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When I was so exceptionally insecure that I was compelled to explore every avenue of acceptance-through-skill (“Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills”), I quickly became consumed with graffiti writing. Although I was well versed in hip-hop culture (indeed, I was an emcee of six years), and despite having three years of formal visual arts training, I had never experienced the sublimity of spray can art from the artist’s perspective. But, “repping” dilettantes to the fullest, I decided to take a stab at this scene. I began with an alphabet. A friend and fellow writer provided the base and I ran with it. I needed somewhere to lay it, though, for if I were to develop as an artist, I needed feedback and lots of it. I designed this rubric for measuring my progress, with success determined using an internal, undefined Likert scale.

First step: hit on a girl using your newfound skill (my first step when testing any new skill)

Result: I designed a piece for a crush and got crushed.

Second step: design a piece and get up stealthy and healthy.

Result: Seven arduous hours (mostly spent watching for cops and running from innocuous pedestrians) culminating in a delightful, albeit misspelled, piece – Epson₀.

Third and final step: complete a freestyle and live to tell about it.

Result: An impromptu collaborative piece that provided inspiration for further writing endeavors.

After this experience I moved to the southernmost coordinate of the American hip-hop triangle – Miami. Graffiti in Miami is like sh*t in a toilet – if it were anywhere else you might react with, “What the f*ck,” but in this location, it gets disregarded. And so, when you try to have your voice heard, you feel like your screaming in a vacuum. I needed to spring a leak. So, I followed two memes in visual art and literature – photo essay and polysemicity.

Using the concept of photo essay, I narrated the story of a stripper. “Film strips” of five frames were pasted ten feet apart around city blocks, requiring interested viewers to move from scene to scene to absorb the full piece.

This concept progressed into a sort of polysemic shift, whereby interpretations of the photo essays (acquired through written feedback next to the original work) were used to reinterpret the piece. What you would be able to do, then, is watch as the piece slowly transitioned from, for example, the life of a stripper, to the masturbatory practices of teens, to visions of overt and latent homophobia. It did not take long for the piece to lose all semblance of relation to the original work. But in the minds of those who received the work, the connection was vivid, and hopefully enlightening.

I would really enjoy creating a live, collaborative piece with willing members of this class. And, for those who might be interested, please, post ideas here.

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