The dumbfuck response is that the door frames read as art frames, making the tags art. The real thing is deeper and grounded in visual perception: the contrast between buzzing line and rectangle is a concentrated reduction of the conditions urban graffiti normally exists in, and goes a long way towards explaining why graffiti style is inseparable from its context, and tends to die when transported outside it.

Thought experiment: take graffiti and flip its context from urban jungle to real jungle. The ambient environment of drab surfaces and strict verticals and horizontals now becomes a dense tangle of buzzing lines and intense color: in a word, the environment itself becomes one big wildstyle. Graffiti exists to be seen, but here it goes invisible. The only way to save it is by figure/ground inversion: real jungle wildstyle would necessarily embrace the very formal properties -- drab surfaces, strict verticals and horizontals -- that it battles in the city.

What this has to do with wrecked doors is that the doors define a human-scale rectangle which can not only be contrasted against (the traditional graffiti function) but also composed within (a move more commonly seen in the bourgeois arts). Given that the interplay of contrast and composition itself represents another available dimension of perceptual contrast, wrecked doors have the potential to generate higher levels of visual impact per square foot than pretty much any other graffiti site.

Finally, note how the inherent human scale of a door is crucial to the whole enterprise: it makes the doors function as visual focal points in ways that large walls do not (and thus as attractive eco-niches for collaborative tags, which add yet another dimension of contrast and compositional possibility). The human scale enables writers to work both within the rectangle and without, even freely crossing the door frame (a popular move) to intensify the effect. The lines buzz against the frame; the frame holds fast: the fight is for our viewing enjoyment.

RG



















































































































































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