David Santos, Jan. 20, '98
A human in visual isolation with a blank "Ganz field" before the eyes soon starts to hallucinate. The mind seeks to create that which is missing. A mural is a hallucination machine a thousandth of an inch thick, an interface between two worlds. Murals are mirrors of worlds. They are time machines.
Community murals in Texas have a long tradition. The Pecos River School of ancient rock art is world famous, but most Texans have never heard of it. Just a short walk from here, above Barton Springs, are ghostly examples of Native American rock art that can date back over 5000 yrs..
Only a hundred years ago Jose Vasconcelos was raised on the Texas/Mexico border and attended school at Eagle Pass. He is most honored for founding public education in Mexico, and for his writings, in particular he coined the term "raza cosmica", but he also was the first modern public art administrator, who fostered the Mexican mural movement to flourish at Prepa Nueve (preparatory school #9 in Mexico city. Important murals are still painted in public schools as Raul Valdez work shows.).
One of Vasconcelos masters, Orozco, defined mural painting as an adventure of the spirit. Muralism is the highest development of painting- an ambiental universal literature capable of expressing anything.
Wall writers gather power by study and practice. They know their ancestors painted caves and pyramids. They recognize a kinship across vast time and space. The Mexican-American writer perceives a continuous tradition with their Indian fore fathers. The great European mural tradition seemed to end with Tiepolo in last century. If it revives, Mexican art will deserve some credit.
The evanesation and etherealization of paint can be traced- starting with lumps of chalk, charcoal, and ochre evolved into liquid paints which became airborne spray art, and now dematerialized photons on a movie screen or CRT.
Lift your gaze from wall to cosmos. To its farthest oldest edge, the universe resembles spray art (for esthetes, worse still, on velvet). Cracking the subatomic level with accelerators reveals even vaster realms of graphismo. The creator is a writer.
Earth's Democracy Walls are battlegrounds. The best wall writing is great art and is routinely destroyed on sight, the brainwashed smile, and official art prospers. A cultural war is raging.
Ambient art often is sometimes explained by the "marking territory" (pissing contest) theory (as such it resembles scholarly publishing). Lewis & Clark left tree carvings and a rock carving, marking turf for the US. Mt. Rushmore is a tremendous turf tag.
Television and billboards write on children. Joe Camel, a fictional creation that peddles poison, has enjoyed more rights to urban space than all the eight year old taggers combined. Children find ways to write back at society.
A "prehistoric" rock artist visiting us would be arrested on short order for some crime- likely some hunting, property, or decency law. This person would share more in common with the modern wall writer than with the typical rock art fetishist.
Most graffiti hides from mainstream view in alleys, tunnels, and abandoned zones. Artistic competitors, cave bears, or cops; all cause similar adrenaline rush. The very intensity of law enforcement spurred new peaks of calligraphic virtuosity.
Mastery and virtue in hip-hop culture- Like modern Homers, great rappers create powerful rhythmic rhyming verse on the fly. Wall writers share this improvisational genius The superman of the future is likely being selected for in some third world hellhole and some sort of tag culture is likely to be an early media signal. There will be counterintelligence and repression that informs itself with scholarly knowledge of graffiti, much as archeology informed criminal forensics.
"Why Johnny can't" tag... Liberating the K-12 Gulag. Taggers are little kids proclaiming a self image on the grimy Ganz fields of modern concrete. This silent push to the eyes, in the natural course of life, infuriates some folks. Graffiti is routinely cursed and demonized.
Graffiti "buffing" (removal by "abatement services"), in its latest form now requires photography to record the "crime" for investigators and courts. Thus a spectacular database being generated for scholars, much as FBI surveillance help reconstruct the sixties civil rights movement..
Graffiti artists beat critics to the net by about 14 web years, not that this was intentional. The imperative of expression relentlessly invades new mediums, and censors must always follow. Mural painting reverberates in all visual media, especially video and the web.
Two art worlds theory- That the cultural chasm between the mainstream artworld and community street murals is so great, that the two effectively constitute separate worlds. Problems then result when the mainstream seeks to regulate street murals like "fine art". The flip side is when the mainstram allows a vast cutural patrimony to be destroyed without notice, as if it didn't matter. The AAS has been the worst offender in this dynamic.
My conservation background is informal- I studied fresco painting at the Academia de San Carlos in Mexico City (America's oldest art academy (established 1781), that nation's visual arts grad. school) and made friends with Hector Trillo, head of the conservation dept., who introduced me to the field. Over several years, most notably with the maestro Vlady, I worked over the years to reconstruct "old masters" technique, particularly Venetian School and conferred with conservation researchers around the world during this time.
I have spent 12 years personally maintaining many of Austin's street murals from the usual threats and developed an anti tag protocol that balances artistic integrity with the reality that formal conservation is not economically practical for most community murals.
The basic approach is to match tags line by line to the background scumbing with an old brush according to local grey scale and then glaze to local color with a small pallet. This two step process allows all tags, of any color on any color, disappear without tedious palette/cup mixing of every local color. A severely damaged wall can be repaired in half an hour. The repair remains faintly discernible (as in "Italian" conservation practice), and no additional original painting is covered.
Where possible the original artist supervises and the average vandalism can often be masked in a few minutes. Surplus acrylic latex house paint, (and selected artists pigments in acrylic) watered way down is commonly used as it is free and seems to make a lean coating that can be removed by scrubbing with, say scotch bright, at any time from the tag below, should that ever be desired.
Sometimes conservation triage attacks other threats- sealant applied to stop moisture infiltration to the wall from the top, hermetic rear wall coat ventilated by scratching or venting, draining away water from foot of wall, or light binder applied to consolidate a "chalking" painting.
We avoid any anti graffiti coatings as risky if the artist, as is common, comes back to refresh or extend the painting. Some traditional mural walls have been "poisoned" by anti vandal coatings and the hapless artist only finds out when their work peels off in huge sheets.
We avoid removal methods based on abrasion or solvents as much on enviro grounds as much as the fear of damage to original paint.
Over two hundred murals of ours have been painted over- the City of Austin being the worst offender- and we hope that some day a practical method, perhaps pulsed light ablation, will reveal those murals that still lie intact within the paint layers.
One very successful practice has been to study the history of a wall's coating. If it has been stable over many years, is dull and has tooth, then its good for use. The old masters also kept an eye out for a good established surface.
A wire brush, strenuously applied, is the poor man's sand blast.
Sandblasting of an old mural wall should be avoided.The old murals are still under there and might be revived someday. Sandblasting also is highly polluting- paint dust goes into the air and stays in the soil. A overlaid panel wall should be used by a later muralist.
Adding an overhang, as roofing or awning, is the best favor to a weathering mural
House paint v. artists paint. House paint has become a highly engineered product optimised for durable out door use. In some cases consumer paint has features, such as antibacterials, UV filters that artist paint may lack.
To Nathan: Impasto in india? Low to high refractive index is the grand piano of the colorist.
New ideas- "weep tubes" in mural to vent water vapor.
Texas Maximalism confronts the minimalism of the rest of Artworld. The neosuperbaroque age has begun.
Economy of the future- top jobs; flipping each others digital burgers, medical guinea pig, video wall writer.
Go now, create some wall art; carry it to some level of mastery, and enjoy the social consequences.
Local maestros I admire- Skam (Al Martinez), Ramon Maldonado, Ambray Gonzales, Raul Valdez, Michael Priest. Thanks to Megan Hill and B.J. Goins.
Its time to launch our own Austin mural conservancy. ALTA's role.
Thank you.
Rock Art Foundation in San Antonio- http://members.aol.com/rockart01/index.html
L.A. Mural Conservancy- http://www.lamurals.org/
Artcrimes Site- http://www.graffiti.org/
A Texas Grafitti Site- http://members.tripod.com/~Oar1RTD/index.html
Graffiti Science- http://members.aol.com/archive1/index.html
Silicon Barrio- http://www.polycosmos.org/silicbar/silicbar.htm
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