I tend to go on about a presence on the street and in our communities by means of the paper, leaflet, sticker and poster. However there is another method of keeping you message on the street, and it doesn't cost a printer, ink cartridges and paper. I am of course talking about graffiti. It seems, like the paper on the street, to have gone out of fashion. Done in the right places it can last much longer than the paper, though it doesn't find its way into people's houses, but it can make its way into their minds. For some of us, a wee walk down memory lane.
Long before the days of social media and online petitions graffiti
has been used as an expressive display against the corporate and
political powers that be. When I say graffiti, I don’t mean the multi-coloured three
dimensional ‘tagging’ and artwork that you see aside canal towpaths and
scrapyards, I’m talking about early graffiti, hand written messages and
slogans written by anarchists and underdogs across the county.
I picked up a couple of books on this subject ‘The writing on the
wall’ by Roger Perry and ‘Graffiti’ by Richard Freeman. These books show
a number of early images of graffiti dating from the 1960s through to
the 1970s, a long time before the Bronx and subway inspired art reached
our shores. Amongst a number of nonsensical written messages and
slogans, there are pictures of graffiti which addresses racism,
capitalism, greed and inequality, all daubed across the walls and
bridges of our inner cities and suburbs.
These images got me intrigued and made me want to dig deeper and seek
out more images of this nature. A high number of the images I came
across were taken during the turbulent Thatcher years, where tensions
were high and the disenfranchised expressed their anger and feelings
towards the Tory government and authorities of the era.
There is something about the images below, a bold statement that
makes you think deeper about the message being put across and what
became of the people who wrote them.
Blek Le Rat is a French street Artist known as the father of stencil
graffiti. He has earned this title through years of spray painting
unforgettable figures on walls across the globe. In the early 80’s he
became one of the first street Artists in Paris, known for his iconic
rat stencils. His stencil technique has since been adopted by some of
the biggest names in graffiti and street art today.
As well as involvement in all aspects of our communities, we need publicity, propaganda, call it what you will, but we must continually put our ideas on the table of everyday life. If our ideas are not known to the ordinary people when they find themselves in conflict, then our ideas will not be taken up. Anarchist have a very colourful palette, let's paint our communities, leaflets, posters, conversations, meetings, stalls, stickers, an avalanche of anarchist ideas flooding this festering mess they call capitalist society. Every opportunity to put our ideas, beliefs, theories out there, should be embraced, from pub and bus stop chats to graffiti, it all adds up.
The mural reads:
“We are growing old among men and women
without dreams, strangers in a present time which leaves us no room for
outbursts of generosity. The best this society can offer us (a career, a
reputation, a sudden, big win, ‘love’) simply doesn’t interest us.
Giving orders disgusts us just as much as obedience. What we are and
what we want begins with a no. We are exploited like everyone else and
want to put an end to exploitation right away. For us, revolt needs no
other justification. Our life is escaping us, and any class discourse
that fails to start from this is simply a lie. Revolt needs
everything—papers and books, arms and explosives, reflection and
blasphemy, poisons, daggers and arsons. The only interesting question is
how to combine them.” “NEVER PJZ!”
