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Claes Oldenburg once offered this exuberant judgment: "You're standing there in the station, everything is gray and gloomy, and all of a sudden one of those graffiti trains slides in and brightens the place like a big bouquet from Latin America."
Have you not often said just those words yourself? Have you not been standing in the gray gloom of the subway station, when suddenly there slid in one of those darling graffiti trains, and could you restrain from muttering Olé?
Norman Mailer has written the most elaborate defense of graffiti. Snuggled among references to Giotto and Van Gogh, his thesis is arresting: "Slum populations chilled on one side by the bleakness of modern design, and brain-cooked on the other by comic strips and TV ads with zooming letters," assert their presences, their worth, by writing on subway cars. It is the old "I am" flung at the deadhead world, but no longer as an assertion. Instead, it screams bloody murder. According to this doctrine, art is a form of threat. And so it is. Art — real art — does indeed threaten a deadening complacency. But it does not threaten it with mugging. Art threatens to make life happy, to bring existence to its senses. And graffiti of the current subway type makes no one happy. What it does is make you scared.
It does so for three main reasons — all gray, gloomily middleclass, but honest just the same. For one thing, we do not ever see who writes HURK and SONY. The "artist" is a sneak thief, and just as he attacks his "canvas" suddenly, his work attacks you. For another, these names (scary in their very loudness) are yelling at you in public places, where you wish to preserve your own name. For a third, there is the terror of the illegible. Most of the graffiti on subways nowadays is indecipherable, which either means that the attack artist is an illiterate — frightening in itself— or that he is using some unknown cuneiform language or the jagged symbols of the mad. And then there is a fourth reason. We have a right to our dullness. We have a right to clean slates, to blank places. Writing on a wall is a way of breaking down the wall. We have a right to some walls.
This said, one would still not have the Gobbler reach all the places in the world where words have been surreptitiously inscribed. The impulse to scratch lines on walls goes rather deep into our natures — "the handwriting on the wall" being a common term for prophetic truth. There are prisons where a name on a wall is a window; and trees with lovers' names carved on wood that usually outlast the love; and wishing wells and secret caves, where someone has wanted to say something so private that only the darkness could bear it. These things are no defacements.
Even Lord Byron wrote his name on the Temple of Poseidon at Sounion in Greece — technically defacing a house of worship, but enhancing it too. Run your finger along his signature now and you are touched by him who wrote: "The hand that kindles cannot quench the flame." One would not gobble that.
But as for the subways and toilet walls and all the other places yearning to be free, Gobbler, do your stuff. Who knows but that one day we all may be up against a wall that bears nothing but the news: MR. SHUTTLEWORTH — By Roger Rosenblatt