On a recent trip to Kolkata, I came across this wall with Long Live the USSR painted on it. Now, I have seen the Mona Lisa at The Louvre and The Kiss at The Belvedere and the experience remains on the tip of my tongue (especially at cocktail parties) because the paintings are beautiful and world famous. Yet, the image of this haphazard spray paint on a dirty old wall in black and red is equally unforgettable. I suppose it’s the power of words as art that makes graffiti so demonstrative; the careless style of its caricatures/ alphabets imply that the artists have to influence the world with their ideas and couldn’t be bothered with detailed drawing.
I began to follow graffiti artists, and discovered that their blasé approach really makes you sit up. U.K based Banksy, a veritable graffiti phantom says, ‘The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by breaking the rules, but by people following the rules.’ While I’m not one to break a red light or honk in a silent zone, I do appreciate a nonconformist. Basically, what I’m trying to say is that I get the gist of the message Mr. Banksy scribbled because I know it can’t be taken too literally. I think it’s great that graffiti is an easily available art form, (like, Banksy says: you can make someone smile while they’re having a piss) that conveys a powerful message in a few words; an editor’s dream. Although graffiti originated in the 1960s, it’s ancient because it can refer to any message scribbled on a wall.Though I still wouldn’t consider Jane loves Harry scribbled on a bathroom wall as graffiti. I prefer to see it as a strong political or social message written in vibrant colours by artists with exotic names like Dondi White (from the U.S) and Lady Pink from Ecuador. Here, I should mention Jean-Michel Basquiat and Al Diaz the stars of graffiti art in New York.
Graffiti can be brazen exposing the world for telling lies about order, love and hope. Or positive, telling you to hate war, embrace brotherhood and so forth. One encounters it- just when they’re listening to Kendrick Lamar after having bought a pair of Moschino shoes they were lusting over for months- and when they have taken the metro in a city that is fuelled by consumption that they should instead: Save the Earth or Act Up. And they balk at the realization that they haven’t done their bit to improve society; that they’re just another cog in the wheel. And after that momentary reality check, they disembark and go on doing what they were doing anyway, until they come across another slogan, another warning, another sign that someone out there wants to change the world- that someone has taken art, reinvented it, and created a whole new art form.
And they mean business because they’re bold enough to paint it on someone else’s wall.
