A brief mention of Cecil Castellucci's new gn, Janes in Love, over at Boing Boing the other day quickly devolved into a discussion of public art as vandalism in the comments. While I don't agree with what everyone had to say on the subject this has been something I've been thinking about ever since I first read the book. (And actually since I read her earlier title, The Plain Janes).
First I need to say that Cecil is one of my favorite writers and I think she is doing something wonderful with her Janes books. A common complaint she has faced on her plots however is that the people who oppose her group of teen girls are written as rather one dimensional. The Janes want to shake things up in their very dull suburban town and introduce art to the streets. Every time they do something many of the adults, most notably Office Sanchez, react in the negative and decry not only what the girls have done but the fact that they wanted to do it in the first place. This suggests an anti-art establishment in the town, and makes what the Janes are doing all that much important.
The stuff they do is in fact pretty creative. They hang puppets from trees, lay dresses out in a parking lot with chalk slogans like "my body is beautiful" and inspire others to do funky things like setting army men up on a park bench. It's all very Christo-lite (thank heavens) but still, I couldn't help but think that at some point those puppets were going to get raggedy and the dresses would have to get collected and while big public art projects are cool you do have to clean them up afterwards. What the Janes are doing is kind of a 21st century "happening". They draw people out of their shells to see something new - consider something new - and then as everyone stands around and thinks about it, the artists quietly fade into the background.
In other words, you never see the girls cleaning it up.
But does this make what Cecil is writing about vandalism? One of the things that bothered me about Wendy Lichtman's new book Writing on the Wall #2: Do the Math is that while the math problems solved in the course of the story are fascinating (just like in the first book she really uses math in ingenious ways) the point seemed to be that the two kids exchanging equations are doing it in the form of graffiti and that is very bad. The graffiti issue is so bad that it becomes more significant then the mystery that protagonist Tess is trying to solve through her mathematical communication. (And to make the message even more obvious, the graffiti exchanges are taking place on the back wall of a church.) The vandalism message hit me over the head with a loud "clunk" in Lichtman's book and it just didn't fit right. Tess and her friends are math geeks and really good kids - do we really need to make them look bad by having them write on walls? It just didn't fit. (Nor did the fact that graffiti ended up seeming to be more of a crime than the fire in the school which sparks the whole wall exchange.) So this was too much of an extreme in the anti-graffiti direction for me. Where's the middle ground though, and does Cecil need to find it or can she just be writing books about art in public spaces and let her readers figure out the good and bad on their own?
And even beyond that, is public art by definition good because it is art? And ho decides then what is art?
I also recently read Bomb the Suburbs by William Upski Wimsatt which is sort of the grandfather of all graffiti/hip hop books. He makes a lot of points about how cities have declined due to suburban attitudes and influence but his thoughts on graffiti I found especially interesting. At one point he quotes a letter he received from a fan. Here's how it starts:
Cavemen did it, so did Romans and Egyptians. The Incas did it, so did Greeks and Native Americans. There was graffiti on the New York Subway a year after it was built. There's graffiti on the moon. If graffiti is vandalism and vandalism is garbage, then man has left his mark with garbage all over the universe.
One man's historical record is another's graffiti; or one teenage girl's public art is another's vandalism.
What's important I guess is to consider why graffiti happens - what the message is that the wall is presenting. Can the message make it more significant then the wall itself? Not if it's just garbage - made up words, foul language, or basic unrecognizable junk. But if someone creates a beautiful picture, or beyond painting if they make a valuable statement about body image, war or personal freedom, then is that significant enough to protect and admire?
Go ahead and look. It's not such an easy question to answer, is it?
