2011

Graffiti is common on this route, under the bridges and here on the bridge over Huntington Road.

Here’s a tasteful, carefully centred, apparently stencilled image of a person on a bike. Many people object to graffiti, but I wouldn’t object to something like this.

If you don’t like it, focus instead on the background, trees and grass on a June evening, and the perspective of a path disappearing into beautiful sunlit green, at the high point of the year, when the daylight hours extend well into the evening and encourage wandering/cycling/just looking.

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February 2011

Even in the days of spray-paint and marker pens, traditional graffiti persists. This example was noted in November 2011 in Dean’s Park, by the Minster, defacing the handsome stone bench. These children – vandals eh?

Apparently, some of the modern graffiti ‘tags’ are symbols of territory between rival gangs. Don’t think that applies here, unless gang culture has developed massively among the under eights.

It looks like these drawings have been made by scraping the surface of the stone with another bit of rock. I recall children doing this in the 1970s on garden walls and the like, and on pavements – and this traditional approach goes back even further, to the original ‘graffito': ‘a method of decoration in which designs are produced by scratches through a superficial layer of plaster, glazing, etc., revealing a ground of different colour.’ (OED)

Another traditional site for graffiti is the tree trunk, usually used for love-related carvings. In 2009, one couple – Polish apparently – carved their love into a tree in York’s Museum Gardens. Note the ‘I’ to one side of the heart, which seems unconnected. Perhaps one of them was starting to carve a statement of love to the other, and it then turned into a mutual declaration of love/tree-mauling exercise. This is either a) romantic or b) vandalism, or maybe both.

An earlier example was noticed on a walk by the riverside, near Hemingbrough. In 1971, ‘ADW’ carved his initials into a tree by the river. Nearby – undated, but presumably from a similar era, another tree bears the scars of three couples carving their initials in its bark.

I did a quick Google search and found an interesting page with photos of trees covered in such carving. The photographer calls them ‘arboreal scripts’.

Carving into trees or stone leaves a more lasting mark than paint. This carving of rural trees and village stonework is also ‘graffiti’, but tends to be seen as an interesting curiosity, rather than a blight on the landscape.

In a lane near the church, in Birdsall, this section of stone coping is now partly covered by ivy and moss, but still visible between the greenery are initials – and the word ‘SOMEBODY’ carved into the stone, decades ago.

Similarly, as mentioned elsewhere on this site, on a side wall of Alne church – famous for its carved Norman doorway – is what appears to be a series of names and initials carved into the stone in the 19th century. Though modern graffiti writers wouldn’t generally deface churches, it looks as though the parishioners of old sometimes did.

More information

Graffiti, on wikipedia.org

The Culture and Politics of Graffiti Art and Graffiti Q & A, from graffiti.org

Graffiti: definitions and information, from urbandictionary.com

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February 2011

Tagging, etc

Moving on from the colourful and often carefully planned type of wall decoration, with its self-defined (though fluid and variable) boundaries, we meet the inevitable scribbling and random tagging. This is more annoying to most people. Particularly this kind of thing:

This shows graffiti on the inner wall of the ruins of St Leonard’s hospital, taken from a first-floor window at the library (taken through the glass, hence the fuzziness). Daubing paint on historic stone is a dumb and useless thing to do, in most people’s eyes.

Presumably this kind of thing is fairly rare, unless it’s that the authorities are so quick to clean it off most of us don’t get to see it. But I’d like to think it’s rare.

The widespread and more recent blight of mindless ‘tagging’ is being monitored, and has its own website. Tagging reminds me of the way male cats scent-mark any important corner in their territory by lifting their tail and urinating against it. So on lamp-posts and the like, and bits of random wall in the city and its suburbs, we see mindless doodlings, one colour, with usually no artistic merit, but presumably of great meaning to the sprayer/dauber, signifying something. Perhaps signifying the confusions of adolescence, in many cases, and a feeling of being angry and disillusioned and disenfranchised? I can remember those days.

These hoardings on the Hungate redevelopment site displayed advertising promising a bright future: ‘a vibrant new quarter for York’. Perhaps the person who doodled the purple shape to the left of this felt alienated and disenfranchised by this vision of unaffordable housing. In the background looms Stonebow House, like a grim warning, reminding us of what visions of the bright new future threw up nearby some decades ago.

I guess we must remember that graffiti is as old as the hills. Even the Romans did it (and I’m not just thinking of that funny bit in the Monty Python film ‘Life of Brian’). All kinds of people have left scribbled comments behind them, wanting to leave a mark, carved on stone, on trees, on toilet walls, on walls about to be papered, on bridges, under bridges.

Bridges seem to be particularly popular – as shown some years back in photos of a footbridge in the Holgate area. There’s also the constantly graffiti-covered bridge over the railway line by the hospital. The authorities paint it over in grey or cream paint, and it’s just a nice clean canvas for new graffiti. Which is usually inoffensive, the same old declarations of love, occasionally someone being called ‘a slag’. I’m surprised young people still bother with this kind of thing, in the age of Facebook and Twitter.

In recent years I haven’t noticed any really offensive graffiti of the ‘[particular ethnic group] go home’ variety. This might be because, rightly, covering up such graffiti is the priority. The council’s website states that they’ll aim to remove ‘offensive graffiti’ within 24 hours, and ‘Non offensive graffiti’ within four days.

(Apart from the obviously offensive racist daubings, I’d love to know how they decide what’s offensive and what isn’t. Perhaps they have a list they go through with you when you ring up?: ‘What does it say – ‘bum’? That’s classed as non-offensive. It would be category one if it said arse.’ ?)

Political, poetical, intellectual and philosophical

I’ve noticed fewer political or philosophical slogans – there were many of these a few years back – some recorded on previous pages. And going further back still, somewhere in York, years ago, I recall a brick wall – it might have been where the railway line goes under Bootham – that had ‘WORK EAT CONSUME DIE’ in white paint. In the 80s, graffiti on brick walls in town was often political – an angry public statement. Such as the ‘No Cruise’ slogan in the background of one of my dad’s photos of 80s buses.

This interesting example of the more ‘thoughtful’ graffiti was – perhaps still is – on the bridge near Bishopthorpe, a bridge that used to carry trains and now carries cyclists and walkers from one bank of the Ouse to the other. It’s the home of the sculpture ‘The Fisher of Dreams’.

Another bridge covered in graffiti. I noticed the ‘Bishy Bikers’ had painted their name on the iron struts overhead. Among the general daubings was this lengthy piece of mysterious prose.

Graffiti can be very annoying, and I say this as someone who has had to clean it off a wall. It would be a mistake though to lump all of it together, and it seems a lot of time and effort is spent tackling it in areas where there’s really no need. I know I wasn’t alone in being rather bemused and indeed irritated by the pointless painting over of some of the artwork on the cycle track underpass. By now it will no doubt have been decorated more imaginatively again, and perhaps painted over again by a publicity-seeking councillor with a tin of grey paint, and then decorated again, painted grey again, and so it goes on. A waste of time, and indeed paint.

It’s obviously a real headache for the local authorities. Perhaps we could save them some money by accepting that certain bridges and underpasses in York will always be covered with random doodlings and declarations of love, and perhaps even colourful and imaginative pieces of art. They have been for as long as I can remember.

It’s painted over partly because it’s seen as somehow leading to other antisocial behaviour, though that theory doesn’t hold for me. ‘The presence of graffiti increases the perception of an unsafe area of crime’, says the TAAGY website. Does it?

It’s also seen as not showing the city in its best light for tourists. Again, not convincing – it’s unlikely they’ll be overly offended by a bit of paint on a wall. Presumably they’ve seen such things before, as graffiti is an inevitable ‘blight’ on every town and city.

Spray-painted graffiti tends to have a short life. I’ve encountered more long-lasting ‘graffiti’ all over the place, carved into trees, stone bridges out in the countryside, or on the walls of village churches and suburban chapels.

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February 2011

Graffiti, by its nature, is forever changing. At the same time, it’s always there, somewhere, crumbling off a painted wall, or carved more enduringly. Usually seen as an ‘urban blight’, but visible in more rural locations too. It continues to take many forms, some accomplished, some irritating.

Spray-painted graffiti/art

Personally, I don’t feel better about my world if I see a load of greyish concrete, and as far as I’m aware, grey concrete underpasses usually have no architectural merit. So if I’m cycling down one of the urban cycle tracks and see colourful embellishments of the more skilful variety covering a bit of grey concrete, I’m often cheered up, rather than offended. And I know I’m not alone.

There are already pages on this site on the subject of graffiti, but I make no excuses for returning to it again. I’ve collected photos of interesting examples while on my wanders/cycle rides, including this example. A piece in the local Press towards the end of last year included a photo showing Mayor Sue Galloway in this area – in one of those obviously staged publicity shots – covering up graffiti with cream paint, while surrounded by people on a community payback scheme.

The clean-up apparently also involved genuinely useful efforts – to tidy up litter and to remove the random ‘tagging’ also spray-painted on nearby structures. I have to say I’d rather they’d concentrated their efforts on this. But obviously the background of the colourfully graffitied wall made a better shot for the local paper than Mayor Galloway scrabbling about after crisp packets in the grubby shrubbery.

Which is proof, perhaps, that this exuberant graffiti wall has some artistic merit, and perhaps should have been left as it was. An amusing letter to the Press expressed similar sentiments.

Graffiti of this type is an easy target for a publicity stunt, but is the type of graffiti that upsets most people the least.

In fact, many of us like it. Utilitarian concrete spaces under roads are not generally attractive – they’re grim. If people want to cover them in jubilant colourful designs, it’s not something I feel troubled by. As long as they take their litter home (another big subject for another page) and confine their efforts to ugly grey concrete underpasses and the like.

It may have been noticed by many people that the more accomplished, artistic, witty graffiti isn’t covering vast areas of town. There’s a general, though variable, code on what’s an acceptable canvas and what isn’t.

The Urban Dictionary includes many definitions and descriptions of graffiti, what it is and what it isn’t, what’s acceptable and what’s not. I noticed this posting, from ‘Suke-one':

This faded and peeling graffiti on the wall of a disused garage on Penley Grove Street was photographed in December 2010, shortly before the garage was demolished.

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