ancorena

這是我在日本期間唯一正事的成果。
與學長姐溝通，努力一月，最後畢竟還是以趕稿收場XDD
這個Panel主題是塗鴉與城市傷痕，我當然以論文副產品的方式寫了關於塗鴉與光的想法。
所以以下內容會包含稀薄的學術性文字，請不適或不耐者酌量服用。
當場接收到英文版的難懂卻精彩回應。感謝這些無名的參與者。
雖然我一向習慣像藏起自己的身體一般藏起所有未經自己認可的想法，
因為這些回應，讓我有刊登在Blog上的動力。
已將注釋略去。參考什麼書就寫在文中。

Night of the Descendent, Night of the Redemption:
On the Graffiti Imagination in the City



1. The Damaging Force of Trompe L’Oeil



Trompe L’Oeil |ˌtrômp ˈloi| noun ( pl. trompe l'oeils pronunc. same) visual illusion in art, esp. as used to trick the eye into perceiving a painted detail as a three-dimensional object.
• a painting or design intended to create such an illusion.
ORIGIN French, literally ‘deceives the eye.’



On many poster stands around Europe, the worldly acclaimed NGO Amnesty International (AI) put these half-transparent posters under one title in many languages: “It’s not Happening Here. But It is Happening Now.” (Graphic set 1) These stunning images forcibly altered the everyday life context of the wealthy citizens in Europe and penetrated it with the global political agenda of AI.
Meanwhile, on the very common surfaces in the cities as our everyday world, there have already existed a great deal of paintings, drawings and public artworks, government/ commercial hired or spontaneous ones, mostly public accessible, such as building Façades, street furniture, or open representations of space in Henri Lefebvre’s sense, like memorials, fountains and squares of any kind. () Those graphic or plastic artworks went by the order of the city to be seen, and thus integrated the cityscape while keeping their individualities. In this phenomenon, Trompe L’Oeil as an example is worthy being introduced in particular.
With architecture, Gyorgy Kepes interpreted transparency in these words: “(transparency) implies more than an optical characteristic, it implies a broader spatial order. Transparency means a simultaneous perception of different spatial locations.” Therefore, in the sense of Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky, transparency is “clearly ambiguous”, and is often “furnished with certain allegorical qualities. Some superimpositions of form” as Moholy-Nagy informs us.
As I noted above, these artificial creations were added onto the other artificial creations. With-in the context of other creations, the Trompe L’Oeil artwork makes difference, not only “illusional”, but also an alternative space, which creates a space that allows the light to penetrate the once impenetrable solid surface, and thus alters the everyday world as we should perceive. In the excerption of AI posters, the transparent surface even further alters the lively living world to become a background of an exotic image of an every-day oppressive fact in another world, and creates an illusion that the oppressing fact may penetrate our living world as we are all the same human beings as well.
Take a step further; the force of Trompe L’Oeil is more than an overlapping and alternating image, but a series of stimulating actions, which effectively empty the ordinary solidity of city walls and bricks. While it opens and expands a new spatial fracture, it shatters the strategy of the city construction as well. And in the sense of strategy/ tactic opposition , it also attracts and directs the every-day attention, not only as a modern time distraction , but also a lively “punctum” , in Roland Barthes’ words, of the cityscape itself.


2. The Shift of Façade

Electrical advertisement was introduced shortly after the invention of the electrical illumination technologies in the beginning of the 20th century. In Berlin, where the trends of modern architecture of Bauhaus school and modern advertisement technique collided, the façades of urban buildings literally began to shine, and thus created the illuminating new skyline of the city. Before this occurrence, the window-shopping and the public lighting expansion only achieved illumination on the ground level. With the change of the façade, the representational space and the representations of space merged in view of the spatial practice, or the exercise of everyday life. The electrical lighting advertisements further opened the open space of the city, though only for the commercial companies that is able to support them, and altered the once decorative creations that are the same with any other things on the façade into a spontaneous and stand-alone signature that carve themselves into the very space of the city.
After the Weimar period, the integration achieved its climax. As Ward has noted, “Light’s attraction in advertising, the obvious panoptic potentiality of electricity’s appeal, was also something that Nazi architect Albert Speer noticed and redirected away from mere consumerist enticement to the arenas of Nazi mass rallies. After spending a decade attacking outdoor advertising for its alleged role in helping Jewish retail to defeat the ‘little businessman’, …the Nazis promptly co-opted the medium” . “In Hitler and Speer’s conception”, she continued, “…As Henri Lefebvre has suggested in The Production of space, Nazism thus weighed down the façade that Weimar modernism had sought to lighten.” But still, “It was through the electrically inspired, never-ending ossification that Nazism reemphasized the opacity of the façade after the Bauhaus’ translucent modernization of the same.” The grand lighting wall of the Nazi gathering ground was the best example of all. No personal detail pass through the wall of no sign but the light itself, the wall as such applying the ut-most modern power of the electricity and purification, implying the ultimate supporting power of the state. The light façade was thus the most translucent façade, and it continued illuminating every architect with a total state in mind.
As for today, after the Nazi Empire had collapsed, the cityscape planners, the commercial designers and the public artists coexist with each other within the range of the legal regulations. But the graffiti artists (or at least, the street graffiti actions) still stand out of this range. When the strategy and the tactic players work together with the permission of the order, graffiti artists emerge from nowhere, and act with-in the fractures of the daily life world.

3. Material Lights and the Night Traveler

Social life engages if the light conditions permit, especially in the night. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch notes that, in the European history, public lighting had been enabling the conventional (more street and square pedestrian), commercial (profitable window shopping and ad display), and producing (for factory owners to keep the line working in the deep night) activities in the night. The statement was also very true for the East for the lighting technologies and policies were mostly globally applied but not developed separately. For this view, Schivelbusch provided us a vivid scene: the auditorium. The seventeenth-century theatre “consisted of two performance spaces of equal importance: the stage and the auditorium”, the auditorium was “more of a social, festive centre than a true auditorium.” And “Illumination made its contribution by lighting up the stage and the auditorium equally.” Yet in the eighteenth century, the auditorium was darkened, and the stage lightened. The light was deliberately reduced to increase the concentration toward the “illusion” of the audience, and thus erased the social life under the stage. And that’s also the case with public lighting. When civilization grants its people a lightened space, most of the sociability will be attracted under the conduct, and thus keep the order under the light, which is granted, but never fully fulfilled for all.
And thus the light has become material. The Light Lures, and the society of the night happen beneath it. During the night, the shadow expands and deepens to be a true fracture. In the ancient documents of China or Europe, the ruling eye was frightened by the people lurking in the dark (or holding their own lights). And therefore the curfew, the night guards, and the closing of the city walls. This comment of Marx further proofs the point: “Capitalism’s darkness necessitated a struggle for light; the divide of the day and night could be transcended only in a revolutionary overturning of all estranged relations, central to which was class power” . As we gather beneath the light, we become the light bearers, and each of us carries the duty to be seen by the order, that is, to become the reflexive object of the light. So in the society of the night, every individual carries the light, and operates with the light, in order, to be seen.


4. Graffiti as Light Residue

Australian scholar Meaghan Morris once noted a story in her article of how the graffiti artists refused to go along with the order’s change of policy. When the city strategy designers finally held a large party to cover up the embarrassing plan of a giant celebrating cake set up in the ghetto, the graffiti artworks flow over the streets next morning, shouting out loud while murmuring ironically: “Let them have their cakes.”
Who are the graffiti artists? When they work around the very streets, they are the true guerrillas of the city. And due to their selves’ and their works’ illegal identities, un-commercial graffiti artworks congregate and proliferate with-in the scars or ruins of the city. Whether in the dark corner like old blocks or waste spaces along the railroad and giant highways, or appear on the low-surveillance spots in the middle of downtown, such as electrical devices, walls in the back alleys, or temporary fences of the construction sites. All that would be the fractures of the representations of space. Graffiti artists, bearing the same light and creative power like their fellow architects and public artists, carve their hieroglyphic signs into these fractures, and leave their traces of light on the very perceivable surface of our everyday world. While Michel de Certeau has found out that the walkers in the city decide their route according to the architectures, advertisements and road marks, the perceivable surface of the city would be almost the only source that from which, spatial practice develop its own disperse. The graffiti, being a symbol of ruined space or rebellious youth, would certainly exist as a mark of city wasteland, or scars. It represents the untamed, dis-ordered, above-surveillance, and the un-official creative power. In other words, they are the true signs that valorize the scars of the order. Graffiti artists appear in the middle of the city nights, leave their signs of light, and the sign would keep shining its own distinguish and disruptive light, in-between the wide spread light of order.