So Clever!

How much trust fund allowance was wasted on this stupid slogan?

Thoughts on Ed Boxx

I don't know if prolific tagger Ed Boxx (also known as Rexx Ram or Red Foxx) is really dead, or if he faked his death as a prank.

I don't know who Ed Boxx really is, and I don't think that I know anyone who has met him in person.

I have no idea what is meant by "Get Up, Get God."

I don't know how I feel about the artist's use of historic buildings as tablets for his work. Actually, I do. I don't like it. But I don't like it a whole lot less than I don't like property owners letting their buildings deteriorate to the extent where they don't even try to clean up grafitti.

One thing that I know for certain is that this Ed Boxx piece on the dormitory buidling of St. Mary's Infirmary captures my attention and admiration. The skyline drawing, the colors, the imitation of the building's rooftop cross in the work -- this is pretty deliberate work. I'd rather not see this work on this building, but that's not the root problem. Not at all.

"Be Good to One Another"

This work by prolific graffiti creator Ed Boxx can be found down near the eastern terminus of Espenschied Street, by the former Carondelet Coke plant. Who can disagree with the message? Admittedly, few will see it but perhaps those who do need the instruction more than those who won't. Such work raises questions: What does one make of positive messages inscribed on private property not being used and not likely to be reused? This "graf" graces the side of a damaged box trailer on the old St. Louis Ship property, which no doubt will be scrapped if its owner ever does anything more than let it sit and rust. Why not let one person's scrap become another's momentary canvas?

Some small thoughts

I'm sure this will only inspire more angry comments, but nonetheless fellow urbanist Julia Kite sent me this postcard from NYC a while back:

There was a time when the Lexington was a beautiful line.
When children of the ghetto expressed themselves with art, not with crime.
But then as evolution passed, the transits buffing did its blast.
Now we wonder if graffiti will ever last.

--Epitaph for Graffiti, Lee, 1980.


I wish I could locate the postcard (rehab + home = disorganization), because the image of the whole mural, a graveyard painted on a subway car, is really something to see and is really beautiful.

Since I spent a lot of my childhood in an area with a marked gang problem, um, if anybody should hate graffiti, it's me. Early on in my life, tags meant that possibly violent attacks might be on the way. I even had the strange misfortune of riding bus #p62 in an area where other gangs were battling Six Deuce for control. New graf on our school was sometimes accompanied by things like members of rival gangs symbolically throwing glass bottles at the windows of our #p62 school bus to publically display their hatred for all things with a 6 and 2. Consequently, when I was a kid, I was terrified of gang-style graffiti.

That said, still, I have early memories of wonderful murals. I still distinctly remember going to Chicago when I was maybe six or seven, and thinking that it must be a bigger, better city because they had many more beautiful, elaborate, large colorful graffiti pieces around the city than StL did. To me, a kid from vibrant but unfancy urban places, an abundance of street art meant I must be in a great and important city. I knew that some of it was illegal, but still the line between some of the truly masterful illegal pieces I saw, and the also lovely legally sanctioned murals, was blurry in my young mind; all of it was so wonderful and made the city so much more vibrant and beautiful.

Now I own property, and now I try to advocate for historic buildings that have been deemed "nuisances," and now I try to convince more timid people that the city is "okay." I am learning some new and painful downsides to graffiti, but for the most part it almost never scares me anymore, even when it sometimes brings me great frustration and sadness (not on terra cotta or unpainted stone or brick, plz plz plz!).

Still, as a young woman who, frankly, spent a lot of her childhood in various so-called ghettos, I have to say, sometimes the line between a truly wonderful, thought-provoking tag and a truly wonderful, thought-provoking legally sanctioned mural is still a little blurry. Where I come from, this is just another form that public art takes.

I'm not saying I think graf is perfect, but I am saying thatgraf at its best is one of those things that can help make the city magic. Like a late night conversation at some crowded coffeehouse, like the feeling of seeing the skyline when you have been away for a while, like walking down a street that you never knew existed, like the corners of absolute surrealness that hide themselves in pockets near the river, like church carnivals and street kittens in springtime: magic. And people live in cities for that special city quality, that something, that overall accumulation of small magics. I'm not saying you moved here to watch the Orpheum get "vandalized," but I am saying that if you wanted endless predictable, pristine and orderly, you'd be livin' in New Town.

Ed Box's Orpheum Theater

The prolific graffiti tagger Ed Box(x) struck the Orpheum Theater downtown over the weekend, bringing his trademarks to an occupied building in the heart of the city. Observers first spotted the graffiti on Sunday. Among the painted items on the theater are a large cigarette, cat head and slogans such as "Forgive People" and "Roll Over Bay Toe Vin." The theater is owned by the Roberts Brothers and its exterior has not exactly been kept in good repair lately. No word on when the exterior will be clean again.

Those who travel the streets of East St. Louis and north city know this work well. The work of Box(x) mars several landmarks that have long since slipped from our region's middle-class consciousness. The downtown tag certainly raises the visibility of Ed Box(x) and hopefully will draw the attention of people who won't see his other questionable endeavors.

Thomas Crone has more at 52nd City: Paging: ED BOXX, paging ED BOXX

Advertising Anarchy

Most readers of this blog are probably familiar with those self-important spray-painted graffiti slogans seen around St. Louis, most often on abandoned buildings in poor neighborhoods south of Delmar (we presume the taggers are among the many members of the No-Go Club). The lines include chauvinistic slogans like "work is terrorism" and more cryptic poser lines like "pouvoir assasains." (Probably a good thing that the tagger doesn't go north of Delmar.) Most often the tagger leaves behind the single anarchist "A" in a gesture of iconographic masturbation. The hand on these lines seems similar, so I assume that the same person or group is responsible for the graffiti.

Disturbing has been the recent trend of this tagger to jump from marking abandoned buildings to occupied or under-rehab houses and cars. Using abandoned buildings for tagging is itself problematic, especially when the tagging comes from outside of the neighborhood. The sloganeering is close to advertising in its style and tone, and is not much different than the Jesus billboards and Seagrams ads one can find all over the city on streets like Florissant, Gravois and Natural Bridge. The aim is to incite poor people to do something that would serve a middle class ideology, be it the expenditure of pocket money on booze or fast food or enlistment into the anarchist or Christian armies. Either way, the message is a command from without and, in class terms, above -- a sort of semiotic attempt at colonization.

The new tags spotted on buildings being rehabbed by do-it-yourself owner-occupants and on people's sidewalks marks a new tactic: warfare on the supposed "yuppies" who are "gentrifying" the city. The tagging presumes that these people are wealthy, which is quite a stretch for people trying to fix up shells neglected by years of ownership by oh-so-lumpen neglectful owners. Nevermind that spray paint really doesn't come off of brick without damaging the brick; that'll show the rich to stay out of the city that rightly belongs to the black-clad sons and daughters of the middle class who are playing at revolution for a few years.

The silliest tag has to be "Smash HR 4437" written on the Montessori school on South Grand (see photo here). Most passers-by don't know the bill, which would restrict immigration, by number. The kids at the school can't "smash" the bill by voting against the bill's supporters in Congress (although I guess the taggers probably hate voting). What's the point? Defacing a school? Scaring kids and parents and making them feel bad about their school?

Do the taggers even care what the point is? This is an act of selfishness that is a diversion from real social change, which involves consent as well as consensus -- not force and ignorance. Real social change also comes unexpected and strong, because it springs from within a society. Change is mass action, not unitary proclamation that assumes there is an audience ready to be lead.