Graffiti: Controversial Community Art

In reading my classmate’s blogs on Graffiti, many common themes emerged. One of the more prominent themes was that of graffiti as vandalism vs. graffiti as art. I found that the entries by Lauren and Erika, when read together, complimented each other and provided a good basis for understanding graffiti’s role in the community and the changing ideas surrounding it, which help explain the reluctance of some to accept artistic graffiti as art.

Lauren’s overall argument seems to have been that artistic forms of graffiti (“graffiti art”) reinforce and represent images of a community. One aspect of her blog that provides a real contribution to the understanding of graffiti is that she clearly differentiates vandalism graffiti from art graffiti. Rather than taking the, ‘I know it when I see it,’ approach that many other students chose, she clearly differentiated graffiti that “result[s] from a desire to create artwork” as “graffiti art”, and destructive graffiti with ties to violence or crime as “vandalism graffiti.” She provides examples of each type from Vancouver’s Kerrisdale neighborhood and explains how the vandalism graffiti at a bus stop does not reflect the community’s image for itself, whereas the artistic murals represent pictorially the multicultural, diverse, higher socio-economic status of Kerrisdale as a community. Murals, because they represent the community, are allowed to stay, she says, whereas vandalism graffiti is quickly removed because it subverts the image of itself Kerrisdale wants to promote. Thus, she shows how art graffiti is a positive part of a community.

Marais and Taylor similarly discuss how graffiti comes in many forms and thus requires a non-homogeneous solution (2010:57). They also contrast publicly sanctioned graffiti art with vandalism graffiti, which they usually define as tagging. Like Lauren, Marais and Taylor believe that graffiti has a place in the community and they add that artistic graffiti can actually deter people from engaging in vandalism graffiti (2010:57). This confirms the idea that art graffiti has a place in a neighborhood like Kerrisdale, because it represents the community through deterring unwanted vandalism graffiti, and through its artistic representation of the community.

Like Lauren and Marias and Taylor, Erika believes that graffiti can be excellent for a community, reinforcing, the fact that the presence of public art graffiti reduces incidences of vandalism graffiti and stating that art graffiti promotes creativity and “a sense of community.” However, Erica’s main purpose is to examine the history of graffiti. In doing so she concludes that graffiti has evolved into something with all the characteristics of a legitimate art form, but its history of association with gangs and violence taints the image of art graffiti. She continually advocates the idea of graffiti artists as true artists, and says that,  “Hateful graffiti is being removed to make way for the new era of graffiti… where… works of art can be admired and appreciated for what they are.” Erika indicates, however, that this process is not complete and for many people graffiti is still associated with crime; this is where Lauren’s blog compliments Erika’s. Lauren’s clear differentiation between the two types of graffiti makes way for art graffiti and vandalism graffiti to exist as separate entities, without the negative associations people currently have of the word crossing into the art side. Gomez reinforces this idea, stating that as the law fails to recognize some graffiti as art, it is inevitable that people will as well (1993:697). Thus with clearer distinction between graffiti art and graffiti vandalism, it will be possible to recognize graffiti art as art, which can have a positive contribution to communities.

Finally, to return to the idea of art graffiti, Metcalf says that anything can be art, but only if recognized as such by the “artworld” (1997:68). Last month, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) showcased the first major U.S. exhibition of solely graffiti and street art, focusing portions of its exhibit on graffiti as it relates to the wider context of its community. The graffiti artists showcased at MOCA are finally getting recognition as legitimate artists by those in a position to confer that status on them. Additionally, those same people recognize that graffiti is closely tied to its community. This exemplifies Erika’s position that graffiti’s image has changed, and Erica and Lauren’s shared idea of art graffiti as a medium facilitating positive representations of a community.

Graffiti image from MOCA. http://www.moca.org/audio/blog/?p=1522

Works Cited

Gomez, Marisa A.

1993 Writing on Our Walls: Finding Solutions through Distinguishing Graffiti Art from Graffiti Vandalism. University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform. 26(Spring): 633-708.

Lauren

Graffiti: Cultural and Coail Construction Stemming form art or vandalism? http://anth378-lauren.blogspot.com/

Marais, Ida and Myra Taylor

2009 Does Urban Art Deter Graffiti Proliferation? An evaluation of an Austrailian commissioned urban art project. In British Criminology Conference. British Society of Criminoology. www.britsoccrim.org/conferences.htm

Metcalf, Bruce

1997 Craft as Art, Culture as Biology. In The Culture of Craft: Status and Future. Peter Dormer, ed. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Museum of Contemprary Art.

2011 Announcing Art in the Streets. http://www.moca.org/audio/blog/?p=1522

Szarbathy, Erika

Graffiti. http://anthropologicalimplicationsofmedia.blogspot.com/

Marxism, Interpellation, and Ideology in Persepolis

Persepolis is an animated French film, which follows the life of Marjane Satrapi, from her childhood before, and during the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and into adulthood. It recounts, from her perspective, her struggles coping with the new political and ideological system after Iran becomes an Islamic republic under Ayatollah Khomeini and how she adapts to life in Vienna after her parents send her away to protect her from herself and the authorities. The film is particularly suited to Marxist analysis because it is within its historical context and through the idea of interpellation that the ideological messages of the film can be best understood. 

Interpellation is the idea that “an individual’s identity is forged by society, but that same individual is also complicit in that creation” (Gray 2010:51). Given the context of ideological revolution in which the events of the film occur, it becomes clear that people’s identities were not formed cohesively by one state ideology and this is the basis for the film’s message. 

Marjane herself, grew up in a liberal household and was influenced by her parents, who believed in progress; her uncle Anoush, who was a Marxist; by her time at the French school in Tehran; and her time in university in Vienna. She reveled in the freedom afforded her by her parents beliefs and the beliefs of her Western education, so she was not quick to accept the new ideology presented her by the Ayatollah, even at a young age. Her identity was forged and set in stone not by the new regime, but by the relatively liberal and progressive beliefs of the old one. Also the revolutionary atmosphere of the people forged her identity. She was complicit in accepting the revolution, but never moved on from it to the Ayatollah’s belief system. Audiences are meant to identify with Marjane, and thus with her struggles with and disapproval of the Islamic Republic. The result is a critique of the new ideology, and the people who mindlessly accept it without question. 

 

A still image from the film Persepolis. 

http://shadowsitcave.blogspot.com/2010

/05/hypothetical-film-festival-ariana.html

For people like Marjane’s teacher and a gardener turned powerful hospital administrator, when presented with the Ayatollah’s rules and vision for Iran, they readily accepted it. In the case of the teacher, Marjane sees her as a mindless follower; one day she is adamantly teaching a Shah approved curriculum of modernization, and the instant the Ayatollah takes control she begins worshipping him in class and teaching how women should be modest and not lead men to temptation. In other words she completely succumbs to the new ideology, simply because it is the new ideology, with no regard for her personal beliefs. Through her teaching she also passes on Iran’s new ideology to her students. This convinces many of Marjane’s classmates, but not Marjane. The motivations for the gardener are associated in large part with the socio-economic benefits it brings him. He goes from being an uneducated servant, to being promoted to a high level public official position, simply because he practices orthodox Islam. For the teacher as well, keeping her job might have been a major motivation for her ready acceptance. However, he also abuses his power and will not allow Marjane’s uncle to be transported out of the country for life-saving surgery, citing as his reason that only the gravely ill can receive overseas treatment. The result is that Marjane’s uncle dies. 

These two examples demonstrate the process of interpolation, showing how and why people embraced the new ideology, and how it was replicated and passed on. They are also key to elucidating the position that the state’s ideology is not a good one. First, by bringing into the foreground the processes of interpolation and state-ideology-forming, as they relate to the weak teacher and greedy gardener, and placing them in opposition to Marjane’s strength and conviction in her beliefs, the Iranian government is portrayed as coercive and immoral. The film does not advocate adoption of a specific ideology for Iran per say, but the criticism people blindly following the government, as well as the criticism of a friend of Marjane’s in Vienna, who disregards politics and sees it as frivolous, subtly sends the message that people need to actively choose their political Ideology and social system, not blindly follow someone on the basis of religion, greed or adoration alone.   

  

Works Cited

Gray, Gordon

   2010 Film Theory. In Cinema: A Visual Anthropology, Pp.35-73. Oxford, New York: Berg.

           

Paronnaud, Jason and Marjane Satrapi

            2007 Persepolis.

 

Community Radio

Personally, previously when I thought of a media genre that fosters community building, radio would not have been the first to come to mind. However, the following examples demonstrate that radio is by no means a one-way mode of communication, broadcasting only the voices of a few; rather, what creates radio programming is the voice of the people, and therefore it reflects the voice of the people. Radio simultaneously reflects and creates community.

            For people living in Fort McPhereson in the Northwest Territories, their local radio station CBQM provides a means for everyone in the community to speak and be heard by the community. As one announcer says, they’ll let pretty much anyone on the air if they ask. This is shown in the range of people who host a show over the course of the documentary including: the pastor, a policeman, and a pair of ragtag musicians with questionable musical talent, among others. The messages of the pastor and policeman are messages for the community on events, and official announcements, such as sharing the problem of house eggings. One does not actually need to be a host to get a message out, however; many of the shows operate as an open dialogue between host and listener, with listeners calling in messages which are instantly relayed over the airwaves. For example, Deborah invites Christine to her house over the radio. CBQM, in keeping everyone apprised of community events and concerns, and giving everyone an almost voyeuristic view into the lives of people that want to make thier personal buisness known, radio in Fort McPhereson simultaneously reflects and creates the community.

Image from: 

http://movies-sawyerneilcaldwell.blogspot.com/

            Austrailian aboriginal radio has a similar structure, but nationwide, not just within one town. Queensland’s station 4AAA broadcasts nationally, and allows families to send messages to incarcerated members of their families along with a song dedication. These messages resonate with members of other communities who hear them, because the problems plaguing aboriginal communities are similar across the country. This means 4AAA closes gaps of distance and creates community locally and a sense of imagined community of aboriginees across the country, as well as in individual towns. Listeners may not ever meet each other, but knowing they have shared experiences and stories leads them to identify as one community. This is heightened by the use of aboriginal kinship terms in broadcast messages, creating a sense of separation of the aboriginal community from the non-indigenous Australians(Fisher 2009:295). Thus, in reflecting common struggles of the community and using shared kinship terms, radio also creates a sense of community among Austrailian Aboriginees that goes beyond one locale, and spans the country.

            To reflect community, however, radio need not share individual stories. For example, during the Revolution in Algeria, people turned to radio for news of the revolution. The program Voice of Fighting Algeria was not voiced by all Algerians, but by those leading the revolution. The broadcast, however, reflected the desire of a large segment of the native Algerian population to end the repressive colonial regime. In this way, it reflected the national community of nationalist revolutionaries, but it also ''consolidat[ed] and unifi[ed] the people'' (Fanon 1965:84). People only needed to say I listened to the Voice in order for others to know that they were on the same side (Fanon1 1965:87). The French authorities began jamming the program, leading to it hopping from signal to signal. As a result, even those who were not fighting on the front line had the shared experience of searching for the signal and fighting the French control of the airwaves to stay informed. They also relived the events of the revolution collectively through conversation about the program(Fanon 1965:85). The Voice reflected the revolutionary desires of the Algerian people, and brought them together by creating a shared sense of struggle and community among all those who wanted to see the French fall from power. 

Naturally, these broadcasts can only reflect and create community if people are listenting to them, and they almost universally are. In sharing many voices and community specific concerns, with a specific audience in mind, communities are created and brought together because they see themselves reflected in the programs they listen to. 

Works Cited

Allen, Dennis

            2009 CBQM. National Film Board of Canada.

Fanon, Frantz

            1965 This Is the Voice of Algeria. In A Dying Colonialism, Pp. 89-97. New 

             York: Grove Press.

Fisher, Daniel

            2009 Mediating Kinship: Country, Family, and Radio in Northern Australia.

            Cultural Anthropology 24(2): 280-312.

 

Reuse of Harry Potter in Cosplay and Doujinshi: Authorial Intent and Social Norms

The use and reuse of media is commonplace today, with digital technology and the
Internet making media easily available to people worldwide. The Harry Potter series, written by J.K. Rowling, is one such example of a cultural media product that has gained immense global popularity. Looking at Harry Potter in the context of how its Japanese fandom reuses elements of the series, specifically the characters, provides a particularly interesting frame for analysis of reuse as some forms can be particularly contentious. Unlike song and dance sequences, which are removable from the context of the original films they appear in (Novak 2010:60), I would argue that characters are so integral to a story and thus require a higher degree of adherence to the source material. In the case of Harry Potter, when characters are reused in a way that retains the original context or authorial intention they are acceptable; however, when character is reused in a way that perverts or associates the characters, and thus the original text, with socially taboo behavior, it is unacceptable.

One way Japanese fans, (and many North American ones as well), acceptably reuse characters from Harry Potter is by engaging in cosplay. Cosplay involves dressing up in a costume resembling that of a favorite character from an anime (cartoon), movie or game, usually at a convention, and often involves hours of painstaking labor crafting the costume by hand. This is a form of impersonation, that is acceptable to authors and within the fan community and while some in wider society may find the act of dressing up on a day other than Halloween strange, generally nobody takes issue with this behavior, (aside perhaps from people who would take issue with the original works on religious or other grounds to begin with). This is acceptable in part because dressing up in a costume and the act of impersonation do not defy any social norms; there are times when it is perfectly acceptable for everyone to do these things, thus the author’s work is not associated with any practices or ideas that may be harmful to the original work.

Additionally, the costumes, as mentioned above, are usually incredibly well designed and thus can be seen as a tribute to the author’s original work. Cosplayers do not take liberties with the original character designs or costumes, they try to make exact replicas (see Figure 1). Therefore, no harm is done to the characters being reused and the author’s original work is being praised in that someone wants to take the time to re-create their creation.

            When characters or aspects from the story are reused in ways that place characters in socially unacceptable situations or simply severely altered from their original selves, both the artist themselves and fans can feel as though the work is being violated. This can be seen in doujinshi (fan produced comics), which reuse popular characters in original stories and are popular among a subgroup of anime and manga (comic) fans. It is not doujinshi’s use of the characters themselves that is the problem, but the context in which they are used. Doujinshi often place characters in distorted sexual relationships, taking a heterosexual characters and placing them in a homosexual relationships, taking siblings and placing them in incestual relationships and many involve rape. One such Harry Potter doujinshi sees James Potter raped by a group of Slytherin students, while Remus Lupin watches from a closet. Orbaugh speculates that Rowling might, like some Japanese authors, find doujinshi’s use of her characters an “unforgivable violation”(2010:184). She and Hahn Aquila also note the outrage of many Harry Potter fans, the majority of whom are not part of the doujinshi reading subculture, who voice their outrage through online message boards(Orbaugh 2010:184; Hahn Aquila 2007:42). These reuses by some fans are unacceptable because they involve taboo actions like rape, and because they alter the source text in ways that completely alter the characters, which are an integral part of the original.

             

             Novak says that with reuse there is a ‘tension between “tribute” and “mockery” that can never be resolved’(64). While doujinshi may not be a direct mockery of the original texts, it does alter them to a point that it could harm the reputation of the Harry Potter franchise if it became associated with them, in the same way a mockery might. Cosplay on the other hand, is acceptable, because it is clearly a tribute, upholding the intention of the author’s creation. How true a reuse stays to the original work, and whether or not it associates that work with immoral acts determines the acceptability of the reuse. 

 

Figure 2: A picture of a Harry Potter doujinshi depicting Harry kissing Draco. http://www.flickr.com/photos/unforth/2351423810/

Figure 1: A cosplay of Lord Voldemort. http://fullcosplay.tumblr.com/post/449153212/cosplay-lord-voldemort-harry-potter-series

Works Cited

Novak, David

2010 Cosmopolitanism, Remediation, and the Ghost World of Bollywood. Cultural Anthropology 25(1): 40-72.

Orbaugh, Sharalyn

2010 Girls Reading Harry Potter Girls Writing Desire: Amateur Manga and Shoujo Reading. In Girl Reading Girl in Japan. Tomoko Aoyama and Barbara Hartley eds. 175-188. London: Routledge.

Hahn Aquila, Meredith Suzanne

2007 Ranma ½ Fan Fiction Writers: New Narrative Themes or the Same Old Story? Mechademia 2:34-47.