Showing papers on "Graffiti published in 2011"

The reversal effect of prohibition signs

Abstract: In public places one encounters many prohibition signs, as well as traces of the norm-violating behavior these signs are trying to reduce, like graffiti or litter. Based on goal framing theory and ...

Art and Crime (and Other Things Besides … ): Conceptualising Graffiti in the City

Abstract: In this paper, we critically review the literature on graffiti and street art with a view to bridging the divide between the stark extremities of public graffiti discourse. We make the case for moving beyond singular responses to the challenges posed by graffiti – into the complex terrain between visions of a city free from graffiti and one where public art has free rein. To this end, we have chosen a series of interrogations of common dialectical positions in talk of graffiti: is it art or crime; is it public or private expression; is it necessarily ephemeral, or does it seek permanence; is it a purely cultural practice, or is it economic? Our list is by no means exhaustive, but it does go some way to uncovering the complexity of graffiti’s dynamic and contested geographies.

The discursive construction of the separation wall at Abu Dis: graffiti as political discourse

Abstract: The article analyses the discursive function of graffiti on the separation wall in the contested space of Abu Dis on the boundary between Jerusalem and the Occupied Territories. This study explores the role of graffiti as micro-level, political discourse designed to influence national and international actions concerning the Palestinian-Israeli conflict over national borders, self determination and human rights. The data for this study consisted of photographic documentation of the Abu Dis graffiti. This data was analysed for its linguistic and informational characteristic, its political functions, and discursive construction. The results of the study reveal that the separation wall is constructed in five different ways that directly interact with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The graffiti on the wall at Abu Dis is a microcosm of the broader conflict and offers an insight into the different chains of political discourse in action in the discussion of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Street art - what is it?

Abstract: Les oeuvres d'arts enrichissent notre patrimoine et se trouvent communément sous forme d'exposition dans les musées et galeries. Quand est-il pour les autres formes d'arts? La rue offre aux passants et aux publics des graphismes souvent éphémères qui naissent puis disparaissent au fil du temps. De nos jours, la société reste partagée sur le sujet des graffitis, certains considèrent ces inscriptions comme un acte de vandalisme et d'autres comme une oeuvre picturale a part entière. En quoi le Street art s'intègre t-il dans notre société ? Afin de mieux comprendre le retentissement de l'art urbain sur notre société, nous commencerons par définir les origines du Street art. Dans une deuxième partie nous étudierons le Street art comme un nouveau moyen d'expression. Pour finir, nous nous pencherons sur l'impact de cette forme d'art sur le vécu urbain.

Graffiti hurts and the eradication of alternative landscape expression

Abstract: . Dominant ideology influences political identity, not only through the production of icons and material artifacts but also through attempts to control and eliminate alternative cultural expressions, such as graffiti. Antigraffiti campaigns seek to define notions of legitimacy and appropriateness in urban landscapes. Inscribing graffiti is an inherently spatial practice, one that provides opportunities for alternative expression. These expressions question the power and authority of dominant sociospatial practices and broaden definitions of citizenship and political appropriateness. In this article we analyze Graffiti Hurts, an organization devoted to the eradication of graffiti, in detail. By framing graffitists as outsiders and criminals, Graffiti Hurts seeks to justify the erasure of graffiti, and in so doing it reinforces exclusionary representations of culture, community, and landscape.

The filth and the fury: 6 Denmark Street (London) and the Sex Pistols

Abstract: In case readers are wondering whether this paper is written tongue in cheek � or with tongue sticking out � it is worth recalling that modern archaeology includes recent periods in its remit, and uses recent materiality to help understand more ancient times as well as a critique on modernity itself. Here the authors find graffiti left by a notorious group of popular musicians and probe it for social meaning as earnestly as students of cave art. Their archaeological study finds an underlying driver that is part political, part personal and therefore also part (anti-)heritage.

Facilis hic futuit: Graffiti and Masculinity in Pompeii's 'Purpose-Built' Brothel

Abstract: Phoebus / bonus futor (Phoebus is a good fukr, CIL IV 2248, Add. 215); Froto plane / lingit cun/num (Froto openly licks cunt, CIL IV 2257); Murtis * felatris (Murtis is a blow-job babe, CIL IV 2292). Long overlooked by scholarship as obscene recordings of sexual encounters, the 135 graffiti of the 'purpose-built' brothel at Pompeii (VII 12 18-20; CIL IV 2173-96 and 3101a; Add. 215-6 and Add. 465) form a rich corpus that illuminates daily interactions among clients and prostitutes in the Roman world. (1) In this paper, I demonstrate through these graffiti the multiple ways in which male clients, individually and collectively, negotiated male sexuality. Specifically, I analyze how male clients both created a hierarchy among themselves and solidified communal, normative masculinity in opposition to nonnormative males and marginalized females. I. Introduction In the past fifteen years, the graffiti of the 'purpose-built' brothel (hereafter referred to simply as the brothel) have entered the scholarly arena, usually as part of works devoted to surveying or analyzing erotic graffiti at Pompeii. For example, some of the brothel's sexual graffiti were treated by Antonio Varone's Erotica pompeiana: Iscrizioni d'amore sui muri di Pompei (1994; translated into English in 2002 as Erotica pompeiana: Love Inscriptions on the Walls of Pompeii). Varone surveys a wide range of erotic and love graffiti from all over Pompeii, grouping them into motifs like "Preghiere d'amore" and "L'arma d'amore." Through this typology, Varone draws out common themes in a diverse body of material. Francesco Paolo Maulucci Vivolo's Pompei: I graffiti d'amore (1995) presents samples of erotic graffiti from Pompeii, including some from the brothel, evoking how prolific this type of graffiti was. Taking a more analytic approach, Matthew Panciera's dissertation, "Sexual Practice and Invective in Martial and Pompeian Inscriptions" (2001), compares the different meanings and implications of sexual practices in the corpus of Martial's epigrams and Pompeii's graffiti. These scholars have shed light on various features of erotic graffiti at Pompeii, but do not address how these graffiti may have worked in each specific locale or in concert with nonerotic graffiti. Varone's article, "Nella Pompei a luci rosse: Castrensis e l'organizzazione della prosti-tuzione e dei suoi spazi" (2005), however, adds a new perspective to the study of the brothel's graffiti. Varone analyzes the status and sexual practices of the individuals in the brothel through close reading of its graffiti, demonstrating the potential gains of a contextual or locus-specific approach. (2) In this article, I follow Varone in exploring the brothel's graffiti together as a corpus, but ask different questions of the material. Specifically, I seek to illuminate the underlying structure of the corpus's rhetoric. The graffiti, I argue, are more than just records of sexual liaisons or advertisements of the services of prostitutes; they represent an interactive discourse concerning masculinity. Clients and prostitutes could and did add their thoughts to the corpus over time, which encouraged multiple viewings. In addition, even illiterate viewers could be exposed to the graffiti through someone else's recitation. (3) It may not be surprising that boasts and defamation are constituent elements of this dialogue; but as I will show, the ways in which boasts and defamation are deployed and against whom, and the implications this has for a rhetoric of masculinity, reveal a discourse far different from the intra-elite masculine invective seen in the poetry of Catullus and Martial. II. Contextualizing the Brothel and its Graffiti At the intersection of the north-south Vicolo del Lupanare and the east-west Vicolo del Balcone Pensile, located to the east of Pompeii's forum, lies a modest, two-story structure. (4) The bottom floor contains five small rooms, each with a masonry bed, opening off a central hallway Erotic frescoes, most showing a male-female pair engaged in penile-vaginal intercourse, line the register above the doorways in the hallway. …

Everyday Writing in the Graeco-Roman East

Abstract: List of Illustrations Preface Introduction 1 Informal Writing in a Public Place: The Graffiti of Smyrna 2 The Ubiquity of Documents in the Hellenistic East 3 Documenting Slavery in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt 4 Greek and Coptic in Late Antique Egypt 5 Greek and Syriac in the Roman Near East 6 Writing on Ostraca: A Culture of Potsherds? Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

Graffiti at Heritage Places: Vandalism as Cultural Significance or Conservation Sacrilege?

Abstract: Current heritage best practice aims to avoid strategies that focus solely on single, often arbitrary periods or narratives in a site's history in favor of those that recognize all of the site's layers of significance. This situation was born from similar concerns to those that made archaeology critically self reflect and adopt positions that attempted to overcome inherent preconceptions and biases. However, the treatment of forms of vandalism at heritage sites, such as graffiti, often stands in juxtaposition to the sites' other layers of significance and reveals that heritage management is yet to address all of its own biases. This article discusses the cultural significance of graffiti vandalism at heritage sites. It argues that new ways of theorizing about heritage and its destruction are required and that heritage management should adopt perspectives akin to archaeology's post-processualism in order to ensure that the significance of contemporary graffiti vandalism is not lost by strategies tha...

The Art of Becoming: The Graffiti of Tikal, Guatemala

Abstract: In their 1995 Latin American Antiquity article, Haviland and Haviland argued that the people who produced much of the graffiti of Tikal were depicting visions from altered states of consciousness. In this paper, I argue that there is room for alternative interpretations. Comparison with children"s drawings from across the world suggests that children or people without training in Maya representational conventions authored a portion of the graffiti. Though this portion may be small, the possibility that children were involved provides a rare opportunity to discuss the experience of childhood. I argue that the content of the graffiti and the inter-subjective context of its production reveal several processes of becoming. Among other things, the graffiti permit an account of how children learn: legitimate participation in a community of people with varied levels of experience. This relational understanding of graffiti production also provides grounds for considering innovation and transformation in the medium of expression. Finally, I argue that the act of representation gives young people a form of mastery over the themes they portray. This helps them to accommodate confusing or difficult relations in their lives and to harmonize with their world in such a way that makes them culturally intelligible subjects.

Gang and moniker identification by graffiti matching

Abstract: Identifying criminal gangs and monikers is one of the most important tasks for graffiti analysis in low enforcement. In current practice, this is typically performed manually by the law enforcement officers, which is not only time-consuming but also results in limited identification performance. In this paper, we present a system that is able to automatically identify the gang or the moniker for a given graffiti image. The key idea of our system is as follows: given a graffiti query, first find a candidate list of the most similar images from a large graffiti database based on visual and content similarity, and then return the most frequent gang/moniker names associated with the candidate list as the tag for the query graffiti. Our experiments with a large database of graffiti images collected by the Orange County Sheriff's Department in California show that our system is (i) effective in determining the gang/moniker of graffiti, and (ii) scalable to large image databases of graffiti.

Art in the Streets

Abstract: The first large-scale American museum exhibition to survey the colorful history of graffiti and street art movements internationally. Highlighting the connection between graffiti and street art and other vibrant subcultures, such as those that developed around Hip Hop in the Bronx and skateboarding in Southern California, Art in the Streets explores parallel movements in dance and music. The exhibition is curated by MoCA Director Jeffrey Deitch, working with a curatorial advisory committee that includes Roger Gastman and Aaron Rose.

Graffiti, Calliglyphs and Markers in the UK

Abstract: Graffiti is a commonplace in the modern world but it is easy to project the concept of illegal graffiti into the past. Writing on walls in previous historical periods is discussed and as most was not illegal the concept of ‘calliglyphs’ is introduced to allow historic writing or drawings on walls or objects to be studied in context. The article then proposes the word ‘marker’ as a concept to define wider forms of personal expression and the human imprint in the late twentieth/early twenty-first century landscapes. A framework for markers is outlined based upon the concepts of permission and tolerance.

The Writing on the Stall: Graffiti, Vandalism, and Social Expression

Abstract: Graffiti and vandalism are everywhere in the modern city; they seem to be part of the typical urban background. While graffiti are usually associated with concrete walls, bridges and train cars, one particular area of focus of vandalistic writing is the walls and stalls of public bathrooms. This area, for both obvious, and sometimes unclear reasons, is a popular forum for anyone wanting to write. This project was conducted with the intent of better understanding these somewhat ubiquitous and seemingly mundane scribbles. As the first step toward this goal, a literature review of approaches to vandalism was conducted. This theoretical exploration, which comprised the majority of the project, explored vandalism in general, with a particular focus on graffiti. The second step of research was the collection of photographs of bathroom stall graffiti on the campuses of both the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville. This second step sought to take the general literature on vandalism and graffiti and apply it to the more specific example of bathroom wall graffiti. In concluding, this article proposes alternative approaches to understanding graffiti and vandalism.

Walls that Talk: Thematic Variation in University Library Graffiti

Abstract: The use of graffiti as a source of data has spread beyond studies of human sexuality and urban youth to include linguistic studies of discourse patterns and grammar, explorations of cultural production in disputed areas, and modeling gender differences While many of these studies focus on latrinalia, 1, 2, 3 graffiti written in bathrooms, two recent papers4, 5 have documented and classified graffiti in a defined subset of public areas at a single university This work builds upon those studies by documenting and classifying graffiti in the main library of four universities in the United States: the University of Chicago, Brown University, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Arizona State University A quantitative analysis suggests that insults and remarks about advice, classes, love, the surroundings, school, and oneself should be considered common in graffiti found in university libraries, in addition to sex A qualitative analysis explores the trends in writing style and approach to the various topics in each corpus

Wet Paint

Abstract: A city worker is in for a surprise when his routine graffiti clean-up takes an unexpected turn for the bizarre. When he encounters a particularly stubborn and difficult painting, his appreciation for art is put to the test.

Whose Place Is This Anyway? The Israeli Separation Barrier, International Activists and Graffiti

Abstract: [in focus, place, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, graffiti, solidarity, social justice, Israeli Separation Barrier]

Graffiti of Ships in the Bahá’í Mansion at Mazra‘ih, Israel

Abstract: Graffiti of ships were found on a wall of a courtyard of the Baha’i mansion in the village of Mazra‘ih, near Akko, Israel. It is suggested that three graffiti depict frigates, near Akko, the largest of about 850 t burden, some time in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. This is evidence for maritime activities at Akko in these years, and for the type of ships.

Ship Graffiti in Burial Cave 557 at Maresha

Abstract: Maresha (Marissa), identified with Tell Sandahanna, is situated 35 km east of Ashkelon and about 2 km south of Bet Guvrin in the Judean Shephelah (fig. 1). It was mentioned several times in the Bible (Josh 15:44; 2 Chr 11:8, 14:9–10, 20:37; Mic 1:15) as well as by Josephus, where it is noted as being in the vicinity of towns in the Judean Shephelah (Ant. 8.10; AviYonah and Kloner 1993; Kloner 2003). Eusebius located Maresha near Bet Guvrin (Onom. 684). It was clearly identified when an inscription was found in a cemetery in which Sidonians residing in Marissa are mentioned. The site was partially excavated in 1900 by F. J. Bliss and R. A. S. Macalister (1902). Since the 1970s, renewed excavations were undertaken by A. Kloner (2008), B. Alpert, and I. Stern. Tomb caves formed a ring around the city during the Hellenistic period, although earlier caves were found as well (Kloner 2003, 21). According to Kloner, east of the site, at a distance of circa 250 m from the upper mound, “is a concentration of at least twenty-five tomb caves arranged in a band nearly a kilometer in length. Their basic plan is a rectangular hall with benches along the walls and Kokhim (loculi) with gabled facades cut in the wall” (2003, 21). Some of the tombs were previously discovered but not drawn by C. K. Conder and H. H. Kitchener (1883, 272). The first plan was published in 1896 by Clermont-Ganneau (1896, 2:445–46). More tombs were found in the early twentieth century (Thiersch and Peters 1905), among which were painted tombs of Sidonian-Idumean origin, and in the 1980s (Oren and Rappaport 1984, 133–35). Kloner reports that, in the northern extension of the eastern necropolis, a tomb (Cave 557) was found with twenty-eight loculi (2003, 21). Burial Cave 557 at Maresha was investigated for the first time during a survey in 1990, following reports of robbing at the site in the 1980s. It does not appear in Bliss and Macalister’s early twentiethcentury maps or in the map published by Kloner in 2003. The excavation of the tomb took place in July–August 1993 and was completed in 1994 within the framework of the Maresha excavations directed by Kloner.1 The main focus was to remove the Figure 1. Map of Maresha and other important Hellenistic/

Iranian graffiti during political transformation: A semiotic analysis of graffiti before and after revolution

Abstract: ............................................................................................................... iii ÖZ ............................................................................................................................... iv DEDICATION ............................................................................................................ vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ......................................................................................... vii

Pichações: discursos de resistência conforme Foucault

Abstract: Graffiti: discurse of resistance based on Foucault. The goal of this article is to observe how graffiti has altered discourses at the present moment. The paper is theoretically based on Foucault's philosophical historical perspective focusing specifically on the phase of studies on power in its genealogical axis. The presupposition is that power, from the economic and political aspect, does not have only one visible face which imposes laws and norms through social control. We understand that power is best understood as a power struggle in which the subject does not always accept the regulations passively and thus unleashes actions of resistance. If institutionalized power controls publications and urban practices on the streets, creating graffiti becomes a form of counter-power and resistance. Society also reacts to this type of invasion, which is publicly visible, and tries to impede this "defacement" of buildings and walls. As a form of protection the creators of graffiti write in code and also insert a voice of protest against a society that is so controlled. If at first, the practice of creating graffiti was due to political resistance and then a form of demarcating territory and also as a demonstration of daring, now it is possible to detect a socio-economic concern. We base our study on Foucault (1995, 2003, 2010).

The cult of images in light of pictorial graffiti at Doué‐la‐Fontaine

Abstract: In the late 1960s the archeologist Michel de Bouard excavated a motte at Doue-la-Fontaine, near Saumur. Buried within the earthen mound was a stone edifice that, between the mid-tenth and early eleventh centuries, had been transformed from a single-storey aristocratic residence to a multi-storey tower better suited to new military needs. De Bouard there discovered pictorial graffiti, incised in rough plaster across a wall in the blinded ground storey; among them were several unusually elaborate compositions. Building on his perspicacious analysis of the physical evidence, I situate the graffiti, dating from c.1000, in the wider matrix of contemporary visual and religious culture. The material enriches our understanding of a major historical phenomenon for which the millennial era is a watershed, namely the emergence and proliferation of cult images.

An integrated mobile system for gang graffiti image acquisition and recognition

Abstract: Parra Pozo, Albert M.S.E.C.E., Purdue University, December 2011. An Integrated Mobile System for Gang Graffiti Image Acquisition and Recognition. Major Professors: Edward J. Delp and Mireille Boutin. In this thesis we describe a system that allows first responders to collect and browse images of gang graffiti for the purpose of identifying and tracking gang activity. This system is implemented both as an application for Android hand-held devices and as a web-based interface. Our system includes the acquisition of gang graffiti images and associated metadata. The data obtained from the device is transferred to a database. We also developed methods to provide basic color feature interpretation of gang graffiti images. We describe a color recognition method for hand-held devices based on touchscreen tracing and a color image segmentation method based on Gaussian thresholding. The segmentation creates a probability map that can be used for shape recognition and analysis. A user can browse the image database by graffiti color, location, date and time, with the use of interactive map projections. Additionally, a user can manually add information to the database, such as gang names, symbols, or general comments.