Losing the guerrilla art war

The bus ride to East has been really pissing me off recently. It's because of the graffiti. Or, at least, what we refer to as graffiti. In reality, our 'graffiti' is just the sad and stunted progeny of a regal line of antiestablishment expression. If graffiti is a lion of the urban jungle, our East Campus Bridge graffiti is a domesticated house cat.

We had a chance, a tiny spark of a chance, to turn this all around. I remember the thrill of excitement I felt, walking up to Biddle last month, upon realizing that someone had spray-painted in block letters the words "Are You on Repeat?" onto the brick facade. Actual graffiti! Some faceless individual had actually put something on the line, had put his/her message in a place where it would actually stand out! This was the difference between sleeping late on Senior Ditch Day and hitting the principal with a cream pie during Homecoming. The whole idea of graffiti is to stand in counterpoint to the institutional norm, and this was the first piece of graffiti I'd seen at Duke that was doing just that.

The best graffiti doesn't have anything to do with what colors you use, or what paint you buy. It's just a statement, or an image, that makes you think about the way you're living your life. Banksy, perhaps the most famous graffiti artist of today, explains that "the people who run our cities don't understand graffiti because they think nothing has the right to exist unless it makes a profit, which makes their opinion worthless." In a world where art museums charge five bucks at the door, graffiti is the only art form that can afford to be free, in more than one sense of the word. In modern counterculture circles, it's called guerrilla art. It's meant to be unexpected, to come as a surprise, to shock you. I can't remember the last time I was shocked by anything on the East Campus Bridge.

I had hoped that would change, when I saw that solitary piece of graffiti boldly staking its claim on Biddle's grand facade. I was hoping that this single, simple message would inspire at least a couple people to write a response, maybe in spray-paint. I was hoping that students would ask that if the Healthy Devil programs DELISH, ESTEEM, SHARP, PATH and STAR can tell us to examine our lives more closely, that a four-word message on a wall should be able to do the same. I was hoping that the graffiti would at least stay up for a couple months.

I didn't get any of these things. The graffiti merited a short notice in the Crime Brief section before it was quietly put to sleep. And the crazy-eyed radical in me, the one that perks up at the mention of WTO protests or Zapatista speeches, gave a sigh of disappointment and went back into hiding. Maybe I'm putting too much emphasis on a few words sprayed onto a piece of brick. But then again, that's kind of what graffiti is all about. In the meantime, I'll still have the East Campus Bridge, in all its glorious faux-rebellion. Maybe I'll spray-paint the words "Are You on Repeat?" on it. But then again, it wouldn't be the same.

James Tager is a Trinity junior.