CONCLUSION

Graffiti is a public artifact, an object existing only via its style, is a time-based form. Graffiti is a text, a practice, a participatory act. Graffiti traces the border between public and private, between the visible and invisible, is positioned in a city in which both time and space are increasingly monumentalized. Yet if this is what this book has said graffiti is (and what graffiti does), what is it that it accomplishes as monument? Well, as our monument-reminder we here find a peripheral, agonistic, momentary monument, a monument acting as a visual reminder of a dissensual relation to site, a reminder of the committed practitioners who produced it, a reminder of the inexorability of decay. As the monument-advice we find something said, something done, and something that is said and done together, a monument advising us of our right to appear, to claim presence, to participate in the city. And as the monument-warning, we find an artifact and practice intertwined with the ongoing privatization, surveillance, and spectacularization of the city, a monument warning us of what are possibly the three most critical issues affecting the public sphere today. The graffiti monument may thus not be the stony, the classical, the permanent monument, not the monological, the elite, the passive monument, not the monument of the state or the monument of the POPS, yet it is a monument nonetheless. It is an artifact that reminds, that advises, that warns us. It is an inscription that captivates and attracts our attention. It is a marker of deeds with true urgency for the contemporary urban realm.

The tensions over the institutional monument all across the world today ¹ should thus come as no surprise. The basic structure of this traditional form is a densely anachronistic one, its agencies often of a deeply exclusionary nature. The monumental iconoclasm we see today must not, therefore, be understood to be simply about destruction. It is instead a disruption of the means through which we come to think about ourselves and our social and material environments. It is a disruption leading to a new way of engaging with the city, a new way of thinking about its past and future and our role as citizens within it. The war on the institutional monument—a war, it must be said, emergent after decades of discourse that led only to decades of obfuscation ²—thus starts to reveal the constructed “naturalness” of the urban street, of an architectonic “neutrality” that is entirely partisan. It starts to reveal the dense anxiety of the state in which all signs of its fragility must be displaced, the anxieties of a status quo that fears change above all else.

The war on the graffiti monument, however, the institutionally forged iconoclasm in which thousands have been imprisoned (let alone killed ³) for placing pigment upon substrate (and for a financial quantum of damage whose value has increased literally tenfold ⁴ since the privatization of the train industry), continues unabashed. This is a war that has been categorically lost (as the still burgeoning images, as the institutional exhibitions, as the award-winning books, as the now fifty-year deep history all attest), yet a war that continues to be fought, nonetheless. There is simply too much invested now to stop. There is a multi-billion-dollar industry that needs servicing, an industry that must remove any sight of this contaminant (even if we have now forgotten why it was a problem in the first place). There is an “us” and a “them” that need to be solidified, a virtue signaling in which order must be maintained. The perfectly clean city is still the professed dream, the dream of the entirely privatized, surveilled, spectacularized city, yet the war is not only about this (impossibly) pristine city itself. The war is about a conception of the private that continually shrinks public space. The war is about the domineering nature of the all-seeing city. This war is about the city as site of commercialization, not habitation. The institutional iconoclasm that the graffiti monument faces is thus not just about its illegality but about the fear of what these monumental images prove. It is about the fear of an urban encounter in which economic returns play no part, of a practice in which engagement is productive, not consumptive. It is about the fear of a monument in which marginalized voices and marginalized bodies surface, in which surveillance and the spectacular are evaded, in which a commons appears.

The public monument, be it of an institutional or graffiti variety, is thus an artifact entirely intertwined with the fate and the potential of the contemporary city, with the practices and possibilities of urban citizenship. The more we understand these forms, then, the more we understand their production and consumption let alone their destruction, the more we can understand the cities in which they stand, understand how we come to produce and inhabit our surroundings. And rather than just seeing graffiti as a rejection of monument, it is graffiti as the archetypal reminder, the archetypal advice, the archetypal warning that I hope has now been revealed. Rather than seeing graffiti as an anti-monument, it is graffiti as monument to the marginal and interruptive, to the ephemeral and dialogical, that I hope has become apparent. Rather than seeing graffiti as a counter-monument, it is graffiti as monument to the individual and collective, to participation and presence, graffiti as monument to our right to the city itself that I hope has now been demonstrated in this book.