Gushy Promises In The Sunshine

Buford Youthward
stockcap@hotmail.com

Form and content are the bookends of all evaluation. As is the case with other seductive tendencies, in modern graff, one must separate the two components. What you say matters much less than how you say it. If "KING SHIT" invades the surrounding walls of your community how important is the surface versus the accent, and savoir-faire of the intrusion? Studying the dilapidated billboards in my community, I find the tobacco and alcoholic products posted as beautiful organic visions complimenting the texture of the city.

The lessons of butchering stock images and false paradises are socially inherent. Picasso embraced this as did Chuck Berry. There's a tradition. The chain of analogies that are aroused in any given work represent the polychromatic, polyphonic and polymorphous energy of existence. Frequently the product is condensed and gathered into a single word, typically with the full expenditure of exhaustion.

The pop-rock collision of graffiti and cubism refuses the static silence and embraces the dynamism of sound and noise. When one gazes upon local graffiti we see it not only as creation itself but an accumulation of knowledge. One doesn't write about anything — one simply writes. Graffiti theory is the first class coach on the freight train of graffiti history. One good journalist is worth more than a hundred great painters. If it is not multi-leveled than the graffiti is nothing.

It is all the anti-signature. The signature that refuses. Graffiti stands to deny all the gushy promises made in the sunshine. Technical production is not the highest priority on the train tracks. The experience of art is cemented in the excitement of peering at inaccessible capital, whereas graffiti provides the viewer with the presentation of the city as the great condenser of moral chaos.

So we spin circles and forever dance on the ballroom floor of bathos and compromise wielding the power of subversive graffiti and the graffiti of subversive power, the reaction of product and the product of reaction.


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