiti once covered the Berlin Wall? How many layers have accumulated on urban underground/metro trains? Ultimately, what makes graffiti graffiti is its illegality. Having participated in many late night SF stencil brigades, i guarantee that the this certainly makes it FUN – though in fact, it’s not illegal everywhere.

Graffiti and murals are also no-admission-ticket-required public domain art. As Banksy said, “I don’t think you should have to pay to look at graffiti. You should only pay if you want to get rid of it.” I’ve put together a small slideshow of some graffiti and mural work i’ve seen over the past few years and sure to be added to when i get to Thessaloniki :-) Nothing extraordinary really, but nice to see what’s out there in difference locales. Also found a good link illustrating the difference styles used by modern graffiti artists. Enjoy! Then go out and make some of your own :-)