Ornament And Order

Ornament and Order

For my parents

Ornament and Order Graffiti, Street Art and the Parergon

Rafael Schacter University College London, UK

© Rafael Schacter 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Rafael Schacter has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East 110 Cherry Street Union Road Suite 3-1 Farnham Burlington, VT 05401-3818 Surrey, GU9 7PT USA England www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schacter, Rafael. Ornament and order : graffiti, street art and the parergon / by Rafael Schacter. pages cm. -- (Architecture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4724-0998-0 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-4724-0999-7 (ebook) -- ISBN 9781-4724-1000-9 (epub) 1. Decoration and ornament--Social aspects. 2. Graffiti--Social aspects. 3. Street art--Social aspects. I. Title. NK1520.S33 2014 709.05'1--dc23 2013043984 ISBN 9781472409980 (hbk) ISBN 9781472409997 (ebk – PDF) ISBN 9781472410009 (ebk – ePUB)

II

Grooves repeated in succession – man’s first aesthetic expression – betray a sense of order, symmetrical grooves show even a certain incipient sense of balance, cogitation and repose … which to this day is the ethical basis of art. Alphonse Marie Mucha, 1966

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Contents

List of Figures   Foreword   Preface  

Introduction  

ix xv xix

1

Part I: Ornament 1

Ornament  

15

2

Consensual Ornamentation  

53

3 Agonistic Ornamentation  

91

PART II: Order 4

Order  

133

5

Inversion, Subversion, Perversion  

161

6

Play, Risk and the Picaresque  

189

Conclusion  

221

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Postscript   Acknowledgements  

235 247

Bibliography   Index  

249 267

List of Figures

Black and White P.1 Cripta Djan at work, São Paulo, Brazil, 2012   P.2 Chu, Untitled, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2013   P.3 3TTMan and Remed, Untitled, Madrid, Spain, 2009   P.4 Nano4814, San, and others unknown, Untitled, Vigo, Spain, 2010   P.5 Noviciado Nueve (and friends), Belvés, France, 2012   P.6 Noviciado Nueve, Madrid, Spain, 2012  

xx xxi xxii xxiii xxiv xxvii

I.1 The Leake Street Classicist, London, England, 2011   I.2 The Leake Street Classicist, London, England, 2011   I.3 Eltono, Untitled, Beijing, China, 2012   I.4 San (Daniel Muñoz), Untitled, Catania, Italy, 2010   I.5 Akim One, Untitled, Odessa, Ukraine, 2013  

2 2 6 9 11

1.1 Nano at work, Madrid, Spain, 2009   1.2 Nano, Untitled (Choquito), Madrid, Spain, 2007   1.3 3TTMan, Untitled (Carteles) [detail], Madrid, Spain, 2008   1.4 3TTMan, Untitled (Carteles), Madrid, Spain, 2010   1.5 Neko, Untitled [Acid Etching in process – etchings also visible in surround], Madrid, Spain, 2010   1.6 Momo, Untitled, London, England, 2008   1.7 Katsu, Untitled, New York, USA, 2011. Katsu’s figurative icon, produced in one pure movement, functions both as an image of a skull whilst also containing the word ‘tag’ hidden within it   1.8 Spok, Untitled, Madrid, Spain, 2007   1.9 Image destruction or ‘buffing’ in Madrid, 2010   1.10 The agency of the image. Madrid ‘window’ of fame, 2010. Image includes tags by Buni, Hear (Alone), Ring, Spok, Nano4184, Neko, Dier, Remed, Shit, Garr (Garrulo – Koas), Parse, Suee, Til, Tonk, Los del rodillo, and unknown others  

16 17 18 20 22 23

24 25 29

33

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Ornament and Order

1.11 The image as mind trap. Revok, Untitled, Los Angeles, USA, 2010   1.12 Graffiti as parerga, as frame and content in the same moment. Vova Vorotniov, Spray as Index 1, Warsaw, Poland, 2011   1.13 Embellishing the painted-out remnants of his old works after they had been ‘erased’ by local authorities, Homer added what he terms ‘subcultural nuances’ to these ghostly, blocked-out markings, decorating the scars that remained from his earlier efforts. Homer, Post-Buffing, Kiev, Ukraine, 2009   1.14 Zedz and Maurer United Architects (MUA). Rendering by Visualdata.org   1.15 Remed, Untitled, Leon, Spain, 2011   1.16 San, Untitled, Besançon, France, 2011   1.17 San, Untitled [detail], Besançon, France, 2011   1.18 The logical corollary of showing graffiti within the gallery space. Akim, Leistungsschau Part 3, Berlin, Germany, 2011  

35

2.1 Remed, Amor Al Arte, Madrid, Spain, 2012   2.2 3TTMan, Viva la Calle Libre, Madrid, Spain, 2010   2.3 Eltono, Untitled, Utrecht, Netherlands, 2013   2.4 Unknown Artist, Mi Vida Es Como La Tuya, Madrid, Spain, 2007   2.5 An example of the propositional rather than perlocutionary intentions of Consensual Ornamentation. Remed, There Is Something Else, London, England, 2010   2.6 An example of the propositional rather than perlocutionary intentions of Consensual Ornamentation. Remed, There Is Something Else, London, England, 2010   2.7 3TTMan, Ceci est mon cuerpo, Palma, Spain, 2009   2.8  Eltono and Nuria, Untitled [Signboard project], London, England, 2008. Not only acting as a performative signature, the signboards which Eltono and Nuria installed in London, Madrid and Stockholm, were later gifted to whomever found them, an explicitly anti-commercial tactic once more linking them to Habermas’s common concern   2.9 El Mac, El Corazón de un Sueño, Havana, Cuba, 2012   2.10 Filippo Minelli, Could you please suggest to me any revolutionary act?, Tudela de Navarra, Spain, 2011   2.11 Escif, Art Vs Capitalism, Grottaglie, Italy, 2011   2.12 3TTMan, Untitled [Fill in the Blanks], Madrid, Spain, 2012   2.13 Remed, Amor Al Arte, Madrid, Spain, 2012   2.14 Remed, Blanco Ante Gris [Gracias por tus mensages], Madrid, Spain, 2011   2.15 3TTMan’s Viva la Calle Libre (Madrid, Spain, 2010) after a half-hearted (or perhaps 2/3-hearted) erasure by local authorities, an attempted erasure only serving to give the original work more prominence   2.16 Eltono, Untitled, Utrecht, Netherlands, 2013   2.17 Eltono, Untitled, Madrid, Spain, 1999    2.18 Eltono, Untitled, Madrid, Spain, 1998  

54 54 55 58

37

38 41 43 45 46 49

62

62 65

66 68 71 72 74 78 79

81 83 84 85

List of Figures

2.19 Homer [Sasha Kurmaz], Illegal Inscription, Kiev, Ukraine, 2010   2.20 Erosie, I Hereby Apologise for the Damage Done, Eindhoven, Netherlands, 2007   3.1 Nano4814, Untitled, Vigo, Spain, 2009   3.2 Spok, TBC, Madrid, Spain, 2009   3.3 Belas Artes Invasion, São Paulo, Brazil, 2008   3.4 Neko, Untitled, Madrid, Spain, 2009   3.5 La Mano and Zosen, Untitled, Barcelona, Spain, 1997   3.6 Remio, Untitled, São Paulo, Brazil, 2012   3.7 Katsu, Fuck You, New York, USA, 2011   3.8 Nov York, Untitled, New York, USA, 2010. Nov’s work here is a classic example of this movement over, rather than with the surface, the piece seamlessly moving from wall to glass to the wall again, then moving beyond even the edge of the building itself   3.9 Nov York, Nov York Needs Release, New York, USA, 2010   3.10 GPO, Doing Graffiti 4 The Crime, Athens, Greece, 2010   3.11 Turbo, Untitled, Paris, France, 2008   3.12 Turbo, Untitled, Paris, France, 2007   3.13 Mathieu Tremblin, Tag Clouds – Colombier Optique, Rennes, France, 2010. Whilst the ‘translation’ Tremblin here undertakes can provide an amazing insight into the scopic abilities of the agonistic artist, their capacity to so clearly decipher this ostensible pollution, Tremblin’s highly astute work is unable to account for a vast amount of information a seasoned agonistic practitioner would also perceive – information pertaining to issues such as style, technique, experience, mind state etc.   3.14 Mathieu Tremblin, Tag Clouds – Colombier Optique, Rennes, France, 2010. Whilst the ‘translation’ Tremblin here undertakes can provide an amazing insight into the scopic abilities of the agonistic artist, their capacity to so clearly decipher this ostensible pollution, Tremblin’s highly astute work is unable to account for a vast amount of information a seasoned agonistic practitioner would also perceive – information pertaining to issues such as style, technique, experience, mind state etc.   3.15 Read More Books, Untitled, Brooklyn, New York, 2008   3.16 Nano4814 at work, Untitled, Vigo, Spain, 2009   3.17 Nano4814 at work, Untitled, Vigo, Spain, 2009   3.18 Nano4814 at work, Untitled, Vigo, Spain, 2009   3.19 Nano4814 at work, Untitled, Vigo, Spain, 2009   3.20 Spok, TBC, Madrid, Spain, 2009   3.21 Spok at work, TBC, Madrid, Spain, 2009   3.22 Eltono, Pixo Gratis, São Paulo, Brazil, 2008   3.23 Eltono, Pixo Gratis, São Paulo, Brazil, 2008   3.24 The Belas Artes Invasion. São Paulo, Brazil, 2008   3.25 Eltono, Pinto Gratis, Madrid, Spain, 2004  

xi

88 89 93 94 94 97 98 101 103

104 105 105 107 107

110

110 111 114 114 115 115 118 119 121 121 122 123

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Ornament and Order

3.26 Neko and Jaime, Untitled, Madrid, Spain, 2009   4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9

4.10 4.11 4.12 4.13 4.14 4.15

127

Spok on the tracks. Madrid, Spain, 2008   135 Spok at work. Madrid, Spain, 2008   136 Spok at work. Madrid, Spain, 2008   137 Formal, traditional, yet unique. Untitled collage by Momo, 2009   140 Invariant, rule governed, yet distinct. Untitled collage by Momo, 2009  141 Remio at work, Los Angeles, USA, 2010   144 Remio at work, Los Angeles, USA, 2010   145 Nano4814, Alone, and Brk at work. Vigo, Spain, 2009   148 Slave Cave Collective, Nazca Lines, New York, USA, 2012. The Slave Cave Collective piece depicted here not only has links to the traditions and history of the graffiti discourse (paying homage to a work which any true adherent to the discourse will instantly recognize) but also linking to the theme of sacrality, pointing quite overtly to something beyond itself   149 Invariant yet idiosyncratic 1. Katsu, Untitled, New York, USA, 2012   151 Invariant yet idiosyncratic 2. Eltono, Untitled 1, Untitled 2, Beijing, China, 2012   152 John Fekner, Self Portrait, New York, USA, 2012   155 Filippo Minelli, Democracy, Nouadhibou, Mauritania, 2008   155 3TTMan, Remed, and Fefe Tavelera at work. Madrid, Spain, 2009   157 The arrival of the poli. Madrid, Spain, 2009   157

5.1 3TTMan, Fighting Peacefully, Tenerife, Spain, 2012   5.2 Carrying the cartons. Madrid, Spain, 2007   5.3 A litro to celebrate. Madrid, Spain, 2007   5.4 Collecting the carteles. Madrid, Spain, 2007   5.5 The Pied Piper of Malasaña. Madrid, Spain, 2007   5.6 Society in the subjunctive. Nano4814, Liqen, Pelucas and Brk at work   5.7 Nano4814, Liqen, Pelucas and Brk, Untitled [detail], Madrid, Spain, 2009   5.8 Lush, Untitled, Melbourne, 2011   5.9 Pelucas, Serpiente escalera, Mexico City, Mexico, 2012   5.10 Neko, Untitled [Los Veo y Subo – I See It and I Get Up], Madrid, Spain, 2009   5.11 On the way to paint (plastic bags full of paint not groceries), Madrid, Spain, 2008   5.12 To unsettle, not destroy/To function in a different register. Three untitled posters by OX from Genevilliers, Paris and Arcueil (France), 2012   5.13 To unsettle, not destroy/To function in a different register. Three untitled posters by OX from Genevilliers, Paris and Arcueil (France), 2012  

162 165 165 167 167 171 171 173 176 179 182

185

185

List of Figures

xiii

5.14 To unsettle, not destroy/To function in a different register. Three untitled posters by OX from Genevilliers, Paris and Arcueil (France), 2012  

185

6.1 Nug, Territorial Pissings, Film Stills, Stockholm, Sweden, 2008. Image courtesy of artist   6.2 Portrait of 3TTMan, Madrid, Spain, 2010   6.3 Getting in 1 and 2. 3TTMan in Action. La Palma, Spain, 2009   6.4 Getting in 1 and 2. 3TTMan in Action. La Palma, Spain, 2009   6.5 Under the tarpaulin. 3TTMan in Action. La Palma, Spain, 2009   6.6 3TTMan, Resurreccioname … Por Favor, La Palma, Spain, 2009   6.7 3TTMan, Resurreccioname … Por Favor, La Palma, Spain, 2009   6.8 Read More Books, Read-Up, Nashville, Tennessee, 2010   6.9 Text as a struggle over inscription. Madrid, Spain, 2007   6.10 Nano4814, Eternal Present (An Endless Void), London, England, 2008   6.11 3TTMan and Remed at Play. London, England, 2010   6.12 Petro, Untitled, Newcastle, England, 2012   6.13 The Montaña Monster, Madrid, Spain, 2009   6.14 The Montaña Monster, Madrid, Spain, 2009   6.15 Monsters and Mayhem, Madrid, Spain, 2009   6.16 Monsters and Mayhem, Madrid, Spain, 2009   6.17 (Con)-Artist Zone. Madrid, Spain, 2009   6.18 Remio, Untitled, San Francisco, USA, 2012  

191 192 195 195 196 197 197 199 201 205 207 209 211 212 213 213 215 218

C.1 Sam3, Untitled, Madrid, Spain, 2010   C.2 Nano4814, Untitled, Vigo, Spain, 2008   C.3 Eltono, Untitled, Bogotá, Columbia, 2008   C.4 Goldpeg, Untitled, Vigo, Spain, 2008   C.5 Goldpeg, Untitled, Vigo, Spain, 2008   C.6 Sixe, Untitled, Vigo, Spain, 2008   C.7 Sixe, Untitled, Vigo, Spain, 2008   C.8 3TTMan, Untitled, Tarifa, Spain, 2012   C.9 The Leake Street Classicist, London, England, 2011   C.10 GPO, Untitled, Athens, Greece, 2010  

223 225 225 227 227 230 230 232 233 233

PS.1 Gone but not forgotten. Destruction and reappearance. Madrid, Spain, 2007   PS.2 Jurne, Untitled, California, USA, 2012   PS.3 Remed, Untitled, Madrid, Spain, 2011   PS.4 Alone [Hear], Untitled, Vigo, Spain, 2012  

238 239 242 244

Colour Plates 1

Eltono and Momo, Untitled, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2011

2 Eltono, Untitled [Coriandoli Graffiti], Turin, Italy, 2009

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Ornament and Order

3 Nano4814, Elijo Irme [I choose to go], Aranjuez, Spain, 2011 4 3TTMan, Untitled [Cement Graffiti], Madrid, Spain, 2010 5 Remed, Untitled, Leon, Spain, 2012 6 Remed, Untitled, Marakkesh, Morocco, 2012 7 Spok, Untitled, Madrid, Spain, 2008 8

Spok [background by Yesk], Untitled, Turin, Italy, 2012

Foreword

Dr Schacter asked me to write this foreword because he knows that for over 20 years I have been OCD with graffiti. I started young like many practitioners and I performed the rituals that are expected of the young. I never could explain to people outside of the culture the genius that I knew graffiti was, the rebellion and the structure that formed and informed it. Dr S. has done just that with this book, he has united what has always been maligned as a violent and destructive act against society with intense theories and thoughts that help to reveal this spray-painted rose from the dark leaved brambles that lobbyists against graffiti have covered it in since its inception. Those special interests have a lot to gain by quashing graffiti and yet counter intuitively a lot to lose by suppressing it. The deep journey that this book is brings us to a place that uncovers that binary and allows the readers to decide for themselves what they think about graffiti in their cities. In New York City, multi-national corporations, wealthy interests and corrupt politicians have stolen the city from the inhabitants and made it almost impossible for the majority of folk to get ahead. They have raised the prices and changed the rules, effectively downgrading the people who built and toiled for their lifetimes there. The tactics used by multi-national conglomerates and corrupt or inept politicians that have profit rather than the people as their bottom-line have marginalized and militarized many in the urban tribe. Neo-martial law and policestate behavior, where imprisonment is seen as a necessity for anyone dissenting against the regime, have increased war-like behaviors from the people precipitating stronger responses from the government. Ever since 9/11 total police control and the fascist-like imposition to respect the authority of the police and state has been on the rise, as they connect those corrupt forces as our only hope to be saved from the artificial threat of terrorism. When revered journalists are easily manipulated by government lies and an imposed classist culture forces all relationships to be based on commerce, graffiti may be one of the last options of public criticism and dissent left (yea I said it, all hope for the future depends on graffiti). I saw the connection of this rise of global fascism masked by a neo-liberal ideal of hyper-capitalism with

xvi

Ornament and Order

the duty of the graffiti writer to dissent loud and clear when Dr S. wrote about Habermas’s description of the ‘refeudalization’ of public space at the end of the 19th century. This book has parts that stand out to me as a clear call to action. Maybe. Or that’s just the innate selfish radical in me, blind to other ideas, projecting all that I want graffiti to be, only seeing my own reflection where ever I look. Based on my coup d’état understanding of what graffiti is, Dr S. would group me in his copyrighted academic term ‘Agonistic Ornamenter’, placing me neatly in a row and column, setting me aside for further study. With the Agonistic sided for the moment, Dr S. delves deeply into what he terms the Consensual forms of graffiti, the ones that many can agree on, the pretty stuff, the ironic pieces that make the disillusioned masses giggle. The pretty stencils and the posters and the re-appropriating of pop culture icons to make a message, ‘Stop Racism!’, but in fact say nothing because of the inherent consensuality. The so-called art that actually serves the capitalist captains by prettying up the hood and raises rents and dislocates the inhabitants; the happy agreeable work that the masters allow for now and will buff once you turn your back, the egotistical sell-out work that you mask in benevolence toward mankind and justify by claiming outcomes of quasi-social justice yet the only tangible product being a clean quality of life corner so the next corporate pig can plant their business’s flag. Ouch, that’s harsh, as if I were judging the Consensual and its recent strangle hold on the conversation of graffiti and it seems like I’m saying that this consensual emperor is wearing no clothes. The Consensual Ornamenters make real pretty work and even better by the accepted premise of the day, they make that money. Who am I to be such a smug judge of others’ hard work? Dr S. talks about this too when he writes on the increasing manufactured polarization of our world views. He alludes to the fact that media and television are owned by a few wealthy special interests and they have framed all debates into this bi-polarity of ‘you are either with us or against us, choose a side’, leaving no room for meaningful dialogue of any type, which leads me to believe that all forms of graffiti can function as the proverbial Lithium for the masses when notions of right and wrong are so strictly defined. Graffiti can be seen as a temporary anonymous break from the strictly defined roles that are set for all members of society and a way to stray from the script we were all given at birth. Perhaps. In this book we learn of the Ancient Greek spaces that were architecturally open and by design meant to foster free argument and debate and they are juxtaposed with the walled off city of today that no one is allowed to touch unless they pay the fee to advertise their wares; the closed off spaces that are only welcome to paying customers and the many private spaces taking over our cities that are intrinsically divided by race and class. Now consider those physical barriers in position to the philosophical barriers that the capitalist–cultural world-elite has instated via idolizing Mr Ai Weiwei who vandalized Han dynasty vases and thereby questioned current policies in slave-labor Asia versus the strict dyslogistic narrative set up against any vandalizing dissenters questioning the Global North Empire. Everybody else in the world is fair game and encouraged to destabilize their notions of religion, governance and financial structures in order to keep them unbalanced, yet once we the people attempt to destabilize the Global

Foreword

xvii

North then we are cast out to the dark corners of the culture and no longer able to partake in the freedom. When double standards ain’t seen as double standards, the propaganda machine is working well. Dr S.’s book says to me graffiti can be a way around the propaganda industrial complex. And yet there is something problematic in Dr S.’s thesis. He divvies up graffiti into those two modalities, Agonistic and Consensual, and claims that the Agonistic mode of graffiti is exclusive (amongst other issues) by virtue of the letters being so hard to read and the practitioners saying that they only do it for those in the know. He seems to have in some part fallen for the macho braggadocio that so many insecure practitioners of the Agonistic act out in public which disguise our truth as much as the seeming unintelligibility of our tags. He and many practitioners have accepted other people’s definitions at face value for lack of understanding that they could come up with their own explanations of their actions. When a vocal few assign a label to a group, even when false, parts of that label start to become the group’s identity. After realizing one’s identity has been fixed by outside forces rather than one’s own truth, those identities can be rethunk. A meditation on graffiti writers: graffiti writers do, as Dr S. claims, make up the Parergon of the city as canvas, that is graffiti writers make the frame of the painting that is our urban existence, yet it is a philosophical frame in as much as a Tibetan Buddhist Mandala is a philosophical work of art. Just as with the Tibetan Buddhist Mandala, graffiti is not meant to last long but instead its function is wrapped up in ritual and deep understanding that all is temporary and life is but a dream. This tag too shall pass. Its rather freeing to think tagging the walls of your city is a path towards enlightenment. What seems like agonistic aggression is in fact the acceptance of difficult truths and the physical reality and actions that go along with that acceptance. Maybe. The more you look around the world at the graffiti on the walls the more you realize graffiti has no owner, no one truth and no definition, this painting on walls thing belongs to the people, no one subculture can claim it. Just because New York City and Subway Art made that type of graffiti look cool does not mean New York City owns it or can even set rules for how it is to be expressed; and if they try to then those rules must be broken. To hell with rules when you seek the freedom. Graffiti is for all, it is made by soccer hooligans and hipsters, it is performed by thugs and antifa political activists, it is used as propaganda for and against the regime all over the world, it’s a way of writing racially charged misogynistic scribblings in toilet stalls and for bringing a community together around a simple message; spray cans in people’s hands is a being of its own. This book remains faithful to a particular narrative about graffiti, the same one that I was raised with but it is certainly not the only narrative out there. Dr S. does hint at this openness when he brings up Mouffe and her idea that agonism is not the struggle between enemies but rather competitors, competing to express the truth as they know it. Competitors who join the game of their own volition, with varying reasons behind their motivation, competitors participating in the game of words, letters and colors; competitors interested in dialogue, not domination. When looked at like this graffiti is quite simply a public debate, not

xviii Ornament and Order

the hate crime it is made out to be. Graffiti is open to all and not an inaccessible subculture that outsiders would box it in to serve their agenda. It can be political or far removed from politics (which is more revolutionary than joining in their onesided, always-the-same-outcome political games to begin with). Graffiti is a free democratic tool for bringing freedom to the world so that the world can be free. Maybe. It’s been a tough task for me to write this foreword. I get furious styles when I think about graffiti. I can politic on it but I’d rather just shut up and do it. Talking about graffiti in an intelligible manner is counter-intuitive to the unspoken religion of graffiti. I prefer grunts in a circle of fellow practitioners, no philosophical talk just performance and wonder. As an outsider to many other subcultures I too enjoy reading theory on those subcultures and to ponder on the hidden-in-plainsight worlds all around me. Dick Hebdige’s Subculture introduced me to a few subcultures I never thought about, mainly the Mods, Punks and Teddy Boys. And just as Punks and Mods would not want to read theory about their reality because they live it daily, I can’t stand to read any ideas on my subculture. It feels wrong to me because I perform the rituals, I can’t talk about the rituals, that would go against the ritual. The ritual is the truth of graffiti, and that truth shines bright when one performs the rituals correctly. It is not to be spoken of or asked questions about, it is solely to be performed. This book is well thought out and genuine to Dr S.’s experiences yet I as one so immersed in this repetitive doodling on walls feels the less we say about it the better. And so by writing this text is Dr S. legitimizing graffiti? Has he just gone and ruined graffiti for the practitioners? Well I suppose everything must change. No need to hold on to the past as a zealot and yearn for the good-old days when things were pure Cornbread-Dondi style. No need to remain fixed in a single identity becoming the joke that cedes power to the capitalizers by playing into their hands. Is this book then the definitive approach to graffiti? Impossible. Graffiti is more of a phantom after reading this book, that is, as much as you write about it as much as you chase it, you just can’t capture it. More doors are opened more revelations appear, less concrete anything is left because graffiti has this intangible spiritual connection to it that just can’t be contained. This book does not legitimize graffiti or even set out to capture its pure essence, this book instead gives philosophical weight so open-minded well-read academics like yourself can see beyond the repetitive refrains of graffiti being immoral, of it being just about money or just about crime, just about masculinity or just about risk. This book is an opening, maybe a door for graffiti writers who are struggling with their own 20-year long fixed identities and are attempting to break into academia, or the reverse, a door for academics who want to understand what those writings on the wall are and seek to put in rows and columns that which is outside of their intelligibility. Though mostly this book is a tool for slowing down and looking closely at what has been taken for granted, by outsiders and the practitioners as well, and an opportunity to begin deconstructing more conventional dogma. Dumaar Freemaninov, author of Nov York.

Preface

The tale of graffiti and street-art – or what I will here term Independent Public Art1 – is a sea unspeakably vast. Although less than 50 years old in its modern incarnation (and widely argued to have emerged on the East Coast of the US in the late 1960s), this vernacular art-form has been transported to nearly every corner of the globe, spawning hundreds of distinct styles (from the traditional technique of spraycan art to various highly conceptual modes of urban installation), generating thousands of local approaches (from the pixação of São Paulo – see Figure P.1 – to the Salvajismo of Buenos Aires – see Figure P.2), eliciting innumerable committed adherents to its cause (of every possible class and culture). Whilst its status as the world’s most practiced form of outsider art is I believe unparalleled, Independent Public Art as a distinct aesthetic genre has only very rarely been subject to any vigorous form of academic examination; in fact with the exception of Jean Baudrillard and Roland Barthes – whose brief remarks on the practices of graffiti are in my opinion the most insightful and profound on the genre as whole has so far garnered2 – its scholarly analysis has failed to produce a study investigating the dense materiality of the images created, their status when examined from an explicitly material–cultural position.

1

Independent Public Art, a term first brought to my attention by the theorist Javier Abarca, is an umbrella label which incorporates all forms of autonomously produced aesthetic production in the public sphere. It thus naturally encompasses practices which have been called graffiti or street-art yet also includes actions which may exceed these traditional designations, building an assemblage out of variance through its intentionally broad nature. What is crucial, and quite clear by the term itself however, is that it does not include works produced in the interior domain, works outside of what could be considered as public space. 2 See both Baudrillard’s essay ‘Kool Killer’ (1993 [1976]) and Barthes’ text entitled ‘Cy Twombly’ (1991 [1979]).

P.1  Cripta Djan at work, São Paulo, Brazil, 2012

Preface

xxi

Though there have been texts focussing on issues such as gang graffiti,3 youth subculture,4 criminality,5 and the culture and history of New York spraycan art6 (as well as a myriad of illustrated coffee books which are almost totally devoid of rigour), what I argue has been missing is an approach examining the formal, intentional, and practice-based aspects of these contemporary epigraphs, one which ethnographically explores both the images and their modes of construction, the product and the performance, the relic and ritual, the ornament and order. Teasing out the aesthetic and material relationships which emerge from the realm of Independent Public Art, Ornament and Order will thus focus on this global aesthetic movement as it stands today, exploring the plethora of acts which emerge from its field of practice. Based on a multi-sited, two year period of fieldwork embedded with an artistic collective in Madrid (a dialogical project which is in fact still ongoing), a wider research project conducted with over 100 artists worldwide7 as well as a number of high profile curatorial projects, the data collected incorporates the entire range of possible actions within the Independent Public Art movement: my closest group of informants – the collective Noviciado Nueve with whom I undertook my in-depth period of fieldwork – perfectly encapsulate this wide scope. 3

See Wallbangin’: Graffiti and Gangs in L.A. (1999) by Susan A. Phillips. See The Graffiti Subculture: Youth, Masculinity and Identity in London and New York (2001) by Nancy Macdonald. 5 See Crimes of Style: Urban Graffiti and the Politics of Criminality (1996) by Jeff Ferrell. 6 See Getting Up: Subway Graffiti in New York (1984) by Craig Castleman and Taking the Train: How Graffiti became an Urban Crisis in New York City (2001) by Joe Austin. 7 An illustrated biographical reference text entitled The World Atlas of Street Art and Graffiti (Schacter 2013). 4

P.2 Chu, Untitled, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2013

xxii

P.3 3TTMan and Remed, Untitled, Madrid, Spain, 2009

Ornament and Order

Containing five key members, 3TTMan, Eltono, Nano 4814, Remed, and Spok, the individuals within the group produced work which extends from the most apparently ‘artistic’ (such as a form of contemporary muralism – see Figure P.3) to the most seemingly ‘vandalistic’ (such as the ‘bombing’8 technique of traditional graffiti – see Figure P.4), working in what I will come to term the most consensual to the most agonistic styles of public ornamentation. They thus provide an almost perfect distillation of the Independent Public Art movement today and are used to move outward from concrete specificities to broader theoretical discussions. Moreover, these same five actors were embedded within a global network of Independent Public Artists which I argue functions akin to the ‘associated fraternities’ formed by medieval guilds (Sennett 2008: 60). These dense webs of relations not only helped me to gather numerous other informants within Madrid (such as the artists Nuria Mora, Daniel ‘San’ Muñoz, and Suso33), in Spain as a whole (such as the twins Pelucas and Liqen from Vigo, Sixe Paredes from Barcelona and Dems33 from Elche), as well as all around the globe (such as MOMO and the legendary Cap in New York, Los Contratistas in Nuevo Leon, the collectives Doma and Fase in Buenos Aires, and Gold Peg and Petro in London). What unites all these various individuals however, as all the various informants whose stories and practices have been incorporated into this text, was their equivalent and unconditional commitment to the practice of Independent Public Art. 8

Bombing is a technique in which an area is rapidly suffused with simple, quick images rather than more complex pieces. Quantity here is quality.

P.4  Nano4814, San, and others unknown, Untitled, Vigo, Spain, 2010

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P.5 Noviciado Nueve (and friends), Belvés, France, 2012

These were not part-time painters or hobbyists, not neophytes or novices. They may have embraced the passion of an amateur, the search for pleasure rather than gain that the enthusiast evinces, but these were actors whose commitment to autonomous aesthetic production in the public sphere came to supersede (as this book will here argue) the often quite divergent formal aesthetics they constructed. The group of individuals with whom I conducted my fieldwork were thus part of a tightly linked worldwide network of comparable practitioners, fulltime members of the global Independent Public Art world who engaged within it as an all-embracing way of life, who established a communal bond through their embedment within this visual regime. Yet, even as this is the case, the majority of the arguments made within this book still function for the vast majority of Independent Public Art seen on our city streets as a whole, for the multitude of acts which have been produced by part-time practitioners, by enthusiasts and devotees who may find other methods of sustaining themselves outside of the wider art world; they follow the formal, intentional, and ritual aspects of the discipline that are in many ways immutable, they follow the aesthetic and ethical characteristics of the practice which abide irrelevant of the level of expertise that the practitioner in question may possess. And they can thus reach out from the tangibility of local action to address more global concerns surrounding Independent Public Art, speaking not just for the group with whom I undertook my study but for the discourse as a whole. Located in Madrid for the majority of my research, my fieldwork did also take place further afield, travelling with my highly itinerant informants as they conducted

Preface

xxv

projects across the world. Journeying from Mallorca in Spain to Monterrey in Mexico, from New York to London and back again (as well as meeting artists from all over the world in Madrid itself – the studio my informants occupied providing a basecamp for countless visitors to the city), it was my informants’ reaction to space that became key to my study, their understanding of the various urban environments they inhabited that became indispensable to my understanding of their practices. Whilst there are of course crucial material divergences within the various cities they occupied (London and Madrid, to take a brief example, having highly variant artistic modus operandi due to the overabundance of CCTV in the former site, the highly permeable boundary between façade and street that is so common in the latter), what remained congruent was the obsession and fervour for the public sphere that all my informants displayed, a commitment to concrete action in the street, to physical performance in public space, which remained consistent wherever in the world they were. Rather than any specific location in itself then, the boundaries of the community examined within this text were delineated by practice rather than place, bounded by an understanding of space rather than space itself. It was a community of practice rather than a physically bound community that I was hence immersed within during my fieldwork (without suggesting that any community can be truly delimited by a circumscribed field), a multi-sited project in which I was rooted with specific people rather than within a specific place. The principal fieldsite relevant to this work – if any that is – could thus be argued to be ‘the street’ in the contemporary global city (or in the ‘alpha city’ as they have been called). The street was the place where the overwhelming majority of my fieldwork took place, where I would both watch and partake in my informants very public way of life, in their daily enacting of what they would term ‘street-life’ (I can only think Randy Crawford was to blame for this). And thus even whilst this focus on the street means I lose out on a huge amount of site-specific data which I collected throughout my fieldwork – losing out on discussing the intricacies of place which anthropology is a discipline so famed for – what I believe I gain is a more comprehensive understanding of Independent Public Art as a whole, a practice produced by highly cosmopolitan, highly itinerant social actors. Following James Clifford’s (1997) imperative to ‘focus on hybrid, cosmopolitan experiences as much as on rooted, native ones’ (ibid.: 24), this monograph will thus take our understanding of Independent Public Art away from many of the established and singular locations in which it is often examined and instead push into the more global, connected networks that this aesthetic discourse truly resides. Focussing on the work my informants produced in the public sphere itself, this text will thus concentrate on what I define as a practice of urban ornamentation, an aesthetic working through an equally adjunctive and decorative essence, one which can only exist amidst the dirt and noise of the street itself. Whilst my informants had numerous skills and worked in a multitude of visual arenas then (from design work and illustration to commercial muralism and contemporary art), these other, subsidiary practices will be set to one side within this book: although this could seem to in some way suspend my informants’ lives, to exclude many of its more ‘mundane’ aspects, this suspension will enable a clearer focus on the way

xxvi Ornament and Order

the images they produced in the public sphere themselves function, giving us the depth to examine them as both material deposit and ephemeral trace, as objects within a latent capacity to attract and hold our attention. As such, issues such as the (now waning) interest in ‘street-art’ from the conventional art-market, or the (still growing) popularity of ‘street-art’ guided tours will be purposefully disregarded within this text: both of these markets (the artistic as much as the touristic) are governed by forces which flow beyond the agency of my informants themselves, forces which may in fact often run contrary to the wishes of the individuals in question. And thus question of whether or not artists can be ‘blamed’ for gentrifying low-income or industrial areas of the city then (Zukin 1993),9 the subject of whether or not they can be labelled as the archetypal post-Fordist workers due to their fluid working status (Gielen 2009), are issues which I have no desire to directly address within this book. Rather than flowing directly toward the relationship between capital and culture (a relationship which I would suggest the inalienable products of Independent Public Art are inherently disconnected from),10 it is the continued need to produce this form of work irrelevant of base financial gain (and often at considerable cost and danger to the actor themselves) that I am more interested in here exploring, a desire, an addiction, which cannot be explained by the force of the market alone.11 Whilst the various ethical paths my informants were often forced to navigate will be at points examined then, it is the factor that demarcated them as a coherent social group – their practices of urban ornamentation – which will be the main focus of this text, their insurgent production in the public sphere which will be at the nucleus of all that follows.

9

Gentrification is an issue which is becoming more present within the Independent Public Art world, muralism often being utilized by local government or other such organizations to boost the perceived allure of an area. However, it seems that in many cases, this overt push toward utilizing Independent Public Art for gentrification is being widely noted, and critiqued. In fact, in two recent cases in London and Athens (see http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/aug/06/olympic-legacy-streetart-graffiti-fury and http://blog.vandalog.com/2013/08/a-street-art-festival-in-athensabout-athens-with-no-artists-from-athens/) the clearly instrumental agenda of the organizations involved has become all too visible and thus backfired upon them. 10 Of course, and quite famously, many works produced on the street by artists such as Banksy and Faile have been physically removed from their sites to be latterly sold in auction houses around the world. Yet whilst these street removals are in themselves often illegal, more significantly the artist or artists in question gain no direct financial reward for the entrance of these objects into the wider art market (and as such, any works removed from the street are never officially authenticated). Independent Public Artists may often choose to enter the market then (and quite often under different names), yet their Independent Public Art in itself must always be considered an inalienable product. 11 As Boris Groys (2010) has convincingly argued: ‘There is no doubt that in the context of a contemporary civilization more or less completely dominated by the market, everything can be interpreted as an effect of market forces in one way or another. For this reason, the value of such an interpretation is null, for an explanation of everything remains unable to explain anything in particular […] Art was made before the emergence of capitalism and the art market, and will be made after they disappear’ (ibid.: 17–18).

Preface xxvii

P.6 Noviciado Nueve, Madrid, Spain, 2012

Rather than the traditional focus on themes of vandalism and art, gangs and pollution, this study will present two central (and eponymous) arguments: In the first section of the book – entitled Ornament – I aim to take very seriously the suggestion by the architectural theorist Jonathan Hill (2006) that ‘[g]raffiti and sgraffito ornament a building’, that graffiti is in fact ‘additive rather than reductive’ (ibid.: 176): As artefacts which are both adjunctive and decorative – the technical prerequisites of all ornamentation – Independent Public Art will be judged to be archetypically ornamental, a factor which not only bestows upon it an equivalent power and precarity, but which places it within the wider debate (and wider anxiety) over ornament in the architectural canon as a whole. Examining the meanings my informants ascribe to their images as well as the communicative schemata emerging out of their very form, the practices will be split into two further subdivisions (termed Consensual and Agonistic Ornamentation), subsets which will come to reflect two quite distinct politico-aesthetic responses to the city itself, which focus on the discursive potentialities of these figural artefacts. In the second section of the book – entitled Order – it will be the immaterial residue of my informants’ spatial acts (rather than the material remnants), the explicitly performative, practice-based elements of their aesthetic production which will be examined. The section will thus move away from notions of ‘meaning’ examined in the preceding chapters and attempt to track how my informants’ cultural production comes to both reflect and actively structure their moral and social worlds. As practices which are embedded within such issues as formality, performativity, traditionality, and play, the social and moral chaos they apparently present will be interpreted as a set of highly framed, orthopraxic gestures, ritual acts in which commitment to the group envelope is physically instantiated, engraved onto the skin of the city. It is hence Independent Public

xxviii Ornament and Order

Art as a system of communication and a system of action, its meaning and its practice I intend on examining within this text. Utilising both ethnographic and critical tools, employing artefactual case studies and fieldwork vignettes, it is an aesthetic which both encodes symbolic propositions about the world as well as intends to change the world itself that we will explore, an aesthetic which is both ornament and order at the same time.

Introduction

It transforms order into ornament, the cosmos into a cosmetic. Jacques Derrida

The actual order of things is precisely what “popular” tactics turn to their own ends […] Though elsewhere it is exploited by a dominant power or simply denied by an ideological discourse, here order is tricked by an art. Michel de Certeau

The Leake Street Classicist On the morning of 1 April 2011, the architect Francis Terry (son of Prince Charles’s neo-classicist of choice and chief architect for the renovation of 10 Downing Street, Quinlan Terry), entered the ‘unfamiliar territory of “Banksy’s Tunnel” in London’s Leake Street’ to perform what could quite conceivably appear to have been an April Fool’s hoax (Art Below 2011).1 ‘Using’, as the press release continued, ‘his knowledge of Renaissance ornament and proportion’, Terry spent the ‘whole day treating the graffitied walls as a classical façade’, attempting ‘to bring harmony and order to the chaos and confusion’ that pervaded the space (ibid.). Alongside the BBC News crew who appeared to ‘capture the work in progress’, Ben Moore (founder of the organization Art Below who had commissioned the work), declared the scene to be ‘wonderfully ironic – Classicists are usually seen as being quaint and conservative, and the graffiti world is the polar opposite but somehow by Francis Terry doing a piece in the tunnel [it] ends up being the most revolutionary act of all’ (ibid.).

1

What is termed ‘Banksy’s Tunnel’ is the original site of the ‘Can’s Festival’ of 2008. Please see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btm6Zq2E9OI for a video of Terry’s installation.

I.1 and I.2  The Leake Street Classicist, London, England, 2011

Introduction

3

In its charming hue of (concrete) grey,2 Terry’s renegade mural (or perhaps his traditionalist trompe l’oeil), reinstated what was a manifestly moral3 order within the tunnel, an ornament attempting to counter the debauched mayhem that surrounded it. It presented a neo-classical critique of what was deemed a pollutive, lawless visuality, an ornamental construction implicitly deriding (and yet, as we will see, implicitly fearing) the scopic order that it expunged. Not only deeply condescending of course – the first time, as the press release clarified, that ‘a qualified chartered architect has done “a piece” in the Leake Street Tunnel’ (Art Below 2011), a work produced with the explicit desire (as noted in the BBC interview) to rehabilitate the minds and hearts of the graffiti artists who would encounter it – the painting completed by the Leake Street Classicist will in fact here be seen to be inadvertently illuminating. It will be seen to allude toward the irrevocably intertwined relationship between ornament and order, between ethics and aesthetics, between our material and social worlds; it will be seen to allude to the inherently ornamental status of all Independent Public Art itself (as equivalently ornamental as Terry’s neo-classical representation), toward the phobia and unease that these insurgent ornaments bring forth (and thus the common necessity for their destruction). And, as such, the ‘revolutionary act’ that Terry provides us with will not only serve as a prime example of the Latourian iconoclash which surrounds the aesthetic we will here be examining – the fact that images are continually involved in the destruction of other images, yet that this very destruction only gives rise to yet more of them – but can act as the perfect starting point for our examination of the convolved relationship between ornament and order, the binary pairing which will come to frame this work as a whole, the binary pairing held within what Jacques Derrida would call a parergonic embrace.

An Architectonic Public Ornament and order are inextricably linked. Not only counterparts for thousands of years within the annals of architectural history (from Vitruvius to Alberti, from Sullivan to Venturi and Scott Brown), the words themselves, as the philosopher and metaphysician Ananda Coomaraswamy has argued (1939), are in fact etymologically coupled through the Greek word kosmos: primarily meaning ‘“order” […] with reference to the due order or arrangement of things’, and, secondarily, denoting ‘“ornament”, whether of horses, women, men, or speech’ (ibid.: 380). This intertwined derivation can be understood to lead to a number of other logical corollaries; the original basis of Greek architectural terminology, the ‘designation of the Doric etc. “orders” […] the connection between an original “order” and a later 2

As opposed to the polychromatic order which Gottfried Semper (2004 [1863]) suggested that classical architecture was subject to, ‘ancient stucco’, as he says, being ‘inconceivable apart from painting’, acting as the base for ‘wall decorations and monumental polychromy’ (ibid.: 384). 3 ‘The concurrence here of the laws of art with those of morals, despite their logical distinction, is remarkable’ (Coomaraswamy 1939: 381).

4

Ornament and Order

“ornament”’ (ibid.: 380); the significance of the term the ‘conferring of an order’ – such as a knighthood, an OBE etc. – or a ‘decoration’ by another name (ibid.: 378); the metaphor of ‘putting one’s hair in order’ – to adorn, to beautify it – a ‘matter’, as he continues, of an innate ‘decorum’ (ibid.: 380); the link between the Sanskrit term for ornament, aram (denoting ‘preparedness, ability, suitability, fitness’), and its usage in reference ‘to the due ordering of the sacrifice, rather than to its adornment (ibid.: 377). What we thus have is a whole host of associations that Coomarawamy teases out in an attempt to disparage the ‘aesthetic’ view of art, to separate the confusion between the ‘(objective) beauty of order and the (subjectively) pleasant’ (ibid.: 381–2). Ornamentation, decoration4, terms that are most often (and most often mistakenly) understood as something ‘adventitious or luxurious, added to their utilities but not essential to their efficacy’, must therefore be seen to have originally implied a completion or fulfillment of the artifact or other object in question […] to “decorate” an object or person originally meant to endow the object or person with its or his “necessary accidents”, with a view to proper operation; […] the aesthetic senses of the words are secondary to their practical connotation; whatever was originally necessary for the completion of anything, and thus proper to it, naturally giving pleasure to the user (ibid.: 376).

Decoration was thus here conceived as having classically denoted an order of the most literal kind, not something disconnected, additional, or purely ‘aesthetic’ (in the anaesthetizing sense, following Susan Buck-Morss), not something produced ‘from an intention to please’, but from an intention towards ‘utility’, intelligibility, ‘essence’, through completion, communication, orderliness (ibid.: 381–2). Not only do we have the established etymological links between ornament and order however, there is also, as Gottfried Semper explained (1856), a deep connection between ornament and the creation of a larger, divine harmony, the ‘rich and precise Hellenic language’ connecting adornment to the ‘highest law of nature and world order’, connecting it to the creation of a sacred order (Semper in Mahall and Serbest 2009: 39). As Antoine Picon (2003) has gone on to suggest, prior to the 18th century, ornament, working in a parallel modality to both ‘order’ and ‘proportion’, was understood to have expressed ‘the fundamental regularity of the universe, and above all, its fecundity’ (ibid.: 298); having no ‘connotation of gratuity’, of supplementarity, it ‘sprang from necessity’, giving evidence of both the ‘creativity and the beauty of the cosmic order’ (ibid.: 298). Much like John Ruskin’s ornamental ideal, his ornamental morality, ornament was understood as a ‘reflective emblem, representing a divinely ordered natural world and the fundamental tenets of 4

The difference between ornamentation and decoration is a slightly thorny issue. Whilst David Brett (2005) argues that ornament can be understood as ‘applied decoration, especially of the three-dimensional kind such as we find in architecture, but also on clothing and many other locations’ (ibid.: 4), James Trilling (2003) suggests that ornament is ‘decoration in which the visual pleasure of form significantly outweighs the communicative value of content’ (ibid.: 23). I remain more comfortable with the generality of the former statement than the specificity of the latter one.

Introduction

5

Christian doctrine’ (Schafter 2003: 4). It was considered to be a deeply ethical, deeply spiritual issue, ornament as a literal ‘expression of man’s delight in God’s work’, as a manifestation of ‘divine laws’ – the laws of the ‘Ten Commandments’ rather than those of the ‘five orders’ (Ruskin 1868: 259). Going beyond the etymological link between ornament and order , beyond its relation to the spiritual or mystical, what has also been commonly argued is the strength of relationship between ornamentation and our very cognitive ways of being: as Mary Carruthers has suggested (2000), ornament, in its use within Roman rhetoric, was used to ‘slow us down, make us concentrate, [to] set up moments of meditation – and so help us to think and remember’, an ‘emotionally affective’ form of practice which functioned through the ordering of our cognitive procedures (ibid.: 131–2). By ‘putting the mind in play’, ornament thus acted not merely as a ‘frill’ but played the ‘essential role of catching the attention of a reader and orienting his/her cogitative procedures […] acting as a marker on the text’s “surface” of matters that might especially require attention, concentration’ (ibid.: 122). Even more significantly perhaps, and as Ernst Gombrich famously argued in his seminal work The Sense of Order (1984 [1979]), ornament could be seen as a manifestation of a deeply embedded psychological urge to classify and regulate, an urge to order one’s surroundings, a compulsion which he believed to be ‘deeply rooted in man’s biological heritage’ (Gombrich 1979: 60): within the struggle for existence, organisms thus ‘developed a sense of order not because their environment was generally orderly but rather because perception requires a framework against which to plot deviations from regularity’ (ibid.: xii), the mind necessitating the formation of an equilibrium between intricacy and simplicity, a structured balance amidst the chaos in which it existed. For Gombrich, therefore, humankind’s innate need to create harmony fashioned both a material, architectonic order, as well as an immaterial, social one. It generated a state through which visual forms could serve as both signs of, and actually engender, a particular type of societal structure, through which the ‘close interaction between social and aesthetic hierarchies’ could become visibly manifest (ibid.: 33). In the context of Madrid, Jesus Escobar’s investigation into the most celebrated and principal public square in the capital, The Plaza Mayor and the Shaping of Baroque Madrid (2003), further binds together our key themes of ornament and order. Within his architectonic and historical account of the very fabrication of the city, he claims that policia (a term generally related to urban aesthetics but often ‘directly evocative of the political mechanisms by which a state of good government can be attained’ [Escobar 2004: 367]), and ornatto (a term translated ‘as embellishment […] of visual objects as well as speech’ [ibid.: 368]), were the critical concepts emerging within 16th-century Spanish political literature on public space, the key ideologies that imbued the burgeoning planning policies of the emergent capital. The terms were, as he reveals, ‘used consistently in the era to give shape to an urban vision of Madrid’ (Escobar 2003: 202), a vision within which their coupling was sustained through an insistence on built form as a mode of bodily regulation, on built form as a practice shaping a wider social body.

I.3 Eltono, Untitled, Beijing, China, 2012

Introduction

7

As Escobar goes on to explain, however, ‘the use of the term ornatto by sixteenthcentury Spaniards’ – a word, as detailed above, typically denoting decoration and beautification – was in fact equally understood through a ‘sense of creating order as well as embellishing the city’ (ibid.: 204). For instance, as Escobar continues, ‘in 1544, Prince Philip argued the importance of opening a new street from the Alcazar to the center of Madrid claiming that “it [serves the] ornatto of this town and [is] a public work”’ (ibid.: 203), a use of the term stressing structural cohesion rather than aggrandizing enhancement. In a similar way, policia, understood in more robust terms as civility, was likewise used to express ‘the pursuit of grandeur, or authority, in urban form’: In some instances, as when Sotomayor [the corregidor, or chief magistrate of Madrid] writes that demolishing a block of buildings will serve the “ornatto and policia” of the Plaza Mayor, the term seems to be equated with a sense of formal order. Yet when he claims an enlarged bread market will serve the “good governance and policia” of Madrid, policia, is more correctly equated with a notion of social order that is achieved by a well-organized polity (ibid.: 204).

Entirely intermeshed with one other then, able to both substitute and reinforce its accomplice, policia and ornatto functioned quite clearly as two parts of a whole, as principles which could both reflect and uphold one another. Through their material enaction, the topography of Madrid became permeated with what Escobar (2004) terms the principles of ‘good government’, providing a physical and metaphorical representation of the ‘beneficence of the king’ (ibid.: 369). The very structure of the city, its architectonic ornamentation (such as seen within the ‘uniformity of the architectural elevations in the Plaza Mayor’), was hence able to advance ‘the Hapsburg ideological message of political order in spatial terms’ (Escobar 2003: 205), policia and ornatto coming to establish an immaterial social order through a materially formal one. Of course, the entangled relationship between ornament and order can be traced back much further in the historical record than the Spanish Renaissance, being an attachment most prominently celebrated during the era of the Greek city-states.5 Often explored through the central presence of the agora (a term literally translated as to gather together or place of assembly) – a site which contained ‘few visual barriers between events occurring at the same time’, a site in which one ‘did not experience physical compartmentalization’ (Sennett 1998: 20) and could thus experience synoikismos (an incorporation of social groups into a cohesive civic union) – this locale is believed to have refined and shaped the potential for free argument and debate within ancient Greek society as a whole, a space which did not simply reflect the democratic ideal, but in fact physically enabled its formation. It was thus the ‘surfaces and the volume of the agora’ 5

As Josef Chytry has argued however (2004), the Eurocentric obsession with Ancient Greece (that I myself can be seen to be beholden to) eschews many other locations where civic space and civic justice are intertwined, namely sites such as Islamic Andalusia (al-Andalus), the Ancient Mexican city-states, and the ‘cosmic-states’ of ‘classical Hindu–Buddhist kingdoms in south and southeast Asia’ (ibid.: 102).

8

Ornament and Order

themselves that fostered the notion of ‘participatory democracy’ (Sennett 1994: 55), promoting a notion of simultaneity, a ‘tolerance of difference’ which stimulated citizens ‘to move beyond their personal concerns and acknowledge the presence and needs of others’ (Sennett 1999: 68). Contrary to the emphasis placed on rhetoric within the theatres of Ancient Greece, where spectators would passively imbibe the words of a solitary orator, the agora’s open, orthogonal design and exposed columns meant that society’s troubles, as Andy Merrifield continues (1996), could be ‘confronted full in the face, in the public light of day’, it meant that they could be ‘argued about from different perspectives, thought through, and contested’ (ibid.: 58). The ornamental colonnades within the agora were hence much more than simple load bearing structures, much more than stanchions for mere reinforcement and stability; they were symbolic, concrete, rhythmical, and functional expressions of balance within society as a whole, ornamental devices replicating and reinforcing the strength of the demos. Whilst the agora provided an open forum for debate, a centre for mercantile, political, and judicial affairs in Ancient Greece, its complementary (or perhaps contrary) zone was that of the acropolis, a site that served mainly a militarily defensive and spiritual purpose. This was a location habitually situated on high ground (compared to the flat of the agora), a geographic division separating human and divine spaces, democratic and aristocratic zones. The numerous temples which would be positioned amidst the acropolis also used a quite divergent form of ornamental design to that used within the agora, a more overtly flamboyant model of embellishment. Yet what would seem from a formal sense as something more ostentatious, something done for reasons of ‘pure’ beauty, can in fact be argued to be nothing so (literally) superficial. George Hersey, in his study The Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture (1988), suggests that the ornamentation of Greek temples ‘represented the remains of trophies of sacrifice’, decorative forms signifying ‘reconstitutions or reformations of the remains into images of victims’ (ibid.: 45). Following the Renaissance scholar and architect Francesco di Giorgio’s contention that the Greek columns and colonnades contained the remains of enemy prisoners, Hersey goes on to discuss the likelihood that living people themselves may have been fastened to the colonnades of the temple as sacrificial donations (ibid.: 125), captured warriors being ‘forced into service as architectural supports’ (ibid.: 107). One can then come to understand the freestanding columns prevalent throughout the Ancient Greek and Roman landscape (built to commemorate military victories as well as ancestral justice against treachery) as acting as ‘“hidden” or metaphorical colossal statues wrapped in bindings’ (ibid.: 126), as visually condensed caryatids or telamons, architectonic forms standing as ‘trophies of the battle against civil disorder’ (ibid.: 126).6 6

Indeed, it has even been argued that the famous Parthenon frieze, rather than depicting a festal procession as often thought, in fact portrays the sacrifice of the daughters of the Athenian king, Erechtheus (the key foundation myth of Athena). As Joan B. Connelly has explained (1996), the very name ‘Parthenon’ can be seen to have emerged not from Athena’s epithet Parthenos, but from the term ‘the maidens’ quarters’, or the ‘place of the maidens’ (in reference to the sacrificed virgins), further

I.4  San (Daniel Muñoz), Untitled, Catania, Italy, 2010

10

Ornament and Order

The association between oblation and ornament can hence be grasped to have been implicit within the Ancient Greek era, what Hersey (1988) terms as ‘stylography’, literally ‘teaching or demonstrating via columns’ (ibid.: 126), grasped as a fundamental rudiment of architectural construction. Both within the agora and the acropolis, amidst both civil and religious realms, ornamentation was hence understood as an influential mode of social practice, as perhaps the key means of creating order, of producing citizens (both spatially and materially) through the physical body of the city. Ancient Greek society was thus able to develop not simply as ‘a religious culture’, but as an ‘architectonic public’, a public formed and informed by its physical milieu (Murphy in Chytry 2004: 85), a public connected through an architectural formation of kosmos.

To Fix and Unsettle Borders The ground I am trying to set in place, the basic starting point from which I hope to continue this study is now, I hope, slightly clearer. What I want to re-affirm at the very beginning of this work is the power of ornament to not simply reflect but to create order, the power of the built environment to produce social as much as structural formations. Whether taking on repressive or emancipative configurations (such as the Haussmannization of Paris or within Jeremy Bentham’s infamous panoptican in the former case, within Yona Friedman’s Ville Spatiale or Ebenezer Howard’s garden-city in the latter), it is the power of the material body of the city to effect the material body of the person that I mean to maintain here, the status of ornament not only as something good to think with, but as something that effects the very way we think in itself. Our built environment will therefore be understood ‘not simply to involve argument but to be, at bottom, about argument’, to both ‘enable and constrain’ it, to mould both ‘the production and reception of social discourse’ (Fleming 1998: 147–8). And the ornamentation of our urban realms will be understood to both evidence and engender a particular order, to not simply contain a ‘second-order significance as a mere reflection of some other more important determinant’, but to have both ‘agentive and transformative’ abilities (Pinney 2002: 134–5), an ability not only to remodel our physical environment, but to reconstruct our understanding of the world itself.7

demonstrating, as she continues, the ‘relationship between mythical tombs and historical temples’ (ibid.: 76). 7 Even as our contemporary cities megalopolises have come increasingly to be formed and shaped through the power of finance and privatization then (the ‘re-conquest of the city by commodity and capital’ as Erik Swyngedouw and Maria Kaïka term it [2003: 12]) a top down, hegemonic imposition which seeks compliance over defiance, passive rather than active citizens, the global uprisings that we have over the last few years in Tahir Square in Cairo and Wall Street in New York, on Avenue Habib Bourguiba in Tunis and Puerto del Sol in Madrid, can only reinstate the potential of the city to act as a site of resistance, a site of conflict and debate in which intimations of other worlds can be detected.

Introduction

11

Through focusing upon the ornamentation and ordering of the city from a grassroots8 rather than institutional standpoint however, focusing on a form of architectural appropriation ‘assumed by civil or “informal” actors’, social actors ‘coming from outside the official institutionalised domain of urban planning and urban politics’, it is the ‘organic evolutions’ that these groups produce that will now be followed, the evolutions which come to embody a ‘different notion of “urbanity” from that which is evident in planned developments’ (Groth and Corijn 2005: 506). Rather than examining the hegemonic impositions of order as undertaken by individuals such as the Terry’s (both father and son), it is a practice which comes to question and subvert ‘the conventions, codes and “laws” of architecture’ (Hill 1998a: 36) that I now aim to follow, a mode of ‘illegal architecture’, a civic practice that functions through the ‘public domain of the street rather than the private realm of a familiar building site’ (ibid.: 11). Examining a popular aesthetic practice which comes to insert itself into ‘contested territorialized spaces’ (Spyer 2008: 525), a border aesthetic that inhabits a place ‘at authority’s edge’ (ibid.: 546), in which pleasure is ‘derived from the mis-use of form’ (Hill 1998a: 48) we will then find a modern practice of epigraphy which is inseparable from the modern polis, both physically ingrained onto its body and enmeshed within its very idea. Whilst these practices may be of what at first seems a transgressive nature, they will come to be seen to flow from the same civic essence as many of their more institutional relatives, to contain a set of ethico-aesthetic principles which link to wider notions of the ‘good’ city as well as to the specific complexities of the group dynamic itself. And it is thus an 8



Or what the artist Akay would call the ‘mud-level’.

I.5  Akim One, Untitled, Odessa, Ukraine, 2013

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ethnography of a group of ‘insurgent architects’ that will now be undertaken, a group who attempt to generate ‘alternative visions as to what might be possible’, who ‘desire, think and dream of difference’ (Harvey 2000: 237). It is an exploration of a literally marginal aesthetic, an insurgent architecture9 which can come to ‘fix and unsettle borders’ (Spyer 1998: 3), a modern form of parietal writing ever present within our contemporary cities and streets.

9

Whilst there are a number of artists within the Independent Public Art sphere whose work commonly involves the construction of built architecture (such as Akay and Adams & E.B.Itso amongst others), I will be bypassing this style of practice in order to concentrate on the more habitual material forms which emerge from this aesthetic milieu. Nevertheless, and as I will go on to argue in the next chapter, as all the works discussed here are considered to be architectural ornamentation, all their producers will be seen as insurgent architects.

Part I Ornament

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1 Ornament

The man of our times who daubs the walls with erotic symbols to satisfy an inner urge is a criminal or degenerate […] With children it is a natural phenomenon: their first artistic expression is to scrawl on the walls erotic symbols. But what is natural to the Papuan and the child is a symptom of degeneration in the modern man. Adolf Loos

[W]e are all of us criminals by instinct. It is part of our very nature […] If we act in defiance of custom or reinterpret custom to suit our private convenience we commit a crime; yet all creativity, whether it is the work of the artist or the scholar or even of the politician, contains within it a deep-rooted hostility to the system as it is. On that account creativity is mad, it is criminal, but it is also divine. Human society would have died out long ago if it were not for the fact that there have always been inspired individuals who were prepared to break the rules. Edmund Leach

Los Choquitos y los Carteles Nano’s choquitos, or ‘little squids’, are all over Madrid. Not just Madrid in fact, they’re plastered over every place he visits. Remnants of himself on the walls of the city. Manifest traces of his personhood materially covering the world. These plump, innocent looking cephalopods, floating around the metropolis, spraying the city with their dense, sepia ink. When I think of Nano they’re one of the first things to come to mind. An image of him leaning on his bike, surreptitiously inscribing his mark on to the wall, a smooth flowing movement of his arm and like magic they appear. ‘I just need to do it,’ he’d say, never feeling able to fully explicate why, ‘even when I work with bigger institutions, in galleries or inside, I just feel this constant need to get back to the street and to bombing … It’s the same feeling I give everything,

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1.1  Nano at work, Madrid, Spain, 2009

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a tag,1 an installation, whatever. Never for self-promotion, but for self-expression’. So there they sit, his choquitos, amongst the grime and coarseness of the stone, ‘like a metaphor for the writer in the street’ he once said; ‘I was thinking about the way they both moved around quietly at night, the ink they both use, it just seemed like the perfect symbol’. There was a huge choquito I remember seeing the day I arrived to meet Nano in Berlin, a massive bright orange squid spurting black ink all over the walls and the surrounding imagery. I was searching for him and Eltono, the battery on my phone had died, I was without a map and only had the address of the warehouse where they were working and some pretty appalling German. On seeing the image I remember feeling a visceral relief, almost as if I’d seen Nano himself.2 It meant simply that he couldn’t be too far off, that at the very least he had been there previously … Nano was always crafting these choquitos, painting them everywhere he went. In phone boxes and on lampposts. In doorways and on shop-grills. In underground tunnels and on 12th-storey window ledges. Always on something. Always working with the physical medium at hand. Working around the tags, the signs, the dirt, the contours of the surface, with the shapes and the form of the city.3 1

A stylized written signature generally produced in one colour with a marker or spray paint. 2 For more on these notions of artefactual agency and animacy, see Schacter 2008. 3 As much as Nano’s choquitos were a key part of his creative oeuvre, perhaps the most common element in his public, spatial production, they must be understood as just one aspect of what is an extensive aesthetic arsenal, one including large scale murals, small scale tags, complex installations, traditional paintings, warped sculptures, handmade fanzines, and absolutely everything else.

1.2 Nano, Untitled (Choquito), Madrid, Spain, 2007

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You’d turn around and he would have disappeared, only to then spot him lagging behind in a doorway marking up the final arrow or filling in the last bit of ink. A final flourish with the implement at hand (whether a marker, a can, a key), and then an immediate departure from the scene. 1.3 3TTMan, Untitled (Carteles) [detail], Madrid, Spain, 2008

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With 3TTMan4 it’s the carteles that first spring to mind,5 these unmissable, uncompromising, polychromatic collages which he would produce in the very centre of the city. On Gran Via, on San Bernado, huge 20-foot-long productions lining the key arteries of the city, works formed on top of the densely packed palimpsests that were the (semi-legal) bill-posters which consumed nearly every single vacant or neglected edifice in the city. For 3TTMan, it was considered to be his first ‘successful’ venture in the street, by no means his earliest artistic foray into this arena, but the first project he thought really connected, that he was fully content with. Unlike Nano – whose City-Lights project (see Plate 4) had in fact been a huge inspiration for 3TTMan in his search for a new way method of production in the city – 3TTMan disliked working directly on the surface of the city’s walls (‘the stone is good’ he’d say, ‘it doesn’t make sense for me to work there’), his previous works thus for the most part having been produced on what is termed street-furniture, on traffic signs, recycling containers, concrete bollards and the like. It was not that he disliked other forms of illicit visual production that worked directly onto the street, simply for him it did not feel like the right surface for his work.6 In coming to use the bill-posters as a site of production,7 however, an already present addition to the city, an already present canvas to be re-worked in situ, 3TTMan managed to find a site he felt fully liberated to work upon. He would thus play with both the words and the imagery, destabilizing and challenging them, trying to make people enjoy rather than just disdain or ignore the posters. It was not simply a project aimed at questioning notions of consumption and consumerism that 3TTMan aimed to produce here, it wasn’t a direct form of ‘adbusting’ or ‘culture-jamming’ however; the work on the carteles was about taking a form of communication ‘imposed to your eyes’, something outside the field of relationality, and turning it into something you could ‘connect to’, something that you could ‘think about in a more interesting way’. As he once told me, ‘I just want to make the people who pass by laugh, to turn the carteles into something you can interact with, to put some life back into the space’. It was thus all ‘about the medium and the location’ for 3TTMan, all about playing with what was at hand; it was about working with, détourning the very materiality of the city. 4 This pseudonym, meaning three-headed man (Trois-Tête-Man), also acts as an almost omnipresent image within 3TTMan’s public work. Meant to suggest the manifold possibilities of every situation (or as he describes it, ‘three ways of thinking in the same body’), it works against the dichotomy of good-bad and instead suggests a more equivocal state. 5 As previously said with Nano’s choquitos, please see the carteles as just one element of 3TTMan’s all-embracing oeuvre. 6 And not that this meant he never worked on this particular plane, recently finding ways to work around that specific prohibition; for example, painting upon the temporary breezeblock barriers that were used to prevent access to abandoned buildings, working within deserted building sites, on sheet-metal, and, of late, working by adding cement to a wall (again always of an abandoned building, or one in a state of deep disrepair) and then carving away an image from that newly lain surface (see the image on the front cover as an example). 7 Or ‘postproduction’ as Nicolas Bourriaud (2002) would perhaps term it.

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1.4 3TTMan, Untitled (Carteles), Madrid, Spain, 2010

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Adjunctive and Decorative Be it Nano’s choquitos or 3TTMan’s work on the carteles (or, for that matter, Eltono’s geometric designs [see Plate 1, alongside the artist MOMO], Remed’s mystical murals [see Plate 5], or Spok’s multilayered street tags [see Plate 8]), these unequivocally spatial works existed within the medium of the street, amidst the dirt, the cacophony, the very concreteness of the city’s walls. They were not produced on a neutral surface (on a pristine canvas or from moulded clay), not presented on a discrete tabula rasa (formed from scratch, or ex nihilo). They were not created within a separated studio space (within a disconnected, insular, private zone) nor within a detached white cube (within the ‘disinterested’, passive milieu of the gallery). These material acts were engraved onto the very surface of the city, scraped onto previously constructed forms. And, in this way, these works thus comply quite succinctly with the first part of the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of ornament, functioning as an ‘accessory or adjunct’ – a secondary element on a primary surface, an auxiliary element on a customarily architectural plane. As ‘sgraffito’ (etymologically originating from the Italian graffio, a ‘little scratch’), these objects can only be truly apprehended in connection to what they were scratched upon, always, by their innate status, being produced upon, within, or fixed to a secondary surface. They thus exist as a literal mura rasa, a scraped or scratched wall, the ‘what’ of the image (in this case either Nano’s choquitos or 3TTMan’s collages), being ‘steered by the how in which it transmits

Ornament

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its message’ (Belting 2005: 304), through their being scored onto an architectural body (in the former case) or a palimpsestic commercial residue (in the latter). To ornament, as Oleg Grabar has suggested (1992), the ‘act of putting something on something else’ – rather than a term attempting to describe the specific ‘nature of what is put’ (ibid.: 22) – can thus here be seen to be exactly borne out. These ‘sgraffitos’ (whether the most elementary tag or the most complex mural, whether a kinetic installation or a wheat-paste poster), are all material forms placed upon supplementary surfaces, and must therefore be primarily understood through their additional, subsidiary nature. Consequently, what I will first be arguing within this chapter is that all my informant’s public aesthetic production must be understood to be fundamentally ornamental in this adjunctive sense, they are works which only exist through the body of a secondary medium and are hence steered, activated though the ‘how’ of the city itself. Furthermore, be it again Nano’s choquitos or 3TTMan’s carteles (or for that matter 3TTMan’s further work on concrete [see front cover], Nano’s City-Lights project [see Plate 4], Eltono’s confetti graffiti [see Plate 2], Remed’s polychromatic calligraphy [see Plate 6], or Spok’s futuristic, comedic murals [see Plate 7]), these now unambiguously adjunctive artefacts all functioned within the sphere of the decorative, of the beautiful, within the realm of what Brett (2005) has termed ‘visual pleasure’.8 Working thorough both a ‘public’ and yet simultaneously ‘intimate’ form of visual pleasure, a material sensuousness and playfulness which may act as a marker of ‘social recognition, perceptual satisfaction, psychological reward [or] erotic delight’ (Brett 2005: 4), these artefacts embraced the captivation and gratification that the figural admits, the enchantment that both the production and consumption of images provide. Whether in their most overtly aggressive or ‘vandalistic’ form – such as a throw-up,9 an acid etching (see Figure 1.5),10 or a ‘keyed’ insignia – or in their most apparently amicable or ‘decorative’ state – such as an elaborate mural, an abstract poster (see Figure 1.6), or a calligraphic message on a wall – all of these forms of cultural production were created within a complex tradition of visual dexterity and physical skill, containing a quite defined notion of aesthetic value and beauty at their core (even if a naturally subjective notion of beauty of course). Qualities such as ‘order or unity, proportion, scale, contrast, balance and rhythm’ (Moughtin, Oc and Tiesdell 1999: 3) – elements understood as the key principles of decorative production – were fundamental to these particular designs, basic tenets which determined their latter formation. Even if they were constituents that these practitioners sought to establish only so as to later defile, if they were used to form a contrast to, or a coherence with their architectural surround, the basic structure of all the public works my informants produced could only become visible through working with and through these underlying decorative principles, principles which formed distinct styles irrelevant of their perceived aesthetic acceptability. 8

Not in the scopophilic sense meant by Laura Mulvey (1975), however. Throw-ups are two colour tags (a fill-in and outline) in which the artists’ name is commonly contracted to two letters – Neko becoming KO, Jaime JA for example. 10 A tag or design produced onto glass with the use of an acid solution or paint stripper. 9

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1.5 Neko, Untitled [Acid Etching in process – etchings also visible in surround], Madrid, Spain, 2010

These were decorative criteria meant to make the object ‘selectable, meaningful, affective and complete’ (Brett 2005: 64), qualities meant to enliven the objects on which they appeared. And what I will thus secondly argue within this chapter is that the material practices described above were all produced specifically to ‘decorate, adorn, embellish [and/or] beautify’ their surfaces, and thus all comply quite faithfully with the second half of the OED’s definition of ornament. If we very briefly explore one of the most prominent examples of Independent Public Art then (and one often thought of as the most artless or ‘lowest’ by those outside of the discourse itself ), this being the commonplace practice of tagging, we can see how this oft described scribbled mess, this supposed territorial pissing, is in fact a doubly ornamental practice. Whilst its negative appreciation may be due to the innate lack of curatorial delimitation within Independent Public Art, the fact that the work of the neophyte and the expert is equivalently available to public view, one can find an almost perfect coherence between this notional pollution and what is deemed as more classical calligraphy. Emerging through both their formal as well as conceptual nature – through the crucial elements of unity, proportion, scale, contrast, balance and rhythm that are paramount in the production of every example (as we will see specifically in our case studies on pp. 78–86, 115–26), through the linguistic discourse and legendary masters that both groupings contain, through both practices attempt to supplement and embellish standardised typography – these two forms of “beautiful writing” (in their Greek etymology) can be seen to be fundamentally indistinguishable.

1.6 Momo, Untitled, London, England, 2008

1.7 Katsu, Untitled, New York, USA, 2011. Katsu’s figurative icon, produced in one pure movement, functions both as an image of a skull whilst also containing the word ‘tag’ hidden within it

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1.8 Spok, Untitled, Madrid, Spain, 2007

Yet as earlier suggested, tagging can not only be seen to be ornamental through its status as an adjunct and adornment of the letter form, it can so too be seen to be acting adjunctively upon its architectural surround as much as the word, the ‘what’ of the image – the written name – guided through both the ‘how’ of the letter as well as the ‘how’ of the city itself. It is thus doubly ornamental, embellishing typography and architecture, supplementing the word and the wall. And even though often deemed ‘incomprehensible’, as Grabar (1992) suggests almost all calligraphy is, these written texts can thus come to ‘elicit a very special response from viewers’, an

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‘emotional or psychological reaction’ (ibid.: 58–9) culminating either in pleasure or disdain, the pleasure of the aficionado or the disdain of the authorities (yet either response being a successful one of course). Just as calligraphy is understood as one of the archetypal forms of ornament, so too tagging must be seen in the same way, as an accessory and an embellishment to a secondary structure, as an adjunctive and decorative aesthetic.11 Not only tagging but all the illicit artefacts that are to be discussed within this text are thus, I would strongly argue, the perfect examples of the ‘applied decoration’ that Brett argues is the essence of ornament (ibid.: 4). They are decorative markings working through what Tom Phillips sees as the elementary foundations of all ornament: ‘form, line, tonality, material, disposition, [and] colour’ (Phillips 2003). They are ornaments which function as intermediaries through which ‘messages, signs, symbols, even probably representations are transmitted, consciously or not, in order to be most effectively communicated’ (Grabar 1992: 227), markings which act to transmit both ethical and aesthetic values. And this, in fact, is perhaps the key proposition that I aim to make within this work as a whole, or, at the very least, a proposition which will simultaneously order and enrich the rest of this work itself: whether constructive or destructive, these illicit artefacts are both decorative and adjunctive, they are accessories to a primary surface, forms of embellishment upon an ancillary plane, and hence objects with a fundamental ornamental status.12 This ornamental condition will not only 11

Grabar’s description of calligraphy (1992) can in fact be seen as a perfect description of tagging: ‘Letters can be modified, extended, looped, shortened, thickened; dots and diacritical marks float around letters rather than help fix their specificity […] while “correct” orthography is frequently violated for the sake of the composition’ (ibid.: 106). There cannot be a more consummate elucidation of the richness of tagging than this. 12 This connection between ornament and graffiti is also supported by a number of other theorists. Whilst I have noted Jonathan Hill’s argument on p. xxvii, the architect Robert Venturi (2004) has also suggested that ‘graffiti on ordinary – or, let’s say, “generic” buildings – can be richly decorative […] We finished a campus center at Princeton, the Frist Campus Center, and on the walls inside we have what we call “ornamental graffiti”. These are sayings by famous Princeton graduates – John Adams, Woodrow Wilson, people like that. That’s a form of graffiti that’s valid. There’s a tradition of classical buildings having words on their façades’. Whilst Venturi does not explain exactly why this ‘ornamental graffiti’ is more ‘valid’ than traditional graffiti (and I suspect he would backtrack from these plainly reactionary comments if pressed), the linkage between decoration, ornamentation and graffiti is made quite clear. In more overtly supportive terms, the renowned British artist Tom Phillips has claimed (in his ‘treatise’ on the subject), that ‘Ornament cannot die. It invents new projects and can spring up in unexpected areas. The most recent of these is the work, often ephemeral, of graffiti artists. Without reward (and often at the risk of the opposite) these prove the imperative of ornament for ornament’s sake […] The use of calligraphy in ornament is as old as writing itself and the graffiti artists of the late 20th century especially in New York brought calligraphic expression to a new height comparable with the best of Islamic letter-based art or mediaeval illumination’. Phillips judicious and provocative hypothesis (perhaps unsurprising from an artist who has often worked within the public sphere) will be, I hope, fully born out within this chapter.

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be argued to function for almost every single manifestation of Independent Public Art however,13 to serve to remove these practices from many of the traditional, and now hackneyed themes so oft brought up in their discussion; it will also come to expose many of the reasons behind the anxiety and fear these artefacts so often invoke, its ornamental condition being both a cure and a curse, both remedy and poison. What we must now briefly examine is thus the tortuous history and complex status of architectural ornamentation itself, the intractable imbroglio between ‘ornamentia’ and ‘ornaphobia’ as Frank Lloyd Wright put it (2005 [1932]: 348), a still existent battle whose exploration will give us a clearer understanding of both the entrenched potential and perception of Independent Public Art today.

The Principle Part of Architecture? The basic drive, the human need to decorate (as amply demonstrated by my informants, the term ‘addiction’ being the most commonly used expression), can be seen as an imperative common to man throughout history.14 Termed Kunstwollen by Alois Riegl, usually translated from the German as artistic will or will to form, this compulsion was understood as the ‘cognitive and psychological drive to give form to sensible material’, a drive through which ‘three dimensional items or states of affairs are projected in a two-dimensional plane on the basis of inscriptions or marks that resemble those kinds of items or states of affairs’ (Crowther 2002: 140). Rejecting formal aesthetic hierarchies and focusing on traditionally low forms of art such as folk-art and craftwork, Riegl claimed that man’s relationship to his sensible surroundings, his material making of the world, did not simply develop as a consequence of brute mechanical might or utilitarian technical solutions but instead indicated the presence of a greater ‘cultural force’. Decorative production (such as architectonic ornamentation), was thus believed to be a physical illustration of otherwise concealed social arrangements, the ‘overall characteristics which make-up a given work’s identity’ being both as much a ‘product of a specific cultural or historical trend’ as a ‘portrayal of the cumulative self-consciousness of that society’ (Ostrow 2001: 8). Though critics such as Erwin Panofsky claimed that Riegl’s methodology was in fact ‘untenable in the face of 13

Only in very rare cases is Independent Public Art not ornamental: the German duo Wermke and Leinkauf, for example, produce projects in which it is the feeling, rather than the product of graffiti that is the main focus of the work. More akin to performance art, there is often no artefactual residue and no ornament as such. However, one could argue that this form of bodily performance itself is ornamental: as a performance produced within and upon the body of the city (as Wermke and Leinkauf’s urban explorations can be seen to be), performances which would mean nothing without the city, they could be seen as highly ephemeral ornamental acts in which the body itself acts to ornament the city. 14 In fact Donald Brown includes the decoration of artefacts as one of his six ‘human universals’ alongside ‘gossip, lying, making metaphors, binary distinctions, and a fondness for sweets’ (Brett 2005: 6).

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any kind of reductive analytic logic’ (Elsner 2006: 760), Ernst Gombrich going as far as to warn of ‘the ideological potential for determinism and collectivism implicit in Kunstwollen’ (ibid.: 763),15 Riegl’s great accomplishment (as equally acknowledged by Gombrich) was to give significance back to ‘superficial’16 ornament and decoration, to enable a ‘bridging’ of the ‘aesthetic, cultural, and structural characteristics of any given object (not only high art but any form of craft) from any time with the broader cultural aesthetics of its time’ (ibid.: 750). Regardless of these critiques, Riegl’s famous claim that ‘the urge to decorate […] is one of the most elementary of human drives’ (1992 [1893]: 31) was, and still is, a widely accepted contention. Yet this acceptance did not stop it from also being a highly contentious pronouncement within the modernist era, not because of any questioning of the drive itself, but as to whether or not this compulsion could be deemed culturally or aesthetically acceptable within the modern age, whether to ornament was moral or criminal, purity or danger. Whilst John Ruskin famously claimed that ornamentation was ‘the principal part of architecture’ (1899 [1853]): 89), a manifestation of what he termed ‘divine laws’ (Ruskin 1868: 259), Adolf Loos, in his infamous essay Ornament and Crime (2002 [1908]), argued conflictingly (or perhaps, more correctly, correspondingly), that decoration was ‘primitive’, ‘regressive’, that ‘the evolution of culture’ was in fact ‘synonymous with the removal of ornamentation from objects of everyday use’ (ibid.: 30). For the followers of the South Kensington School, then, ornament was seen to be a pivotal tool for reflecting the ‘spirit of a culture’ (Sloboda 2008: 230), yet for the adherents of the International Style, the inclination toward decoration was, as Loos basely put it, ‘excrement’; he insisted (in what we could in fact say was more ornate terms than others had used), that ‘breaking oneself of this habit was as necessary as toilet training’ (Buck-Morss 1995: 14). The eventual victors in this modernist struggle over ornament are (ostensibly) clear to see, yet this has not stopped its re-emergence and the attendant renewal of its vilification within contemporary architectural practice. Thus while architects such as Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron have attempted a contemporary ornamental renewal, forming a new style of sgraffito embellishment in ‘direct critique of Loos’ unadorned modernism’ (Hill 2006: 177), the art critic and historian Hal Foster has reengaged with the Loosian perspective (2002), claiming that with the return to prominence of ‘design’ (a quality that is ‘all image and no interiority’ [ibid.: 25]), the ‘aesthetic 15 As Jaś Elsner notes (2006), quoting Gombrich, ‘in many ways the whole of Art and Illusion is a sustained Popperian attack on all the implications of evolutionism, historicism, collectivism, and determinism that Gombrich saw lurking in the “mythmaking” and “mythological explanations”, in which the Kunstwollen becomes a ghost in the machine, driving the wheels of artistic developments according to “inexorable laws”’ (ibid.: 762). 16 As Daniel Miller has illustrated (2005), the very conception of superficiality showing only insincere or inconsequential realities is not a clear-cut one: ‘as Strathern (1979) argued for Mount Hagen […] and I have argued for Trinidad (1995) other people simply don’t see the world this way. They may regard the reality of the person as on the surface where it can be seen and kept “honest” because it is where the person is revealed. By contrast, our depth ontology is viewed as false, since for them it is obvious that deep inside is the place of deception’ (ibid.: 32).

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and the utilitarian’ has become ‘not only conflated’ (as within Art Nouveau), but ‘subsumed in the commercial’, the ‘semi-autonomy of architecture and art’ sacrificed to its manipulations (ibid.: 17–18). Ornament can thus quite clearly be seen to present us with the archetypal example of what Bruno Latour (2002) has termed an iconoclash, the endless cycle of ‘fascination, repulsion, destruction, atonement’ that images have so often come to provoke, the state in which despite their common removal, ‘they always return again, no matter how strongly one wants to get rid of them’ (ibid.: 15). It can be seen to stand directly at the point where one ‘does not know, one hesitates, one is troubled by an action for which there is no way to know, without further enquiry, whether it is destructive or constructive’ (ibid.: 16), being both crime and custom, deviance and divine. Yet how did this seemingly innocuous appendage, this entity that cannot even be defined by a particular object, a particular era, or a particular style, something that can be, in effect, practically anything (as long as it is both adjunctive and decorative), come to achieve this entirely befuddled status? What truly is it about ornament that has made it such a divisive concept?

A Mania, A Tedious Repetition Whilst we have seen in our introduction how ornamentation was used in Madrid to create a specific form of social order, a specific type of Spanish citizen, how it was used in ancient Greece to emphasize and communicate both cosmological

1.9 Image destruction or ‘buffing’ in Madrid, 2010

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and sociological meaning, its latter-day usages were understood by many late 19th-century critics (William Goodyear17 here serving as a paradigmatic example) as mere ‘empty’ decorative effects, trappings tending to ‘divorce the system of ornament from the system of construction’ (Goodyear 1894: 68). Whereas the Romans were understood to have ‘built sensibly and artistically, without claiming or showing the higher refinement of the Greeks’ (ibid.: 67), the ‘“engaged” columns’, the ‘simulated entablature and pediment’ used within the ‘decadence’ of Renaissance architecture, was considered to have been ‘a mania, a tedious repetition, a mechanical and life-less formula’ (ibid.: 68). Once the separation of structural and ornamental systems had ensued, there was believed to have been ‘no bound to the license of arbitrary forms and lines’, and what emerged was thus a ‘colder and more mechanical execution of decorative details’ (ibid.: 69). The Renaissance reconstruction of classical Greek architecture and ornament in particular was hence understood to have created a ‘more formal and rigid application of the “Orders” to wall surfaces’, the outcome of which, Goodyear conclusively declared, obliterated the ‘general correspondence between form and use’, creating a ‘more fretful’, ‘more anxious’, ‘less suggestive’ form of architecture (ibid.: 69). Taking this argument even further, Hersey in fact suggested that in many of the translations of architectural treatises undertaken in the early part of the quattrocento ‘Greek words were manhandled or else omitted entirely’, despite the fact, as he remarks, that ‘the results were nonsense’ (Hersey 1988: 77). He argued that even Alberti and Filarete paid scant attention to the original terms used in Vitruvius’s18 analysis of the origins of the orders and the meanings of ornament within the Ancient Greek system, both of them further omitting his (for Hersey vital) accounts of ‘the legends of the Caryaen women and the Persian captives’ (ibid.: 79), the meaning of which gave ornament its ability to mediate and resolve both ancestral and contemporaneous societal discord (ibid.: 75). In Hersey’s denunciatory summation, then, architects and artists continued to exploit the ‘ritual complexities of classicism even after all consciousness of sacrificial meaning has ebbed away’ (ibid.: 2), the Greek revival aesthetic becoming superficial ornamentation in the worst sense of the term: it was simply form without function, ornamental ‘orderliness’ without true order. Yet it was not only neo-classical ornament which necessitated expulsion during the modernist era however. For Loos and his many followers decorative form in its entirety was ripe for extinction, representing ‘backwardness or even a degenerative tendency’ (Loos 2002 [1908]: 32), being for ‘people and nations who have not reached [our] level’ (ibid.: 35). Humanity was thus made to ‘groan under the slavery of ornament’ (ibid.: 30), the master of structure in constant threat from its subaltern adjunct, made to groan under a form which did ‘immense 17

Goodyear was entitled ‘America’s first art historian’ in his 1926 entry in the National Cyclopaedia of American Biography. 18 Hersey argues that Vitruvius, even though living during the Roman era, was steeped in Greek culture: ‘For though he is so often called Roman and linked to Augustus, Vitruvius was trained in a Hellenistic tradition carried on in the name of Hermogenes. Nor does he cease to remind us that his culture is Greek’ (Hersey 1988: 3).

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damage and devastation’ to our ‘aesthetic development’ (ibid.: 31). Decorative form was thus, irrefutably, matter out of place, a contravention of the desired order, a symbolic appearance of dirt (Douglas 1966). It was a fetish that ‘one must be free of in order to be enlightened’ (Foster 2004: 79), a ‘fetish’, as Mark Wigley (1992) continues (in a perceptive critique of David Harvey’s condemnation of ornament in The Condition of Postmodernity), that ‘convolutes the distinction between structure and ornament’ (ibid.: 1014). However whilst Loos presents us with an ostensibly functionalist argument, ornamentation being both ‘wasted manpower’, ‘wasted health’, ‘wasted material’, and ‘wasted capital’ (ibid.: 33), whilst he seemed to espouse a form of architectural social Darwinism which led onwards and upwards to the pure and unadorned, he can in fact be understood to have been more concerned to discipline, rather than truly rid himself of ornament. It was not that ornament was inherently depraved, but simply that it moved too fast; what Loos required was a restrained ornament, one which would free architecture from the ‘ephemeral’, innately feminine, hurried fashions of the time (Wigley 1993), one that would be led by an aristocratic, rather than bourgeois force (Stewart 2000). Embracing the subtle, staid fashion of the ‘English gentleman’ then, as opposed to the transient and colourful fashion of women or dandies, Loos yearned for a return to an exclusive conservatism which upheld difference ‘through the display of fine distinctions’, through a display of ‘nonconspicuous “conspicuous consumption”’ (ibid.: 129). He desired an ornament so refined that it could almost be seen to have disappeared entirely, an ornament, a ‘surface’, working as an ‘elaborate method for concealing and preserving, if not constructing, identity’ (Wigley 1993: 35). The vehement condemnation of ornament by modernist practitioners can hence be seen to have been a disguise for its almost inconspicuous application (to all but the most discerning, superior eye of course). It was, as Boris Groys has termed it (2010), ‘the creation of another, revelatory layer of ornament … [which] guarantees the unity of the ethical and the aesthetic that Loos sought’ (ibid.: 26). It was a recoding of ornament, a reinvention, as James Trilling has noted (2003), which gave it ‘a completely new character and direction for the twentieth century’ (ibid.: 134), an ornament ‘without images, patterns, motifs, or history’, an ornament cloaked ‘in a diatribe against ornament itself’, an ornament which ‘we could pretend was no ornament at all’ (ibid.: 136). Surfacing directly from the natural materials themselves, from the ‘spontaneous’ patterns of stone (ibid.: 212), the decorative ‘grain of wood’, the abstract ‘veining of marble’ (ibid.: 222), Loos’s ornament was hence a decorated austerity, surface pattern and motifs emerging from the expensive and rarified materials themselves. It was, as Trilling continues, a creation of a (seemingly oxymoronic) ‘modernist ornament’ (ibid.: 211), ‘a feat of self-deception that shapes our visual culture to this day’ (ibid.: 136), a ‘cultural hokum of the very highest order’ (ibid.: 211). Venturi, Brown and Izenour make a similar point (1972), noting that the censure and denunciation of ornament by Modernist practitioners was simply a denial ‘in theory’ of what ‘they were doing in practice’ (ibid.: 114), a construction of a surrogate ornament, an architecture of ornament. Famously differentiating between what they termed ‘decorated sheds’ (in which ‘systems of space and structure are directly at the service of program,

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and ornament is applied independently of them’ [ibid.: 87]) and ‘ornamental ducks’ (a ‘kind of building-becoming-structure’, in which the architectural system is ‘submerged and distorted by an overall symbolic form’ – a form named ‘in honor of the duck-shaped drive-in, The Long Island Duckling’ [ibid.: 87]), Venturi et al. claimed that the duck ‘is the special building that is a symbol’, their decorated shed ‘the conventional shelter that applies symbols’ (ibid.: 89). Within the duck, then, structure and ornament were fused, in the shed, conditional, the models thus fitting to the modern (the former) and postmodern (the latter) stereotype of design. The denial of ornament in the modernist era – whether through its perceived falsity or degeneracy – could hence be seen as a denial of the true status of the architecture that it inspired, a hopeless plea, a disavowal of its implicit ornamentality. And Loos’s very own structures could therefore be appreciated as the very ‘decoration it thought it had thrown out’ (Brett 2005: 12); they were the ducks in which the entire structure was ornament.

Tactile Adhesiveness If, as now seems the case, the rejection of ornament solely leads to the production of a new style of applied decoration (the iconoclash par excellence), what is it that creates the anxiety that so palpably surrounds the ornamental discourse? What is it that makes ornament so irrepressible, so tenacious even in the face of its abhorrence?19 The answer, for Alfred Gell (1998) at least, centres on the notion of artefactual agency. Whilst the ‘most committed aesthetes are far from keen on riotous decoration’ then, it can be understood to have survived and prospered, ‘even in the face of aesthetic condemnation from on high, because it is socially efficacious’ (ibid.: 82, emphasis added). As a ‘social technology’, surface decoration was believed to encourage and sustain the ‘motivations necessitated by social life’ through producing a vigorous ‘attachment between persons and things’ (ibid.: 74), an attachment bound through the social complexity of these artefacts. Art objects, and likewise ornamental artefacts, were thus understood to act as indexes of their producer’s agency, ‘vehicles’ of their ‘personhood’ (ibid.: 81). They were seen by Gell to behave in many quite logical ways as the person who formed them (as he explains through examples as diverse as anti-personnel mines and the oeuvre of Marcel Duchamp), to be ‘fragments of “primary” intentional agents in their “secondary” artefactual form’ (ibid.: 21). Just as Maussian gifts can be understood as physical traces of persons then, as a method of binding persons through the transference of agentic objects (a continually imbalanced transference which can never be completed), decorative technologies were thought to act in an entirely analogous way, actors compelled to ‘load surfaces with decoration’ in order to ‘draw persons into worldly projects’, in order to ‘mediate social agency back and forth within the social field’ (ibid.: 81–2).

19

As Brett has argued (2005), ‘the impulse to decorate and to find sensuous pleasure in materials cannot be denied; IT WILL BREAK OUT, COME WHAT MAY’ (ibid.: 208).

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Akin to Semper’s suggestion that by ‘adorning anything, be it alive or inanimate, I bestow upon it the right of individual life’ (Semper in Collins 1998: 124), the agency of the ornament is grasped by Gell to be innately held, figured through its web like patterns, its webs of relationality. Not only materializing through its indexical status however, decorative efficacy was further understood to emerge through the ‘pleasurable frustration’ of our being trapped within a rhythmic surface (Gell 1998: 80), the ‘mazy dance in which our eyes become readily lost’ (ibid.: 76). The complex animation of a decorative design functioned as what he termed a ‘mind trap’, a technology of enchantment which blocks our process of pattern reconstruction, leading us to be ‘drawn into the pattern and held inside it, impaled, as it were, on its bristling hooks and spines’ (ibid.: 76). Pattern thus works to make objects ‘come alive in a non-representational way’ (ibid.: 76), our captivation and fascination forming through our inability to ‘mentally rehearse’ their productive origins, our inability to ‘follow the sequence of steps in the artist’s “performance”’ (ibid.: 81) and the difficulty we have in grasping the geometrical or performative genesis of a complex pattern through mere ‘visual inspection’. Our inability to untangle them thus forms what Gell terms ‘unfinished business’, a ‘delay, or lag, between transactions’ meaning the object is ‘never fully possessed’ but always ‘in the process of becoming possessed’ (ibid.: 80–81 my emphasis). It forms an uneven exchange in which the viewer is forever entangled in its materiality, ‘hooked, or stuck’

1.10  The agency of the image. Madrid ‘window’ of fame, 2010. Image includes tags by Buni, Hear (Alone), Ring, Spok, Nano4184, Neko, Dier, Remed, Shit, Garr (Garrulo – Koas), Parse, Suee, Til, Tonk, Los del rodillo, and unknown others

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within its body (ibid.: 81–2), a quality not only meaning that it remains out of our grasp, but that it forms an inexhaustible bond between index and recipient, object and beholder. Just to ‘look at decoration’, as Wigley continues (2011), is thus ‘to be absorbed by it. Vision itself is swallowed by the sensuous surface’ (ibid.: 132). Merely resting our eyes on the ornament is a profound danger (as Gell discusses at length in terms of apotropaic art), us being caught within the material residue of performance, in the literal animation of the image, captivated by its magical power. This Gellian way of comprehending patterned form can, I believe, start to explain the deeply phobic, deeply iconoclastic attitude so often displayed toward ornament, the iconoclastic attitude revealed not only towards Art Nouveau and the decorative, rather than fine arts, but that displayed toward the illegal ornaments here described. It is their deeply agentic quality, this attachment in which ‘persons or “social agents” come to be “substituted for by art objects”’ (Gell 1998: 5), which comes to exacerbate their fear, this individuation, the ‘biographical relation’ created between ‘decorated index’ and ‘recipient’ (ibid.: 80), which becomes the very cause of the contamination they generate. The phalérophobie of the Modernists (as well as the anti-graffiti authorities) is thus directly correlated to the stigma of personhood each sign elicits, their status as in some way alive. As discussed at length in Schacter (2008), the way both producers and consumers understand these images, the metaphors used as well as the reactions prompted, consistently return to notions of agency, to the living quality of these supposedly inanimate objects. And that the word ‘tacky’, as Gell continues, was chosen by ‘severe modernism to condemn the popular taste for riotous ornament and other lapses of taste’, can hence be seen to be rather interesting in itself, ‘tactile adhesiveness’ (as he narrates following Mary Douglas), being something which attacks the ‘body/world boundary’ (ibid.: 82–3), which contains a viscosity, an adhesion, literally attaching the material world to ourselves. Ornamentation, as Grabar has similarly argued (1992), cannot therefore simply be understood as a ‘category of forms or of techniques applied to some media’ but is rather an ‘unenunciated but almost necessary manner of compelling a relationship between objects or works of art and viewers and users’ (ibid.: 230), a relationship established through what he has elsewhere termed their ‘demonic’ power. And it is this agency which thus necessitates the fear that surrounds it, that necessitates its removal; it is the ‘wanton subjectivism’ (Foster 2002: 17) of these artefacts which lays at the centre of this ornaphobia. Loos’s utopia (and, concomitantly, the utopia of the anti-graffiti authorities) would have streets which would ‘glisten like white walls’ (ibid.: 77), streets devoid of all smearing, all tattooing, all sgraffito, all selfhood; theirs would be a city devoid of the embedded social relations that ornament contains, a state of total ‘white-out’ (Wigley 1993). The unease and angst that emerges at the sighting of Independent Public Art, of commonly found examples of graffiti and street-art, can hence be understood to emerge not simply through their contravention of legal codes; it can be understood to emerge through their providing evidence of an embedded form of sociality, expressing the evident ‘personhood’ of their producers, eliciting an evidentially animative quality. Through ‘tattooing walls’, as Jean Baudrillard remarked (1993 [1976]), graffiti ‘free[s] them from architecture and turn[s] them once again into living, social matter’ (ibid.: 36); it turns each tag, each poster, each mural, each marking in the city into a material substantiation of an individual, a personhood revivifying a physical

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space, an animative relationship set in an indefinite process of consummation. The decorative nature of ornament, the ‘what’ of the image, can thus be seen to be as powerful as it is pollutive, to have an ability to attack and repel in quite equal measure. It can be seen to trap and captivate its recipients, to draw them into their world irrespective of their desires.

The No-Place of Abjection Not only due to its ‘falsity’ however, its defilement of the pure or its ‘sticky’ personhood, ornament’s anxiety-producing status can be understood to emerge through its confusing status in physical terms (explicitly confusingly, from its Latin root confundere to ‘mingle together’), its placement both attached and detached from the integrity of its ‘primary’ structure. As an archetypal example of a parergon – a Greek term whose literal meaning is ‘beside, or additional’ to the ‘work’ (famously illustrated by Kant by the frame of a painting, but also by clothing or architectural columns), yet a word which Jacques Derrida (1987) has explained must always be understood through its integral relation rather than separation to its ergon – ornament can be seen to be ‘neither inside or outside, neither above nor below’ (ibid.: 9), to have a ‘thickness’ separating it from the constitutive and the peripheral in the same moment: The natural site chosen for the erection of a temple is obviously not a parergon. Nor is an artificial site: neither the square, nor the church, nor the museum, nor the other surrounding works. But drapery or the column, yes. Why? Not because they are easily detached; on the contrary, they are very difficult to detach. Without them, without their quasidetachment, the lack within the work would

1.11  The image as mind trap. Revok, Untitled, Los Angeles, USA, 2010

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appear or, what amounts to the same, would not appear. It is not simply their exteriority that constitutes them as parerga, but the internal structural link by which they are inseparable from a lack within the ergon. And this lack makes for the very unity of the ergon. Without it, the ergon would have no need of a parergon. The lack of the ergon is the lack of a parergon, of drapery or columns which nevertheless remain exterior to it (Derrida 1979: 24).

It is this quasidetachment as Derrida terms it, the inherent impossibility of disengagement that makes the parergon so fascinating, so elusive, its positionality meaning that it acts not only as the supplement, but also as the surplus that exposes the lack within the interior, the innate fissure within its adjunctive partner. Ornament, in accordance with the general principle of supplementarity (as explained by Derrida in Of Grammatology [1998 (1967)]), thus comes to reveal its inbuilt, irreconcilable double-bind, its status as both replacement and addition, exposing both the shortcomings of the whole as well as the natural deficiencies of its own form. This, then, is its inherent paradox, ornaments status, as Mark Wigley (1992) has suggested, as something that ‘destabilizes the very structure that it at once supplements and makes possible’ (ibid.: 1014), its ability to disrupt what previously seemed to be the clear distinction between ergon and parergon, structure and ornament. Much like a tattoo then (an artefact ‘explicitly presented as the ur-ornament’ by Riegl [Canales and Herscher 2005: 246], as well as one directly related to graffiti by Baudrillard [1993 (1976)] and Fleming [1998] amongst others), we can see ornament as both on the body (metaphorically and physically) and at the same time external to it, integral to the structure whilst simultaneously extraneous. Yet, if it is separated or detached, it no longer remains what we understand it to be; the structure, the body, must be destroyed. ‘Lodged on the border between inside and outside, the tattoo’, as Juliet Fleming notes (2001), ‘occupies the no-place of abjection’ (ibid.: 84); like ornament (and like, as she contends, medieval graffiti), it is a ‘creature of’, as it is a ‘disturbance to’, its very surface (ibid.: 85), a substance that is both in and out of place, included and excluded, within and without, a substance that can in fact be defined not by its materiality, but by the inherent difficulty of identifying its boundaries.20 Ornament can hence only ever be understood through the relationship to its ‘other’, it can only ever be seen as the ‘outsider that “always already” inhabits the inside as an intrinsic constituent’, the ‘subversive alien’, the ‘foreign body that already inhabits the interior and cannot be expelled without destroying its host’ (Wigley 1987: 160). Like the fetish then, it is ‘first and foremost a question of place’, only existing ‘as such when it both occupies and veils a space not properly its own’ (Wigley 1992: 103). Ornament thus ‘territorializes, unsettles, displaces, and reaffirms’, it comes to both ‘fix and unsettle borders’, confounding ‘clear-cut boundaries among things and between persons and objects’ (Spyer 1998: 2–3). And the parerga can thus also be connected to Derrida’s analysis of the pharmakon, the perplexing word used by Plato in the Phaedrus which simultaneously denotes a remedy, a poison, a drug and a philter, substances that could seemingly not be more distinct yet are still somehow intrinsically coupled. 20

And I believe it is no coincidence that an extremely high proportion of graffiti artists have gone on to become professional tattooists.

1.12  Graffiti as parerga, as frame and content in the same moment. Vova Vorotniov, Spray as Index 1, Warsaw, Poland, 2011

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1.13 Embellishing the painted-out remnants of his old works after they had been ‘erased’ by local authorities, Homer added what he terms ‘subcultural nuances’ to these ghostly, blockedout markings, decorating the scars that remained from his earlier efforts. Homer, Post-Buffing, Kiev, Ukraine, 2009

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Like the parergon, the pharmakon contains within it the ‘complicity of contrary values’ (Derrida 1981 [1972]: 126), it elicits no pure, fixed identity; it is not merely an ‘ambiguous’ term, a term from which we could further ‘appreciate the richness, subtlety or scope’of Plato’s text (Norris 1987: 37), but a word that denotes ambivalence, that defeats all attempts of placement and can be understood as an external threat to its own internal purity. This is what gives ornament its friction, its danger. As with frames and fetishes, tattoos and sgraffitos, ornament acts both as a part of the whole and apart from it, blurring the boundary between interior and exterior, licit and illicit, primary and secondary, inside and out. And whilst these objects are nominally seen to merely delimit, they must in fact be grasped as highly porous surfaces, they are borders rather than boundaries – areas not acting as ‘a limit’ but an edge, a site which is a highly ‘active zone of exchange’ (Sennett 2008). The deep-seated iconoclash we find present within the discourse of ornament, within the discourse of Independent Public Art, can thus be seen to emerge through the curious status of ornament itself, through its ability to destabilize the distinction between primary and secondary, ergon and parergon, through its ability to unveil the deep ‘lack’ of the concrete surface – its lack of protection, lack of colour, lack of personhood. The bare, incomplete wall can thus be seen to call out for its ornamentation, the sparse structure begging to be etched upon, revealing a cenophobia, a fear of the empty that only decoration will alleviate. The essential addition, the ornament, the ‘how’ of the image, thus not only implies a constitutional deficiency within the ergon but at the same time in some way satisfies that lack, re-establishing a harmony within the whole. Every ‘act of aesthetization’, as Boris Groys has noted (2010), is thus ‘always already a critique of

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the object of aesthetization simply because this act calls attention to the object’s need for a supplement in order to look better than it actually is’ (ibid.: 42). It not only points toward the originary want that the supplement fills, but destabilizes the very notion of primary and secondary, supplement and structure, ornament and order. What can be understood to ‘constitute’ graffiti then, as Roland Barthes outlined (1991 [1979]), ‘is in fact neither the inscription nor its message but the wall, the background, the surface (the desktop); it is because the background exists fully, as an object which has already lived, that such writing always comes to it as an enigmatic surplus: what is in excess, supernumerary, out of place’ (ibid.: 167). Paint not only lies on the surface of the wall, it embeds itself within it, it infuses into its surface, the removal of this insurgent ornament hence necessitating a form of destruction, the erasure of the addition always entailing the scarring of the surface.

Made Servile to Structure The uproar Independent Public Art so often arouses is not simply due to its illegality, to its status as an art form which contravenes the laws of public space. It is its fundamentally ornamental nature that causes much of the anxiety which surrounds it, which is, I would argue, in fact at the root of the iconoclash in which it exists. It is Independent Public Art’s decorative and thus agentic nature, its adjunctive, and thus parergonic status, which acts as the causal factor provoking the fear of these urban ornaments, it is their tactile adhesiveness and lack of fixity that provokes the unease. If we examine two other aspects of our contemporary visual culture, we can in fact see how this twofold ornamental anxiety is born out. Bill posters, for example, are, like graffiti and street-art, similarly illegal, similarly part of our contemporary visual culture, yet they do not cause the palpable dread that the sighting of graffiti so often generates (if they cause any disquiet at all).21 They may be adjunctive, they may be parerga, but they are objects not containing any individual agency, they are objects manufactured by corporations not persons and thus do not contain the residual smudge of the individual, the marking of a body; they are not decorative, not agentic, and thus not feared. In an equal and opposite way, graffiti images on canvas cause no panic, they cause no innate alarm. They may be decorative, they may be agentic, they may be formed from the individual markings of a hand (and formally identical to images found on the street), but they are objects contained within a physical frame (rather than existing as a frame), the anxiety thus dissipating from the piece, moving from the centre to its newfound edge; they are not adjunctive, not parergonic, and thus cause no concern. Even more suggestively, the recurrent erasure of legal graffiti (Independent Public Art produced with explicit permission), as well as the habitual unease even generated by officially authorized graffiti sites (such as legal ‘hall of 21

In the same way, a vast number of the advertising hoardings (and other forms of street furniture) which exist in our cities are illegally erected. The money spent on tackling these illicit visual artefacts, as well as the penalties given to their constructers, is however, significantly less than those meted out to individual contraveners of laws over public space.

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fames’), only comes to further instantiate this argument. And whilst of course I would not contest the fact that some amount of fear is generated by the basic illegality of many of these ornaments (due, most likely, to their recurrent linkage to more violent or invasive crimes by the now widely discredited Broken Windows theory of Wilson and Kelling [1982]), this does not explain why other illicit aspects of our environment do not generate the same level of fear and loathing. It is simply these ornaments bicameral dimension, their adjunctive and decorative fundamentality, which I argue is at the centre of the iconoclash they are surrounded by, the phalérophobie, the ornaphobia, the anxiety they bring forth. It is the tension between the ornament and the architecture which bestows Independent Public Art its vitality and its vilification, its decorative, sticky agency which grants it the power to both bind and repulse.22 For all these reasons then, ornament, as Wigley has argued (1988), has always been ‘conceived of as potentially dangerous, potentially chaotic’, something which must be made ‘servile to structure precisely because [it] lies in the dangerous realm of representation and can mislead us, take us away from the natural presence of harmony and order’ (ibid.: 52) – the same ‘harmony and order’ as we saw earlier with Francis Terry of course. As architects have habitually attempted to ‘tame ornament’ then, to make it ‘represent structure, to articulate structure’, the core structure in itself has for the most part, ‘been protected from interrogation’ (ibid.: 52), kept sacrosanct, inviolable. Yet as Wigley continues, if one can produce a form that changes the condition of ornament, if ornament is articulated as a critique of structure, then the status of your theoretical position changes as well; anyone who launches the interrogation of structure, by definition, changes the status of theory. If it is the case that the whole discipline is set up to protect this view of the object, to enable the whole of our culture to maintain its traditional ways of operating, to maintain its security, then any architectural theory that tampers with that view is not just tampering with descriptions of architecture; it is also tampering with the way we construct ideas. So there is a kind of circular argument here: if we could successfully change the way we conceive of the object, change the status of the object, then we will have changed the status of theory. Theory is constructed on the basis of a certain view of the object (ibid.: 52).

As I hope now to advance, it is this particular modality of ornament, a form in critique of its very own structure, a form that aims to question that which it is positioned within, that acts as the archetype for the practices of Independent Public Art I seek to explore here.23 22

On the occasions that Independent Public Art does become venerated on a more popular level, however, this often has much to do with perceptions of wider market value. 23 Of course, many architects have attempted to disrupt the structure/ornament dynamic. Distinguishing between decoration and ornament, Herzog and de Meuron, as mentioned above, have attempted to produce a style of ornament which is not simply something additional, but something which is integral to form. As Herzog has suggested (2006), ‘When ornament and structure become a single thing, strangely enough the result is a new feeling of freedom. Suddenly, you no longer need to explain or apologise for this or that decorative detail: it is a structure, a space. In actual fact, I am not particularly interested in either structure or ornament or space as such. Things start to get interesting when you bring all these elements together in a single thing, and if you can experience it,

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1.14  Zedz and Maurer United Architects (MUA). Rendering by Visualdata.org

Not only coming to create a form of voluptuousness in the midst of cultural aridity, fashioning a form of embellishment which can counterpoint a dominant set of signs, these ornaments construct a new sense of order within the city, physically scoring an idea, a concept of civility onto its material surface. And just as tattooing can work, as Alfred Gell has again show (1993), as an influential form of bodily practice, as a mode of ‘honourable degradation’ (ibid.: 207), so too these ornaments which tattoo the skin of the city work as an influential form of social practice, a means of re-forming the city, re-negotiating the symbolic and formal expressions of built form, re-framing the very meaning of the space they inhabit. Their supplementarity can thus expose the immanent tensions within by moving through the building, by using it’. In their design for the ‘Ciudad de Flamenco’ in Jerez de la Frontera, Herzog and de Meuron in fact utilized a design composed of abstract tags used to create a highly decorative pattern. As Luis Fernández-Galiano explains in the official bid document (2004), the design ‘provides a guiltless decoration whose necessary and aleatory geometry reconciles Arabic-Andalusian imagery with urban graffiti, and this skin of cement, sensually scarified by the formwork and the passage of time likewise amalgamates the rhythmic roughness of flamenco with the tactile violence of tattooing’. Linking ornamentation, graffiti and tattooing, this description tallies perfectly with the argument I seek to make here. In an even more overt connection with graffiti, the world renowned graffiti artists Delta and Zedz, working in collaboration with the architect Marc Maurer as part of the design team delta-maurer-zedz, attempted to confront the structure/ornament dynamic directly through transforming their graffiti images into graffiti architecture. Rather than simply tagging upon a building then, their designs of the buildings themselves emerged through their typography, Zedz and Delta’s designs forming large-scale environments in themselves, ornament and structure being entirely fused. The traditionally tense relationship between architecture and ornament was thus transformed in this project from a negative to a positive; neither order nor ornament, wall or graffiti, coming to dominate the other (see Figure 1.15).

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our metropolitan environments, reveal the double-bind encased within the concrete walls of the city, expose the various conflicts around notions of public and private space, of use-value and commercial rights. Its ornamental, parergonic logic demonstrating the shortcomings of structure, whilst, at the same time, in some way completing it.

Agentic and Parergonic Whilst at the beginning of this chapter I argued that all my informant’s public aesthetic practices were of an ornamental nature, being both decorative and adjunctive (and using Nano’s choquitos and 3TTMan’s carteles as archetypal examples), it would seem apt to now present some instances of work that function within the agentic and parergonic state that this ornamental status bestows upon them, to present some examples of Independent Public Art that exhibit these specifically Gellian and Derridean characteristics. First then, let’s take this eponymous (and untitled) work by Remed (see Figure 1.15): an abstract, multi-coloured tag bearing the five alphabetical characters which make up his name as well as an incorporated heart shape in its very centre. We can quite clearly see from the image that it is a) adjunctive, a secondary addition (coloured pigmentation) to a primary surface (built form), a painted figure on concrete ground, a material production formed on to the already-present architectural body of the city. It is a work which is fused on to a surface (the paint binding itself to the wall), a work that can only function through the medium it is attached to (the ‘what’ of the image – the tag itself – steered by its ‘how’ – the wall through which this message is transmitted), and thus a quintessentially supplementary form. Moreover, the image is also b) decorative. It is, in its role as a chirographic artefact, quite clearly working within the previously alluded to elements of ‘order or unity, proportion, scale, contrast, balance and rhythm’ (Moughtin, Oc and Tiesdell 1999: 3). It can hence be seen to create a particular unity ‘out of a diversity of elements’ (ibid.: 4), the different letters forming a cohesive, integrated whole; a proportion ‘giving due weight to the compositional elements’ (ibid.: 4), each element being both commensurate to its neighbour and to the entire piece as a whole; a scale ‘relative to the entire building’ (ibid.: 5), neither too large nor too small for the space in which is lies, fitting almost perfectly within the remaining tiled surface on the wall; a contrast denoting the ‘triumph of unity over chaos’ (ibid.: 10), or, perhaps more aptly, of a perceived ‘chaos’ over an acknowledged ‘order’; a balance ‘between complexity and repose’ (ibid.: 10), neither overly obfuscatory nor idle in its design; and, finally, a rhythm, ‘a pattern imposed by the mind’ onto an outward surface (ibid.: 9), a pace directed, slowed, quickened by the overt markings, the originary tempo and flow of Remed’s performance visible in its material remains. The decorative status of this marking, its technology of enchantment, is not produced to be merely attractive, as mere ornament however. Its function (that which is present in all decorative markings), is to attract, to entice us within its web.

1.15 Remed, Untitled, Leon, Spain, 2011

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Remed’s work not only provides evidence of an individual then, leaving a distributed aspect of his self, a fragment of his agency – his very name in fact, his personhood – on the body of the city. It also embeds a form of sociality within the wall it touches, opening a network between objects and persons (the attachment engendered between writer and reader, the relationship which Remed seeks to instantiate with the recipients of his work); it acts as a mind trap, its evident animation forcing us to follow its meandering lines, to mentally rehearse its performance (the twists and turns, the ‘mazy dance’ this pattern presents). And it thus attracts to trap, it engages to enthral, its decorative functionality revivifying the city in quite literal terms. Like the prow-boards and other famous indexes Gell discusses (1998), Remed’s work thus contains a twofold social efficacy, one emerging both through its agency and its animation, its urge to form a relationship with both the city and its inhabitants, to intertwine his self with their skin. At the same time however, its thoroughly indeterminate status (the tension inherent within all ornamental form), immediately emerges when we realize the bond made between wall and paint, the near impossibility of ever separating the two. Once applied to its surface – again, much like a tattoo – the paint can only be removed through damaging the primary surface itself, being blotted out entirely by anti-graffiti advocates and thus creating what has often been called accidental or abstract graffiti (the erased markings of Independent Public Art which often occur in a different colour to the wall itself – see Homer, Figure 1.13, as an example),24 as well as often returning to haunt their sites through the failure of the overpainting to entirely hide the original mark (in what are commonly termed graffiti ‘ghosts’, instances when the original marking bleeds through the paint which attempted to remove it). Remed’s marking not only makes the innate porousness of the wall clear then. It displays its primary lack, its double-bind as both perfectly in, and perfectly out of place, its ability to entirely transform the nature of the ergon, to allude toward another order existing within the city. With San’s untitled work produced in Besançon, France (see Figure 1.16), a mural scratched (in a literal enaction of the Italian word graffiare) directly onto the surface of the door which it embellishes, we can grasp its evidentially ornamental status (in its technical terms), its standing as an auxiliary support to a primary body, its keenly decorative pattern functioning through all the basic principles as outlined with Remed’s work above. With this image in particular however, it is not merely its agency which stands out but the inability for us to reconstruct its performance; whilst the weaving pattern of Remed’s tag may confound our eyes, may index its dance like bodily performance, the astonishing intricacy of San’s work, its knot-like complexity, can bedevil our attempts to imagine its genesis, and thus to gain mastery over the work. 24 Whilst often produced by council graffiti removers (as we can see on 3TTMan’s image on p. 81), these removals are also often produced by outraged members of the public. One such famous iconoclast (or perhaps outsider artist) is Fred Radtke, also known as the ‘Grey Ghost’, whose grey graffiti removals have come to exist almost like an abstract tag, directly, agentically linked to his self.

1.16 San, Untitled, Besançon, France, 2011

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1.17 San, Untitled [detail], Besançon, France, 2011

Yet, furthermore, in San’s scratching we can also detect the major/minor, master/ slave positionality so inherent to ornamental form – its state within the very structure while being innately disconnected from it, its concurrent attachment and detachment from the whole, wedded yet divorced, supplement and surplus – clearly functioning here to disturb the probity, the very cohesive state of the supposedly primary body. San’s work is thus both on the door and yet it is not the door, it is on the surface yet cannot be separated from the surface itself. And as the archetypal example of a ‘foreign body that already inhabits the interior and cannot be expelled without destroying its host’ (Wigley 1987: 160), it again exposes the incompleteness of the intact state, the parergon working alongside its ergon ‘without being a part of it and yet without being absolutely extrinsic to it’ (Derrida 1987: 55). Our artefact here can hence unveil the deep ‘lack’ of the its surface (its lack of protection, lack of pattern, lack of personhood), its engrained status thus functioning – contrarily to the colonnades that Kant saw as insuring the integrity and purity of the parerga – to succeed only in disrupting this dynamic. The bare surface, the untouched door, can thus be understood to call out for its ornamentation, a horror vacui, or, as Gombrich perspicuously notes (1984), an amor infiniti (ibid.: 80), that only ornamentation will relieve. This insurgent form of ornamentation, like Independent Public Art as a whole, can thus be seen as the archetypal example of a parergon in critique of its ergon, a decorative pollution, a Loosian crime of style. It can perfectly illustrate the force of

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Riegl’s Kunstwollen,25 the Latourian iconoclash, both Hersey and Coomaraswamy’s notion of ornament not simply as a facile (or perhaps fascial) ‘beautification’, but as a form of votive offering.

Uses and Abuses While all my informants public practices – like the two shown above – will be understood as ornamental ones then, ornamental forms with agentic and parergonic qualities, there are two quite contrasting modalities that can be detected within these practices as a whole. These, what I term Consensual and Agonistic Ornamentation – practices which will be explored in depth over the next two chapters – are actions broadly divorced through gestures of consent (in the former case), and dissent (in the latter), gestures separated through a binary opposition, which, although cam seen be seen as an overly simplifying dichotomy (especially in reference to many urban practices26), broadly elucidates the intentional schemata and receptive outcomes of these most public of aesthetic practices.27 What are more usually (and often incorrectly) defined as ‘street-art’ practices – aesthetic practices occurring illegally in the street and subsuming techniques such as wheat-pasting,28 muralism, and freehand drawing – will thus predominantly be located within the term Consensual Ornamentation, alongside the various and diverse images and forms that these actions inevitably engender. As we will come to see, these actions will all be linked by a desire for inclusion within the public sphere as a whole, by a certain conceptual openness that seeks a harmonious relation with its recipient, and a visual decipherability (rather than visual fixity) which often (but of course not always) works through a figural rather than textual modality. On the other side however, what are 25

‘I need to do it’, ‘I have to do it’, ‘I can’t live without it!’ These were some of the most common responses to the habitual question, ‘so why do you paint?’ It seemed to be a flawless example of Riegl’s Kunstwollen, a perfect example of elementary ‘urge to decorate’ (Riegl 1992: 31). 26 G. Thomas Goodnight for example (1997), argues that many attempted conceptualizations of action in the public sphere are habitually bedevilled by a withdrawal into overly reductive oppositions (such as I have used here perhaps), oppositions eluding the real complexity of the practices themselves: ‘To read publics, not in the mix, match, and multiplicity of symbolic activities, but through the framefrozen binaries of con(dis)sensus is likely to diminish learning from rhetorical models by overdetermining presumption and by masking risks encountered in enactments of public discourses, discussions, and performances’ (ibid.: 220). Whilst I hope, of course, to stress the palpable complexity of both discourses being discussed, I will still be persisting – simply due to the ethnographic reality encountered – with this broadly dichotomous thesis. 27 As is examined on pp. 126–8, this division between harmony and dissonance can be seen to relate to various institutional aesthetic discourses which follow similar conceptual lines, artistic gestures which seek either to reject or to embrace an engaged modality. 28 A technique of postering which uses a liquid adhesive made from flour and water.

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more usually (and again, often incorrectly) defined as ‘graffiti’ practices – aesthetic practices likewise occurring illegally in the street but here subsuming techniques such as tagging, throw-ups, and etching29 – will by and large reside within the assemblage of Agonistic Ornamentation, as will, of course, the attendant images that these practices necessarily generate: here we will find a desire for a very partial rather than wholesale inclusion in the public sphere, a conceptual and formal obfuscation which if not simply dissensual, illustrates a combative modality of communication, and a style which often (but again not always) works through textual rather than figural form. Formally elucidated through specific examples (see pp. 78–86, 115–26), these two ornamental approaches will be conceptually illuminated through the political theories of Deliberative Democracy and Agonistic Pluralism (in particular through the work of their theoretical forefathers Jürgen Habermas and Jean-François Lyotard), theories which come to clarify these aesthetic discourses through their somewhat surprizing congruence with my informants’ quotidian cultural production.30 What must be made clear, however, is that neither of the modalities being delineated is able to be disassociated from its original sites of application, its prime mediumistic locale from the public space of the city where it appears. As forms of ornamentation, once removed from their surround, from their carrier, these artefacts naturally go through a radical transformation, and must be assessed through a new set of criteria (a set of criteria unrelated to the narrative of this story). Of course this does not mean that the practitioners of these ornamental forms cannot produce ‘legitimate’ work (as seen by their peers that is) within a gallery or institutional setting. It simply means that when produced within a different surround, a different medium, the terms of discourse themselves must be similarly reworked, it must be governed by an entirely different set of aesthetic, ethical, political principles. The final production can hence be considered as exciting, interesting, or enveloping as anything produced within its original setting (within the medium of the public sphere), but will be a different form of cultural production in toto.31 The ‘white cube’ may hence be understood as ornament (a decoration, a la Loos, without decoration), but will be seen to preclude the production of ornament. 29

The use of either acid solutions to indelibly imprint one’s tag, normally onto glass, or a key or knife to cut the same into other surfaces. 30 I must state here that the relationship between these political and aesthetic discourses was not one I went to the field with. Far from it in fact. Whilst I understood that there were two broadly different forms of cultural production occurring, I had no previous schooling in the theories of democracy which they are here linked to. The connection to these Habermasian and Lyotardian theories became apparent only after the continual evocation of both democratic and communicative ideals by my informants, their evocation of themes related to consensual and agonistic perspectives. Whilst in Part I I will be examining what are broadly visual forms of cultural production through theories which emerge from the realm of language then, this is supported through my informants concentration on notions of transmission, through the meanings that my informants themselves attached to their works. 31 Although, Ruskin (1859) would probably disagree: ‘[P]ortable art’, he argued, art ‘independent of all place’ was ‘for the most part ignoble art. Your little Dutch landscape, which you put over your sideboard to-day, and between the windows to-morrow, is

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1.18  The logical corollary of showing graffiti within the gallery space. Akim, Leistungsschau Part 3, Berlin, Germany, 2011

Of course, I realize that by initially relating these neologisms to two previously recognized disciplines (street-art and graffiti), their usage could perhaps seem extravagant. I need, therefore, to make clear why the terms I have chosen are of benefit, why they are more appropriate than their more commonly used designations. Primarily, I would suggest that the primary terms (‘graffiti’ and ‘streetart’) have been used to signify so many different and variant practices, so many different and variant practitioners, that they have come now to signify little or nothing at all; they connote so much, they denote almost naught, and my continuing use of them would merely add an additional shade to their already elusive, already muddied meanings. Furthermore, in their most habitually understood senses, I would suggest that the terms build up a division between these visual discourses based on a wholly unwarranted either/or position – either ‘innovative’ (street-art) or ‘traditional’ (graffiti), either ‘inauthentic’ (street-art) or ‘authentic’ (graffiti), either ‘positive’ (street-art) or ‘negative’ (graffiti), clean (street-art) or dirty (graffiti) – pigeonholing these practices into zones that are in fact more complex and messy than these polarities suggest. Whilst I have signified the initial binaries relating to these idioms then (the relation between Consensual Ornamentation and what is often termed street-art, between Agonistic Ornamentation and what is termed graffiti), one could easily introduce purported examples of ‘graffiti’ that sit more comfortably within the Consensual category, just as one could discover ostensible

a far more contemptible piece of work than the extents of field and forest with which Benozzo [in producing his famous frescoes] has made green and beautiful the once melancholy arcade of the Campo Santo at Pisa’ (ibid.: 80).

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cases of ‘street-art’ that reside more easily within their Agonistic counterpart.32 It is hence both the overburdening and underwhelming form of signification prevalent within the initiatory taxonomies that I want to dispose of; an often deeply-misplaced meaning that precludes any multi-layered understanding of these particular discourses that leaves the original terms inadequately placed to delineate their true distinctions.33 The term Consensual Ornamentation thus aims to describe many of the actions of (what might often be termed) street-art, without reducing it to the common inferences that it now typically elicits, the themes of (purportedly, and most probably fleetingly) acceptable ‘art’, of gentrification and institutionality that it commonly signifies. Likewise, the term Agonistic Ornamentation aims to depict many of practices of (what might often be called) graffiti, without reducing it to the frequent presumptions that it typically adduces, without diminishing it to the themes of vandalism, masculinity and gangs that it habitually connotes – suppositions that, for both of the categories, simply lessen our ability to interrogate them more astutely. Moreover, and as has so far been elided, all the above mentioned issues fail to mention the very basic fact that my informants themselves shunned their branding as either graffiti-writers or street-artists (even the term artist being for many of them difficult to accept), labels that they saw as depreciating the divergent and often very contradictory forms of cultural production that they generated, that simply turned them into one-dimensional artistic caricatures rather than embodied, complex actors.34 What’s more, they felt that when the terms were used, they were often abused by many of their ‘contemporaries’, artists (or, more often, the institutions or 32

Stephen Powers, perhaps more commonly known as ESPO for example, who is without doubt a classic ‘New York’ style graffiti writer (see his book The Art of Getting Over, [Powers 1999]), currently produces works that function within the realm of what I term Consensual Ornamentation – outward looking, legible, community-embracing visual designs. Although he may or may not define this work purely as ‘graffiti’ (he has been known to call it ‘emotional advertising’), Powers is a fierce and notable critic of street-art and would see graffiti as a directly hereditary movement to his current practice. Thus, this could be a purported instance of the Agonistic working within the realms of the Consensual. Likewise, La Mano, an artist from Barcelona, whose eponymous ideogram of a raised fist could put him firmly in the realms of street-art (many seeing the original disjuncture between graffiti and street-art emerging from the movement from letterbased to image-based ‘tags’), could be quite easily understood to work within the realm of the Agonistic. As a defiant, overtly seditious image, one locating itself within all the traditional spaces of graffiti production (including the all-important trains), his work could be seen to move effortlessly between these two visual spheres of the Consensual and Agonistic (see p. 98 for an example of his work). 33 As James Elkins has argued in terms of the concept of the gaze (2007), the original expressions are both ‘overdetermined (burdened by contradictory theories) and radically underdetermined (worn too thin to have much purchase on individual artworks)’, and thus necessitate removal. 34 Thus, as Louis said to me before I finally returned to London, ‘just don’t talk about street-art! Please! It’s not about that. It’s about everything that we do’. Nano, in a similar vein, told me ‘of course, graffiti is massively important to me, to all of us. I know its history, its birth, I’ve done it and lived it and I do share many of the points of view that

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galleries that spoke for them) inventing a famed history of graffiti by the practitioner when in reality they had only ever painted a single tag, inventing a fertile narrative of cultural production on the street when in fact they simply craved a route into the gallery or contemporary art world as (and again, quite antithetically) a street-artist. This was considered to be a ‘fraudulent’ but all-too-common process of induction that my informants wanted no part of.35 None of them felt that their actions could comfortably subsist within these extant terminologies; they felt trapped within the idioms, at once too broad and too narrow, too spacious yet specious.36 By using the terms Consensual and Agonistic Ornamentation, then, the spatial practices my informants undertook will be described through their method, their medium of production and intrinsic technique – adjunctive/decorative and thus ornamental – as well as the politico-aesthetic foundations that maintain their inherent distinctions – as I will now go on to delineate, a practice of agonism versus a practice of consensuality. It is these forms tangible, material and ornamental values (their working as decorative ‘supports’ to a primary structure) as well as their intangible, immaterial and conceptual values (their working as theoretical ‘supports’ to an ontological structure) that I want to establish, the interaction between ‘form, intention, and practice’ (Holston 2006: 35), the complex interweaving of meaning and performance. First following the native exegesis – the interpretations and significance my informants themselves attribute to the artworks they produce – it is hence the communicative intent of these aesthetic paradigms that will now be explored, two modalities of public, insurgent ornamentation which, as we will now come to see, come to define a very particular way of understanding the contemporary city.

go with it. But I’m not going to play the part of a “real” writer because that’s not the only thing I’ve lived. It’s part of me, but it’s not possible for it to be everything’. 35 It was not that commercial success was looked down upon by my informants, nor was gallery or institutional work in itself. This was understood as part of an artistic ‘career’, just something to be managed correctly if one wanted to keep on steady ethical grounds. It was simply the bogus history used to convey some sort of ‘renegade’ artistic past that was disparaged and dismissed. Tono, for example, now called himself a ‘public-artist’ to disassociate himself with the hoards of ‘non-street street-artists’ who had emerged into the public eye; ‘Maybe I should start calling myself a “bakerartist”’ he once joked, ‘I worked in a bakery for like two weeks when I was 16, so yeah, that must make me a baker-artist!’. Yes, it could be argued that there was a degree of competitiveness over the notions of authenticity that emerged here. But more than this, there was a simple frustration over the utilization of the street under false pretence, for instrumental, rather than inspirational purposes. 36 Spok might disagree with me here. He would, first and foremost, describe himself as a graffiti-writer. But there were other aspects to his creative output that he likewise embraced, and he readily saw the contradictions both in his own practice as well as those exposed by friends trying to ‘keep it real’. Graffiti was a core part of his life, but only he understood the term itself, and it was one working in almost direct opposition to its popular understanding.

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2 Consensual Ornamentation

[U]nder conditions of the large, democratic social-welfare state, the communicative interconnectedness of a public can be brought about only in this way: through a critical publicity brought to life within intraorganizational public spheres, the completely short-circuited circulation of quasi-public opinion must be linked to the informal domain of the hitherto nonpublic opinions. Jürgen Habermas

Man is a political animal, in other words an animal that exists in a polity, a public space. To put it more precisely: Man is an animal, that by virtue of being from the very outset embedded in a public network of social relationships, first develops the competences that make a person of him […] We humans learn from one another. And that is only possible in the public space of a culturally stimulating milieu. Jürgen Habermas

Now that both the adjunctive and decorative constituents of Consensual Ornamentation have been clarified (along with all the various issues that this ornamental status raises), in what way am I trying to describe certain types of my informant’s public aesthetic production as something consensual, if, and again following the OED, we understand consent to mean ‘to agree together, or with another’, to ‘act or be affected in sympathy’? Whilst I have explained the basic conceptual outline of these artefacts – what I argue to be their open, communal desires, their desire for harmony and accord – while I have indicated the physical forms that they often manifest – being artefacts which for the most part work through a figural medium, ones which are both formally decipherable and outward looking – I need to make clearer why the term consensual is so relevant, and, moreover, where this term itself emerged from.

2.1 Remed, Amor Al Arte, Madrid, Spain, 2012

2.2 3TTMan, Viva la Calle Libre, Madrid, Spain, 2010

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2.3 Eltono, Untitled, Utrecht, Netherlands, 2013

Focussing on Jürgen Habermas’s hugely influential work on the public sphere and rational communication – in particular two of his most renowned projects, his early (and perhaps most famous) work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1991 [1962]) and his later opus The Theory of Communicative Action (produced in two parts, Reason and the Rationalization of Society (1987a [1981]) and Lifeworld and System [1987b (1981)]) – it is a distinctly Habermassian notion of consensus that I seek to link with what I term Consensual Ornamentation, a practice in which open civic dialogue and rational consensus are key. Habermas’s lifelong commitment to what he termed the ‘conceptual triad of “public space”, “discourse” and “reason”’ (Habermas 2004: 2), will thus be seen to exactly mirror the desires of the practitioners of Consensual Ornamentation, to mirror their desire for harmony, communion, for an intersubjective relation with the wider public sphere. Before we delve into Habermas’s work in more detail however, I want briefly to present three, archetypal images of what I argue Consensual Ornamentation to be, three examples which I will leave suspended as the theoretical argument builds. These three – Remed’s Amor al Arte, 3TTMan’s Viva la Calle Libre and Eltono’s Untitled – will later be used as distinct case studies to analyse the argument being made, representative instances which will come to support the relation I now seek to make both with Habermas’s theory of the public sphere, as well as his thesis concerning consensual, communicative rationality. As for now, however, it is the specifics of these arguments that must be determined, and it is to Habermas’s magnum opus that we now proceed.

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In Clear Contrast to the State The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere presents us with Habermas’s account of the ‘emergence, transformation and disintegration of the bourgeois public sphere’ (McCarthy 1991: xi). It is a dense, thick description of the rise and fall of the ‘coffeehouse’ culture of 18th-century liberal-democratic Europe (specifically Britain, France and Germany), an account of the initial formation and later ruin of a political space (one existing in both physical and metaphysical sites), shaped by a group of disparate and heterogeneous social actors. Habermas’s public sphere was a location within which reasoned discourse could be rationally debated, argued through and contested in an open, unrestricted environment, a sphere in which individuals could come together to shape communal opinion within a growing market-based, metropolitan environment. It was a setting where difference and disagreement could be discussed within an amicable, uninhibited forum, a location from which a new form of political practice, one resisting the previously overpowering hegemony of ‘public authority’ (Habermas 1991: 2) – the inequitable manifestation of state power – could be physically enacted and endorsed. Habermas argued that this emergent public sphere was formed through two simultaneous, and quite crucial constructions: on the one hand, a newly built spatial habitat – a physical milieu comprising of freshly constructed ‘lecture halls, museums, public parks, theatres, meeting houses, opera houses [and] coffee shops’ (Boyte 1992: 342) – and on the other, a newly built infrastructural backdrop – a material environment in which social communication could develop, and thus emergent from ‘publishing houses, libraries [and] clubs’ (ibid.: 342). Through this twofold arrangement – through not only the formation of new political spaces but also the provision of a new form of material culture, the ‘newspapers’ and ‘moralistic and critical journals’ that came to be discussed in the coffee houses (Habermas 1974 [1964]: 52) – an environment was created in which private citizens could come to together to discuss issues of importance to society at large, determining these matters through logical argument and critical choice. Habermas’s public sphere, in Douglas Kellner’s terms, thus ‘presupposed freedoms of speech and assembly, a free press, and the right to freely participate in political debate and decision-making’ (Kellner 2000: 264). It mediated ‘between the private concerns of individuals in their familial, economic, and social life’ and the ‘demands and concerns of social and public life’ (ibid.: 263), giving these autonomous actors a space within which they could meet under a notion of shared common values, challenging one another as equals rather than adversaries. It allowed the emergent bourgeois movement to overcome ‘private interests and opinions to discover common interests and to reach societal consensus’ (ibid.: 263), enabling this growing social stratum to come together as a significant political entity. The emergence of this new public sphere not only ‘undercut the principle on which existing rule was based’ (Habermas 1991: 28); it was able to stand ‘in clear contrast to the state’ (Habermas 1974 [1964]: 52), to place itself as a political body working ‘against the public authority itself’ (ibid.: 52).

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However, Habermas’s analysis is set out (as the title would have it) on the attendant transformation of the state of the public sphere, the weakening of this previously described harmonious (and perhaps utopian) state of affairs, as well as, latterly, discussing the potential for its contemporary reformation. Habermas thus goes on to describe the so-called ‘refeudalization’ of the public sphere by the end of the 19th century (ibid.: 54), a state through which the titans of industry and other domineering corporations came to ‘control and manipulate the media and state’ (Kellner 2000: 264), and the state itself (through the burgeoning welfare system and the massive increase of bureaucratization) began to play an increasingly important (and for Habermas, increasingly negative) role within civil society in general. The overbearing role of state and corporate action thus diminished the shared, involved nature of participatory citizenship. It meant that the bourgeois public came to act as consumers rather than citizens, ‘dedicating themselves more to passive consumption and private concerns than to issues of the common good and democratic participation’ (ibid.: 265). Communal opinion, rather than being rationally debated and argued then, ended up being managed and controlled by ‘political, economic, and media elites’, hegemonic forces who directed opinion ‘as part of systems management and social control’ (ibid.: 265). The previously venerated public sphere thus became a ‘field for the competition of interests, competitions which assume the form of violent conflict’ (Habermas 1974 [1964]: 54), and the decrees and regulations that previously came about through rational public discussion, could now, with the collapse of the public sphere, ‘scarcely still be understood as arising from the consensus of private individuals engaged in public discussion’ (ibid.: 54). The original emancipatory conception of the public sphere that Habermas described thus mutated into its almost direct antithesis, a state within which mass media distorted the previously liberating media forces, where they had become subject to political dominance and influence, where it became a site for mere commerce, consumption and commercialization, rather than a channel for rational and reasoned discussion of matters of true import. The communal opinions generated by the public sphere thus ‘decomposed’ into the ‘informal opinions of private citizens without a public’, being now solely generated through ‘formal opinions of publicistically effective institutions’ (Habermas 1991: 247). The very thing that initially enabled the development of a cohesive public sphere, the expansion of free, open, mass communication, came to be that which in fact brought about its ensuing disablement; the bourgeois public became compliant and docile consumers of messages, inert spectators of a partisan media discourse, rather than recalcitrant, active participants in an independent, impartial public arena. The very concept of the public sphere, as Habermas decisively concludes (1974 [1964]), a concept ‘which calls for a rationalization of power through the medium of public discussion among private individuals’, came to be in peril of complete disintegration due to the ‘structural transformation of the public sphere itself’ (ibid.: 55). Only through a complete reconfiguration could its affirmative values be renewed, only through what Habermas describes as

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2.4 Unknown Artist, Mi Vida Es Como La Tuya, Madrid, Spain, 2007

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‘a rational reorganization of social and political power under the mutual control of rival organizations committed to the public sphere in their internal structure as well as in their relations with the state and each other’ (ibid.: 55), could the public sphere return to a state of serving its populace, from the prevailing situation of its populace simply serving it.

Forced to Participate Habermas’s later work, The Theory of Communicative Action (1987a, 1987b), sought to develop a model – moving away from his previous focus on negative dialectics1 in a linguistic turn2 towards language and communication – that attempted both to critique the destructive hegemonic structures he saw intensifying through the public sphere’s continuing entropy and to encourage a new form of social action that

1

Critiquing the ideology of society in terms of the actual social reality. Barbara Fultner (2002) argues that this turn was ‘initially motivated by the conviction that a critical social theory required a sound methodological and epistemological foundation: hence the project of providing a linguistic grounding for sociology’ (ibid.: xxii). 2

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enabled a recuperation from this collapse. The theory, based upon the key notion of ‘communicative rationality’, and much in debt to J.L. Austin’s work on speechacts, examined a form of interaction that was ‘oriented to achieving, sustaining and renewing consensus’, a consensus that rested upon ‘the intersubjective recognition of criticizable validity claims’ (Habermas 1987a: 137). It meant to establish clear grounds from which to critique hegemonic practices (both state and mercantile) that gained authority solely by inhibiting any educated, informed opinion, that gained authority by impeding authentic public participation. What Habermas thus suggested was that only genuine communicative action contained the intrinsic rationality that could, returning to the words of Douglas Kellner (2000), ‘generate norms to criticize distortions of communication in processes of societal domination and manipulation’, and, in this way, could then ‘cultivate a process of rational discursive will-formation’ (ibid.: 271). Through the use of language oriented towards two key concerns – understanding and consensus – participants would be able to produce ‘validity claims (propositional truth, normative rightness, and subjective truthfulness)’, which could then be embodied in both linguistic and non-linguistic ‘symbolic expressions’ (Habermas 1987a: 75). These three ‘validity aspects’ – normative rightness, the normative suitability of any claim within the shared social world (adjudged through what was considered to be morally correct behaviour); subjective truthfulness, assessed its sincerity within the internal, subjective world (thus perceived valid if honest); and propositional truth, considered the assumed existential presuppositions of any assertion within the sphere of the external, objective world (that is, whether or not something in fact corresponded to reality)3 – were seen to be implicit characteristics of any speech-act ‘carried out in an attitude oriented to understanding’ (ibid.: 306). Yet what was key for Habermas was that these validity claims were orientated towards understanding, that they implicitly renounced any ‘strategic’, or perlocutionary communication – where effects were produced ‘external to the meaning of what is said’ (ibid.: 291) – and instead insisted on the sole pursuit of ‘illocutionary aims’ (ibid.: 295), whereby effects are produced ‘from the very meaning of what is said’ in the ‘manifest content of the speech act’ (ibid.: 290). Illocutionary force was thus understood to involve the ‘establishment of a relationship between speaker and listener through rational speech’; perlocutionary force, on the other hand, sought simply ‘to bring about a desired end’ through which speakers might ‘strategically manipulate listeners into agreement through the use of variegated, emotional, rhetorical forms of speech’4 (Drexler and Hames-Garcia 2004: 56). Strategic action, parasitically using 3 Maeve Cooke (1997) translates these three realms into three statements: the social, a claim to normative rightness, ‘Abortion is morally wrong’; the subjective, a claim to truthfulness, ‘I have a headache’; and the objective, a claim to propositional truth ‘It is raining outside’ (ibid.: 11). 4 While Habermas agrees with Searle (1974) that perlocutionary acts may function through illocutionary ones, that ‘by arguing I may persuade or convince someone, by warning him I may scare or alarm him’ (ibid.: 25), he disagrees on the level of intentionality linked to this. As he suggested (2000): ‘Someone who makes a bet, appoints an officer as supreme commander, gives a command, admonishes or

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illocutionary force to proceed, saying one thing but indirectly (or duplicitously) meaning something else, was hence recognized to be not only ‘coercive’, but also ‘wholly external to the validity claims raised by an utterance’, and, therefore, ‘not subject to contest and challenge in discourse’ (Markell 1997: 390). What was thus vital for Habermas was that the orientation to agreement must arise from a specifically independent, uninhibited state, a site from where social actors are free to contest and challenge any truth claims. The very possibility of consensus hence presupposed ‘that those acting communicatively are capable of mutual criticism’ (Habermas 1987a: 119), that every communicative act, while aiming for understanding and agreement, became a discursive offer that could lead to resultant consent or dissent, that through the act we find ourselves, whether agreeing or not, ‘forced to participate’ (ibid.: 119). Consequently, as Markell argues (1997), to be oriented toward agreement ‘an actor need not have agreement as the goal of his or her action or speech, nor must the action or speech be likely to produce agreement’ (ibid.: 391); the search for understanding simply entailed a ‘foreswearing of the mechanisms of coercion and influence – a foreswearing of perlocution […] and a corresponding commitment to provide reasons for one’s claims if they are challenged’ (ibid.: 391). Following John R. Searle (1969), perhaps Austin’s most famous devotee, illocutionary acts were thus understood as acts completed when ‘we succeed in doing what we are trying to do by getting our audience to recognize what we are trying to do’ (ibid.: 47, emphasis added). The latter ‘effect’ on the hearer was not meant to be a ‘belief or a response’, but simply that that ‘the hearer’ understand ‘the utterance of the speaker’ (ibid.: 47). Within this reading, then, the notion of consensus is based solely upon an affirmative attitude anticipating a final accord, one which has the procedural potentiality to achieve this ultimate understanding, but does not automatically necessitate the reaching of this conclusionary state. Illocutionary practices were a vital element of Habermas’s theoretical reasoning, the key, in fact, to communicative action itself; however, a final agreement from the practices initiated was not the requisite climax of the communicative process.5 warns, makes a prediction, tells a story, makes a confession, reveals something, and so forth is acting communicatively and cannot, at the same level of interaction, produce perlocutionary effects at all. A speaker can pursue perlocutionary aims only when he deceives his counterpart concerning the fact that he is acting strategically – when for example, he gives the command to attack in order to get his troops to rush into a trap, or when he proposes a bet of $3,000 in order to embarrass someone, or when he tells a story late in the evening in order to delay a guest’s departure, and so on. It is certainly true that in communicative action unintended consequences may occur at any time but as soon as there is a danger that these will be attributed to the speaker as intended effects, the latter finds it necessary to offer explanations and denials, and if need be, apologies, in order to dispel the false impression that these side effects are perlocutionary effects’ (ibid.: 128). 5 I do of course realize that the term illocutionary as used here may seem to have the almost exactly contrary meaning to that ascribed by Maurice Bloch (1975). This issue, however, will be dealt with further below (on p. 203); suffice it to say that for now we will put Bloch’s claims out of mind.

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As we have already seen through the examination of Structural Transformation, however, Habermas is not one to eulogize about the past without critiquing the present, and the complication emerging within this particular text is encapsulated through the abovementioned distinction between ‘communicative’ and ‘strategic’ action. Through what Habermas (1987a) saw as the eventual degeneration from the former to the latter form of interaction, we are led inexorably towards the ‘colonization of the lifeworld’ (ibid.: 356) by what he terms ‘steering media’ (a matrix shaped through the financial clout of private sphere industry and the administrative power of the state), and the concomitant ‘expansion’, as David Ingram continues (1991), ‘of economy and state into areas of everyday life – family, school, culture and so on – that are not inherently disposed toward profit maximization’ (ibid.: 77). This colonization not only hinders the capability of citizens to enter the spheres of debate themselves, however, but, through the heightened specialization of political culture in general, encourages a more passive, non-participative public arena. And, by evading the consensusoriented communication central to what Habermas called the lifeworld (our socio-cultural environment), steering media, producing public opinion without the indeterminate reflexivity of public discourse, come to foster what G. Thomas Goodnight (1992) terms a ‘“technicizing” of the lifeworld as these “delinguistified” media promulgate an ever greater variety of “subsystems” to take over functions formerly located in the activities of communicative action in private and public life’ (ibid.: 249). The strategic, instrumental, success orientated choices formed hence transform the previously powerful public sphere into a mere ‘space for solving public relations problems, a variable in assuring mass loyalty and governmental legitimacy’ (ibid.: 249), and authentic speech-acts, authentic communication, come to be increasingly difficult to obtain. The public citizen is simply ‘reduced to a client of state programs’, the private person merely ‘to a consumer’ (ibid.: 249), and the role of the public sphere and the public citizen lost further to the power of strategic action.

Achieving, Sustaining and Renewing Consensus What I now want to propose is a twofold thesis. Firstly, I would like to explore Consensual Ornamentation as an enormously elongated Habermasian 18thcentury coffeehouse, albeit with a slightly different conversation taking place and a somewhat altered location of practice. I would thus like to suggest that the practices being undertaken by a core constituent of my informants can be understood within the mode of embodied rationality which Habermas claims was lost with the transformation of the public sphere, a mode that can, however, be seen to be living on in this somewhat unexpected way. It is therefore not the use of public space as an alternative or replacement to the Habermasian model that I aim to explore here, not a ‘counterpublic’ as understood by Michael Warner (2002) for example (a notion we will see more closely within Agonistic Ornamentation below), but a construction that can in fact be seen to closely replicate the mechanics of the classic archetype.

2.5 and 2.6  An example of the propositional rather than perlocutionary intentions of Consensual Ornamentation. Remed, There Is Something Else, London, England, 2010

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Crafting an open arena for rational, cogent, public argumentation and debate, the producers of Consensual Ornamentation can thus be seen to be re-working the original conception of the public sphere in what is now an illicit manner, an illicitness transgressing commercial law and private property but not societal wellbeing, an illicitness that aims to serve the public, not despoil it. Like the practice of reasoned discourse that founded it, then, this mode of public ornamentation will be grasped as a practice based upon the intentions of private individuals to rally together, shaping communal opinion within an open, public environment. It is an act signifying the presence of a community of discussants, a community of actors sharing and conversing within the public sphere of the city. And, working as an ensemble, synergically, coming together as a stylistic family, all of these public accomplishments are aimed at addressing communal opinion collectively, attempting to counter the beliefs, judgements and outlooks of hegemonic institutions by proposing an alternative, by displaying a diversity, by setting out a statement of intent in direct contrast to the manipulative, instrumental effects of the existent visual culture in the city. Working in direct contrast to the current media discourse, it is thus the simple offer of a proposition rather than mendacious persuasion which is desired by my informants, a proposition intent on receipt, intent on attention not acceptance, on recognition over submission. Secondarily, I want to propose Consensual Ornamentation as a discourse working towards the realization of consensus through ‘communicative rationality’, a rationality aimed, at its very core, at reaching a dynamic plane of understanding with its public audience, at reaching a form of understanding with the entire city at large. It is thus a practice oriented toward the construction of a direct social relationship, constructed with an overt desire to create a purposeful rapport with its requisite viewer that I believe is taking place here. And I will hence be arguing that the ornamental productions of my informants can be conceived as fully Habermasian illocutionary utterances, as acts not only where the speaker ‘in saying something also does something’, but where they act as a ‘warranty’ of ‘commitment’, a warranty that can ‘provide reasons in support of the validity of the claims’, as Maeve Cooke explains (2000: 8). They are utterances free from any form of strategic manipulation, utterances that form a state of consensuality that does not confine plurality, does not limit any conception of difference, but attempts to pull people together rather than draw them apart. This approach aligned toward ‘achieving, sustaining and renewing consensus’ (Habermas 1987a: 17) can be demonstrated not only through Consensual Ornamentation’s desire for decipherable, visually articulate images – the aesthetic forms, as we will discuss further below, working through either simplicity or legibility, being shaped directly so as to be part of a wider social discourse, to be understood by as wide a sphere as possible – but also through its medium in the most open of museums, in the city itself, which, following Mieke Bal (who we will hear more from below), I will suggest is the archetypal space of expository, discursive acts. Due to this desire for connection, then, this desire for an effusive union with their public counterpart, an authentic form of understanding can be seen to be formed through the simple enunciation of a statement of intent. And the harmony desired by Consensual Ornamentation is

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thus not attempting to compel or force agreement, it is not consensus in its liberaldemocratic conception, a deadening middle-ground where there is nothing but a ‘notional’ consensus, but a form resting upon ‘the intersubjective recognition of criticizable validity claims’ (Habermas 1987a: 137). It was a discourse taking place within conditions of free determination; autonomy from any internal or external limitations.

Readers, Listeners, Spectators Critically, however, for Consensual Ornamentation to successfully operate within these two overarching propositions it must be seen to meet both the three institutional requirements for the fully functioning, rational public sphere that Habermas set out in Structural Transformation – those of a common humanity, a common concern, and an inclusive public (Habermas 1991: 36–7); as well as the three validity aspects detailed in Communicative Action, the contestable facets of any ‘speech act carried out in an attitude orientated to understanding’ (Habermas 1987a: 306) – namely normative rightness, subjective truthfulness and propositional truth. These requirements were pivotal to each of Habermas’s theses, determining factors in the success of their respective discourses, and must therefore be equally applicable to these ornamental forms themselves. The first injunction, then, the foundation of what was termed a common humanity, entailed a total disregard of entrenched social status, a collective ethos in which each citizen could communicate in equal terms with any other person in society. In the salons and coffee houses where the public sphere emerged, egality was not simply presupposed, but concepts of rank altogether disregarded, social hierarchy trumped by the ‘authority of the better argument’ (Habermas 1991: 36). Not only were ‘economic dependencies’ totally without influence, but both the ‘laws of the market’ and ‘laws of the state’ suspended (ibid.: 36), nothing being of more importance than debate, discussion, and equitable social intercourse. In the same way, the discourse produced within Consensual Ornamentation can be seen to have been designed, first and foremost, to be transmitted to the entire public at large, not to a predefined section of the community (to those who had received an education in the arts, whether an education in the fine-arts at art school or in the low-arts in the street), but to everyone who participated in the life of the city. Being consciously produced for a diverse and disparate group of people then – for the affluent public who would normally only encounter art within gallery shows in the exclusive parts of the city, for the low-income inhabitants who would normally never set foot inside one, for the art-educated public who craved a new model of aesthetic experience, for the drug-addicts who wandered the streets in a dazed stupor6 – these works can thus be understood to have aimed, 6 When I once questioned the placement of one of Eltono’s street installations, it being in a backstage location habitually used by drug-users and sellers, he looked at me indignantly and told me ‘art is for addicts too you know!’ There was no irony or cynicism in his statement, it simply being another example of the adherence to ‘art for all’.

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as Habermas pronounced, at ‘transcending the barriers of social hierarchy’ (ibid.: 34–5), at being open and accessible to all members of the social world. Working through what was an attempt at a legible form of visuality – a visuality produced in either a lucid calligraphic form (such as we can see above in Remed’s Remed ama la calle), a visuality of commonality which often used popular, ‘low’ imagery rather than ‘highbrow’ aesthetic (as we can see below 3TTMan’s Ceci Est Mon Cuerpo), an aesthetic of simplicity, a visual sparseness acting as a performative signature (such as in Eltono and Nuria’s Untitled signboard adjacent) – all these works explicitly attempted to open up a discourse with the public at large, to initiate a conversation irrespective of the status of their recipients. These ornaments hence aimed for a parity which held elitism in contempt, they aimed for a coequal discourse which as we will see in the case studies below, would often obtain this literal response. And just as in Habermas’s definition of common humanity, within Consensual Ornamentation economic dependency was irrelevant – one did not have to pay to encounter these work and thus their recipients could come from any background; so too the laws of the market were upturned – the artefacts being produced for experiential rather than instrumental values; likewise the laws of the state were rejected – the conversation continuing in total contempt of legal regulations. The value of an open, egalitarian and consensual form of visual communication was always and already paramount in the producers’ minds. It was an aesthetic discourse which had common humanity embedded within its designs, an aesthetic discourse with an unending desire to speak with the entire city as a whole. Habermas’s second key requirement, common concern, demanded the ‘problematization of areas that until then had not been questioned’ (ibid.: 36), the transformation of issues which had previously been in the sole possession of ‘public authority’ into a more universal domain. Through the rational

2.7 3TTMan, Ceci est mon cuerpo, Palma, Spain, 2009

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2.8 Eltono and Nuria, Untitled [Signboard project], London, England, 2008. Not only acting as a performative signature, the signboards which Eltono and Nuria installed in London, Madrid and Stockholm, were later gifted to whomever found them, an explicitly anti-commercial tactic once more linking them to Habermas’s common concern

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communication engendered by this new public sphere, meaning, which previously had been filtered through the lens of either Church or State, was reshaped into something created by the public itself, the previous ‘monopoly of interpretation’ (emerging not only from the ‘pulpit but in philosophy, literature, and art’), reclaimed through the ability of this public to determine, interpret, and express opinion on their own. In the same way, I would argue that quite implicitly, Consensual Ornamentation is able to question and interrogate notions which otherwise remain imperceptible, bringing to the surface issues which otherwise remain unspoken and undeclared by working in the very centre of the public arena. By working in this space without authorization, critical attention naturally becomes centred upon the very nature of public and private rights within the city, the very nature of public and private liberties. By using the street as a site for uninhibited creative production, by going against instrumental reason and working there freely7 and spontaneously, not only does the work bring 7 Of course, it could be argued that the short-term losses of working without financial compensation were due to the long-term (perceived) gains of latter institutional success. However that mode of thought (although posisbly the case for a number of now successful ‘street’ artists), went against the experiential need to work in public space that my informants both enunciated and enacted, the urge to communicate with as wide a sphere as possible meant a natural movement to what they often termed the ‘largest gallery in the world’. Their public work was often in fact a financial burden rather than gain, harsh fines – let alone the losses in terms of opportunity cost – becoming an

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to light issues of the contrived meanings of vandalism and defacement, of the valid place for a ‘public-art’ in the city, it also rescues these issues from institutional containment, returning them to matters of common, civic concern. Like 3TTMan’s carteles project earlier discussed, it was about stating ‘explicitly what precisely in its implicitness for so long could assert its authority’ (ibid.: 37), explicitly commenting on the implicitness of the billposters (‘all this information, all this shit just trying to make you unconsciously do something, to buy something’), voicing concern regarding the implicit regulations of the city as a whole (of where one can and cannot write, can and cannot play). Yet while in the classical public sphere it was the ‘Church’s and courts’ publicity of representation’, the ‘loss of their aura’, the ‘profaning of their once sacramental character’ (ibid.: 36–7) that led to the flowering of common concern – this occurring in part through the commodification of artworks, the extraction of these artefacts from sacramental and auratic realms and into the specifically cultural milieu of the aesthetic that enabled this – within Consensual Ornamentation it is the non-commodification of art works which leads to this common concern, which wrestles art from the institutions which have taken control of its meaning. The aura and sacramental nature of contemporary art then, its commonly obfuscatory nature (and the common fear of voicing the wrong opinion, the wrong meaning), is displaced by the discursive openness of these ornaments, their literally touchable, public status, their rejection of the trappings (the protection, the self-importance, the physical and metaphorical framing) of capital A art. And just as Habermas argues that the rise of the salons enabled the creation of art critics (for good or for bad), so too Consensual Ornamentation turns the public at large into potential critics, each able, like the Kunstrichters Habermas describes (ibid.: 40–42), to form a lay judgement which encounters no greater authority to meaning than their own. The last of the tripartite principles that make up the Habermasian public sphere, the inclusive public, is understood as a public that ‘could never close itself off entirely and become consolidated as a clique’, a community that ‘always understood and found itself immersed within a more inclusive public’ and thus ‘established itself institutionally as a stable group of discussants’ (Habermas 1991: 37). The notion of inclusivity here is thus concerned with the ability of the public to participate as ‘readers, listeners, and spectators’ within matters of public debate (ibid.: 37), a truly egalitarian community which can be seen to be similar to the contemporary concept of open access. This model, as conceived of by the leading scholar of open access Peter Suber (2005), is one which is ‘free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions’, a communicative realm unencumbered by ‘price barriers’ and ‘permission barriers’, a communicative realm ensconced in the ‘public domain’ (ibid.: 231). Whilst common humanity functioned through social parity then, this institutional requirement functioned through social access and through Consensual Ornamentation’s expository placement in the centre of our urban conurbations, through its inherently legible existence within these sites, I would argue that it can be conceived of as an aesthetic modality adhering to these basic premises, a practice open not merely in its meaning, but in its physical placement. ever present concern. Working in the street was simply a necessity for their moral way of life, not a strategic investment in futurity.

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2.9 El Mac, El Corazón de un Sueño, Havana, Cuba, 2012

The issues these practitioners interrogate thus become ‘“general” not merely in their significance, but also in their accessibility’, becoming general because ‘everyone’ is ‘able to participate’ (Habermas 1991: 37), because the simple witnessing of these images turns their public into the readers, listeners, and spectators the inclusive public needs. My informants’ explicit desire was simply to create a discourse with their recipients, to provoke a relationship between viewer and image, an aspiration for comprehensibility from people who may have no previous knowledge of any formal, artistic discourse within which the work may be set within. This was a search for communion, for consensus, for understanding and, opposed to the profound (and intentional) indecipherability of the soon to be discussed Agonistic Ornamentation, its profound (and intentional) isolation into a clique, the work produced within its Consensual counterpart was formed with lucidity, physical accessibility, and inclusivity at its heart.8 Through following these three institutional requirements, Consensual Ornamentation can hence be seen to be reintegrating the classical desires of the public sphere within the contemporary city, a state in which only in the light of the public sphere ‘did that which existed become revealed’, where only in the light of the public sphere ‘did everything become visible to all’ (ibid.: 4). It is therefore fully 8 If we place Agonistic Ornamentation within these three institutional requirements, the divergences to Consensual Ornamentation become very clear. Within the Agonistic partner then, common humanity is disregarded in favour of an intentionally constrained social discourse, common concern (whilst met in questioning previously disregarded issues) is not addressed in terms of the wider public as a whole, and an inclusive public revoked, as mentioned, in favour of the clique itself. This is not to in any way disparage the contribution of Agonistic Ornamentation, merely to note its failure to comply with Habermas’s standards for an open public sphere.

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coherent with the key technical prerequisites of a rational civic arena; a space where meaningful democratic practice is enacted through the medium of open discursive, public interaction; a practice shaped towards the establishment of a shared public bond; an action in which each person must be accountable for their own beliefs. Through its common humanity (its total disregard for social status), through its common concern (its problematization of unquestioned issues), through its inclusive public (its refusal of the clique), Consensual Ornamentation embraces the commons, the quotidian, the universal, embracing not only self-expression, but an arena in which one can freely present their ideas and opinions. And whilst it may be illegal, it can still be understood to function as an ‘immanent critique’, one which avoids ‘fetishizing existing rules’ and at the same time does not ‘dismiss the essence of these rules’ (Thomassen 2010: 55). Whilst it may work through a material violence, this is a ‘demonstrative violence’ (one that brings ‘attention to arguments’) rather than a base ‘violence and vandalism in the traditional sense of the terms’ (ibid.: 55). Like the newly surfacing spatial constructions and infrastructural habitat that enabled the evolution of the bourgeois public sphere then, the mass availability of the spraycan can be understood to have functioned like the incipient printing presses of the 18th century (or the developing availability of tea, coffee and chocolate), the very walls of the city acting like the clubs or coffee houses where people openly exchanged thoughts and ideas, facilitating a body of practices intent on resisting ‘public authority’, resisting the rising passivity engendered through the latter transformation of the public sphere. Consensual Ornamentation is thus here seen to both ‘undercut the principle on which existing rule [is] based’ (Habermas 1991: 28) – using an adapted spatial medium with which to promote ideals contrary to the instrumental rationality of the city and the state – and to use the very ‘principle of publicity against the established authorities’ (ibid.: 56) – utilizing an unconventional, illegal medium to promote issues contrary to the prevalent systemic values. It will hence be understood as a domain battling against the ‘shaping, constructing, and limiting [of] public discourse to those themes validated and approved by media corporations’ (Kellner 2000: 265), a domain advancing an alternative mode of discourse not based on strategic factionalism or base economic gain. And acting as a ‘rival organization’ (Habermas 1974 [1964]: 55) – as an organization committed ‘unhampered communication and public rational–critical debate’ (Habermas 1991: 209) – we thus find the practitioners of Consensual Ornamentation to be invested totally in the survival of the public sphere, totally dedicated toward the practice of ‘public discussion amongst private individuals’ (Habermas 1974 [1964]: 55). We find them totally dedicated toward rational public discussion within the modern polis.

The Apostrophe in Poetry Before going onto discuss the technical requirements of Communicative Action, I need to make a brief aside. Just as aesthetic judgements – due to their supposed subjectivity – could be understood in Habermassian terms as invalid forms of argumentation owing to what was believed to be their non-contestability (their lack of a specific claim), so too within the three validity claims of Communicative

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Action, only one was thought to be strictly relevant to aesthetic critique. Whilst theoretical discourses were thought to engage propositional truth, practical discourses normative rightness, aesthetic criticisms were argued to be the sole arena for subjective truthfulness (ibid.: 23). It was thus understood to be only through formal language, through literal speech-acts, that subjects could ever come to a truly mutual understanding, non-linguistic forms having an orientation towards understanding only if the interactions produced could be fully mediated via linguistic channels. The aesthetic was understood to be solely concerned with the authenticity of feeling produced through an engagement with an object, sincerity as realized within the internal, subjective world, and thus unsympathetic to its effect upon either normative rightness or existential truth (its moral correctness or faithfulness to reality). Whilst Habermas did suggest that aesthetic productions could at some points be seen to ‘supplement’ speech-acts, ‘poetic, fictive, and other aesthetic “languages”’ were still understood to be on the whole ‘parasitic’ on communicative action, ‘uprooting’ them from their normative use (Ingram 1991: 80).9 However, I will argue that we can in fact find a way out of this ostensible bind by analysing these particular ornamental works not as indirect adaptations of speech-acts but directly analogous to them, not merely supplementing speechacts but, through acting as forms of public exposure, functioning as speech acts in themselves. Through this transference aesthetic products can then be understood, following the work of Mieke Bal (1999), to articulate an argument with all ‘the communicative possibilities that language offers’ (ibid.: 7), to articulate an argument to its fullest, communicatively rational extent. Tracing back the origin of the Greek verb apo-deik-numai, Bal, translating the term as ‘publicly demonstrating’, uses the (providential) example of a ‘graffito’ to explore a form of visuality which acts as its archetypal form, a form which is at the same time an ‘exposition, exposé and exposure’ (ibid.: 4): [T]here, on a city wall, for all members of our present, multicultural society to see, to see and hence to read, to read the handwriting on the wall. It is an exhibit; it is on show; and it shows itself, shows its hand, its presence. And in its capacity as visible exhibit, it exposes itself and what it has to say (ibid.: 4).

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Habermas’s later work does seem to come to an understanding of aesthetics that has a more ambivalent view towards the rigidity of these discourses and their relation to each validity claim however, an approach that sees the three claims being ‘metaphorically interlaced’ (Warnke 1998: 95). Following Albrecht Wellmer, who himself combined Adorno’s aesthetic theory with Habermas’s communicative one, the ‘work of art’, as Donald Burke explains (2007), ‘expands the communicative potentials of recipients’, it ‘participates in communicatively shared meaning’ (ibid.: 234). Yet even as this approach could make my argument much easier, I will continue to insist (mainly through Mieke Bal’s work above) that aesthetic acts can still deliver all three of Habermas’s original validity claims, with or without this Wellmerian approach.

2.10  Filippo Minelli, Could you please suggest to me any revolutionary act?, Tudela de Navarra, Spain, 2011

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2.11 Escif, Art Vs Capitalism, Grottaglie, Italy, 2011

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Bal argues that expository discourse was ‘apo-deictic: affirmative, demonstrative’, these ‘gestures of showing’ deemed performances ‘best considered as (or analogous to) speech acts’ (ibid.: 7). Similar to Roy Rappaport’s (1999) examination of the ‘indexical relationship between dancing and pledging’ (ibid.: 81),10 ritual, aesthetic acts – like conventional speech-acts – could here be considered as profoundly performative, working in an illocutionary vein to bring an event into being through a performative ‘enunciation’. A Maring dance ritual (a procedure utilized in times of war), thus explicitly communicated to all present a promise to fight when necessary, an action functioning through its ‘formality, solemnity and decorum’, an action infusing ‘whatever performatives the ritual incorporates with a gravity that they otherwise might not possess’, making it clear to all the ‘participants just what it is they are doing’ (ibid.: 116). To ‘dance’, for Rappaport, was thus quite clearly ‘to pledge’ (ibid.: 57), a communicative, performative act working through a strictly a non-linguistic modality, an act that in fact produced a stronger illocution through its refusal of language (ibid.: 21), a refusal of the mendacious potential that language brings forth. Whilst clearly not always purely linguistic in medium then, these forms of public exposure, as Bal continues (1999), whether in the form of a dance, a graffito, a museum, or novel, can accordingly exist as a speech-act ‘in its purest form: direct address, to you and me in the present but loaded with “pastness”, carrying along the tradition of apostrophe in poetry’ (ibid.: 7–8). As with her discussion (1996) of Foucault’s reading of Las Meninas, what must hence be grasped is the interpretation of ‘painting as a proposition, as a visual work that has something to say’ (ibid.: 30). And what I will hence argue here is that Consensual Ornamentation can function within all of Habermas’s validity claims, its expository nature, its status as public exhibit, its illocutionary nature (as discussed below), bestowing upon it a quite clearly propositional quality whether in the form of a 10

Rappaport’s work will be examined in more depth in Chapter 5.

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direct textual proposition – as in Filippo Minelli’s image (Figure 2.10) – or in a more figural state – as in Escif’s quite clearly propositional image (in its interrogation of the relationship between art and capitalism) which we can see in Figure 2.11.

Not Interwoven, But Extramundane Now that this argument has been put forth, we must still, however, come to analyse Consensual Ornamentation through Habermas’s previously stated validity aspects, the validity aspects through which all communicatively intended speech-acts may then be accepted or rejected. The first of the claims then, normative rightness, gauges whether or not the declaration prepared conforms to wider societal norms, whether it is an acceptable form of communication in its particular context. This validity claim is hence about the appropriateness of the specific statement, it being considered valid simply if the recipient can acknowledge the right of the agent to offer this statement rather than its relevance per se (Cooke 1997: 87).11 What is thus crucial for normative rightness is that this appropriateness is simply understood ‘in terms of the speaker’s attempt to establish an interpersonal relationship with the hearer(s)’ (ibid.: 88), its validity questioned through the speaker’s ‘entitlement to raise that particular claim to that particular hearer in that particular context’ (ibid.: 60), rather than the perceived truth or sincerity of the statement (as examined within the next validity claims). Like a speaker having a ‘right’ to perform an act in a given context, like an author having a ‘right’ to inscribe it, this claim made towards normative rightness by the producers of the illicit ornaments examined here is hence passed if they can be understood to have an equivalent ‘right’ to incise their messages within their medium of the city, if they can argue that their messages – even if one may not agree with them – are appropriate, acceptable, allied to their settings. By disregarding their official status in the eyes of the law then (the fetishization of rules as Thomassen terms it above), how can we argue that the agents who produce these artefacts have the‘right’to offer them to us? Primarily, we can suggest that the acceptability of Consensual Ornamentation emerges through its formal, contextual suitability, the explicit desire of its producers to work within, rather than contrast against their architectonic surround, to produce artefacts (such as 3TTMan’s project Fill in the Blanks – see Figure 2.12 – a project in which he repaired the broken Madrileño pavements with his cement designs) that enhanced rather than disfigured their surrounds; as Eltono once told me, in a quote which could in fact be representative of Consensual Ornamentation as a whole, ‘my work, I think it’s really about order; it’s not disturbing its space, it’s following the lines, it’s order, even it’s a new order […] I think actually sometimes my work stays up because it’s in place, it’s working with the architecture around it, not against it’. 11

As Cooke argues (1997), ‘Were participants in conversation always concerned with the effective exchange of information, the need to be relevant would certainly be more important. However, conversation is in fact usually not concerned with this – conversations seldom have any well-defined goals. It is precisely because the concerns of the participants in a conversation are usually ill-defined or nonspecific that a contribution to a conversation can rarely be dismissed as “irrelevant”’ (ibid.: 88).

2.12 3TTMan, Untitled [Fill in the Blanks], Madrid, Spain, 2012

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The frequently prolonged existence of this form of work, then, the common hesitancy for the removal of these ornamental artefacts from the city – especially when placed in a comparative temporal framework to Agonistic Ornamentation – can thus be seen to allude to its hazily ‘accepted’ state, its contextual ‘rightness’, this state where the iconoclasts ‘cannot be sure’, where ‘one hesitates’ (Latour 2002: 16); it points towards the fact that much of the work does not seek to aggressively confront its medium, does not mean to violently assail its viewer, but simply intends to initiate a ‘conversation’ within what can be deemed as an aesthetically, conversationally acceptable modality. Moreover, each act, each ornament can be seen to attempt to initiate a direct interpersonal relationship with their viewer, its decorative status attempting to snare its associate viewer, being explicitly produced to elicit a response. This was the main reason for working in the public sphere, to create a connection to people who they may otherwise never encounter, to create an alliance with those whom they lived amongst. The practitioners of Consensual Ornamentation thus emphatically wanted their work to be deemed ‘acceptable’. They wanted to reach out to the public with their images; they believed their work was more appropriate, more social, than the vast majority of visual culture that lay within the street: their work was meant to be there. And that is exactly why 3TTMan was so happy to argue with the police when they tried to prevent him working (as they often did, 3TTMan choosing, for the most part, to work openly during the day exactly because he believed what he did was right, licit or not), that is why he was so eager to refute their (fetishistic) laws; the exact point of his practice was to create a relationship with his viewers, to ameliorate the environment, to be in place. His work, as with the other producers of Consensual Ornamentation, was thus the very definition of normative rightness, the production of an act deemed appropriate within our shared social world, the production of a contextually acceptable act. The second claim, subjective truthfulness, has its specific aesthetic validity confirmed in Habermas’s original thesis – referring to the authenticity of feeling or desire, to the inner experience one often encounters in art – a conception of ‘sincerity’ covering ‘expressive self-presentations’ in which acceptability depends on the unspoken assurance that the speaker can sustain any validity claim (Habermas 1987a: 17). It aims, therefore, to prove the authenticity of the expression pronounced by the claimant, defending it in reference to their ‘beliefs, intentions, feelings [and] desires’ (ibid.: 307); to provide an ‘intersubjective commonality’ through a ‘mutual trust in subjective sincerity’ (ibid.: 308), a simple belief that what is said is honest, open and candid. In terms of Consensual Ornamentation, I would argue that this validity claim is straightforwardly obtained through the basic and inherent danger contained within its productive process – the danger of both incarceration and pecuniary penalty through police action, the danger of physical harm emerging through its often hazardous means of construction – risks directly alluding to the commitment needed just to embark on the communicative process. Sincerity is thus proven through this commitment, a commitment which cannot be ironic or feigned, a commitment which underscores the seriousness and earnestness of the producer.12 Moreover, the further fact of working ‘free-of-charge’, of seeking no 12

This notion of risk and commitment will be discussed in depth through Leo Howe’s work, pp. 192–203.

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financial benefit for the hours (weeks, years) spent working in the city, can be seen to reiterate this basic sincerity: why would one go to so much effort if not being ‘truthful’? Why would one bother if disingenuous? The long-term strategic goals suggested by some as the ‘cost-benefit’ for the loss of any immediate reimbursement (whether of a strictly economic or else cultural capital), simply does not corroborate with the base need to paint in the streets, the base need to be productive in public space that my informants displayed on a daily basis. The failure of these actors to rigorously document their work (hence my original ‘use-value’ as a photographic participant observer), or to use their public engagement as a simple marketing tool (inscribing their work with a website address, for example, a common street-art technique that was explicitly critiqued by my informants), implicitly attests to this fact, rejecting any suggestion of instrumental motivation. The reasons for painting were communicative, experiential, experimental rather than strategic. And thus whether ‘true’ or not (as we will see in the following and final validity claim) there could thus be no ‘suspicion regarding the subjective truthfulness of the speaker’ (Cooke 1997: 60). This was a compulsion not born of future desires, but a present moral obligation.13 The last of the remaining validity aspects, propositional truth, considers the factuality of any assertion within the objective world (as opposed to the subjective world encountered through truthfulness and the social world confronted by rightness). It thus examines the existential content of any statement depending on two particular conditions: first, that ‘it must be grounded in experience; that is, the statement may not conflict with dissonant experience’; and second, that ‘it must be discursively redeemable; that is, the statement must be able to hold up against all counterarguments and command the assent of all potential participants in a discourse’ (Habermas 2002: 89). What is important for us to note here however is that Habermas’s notion of truth is implicitly fallibilist, one continuously open to renegotiation through the medium of action. To ‘distinguish true propositions from false ones’ then, as Habermas has suggested, one must ‘take recourse to the judgment of others – that is, of all others with whom I could ever enter into discourse’ (ibid.: 89), a consensually motivated truth coming to be fruition through what he considered to be the ideal speech act. When examining Consensual Ornamentation, one could therefore argue that this appears to be the hardest claim (in ‘truth’) to fulfil, requiring a more precise look at the particular claim made by the exact work in its extent setting; its veracity or mendacity, therefore, whether its claim is ‘justified or unjustified’ (Habermas 2000: 91), could potentially be possible to discern only through an examination of each unique performance.14 Yet equally, 13 Thus, whilst all of my informants did desire some measure of success, this success meant solely the ability to continue with what they loved doing, which (in a circular argument) was working within the street! As discussed earlier, the argument toward strategic aims falls flat when one realizes the innumerable ways these actors could increase their economic or cultural capital in a more effective (less time-consuming, less dangerous, less expensive) manner. 14 As Hugh Baxter has explained however (2011), while all communicative acts raise all three validity claims, traditionally only one claim is thematic; truth claims can thus often be seen to work in an indirect or subordinate manner: ‘We would not

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we could assess Consensual Ornamentation’s claim to truth as functioning explicitly through the mediation of what Habermas (2003) terms ‘performative certainty and warranted assertibility’ (ibid.: 253), the mediation of action and discourse, theory and practice. Whilst all my informants’ practices are grounded in experience then – their daily experiences of life in the city, the years of producing work within the street – their discursive validity, their redeemability, is likewise assessed through the habitual confrontations emerging in its production, the customary confrontations with police, passers-by, with fellow practitioners, confrontations leading to a process of argumentation in which their claims can be rationally debated, where one must justify one’s truth against the objections of others. This conception of truth is thus not only fallibilist, changing as their aesthetic productions changed (perhaps, as is common, from Agonistic to Consensual Ornamentation, or simply through processes of production attempting to relate more directly to a concept of ‘community’), not only open to the judgement of others (working innately through a modality of exposition), but comes to emerge directly through communicative action, through ‘public debate and complete inclusion of all those affected’, through ‘equal distribution of the right to communicate’, through both the ‘force of the better argument’ and the ‘sincerity of how all those affected express themselves’ (ibid.: 37). Propositional truth can thus be seen to be validated through my informants’ experiential and discursive acts, yet agreement by the respondent, by the hearer or viewer is still not a required conclusion to the proposition that was formulated. ‘In its simplest terms’, as Maeve Cooke explains (2000), ‘communicative action is action whose success depends on the hearer’s responding to the validity claim raised by the speaker with a “yes” or a “no”’ (ibid.: 3), not necessarily agreement with the claim proposed, but merely a ‘critical stance’, an ‘intersubjective recognition’ (Habermas 2003: 76). It is a ‘practice of argumentation’ where one is as much ‘willing to convince one another of their views’ as they are willing ‘to learn from one another’ (ibid.: 77), a practice of mutually constitutive discursive rationality which Consensual Ornamentation can be seen to evoke. After all this dense textual analysis, it now seems an appropriate time to return to the images which I suspended at the very beginning of this chapter – to Remed’s Amor al Arte, 3TTMan’s Viva la Calle Libre and Eltono’s Untitled – to bring back these archetypal examples which will stand-in for the practice of Consensual Ornamentation as a whole. Which of these, then, could we say is a more, or less, propositional variety of Consensual Ornamentation, which provide an example of an imagistically illocutionary act? How do these images function within the realms of common humanity, of common concern, of an inclusive public? How do they comply with the notions of normative rightness, subjective truthfulness, and propositional truth? ordinarily say, for example, that a speaker’s request for a glass of water “raises a truth claim” – that she claims it to be true that a glass of water can be obtained and brought in a reasonable amount of time. More likely we would say that she presupposes these factual circumstances’ (ibid.: 12). In the same way, the truth claim of Consensual Ornamentation can be seen to be presupposed, the untapped potential of the city, for example, the instrumental suffusion of the street, being seen to be the basic and indirect proposition of each work.

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2.13 Remed, Amor Al Arte, Madrid, Spain, 2012

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Amor Al Arte by Remed Love of Art. Boldly written in white chalk in a large, handsome, calligraphic script and set at eye-level upon an orange and grey stone wall. A simple sentiment, an uncomplicated statement: three words, a pulsating heart, an infinity symbol, and Remed’s eponymous ideogram (the small figure at the far right of the image). Being illegally produced, using the traditional medium (city wall) if not a traditional tool (spraycan) of contemporary graffiti, I need first briefly explain why this image is not here being taken as a manifestation of street-art or graffiti, why I believe it constitutes an example of Consensual Ornamentation. To reiterate, then, by shifting our focus away from the idioms of both graffiti and street-art, idioms that an image such as the one above would nominally be inserted within, we can then move away from the habitual themes of gangs, crime, illegality, vandalism, ‘art’ and gentrification, themes that fail to address both the patently ornamental and overtly communicative aspects of the work itself. Even more importantly, however, is the fact that Remed himself would reject the placement of this image within either of those originary terminologies, neither of which can come to elucidate the true import of the image itself. Whilst it is easy to reject this image as an instance of either street-art or graffiti then, I must still explain how Remed’s work corresponds to the ornamental constituent of Consensual Ornamentation. We can quite clearly see that this work is a) adjunctive, an addition (chalk) to a surface (brick wall), a figure on the ground, a mura rasa; and b) decorative, to once again be working

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within the base elements of ‘unity, proportion, scale, contrast, balance and rhythm’ (Moughtin, Oc and Tiesdell 1999: 3), acting decoratively through its calligraphic status. It not only matches the basic definition of ornament, but much like the tags previously discussed, Remed’s work can in fact be seen to be doubly ornamental, as an addition and embellishment to the letter and an addition and embellishment to the city in the same moment. Whilst this ornamental status alludes to a clear personhood – intertwining Remed’s body with the body of the wall – whilst it can be understood as inherently ambiguous – like chalkboard markings, never being able to be fully erased – in what way can we deem this work as something consensual, something working within Habermas’s notion of embodied rationality, within his conception of communicative action? Firstly then, we can see this work, through its overtly textual status, to be explicitly stating something; it conforms to a literal vocabulary and grammar, it has a definite sense and reference. And propositional? It acts to convey information, to remark upon some specific matter, making a concrete, attestable statement working, as Bal would put it, through the medium of a ‘text-image’ (Bal 1999: 4). Not only producing a factdriven declaration however, it can equally be considered an illocutionary act, a fully performative action; the loving of art is being enacted through the writing upon the wall of the city, the very act of performance an act of love, the meaning and the action of the statement signifying the very same thing. It can thus be seen as both a literal pronouncement and performative enunciation of Remed’s love of art. Yet how does it correspond to the tripartite procedural notions required in Habermas’s analysis of

2.14 Remed, Blanco Ante Gris [Gracias por tus mensages], Madrid, Spain, 2011

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the public sphere? First, in terms of a common humanity, Remed’s work can be seen as an act that, through its unrestricted presence in the public domain, disregards any notion of social status; in terms of common concern, it can be seen as a statement broadcasting itself outside of the traditional media, working against public authority through its independent production and against the pure instrumentality of the visual culture of the city through its non-strategic demands; and in terms of the inclusive public, it enables pure accessibility to the public of readers, listeners and spectators through its legibility, its inclusivity, through its refusal of the clique. As a rationally communicative form it can also be seen to conform to the notion of normative rightness. Its acceptability as a form of communication in its particular social situation is attested not only by its clearly supportable statement, not only through Remed’s attempt to establish an interpersonal relationship with his recipients, but is made manifestly evident by the literal response that Remed’s work elicits; as we can see in Figure 2.14, Remed’s messages are often subject to literal responses – Gracias por su mensajes ;), ‘Thank you for your messages’ – rejoinders which proved the contextual acceptability of his initial proposition. As an example of communicative action it can also be seen to conform to the notion of subjective truthfulness. Remed’s perceived sincerity can thus be proven through the illicit performance and attendant risk this produces, through the basic lack of instrumentally motivated ‘gain’ the message attempted (proven through the lack of identifying name or website attached), a sincerity which Remed’s resultant response A ti para sentir los!, ‘to you for feeling them!’, can be seen to reinstate. And as an ideal performative act it can conform to the final validity claim of propositional truth. Its acceptance within the sphere of the external, objective world being shown through its very discursive redeemablity, the propositional counterargument to Remed’s initial statement being refuted through its very existence. It’s simple. I paint in the street because I want to have one pure moment. One moment where I can express myself simply and clearly to everyone who passes in the street. I’ve always painted on canvas, and I’ve always been able to show my studio art to a gallery, but the work in the street is like the sum of all my knowledge, all my life, all the evolution I have had. It’s all of that together put in the street. I mean it works both ways, the street influences the studio and the studio the street of course. But my expectations, and maybe with 3TTMan and other friends, is to get closer to the condition of the studio when we paint in the street. That is the best gift I can give to myself and the people. To be true in the streets, to be as dedicated there as I am in the studio. That’s what I think people deserve. Not to sound egotistical. But they don’t deserve just a tag. I mean I LOVE tags. Because I know them, I understand them, I read them, I write them. But when I’m painting in the street it’s for the universe, the whole city, not just for the ones that are making tags. I’m painting for your mother and mine, I’m painting for everyone I have never even met. So I have to make it “touchable”. I want people to see it and understand what I’m saying. I just try to make something beautiful that will talk without me having to be there to explain it […] Now my paintings, in the street people see it and I don’t have to say anything. With all of them I think people can understand it straight away through its simplicity. I love that. It makes it all more simple, more direct, it allows me to get a true feedback. I can really communicate with people. I know they will see it, I know they will understand it. And it gives a real communication to the street, to all the people in it (23/8/2008).

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Viva la Calle Libre by 3TTMan At one stage removed from our first example, what we have depicted here contains both figural and discursive elements, components of both overtly textual and representational content. On the left and right hand side of this triptych we can thus find 3TTMan’s eponymous hero bursting in and out of the wall in which he lays, diving through the brick in a dramatic manner; and within the central panel we have four words, Viva la Calle Libre, ‘Long Live the Free Street’. Set on a prominent corner in the centre of Madrid, beseeching all who pass it. Again, illegally produced, again using the medium (city wall) but not tools (cement) of traditional graffiti, and, once again, being neither suffused within the realm of graffiti nor street-art. Having already explored the ornamental constituent of Remed’s work above I will here forgo any lengthy analysis of this aspect here (if I still have to convince the reader at this stage I am fighting a losing battle), only to stress its nature as secondary substance (cement) on primary surface (wall), its explicitly adjunctive status, its innately decorative, agentic endeavour (3TTMan not only producing the work but being represented within it), and its indeterminate condition both attached and detached to its surface. Yet its locutionary, illocutionary, its propositional status? Well we could firstly quite clearly see the work to be ‘saying’ something (and thus be locutionary), working through a certain force, through a lucidity in its statement; Viva la Calle Libre thus not only provokes a relationship between speaker and listener via clear, rational speech,

2.15 3TTMan’s Viva la Calle Libre (Madrid, Spain, 2010) after a half-hearted (or perhaps 2/3-hearted) erasure by local authorities, an attempted erasure only serving to give the original work more prominence

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it acts as a wish, a prime example of an illocutionary utterance, a statement and an action at the same time. Moreover, as an explicit performative, ‘Long Live the Free Street’, like ‘Long Live the King’, is a statement in which the act of wishing is fulfilled through its own utterance, the utterance not narrating something true or false but something felicitous or infelicitous, something which functions through its ability to successfully perform the act in question. Yet aside from these conventional locutionary properties, I would also move to argue that the images themselves, devoid of their central text, function in very way as the above illocutions. The eponymous three-headed figure thus works not just to substantiate but to visually pronounce, to perform, to assert the very statement itself, the image representing the freedom 3TTMan embraces, representing the literal breaking down of barriers. Yet does this image correspond to the vital Habermasian technicalities of common humanity, common concern and inclusive public? Being present, available to all those living in the city in the openness of the street, it can be understood to implicitly disregard entrenched social hierarchy, to be legible, and thus open to all possible readers, listeners, viewers, to form a legitimate topic of discourse, a legitimacy registered through its vocal support of an open public sphere. Yet does it work within the communicative validity claim of normative rightness? It is here proven through its status as an acceptable gesture, a declaration which is appropriate to make within the city itself (in a city increasingly subject to restrictions and limitations), with is appropriate if not relevant to societal norms. To subjective truthfulness? Here ably demonstrated through its illicit, non-remunerative status, the sincerity of the statement proven by the act itself. And propositional truth? Here established through its ability, like all of 3TTMan’s works, to stand up to counterarguments (‘down with the free street’), to cohere, to obtain within its particular ‘truth’, the truth of 3TTMan’s total support of the continual vibrancy of the street. What first gave me the idea of doing the project was seeing a wall on which children had drawn their names, their declarations of love, when the cement was still fresh. It felt raw and natural at the same time. I became more and more fascinated by these interventions in the street because they seemed to reveal a more spontaneous expression than when someone is consciously working in public space, like a purer form of communication … I don’t like something just to be good, to be beautiful, to be good for its own sake. For me it’s a way to express yourself, but as you express something you create something which can touch others. At the end, what we do is for people to see it, and so I like to send messages in it. The saturation of information in the street today makes all those who use public space as a medium of communication – whether that’s advertisers, graffiti writers, architects – to seek visibility at any cost. What I love is that with the cement however is such a rudimentary technique can have more impact than these huge marketing campaigns. There’s no need to have permission, in fact the technique allows you to work in the center without authorization. You get around the “need” to do something for any reason than itself. Like with the Fill in the Blanks project [see Figure 2.12, a project in which 3TTMan used his cement technique to repair potholed pavements all over the city] I felt the responsibility to do that, to pick up what the City Council had dropped, to improve the city for everyone. I felt the civic rumble in my soul! I don’t want to impose my ideas on people and say yeah, you have to think this way, for me, that’s too much of an imposition. I want to do

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something fun, respectful, honest. And you could see people really understood it. There’s a direct relation and reaction … There’s no other art that works in this way, with no intermediary. I mean I don’t pretend to be a type of social artist that causes a revolution in the people, and brings up the masses against the government, for me that cause is too high. I just want to have a relation, a connection with the people, I actually think that is worth a lot more. I just want to provoke a thought, to put it there, and then let people see what they think about it, not force them to think something (23/8/2010).

Untitled by Eltono The tuning fork. Eltono’s iterable, always evolving design. Situated at the furthest end of our three examples in purely textual to expressive terms, in levels of overt propositionality to ambiguity, and thus possibly the most difficult to coincide with the strict technicalities of Consensual Ornamentation. Although I will argue that this image is still one searching for a consensual response, here we have no textual elements. A form of almost total abstraction. We have seven discrete, sharp lines set out in white, red and blue, alongside three matching triangles set in red and blue: figures which snake around each other to form Eltono’s eponymous shape. Situated upon a black, painted wooden board set within a red-bricked wall (acting as an almost perfect canvas) and adjacent to a tag-covered electrical box and an advert-covered general store. Again, illegally produced, again using the medium (street wall) but not tools (acrylic paint) of traditional graffiti, and again, for the final time, working in an entirely different way from either what are too commonly termed either graffiti or street-art. 2.16 Eltono, Untitled, Utrecht, Netherlands, 2013

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As previously justified, I will not trouble to investigate the ornamental aspect of the work, save to say adjunctive element (paint) on primary surface (wooden board), to stress once more its obviously decorative, maze-like form (and thus to allude toward all the tension-fuelled discourses which are allied to this ornamental status). But its potentially locutionary, illocutionary, propositional standing becomes presently the more complex element to unwrap. As discussed, being a publicly accessible form we can firstly conclude that it is an inherently expository one, it is ‘saying’ something (whether in purely linguistically comparable terms or not) by just being there, on the public wall of the city. But could we not simply see this as a Lyotardian sensual, figural message (as we will come to explore in more depth within the next chapter) rather than a more literal one? The image is obviously operating in a communicative way, it is exposing itself to us as a viewer, but can it be understood as having any rational, discursive potential? Although I could move to suggest that it is working within a specific graphic vocabulary, a vocabulary based on simple geometrical shapes, or perhaps one working within the grammar of the architectural construction it is situated within, this would still be a purely metaphoric analysis. So what real linguistically viable issue does this work attempt to explore? 2.17 Eltono, Untitled, Madrid, Spain, 1999

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2.18 Eltono, Untitled, Madrid, Spain, 1998

What I want to argue here is that, as a speech act, Eltono’s image can function through the means of what Michal Ephratt (2008) has termed an ‘Eloquent Silence’ (ibid.: 1909), a silence not denoting an ‘absence of meaning’ but one that is fully ‘part of communication’ (ibid.: 1910), not silence as a pause for speech, nor silence as a method of generating power over another, but as an ‘active means chosen by the speaker to communicate his or her message’ (ibid.: 1913). In this manner, silence can take on referential roles, one can ‘make claims and proclaim propositions using eloquent silence’ (ibid.: 1916) – such as a collective silence which can express a negative answer or such as the famous blank page in Laurence Sterne’s Tristam Shandy which informs us of Yorick’s death. And thus working against both the licit and illicit images which it lies beside – overtly echoing the operational modality, mimicking the medium and techniques of each – I will here suggest that Eltono’s work can be understood to be proposing a form of simplicity, a sense of quietude. Working against the violence of the official signs as much as the violence of graffiti, it can be seen as an example of what Bal (2001) terms ‘speech-art’, images which ‘seem to say “look!” while often implying “That’s how it is”’ (ibid.: 165), a visual performance of something new in the street urging us to see the very street in a correspondingly new way. Working through a visual simplicity, a visual order, it can be making a proposition through its being rather than through its saying, through a refusal of the noise we are so often forced to encounter. As Eltono himself suggested, his move away from traditional graffiti was undertaken in order to encounter a wider public audience, produced so as to find a harmony with both the material and social body of the city (integrating both its architectonic and societal elements in a more consensual manner). It was an explicit search for the notion of common humanity, where every member of the public domain was invited into the discourse (enacted through its visual simplicity); a search

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for common concern, approaching issues important to members of society as a whole (critiquing the cold, strategic functioning of the city itself ); a search for an inclusive public, where its simple presentation necessitated a form of dialogical interaction (where consensus was based upon the search for understanding, the repudiation of coercion). And it was something also produced directly within the notion of normative rightness, its acceptability reached through a harmony with the space itself, an image working explicitly with, not against, the lines of the city; with a sense of subjective truthfulness, a sincerity reached, as stated earlier, through its illicit and non-remunerative performance; and with the conception of propositional truth, the factual honesty of the claim a statement on the existential nature of the city. Eltono’s image, for its all abstraction then, is an image which explicitly attempts to form a consensual relation with all those who see it, built in order to communicate with its recipients, to suggest another way of seeing the city. Even as it may seem to present nothing but form, nothing but shape and colour, it is an image produced with a proposition at its heart, an existential need to present his way of understanding the city to its inhabitants as a whole. At the beginning I wanted to change, I wanted to try something new, to modify the way I worked in the city. But the way of thinking, the way I’d learnt to relate to the street through graffiti, I needed to keep that because I loved that interaction with the city. So I tried to find a way of working in a more involved way, to try and find a real interaction with people. When you’re doing graffiti the rest of the people don’t care that much, it’s only for the small group you’re in, the other writers in the city, but I got to the stage where I wanted to reach other people, to communicate with everyone in the street. What I realised with my work when I stopped painting letters is that I could reach another kind of people. I saw old men or kids appreciating my work, stopping and looking at it. They probably appreciated the fact that I respect the place, I’m not covering it, I’m not destroying it, I’m working, playing with it. It’s easier to appreciate than big silver fat-cap tags, less aggressive. The thing with graffiti is that it’s just communication inside graffiti, it’s graffiti for graffiteros. And the rest of the city doesn’t see it, doesn’t read it, doesn’t care. They hate it and that’s it. And that’s fine, that’s also important. But I realised with my work that I was able to communicate with everybody. Working in the street is simply the most democratic way. Of course some people won’t get it, not everyone will understand what I am trying to do. But I still want to put art into places it doesn’t normally go, so people will bump into something new and unexpected. To make people interact with the city in a different way. It’s like a beautiful kind of secret, people see it and may think about it, it creates an intimate relationship. They see it and they think, ‘who did that? What is he trying to say to me?’ It’s a powerful media because you can make people stop and really question their whole environment (23/8/2008).

A Unity of Form and Function Consensual Ornamentation can thus be understood as a discourse shaped to facilitate an intense communal transaction, an act orientated, at its very basis, towards the reaching of an understanding, a sympathy and intersubjective relation with its public accomplices. Rather than being merely a discourse oriented

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towards the attainment of perceived ‘success’, it must be seen as a communicative platform attempting to confront the misrepresentations of steering media, a counterinstitution (through its solicitation toward understanding, not simply gain) from which actors can critically assess the distortions present within modern media forms. Akin to the rival ‘new social movements’ that Habermas discusses (2002), movements that have the potential to ‘foster the revitalization of possibilities for expression and communication that have been buried alive’, so-called ‘counterinstitutions’ that are understood to evade the ‘clutches of the steering media’ (ibid.: 395–6), Consensual Ornamentation can hence be seen to reject the instrumentally motivated direction of the public sphere in preference for a more human form of communication, to create a new form of participation which increases rational discourse and debate, a form of critical publicity which attempts to return to free deliberation and contestation. All the works of Consensual Ornamentation are thus meant to be seen, to be interacted with, formed in order to integrate with the public space of the city. And hence whilst illicit, they simply aspire to elicit a response, to function through an exposition that transgresses law but not perceived rights, that transgresses prevalent hegemonic codes but not prevailing social ones. The illegality of production can thus be seen as a stance which enables a space from which to work against Habermas’s steering media; it must not be understood as a straightforwardly aggressive or antiestablishmentarian tactic but instead as a new stage from which to enter public debate, a new location from which to penetrate into the public sphere as a whole, a new site from which one can critique hegemonic practices and develop what was considered as an authentic, non-perlocutionary mode of public participation. The collective adherence to images with the potential for open interpretability, images that never produced a brash conclusive statement (a finality occluding impending discourse) but which instead opened a path to discourse, was in fact used by many informants as a technique to both combat the perceived aggressive admonitions of much of the visual culture in the public sphere (whether classical ‘public art’ or advertising, both seen as a perlocutionary visuality with indirect, instrumentally motivated intentions – ‘buy me’, ‘stop here’, ‘do this’ or ‘do that’), to insist upon the interactive, responsive nature of traditional discourse. Whether or not a final consensus was eventually achieved, as previously discussed, was thus not the imperative issue; rather, the desire was simply for genuinely illocutionary communication, a manifest not mendacious message where the beholder could then make up their own mind, where they could be (at the very least) party to an attempt at rational communication. It was about the ‘performance of an act’ (Austin 1962: 99) rather than their ‘consequential effects’ (ibid.: 101), a technique highlighting the disparity between ‘convincing, persuading, deterring, and even, say, surprising or misleading’ and acts such as ‘informing, ordering, warning, undertaking, etc., i.e. utterances which have a certain (conventional) force’ (ibid.: 108). A performative utterance could thus be completed without the intended result of anything other than recognition of its existence, without anything more than their counterpart understanding, rather than agreeing with, the particular statement presented (Longworth 2006). And it is simply this orientation, this bearing toward rational assertion, that defines communicative action, and thus that defines Consensual Ornamentation at its very core.

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2.19 Homer [Sasha Kurmaz], Illegal Inscription, Kiev, Ukraine, 2010

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In all three of the specific case studies presented above, then, in all the images and artefacts discussed within this chapter as a whole, I would argue that we can see an ornamental form enmeshed within the very centre of the public sphere, an ornamental form in fact moulding a coherent public sphere through its very existence. I would suggest we can distinguish an aesthetic searching for agreement, searching for accord and union with its surrounding community, a style of parietal writing striving to act in an open manner within its available surroundings – irrespective of its officially permissible status and willing to rationally debate this standing. As clearly ornate additions to architectural facades, as productions transcending the very impermeability of their now porous walls, these ornamental forms both embellish and beautify their surfaces in their own idiosyncratic ways, they form a unity between expressive meaning and construction, a unity of form and function that makes the images produced far from the empty decorative effects created by many modern forms of ornament, modern forms that replicate a past ornamental structure with no understanding of their initiatory purpose. Here, I would contend, we can find an unmitigated correspondence between appearance and use, between representational and architectonic meanings, the designs acting as performances of thought, of the argumentative impulse, the social beliefs of the very producers themselves. Even as the experience of production itself is a key element within the productive process – the jouissance, spontaneity, and simple corporeal interaction with the city that will be discussed in Section 2 – it is these intentional, communicative values that I believe uphold the core distinctions between Consensual and Agonistic Ornamentation, this communicative search for consensus on the one hand and dissensus on the other that defines them at their very base.

2.20 Erosie, I Hereby Apologise for the Damage Done, Eindhoven, Netherlands, 2007

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Habermas’s work, then, despite the numerous and often impassioned critiques set against it,15 can thus still be seen to hold a key place within the timeless search for a liberating model of a public sphere. Understood through the medium of Consensual Ornamentation, we can perceive a clear continuance of the enduring search for the good life, we can see the abiding desire for an authentic way of communicating in the modern, complex city. And seen through this Habermasian lens, we can see Consensual Ornamentation striving to re-work both the conceptions of the classic public sphere – a place where one can discuss issues away from the demands of the state or the market – as well as the concepts of communicative action – where we can then discuss these issues rationally, openly, where everyone can partake in discourse. We can find an ornament with a consensual order at its heart, a form of public, insurgent ornamentation with both a communicative interconnectedness and openness imbued within it.

15 Critiques often based on a descriptive analysis of his work, an assessment of whether there ever actually was the equality of class, gender and so on that he contended, rather than an argument of a prescriptive nature that I am attempting here, a discussion of the subjunctive, utopian, philosophical project that he proposed

3 Agonistic Ornamentation

If one is pagan, it is certainly not because one thinks that one game is better than another; it is because one has several kinds of games at one’s disposal […] One can introduce into the pragmatics, into our relations with others, forms of language that are at the same time unexpected and unheard of, as forms of efficacy. Either because one has made up new moves in an old game or because one has made up a new game. Jean François Lyotard

The position of art is a refutation of the position of discourse. The position of art indicates a function of figure, which is not signified, and this functions both at the edge of and within discourse. It indicates that the transcendence of the symbol is the figure, that is, a spatial manifestation that linguistic space cannot incorporate without being shaken, an exteriority that cannot be interiorized as signification. In its alterity, art is posed as plasticity and desire, curved extension, opposed to invariability and reason, diacritical space. Jean François Lyotard

Outmoded and Suspect As with its Consensual partner, what I must first here outline is the full importance of the Agonistic part of the neologism which this chapter eponymously takes as its title. With its ornamental criteria satisfied (outlined again in their specifics within the case studies below), I must explain why I am trying to describe this particular aesthetic domain as something agonistic, if (and once more) following the OED, we understand the term agon to mean both an Ancient Greek ‘public celebration of games’ and ‘a verbal contest or dispute between two characters in a Greek play’,

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the term agonistic to mean ‘polemic, combative’, ‘striving to overcome in argument’. Whilst the conceptual borders of this discourse have been previously outlined – the closed, intentional fractured cultural approach they take on, the desire for disharmony and discord they prompt – while the material forms they most commonly exhibit have been briefly laid out – a practice by and large based in a calligraphic form, one embracing an often intentionally impenetrable appearance and an inward-looking approach – I need to make clear why this agonistic term is so pertinent, and, moreover, where this very expression emerges from. In order to further my particular argumentative thrust, then, I will be examining the work of two key agonistic theorists, the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard and the political theorist Chantal Mouffe (both of whom will be ably assisted by figures such as Homi Bhabha, Michel Foucault and Friedrich Nietzsche). Each of these individuals has utilized the classical Greek notion of the agonal spirit, seeing the competitive agon, rather than the consensual agora, as key to the wellbeing of the public sphere. Each of them have focussed on the Homeric impulse toward contest and competition, where struggle is both means and end, where true freedom in understood in terms of strife, discord and disputation. And although their at times variant understandings of agonistic practice do on occasions clash (in what could be seen as a classically agonic manner), it is through their combined elucidation that we will come closer to a definition of Agonistic Ornamentation, that we will be able to grasp the types of practices, rather than forms of argumentation, that agonism demands. Like in our previous chapter however, before we begin to probe the theoretical basis of this aesthetic discourse, I want again to present three, archetypal images of what I argue Agonistic Ornamentation to be, three examples which I will for a second time leave suspended as my argument builds. These three – Nano4814’s Untitled, Spok’s TBC, and the Choque Gallery Invasion/Belas Artes Invasion (orchestrated by Cripta Djan and Rafael Pixobomb)1 – will later be used as distinct case studies to analyse the argument being made, representative instances which will come to support the relation I now seek to make both with Lyotard and Mouffe’s theory of the agon. For now, however, we must depart from the artistic field as discussed in the previous chapter, a field that believes in its ‘transformative potential’, in its potential to ‘provide a consensual ground for public acts of political speech and resistance’, we must depart from a zone within which ‘consensus and collectivity are valued positively as instantiations of democratic relations between the artist, the viewer, and the artwork’ (Hinderliter 2009: 17). Instead, it is toward a regime that sees the very idea of consensus as an outmoded and suspect that we will now progress – ‘outmoded, because the condition of postmodernity is characterized by the plurality and incommensurability of “language-games”’; and ‘suspect, because the pursuit of consensus “does violence” to this plurality and thereby constrains possibilities for authentic political action’ (Markell 1997: 377). It is toward an arena attempting to emphasize the innate heterodoxy, the irrepressible difference of the public sphere that we must now move to encounter. 1

Permission to reprint images of the Choque Gallery Invasion, I have been, very regrettably, unable to obtain. The Belas Artes Invasion depicted here, an event also organized by Critpa Djan and Rafael Pixobomb, is thus used as a visual illustration of a similar act. For the actual images of the attack at the Choque Gallery, please see here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pixoartatack/sets/72157624054565690/.

3.1 Nano4814, Untitled, Vigo, Spain, 2009

3.2 Spok, TBC, Madrid, Spain, 2009

3.3  Belas Artes Invasion, São Paulo, Brazil, 2008

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The Impossible or Unforeseeable Move At its nucleus, the theoretical landscape we are here exploring is one based on a resistance to everyday normativity; an ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’, in the famous words of Lyotard (1984: xxiv); a ‘permanent provocation’, in those of Foucault (1982: 790); a ‘cure and an aid in the service of growing, struggling life’, in the poetic expression of Nietzsche (2001: 234). It is an approach encompassing a wide range of contestational procedures, one laying weight upon the boundlessness of injustice, upon the basic impossibility of ever reaching a fully inclusive and unfettered state. For agonistic theorists, conflict and disorder are seen an inherent part of democratic existence, as a way, in fact, to expand and develop the practices of an egalitarian public sphere. Autonomy from the search for accord and an embracement of dissension is believed to develop a position from which hegemonic power can be confronted and interrogated, a location from which these authorities can be defied, there statutes revised. Disagreement and disputation are thus recognized to be necessary, rather than negative components of political and social life, constituents that are at the foundation of an active, vigorous instantiation of citizenship. Within the agon then, nothing can remain unchallenged: boundaries and borders, inequities and imbalances. All are subjects not to be finally agreed upon, but to be consistently disputed about, issues that should remain within a continuous cycle of friction. Agonistic space can therefore be understood on the one hand as a truly competitive one, a space in which ‘one competes for recognition, precedence and acclaim’ (Benhabib 1992: 78), yet on the other as a space in which one does not battle in search of the ‘truth’ but its direct defiance, a truth ‘marked and informed by the ambivalence of the process of emergence itself’, a truth marked by the ‘productivity of meanings that construct counter-knowledges in medias res’ (Bhabha 2004: 33). For Lyotard, as he suggested in his ground-breaking text The Postmodern Condition (1984), invention itself was understood as something ‘always born of dissension’ (ibid.: xxv), authentic communication likewise born of a recalcitrant will. As he went on to pronounce, ‘to speak is to fight […] and speech acts fall into the domain of a general agonistics’ (ibid.: 10). Language was understood to be in a state of continuous tension, a condition of unremitting ‘civil war’ (Lyotard 1988: 141), and thus whilst Lyotard was of course (notionally) supportive of Habermas’s attempted resistance towards the instrumentality so prevalent within the public sphere, he fiercely critiqued the Deliberative Democrat’s conviction in the democratizing ability of consensuality and discursive reason, an outlook that he in fact argued was ‘parasitic upon an Enlightenment metanarrative of emancipation’ (Villa 1992b: 716). The general acquiescence to hegemonically inspired ‘truth’ was, naturally, considered to be of profound danger for a truly emancipative society; however, the idea that ‘a model of argumentative rationality and agreement derived from science’ could bestow a ‘context-independent criteria of validity’ was vehemently dismissed by Lyotard (ibid.: 716). Scientific knowledge of the type espoused by Habermas – where a ‘scientific statement is subject to the rule that a statement must fulfill a given set of conditions in order to be accepted as scientific’ (Lyotard 1984: 8) – was thus contrasted with what Lyotard termed a narrative knowledge – one that ‘certifies itself in the pragmatics of its own transmission without having recourse

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to argumentation and proof’ (ibid.: 27) – a crucial distinction which he believed protected the true heterogeneity and multiplicity of the social world, a distinction which could stand in contrast to the dictatorial metanarratives. The result of this was the emergence of so-called petits recits, ‘little narratives’, local, first-order utterances that could denote a radical difference and that could resist incorporation within the totalizing histories of the metalanguage. Acting ‘figurally’, as the ‘unspeakable other’ (Readings 1991: xxxi), working both within and against normative discourse, these little narratives were understood to displace any scientific claims to narrative theory. The paralogical space they opened – paralogy indicating a ‘sensitivity to differences’, an ‘ability to tolerate the incommensurable’ (Lyotard 1984: xxv) – was one which did not aim for consensus but rather for its own displacement, aiming to create a ‘horizon of dissensus’ (Lyotard 1984, cited in Readings 1991: 51), a space where there could be ‘no narrative to put an end to narratives’ (ibid.: 51). In the agonistic realm Lyotard recounts there were thus no metaprescriptions with any universal authenticity, no discourses with any unifying authority. And through the subsequent collapse of prevalent notions of truth, ‘discordant language games’ could then emerge, games that Lyotard maintained could open ‘the way to forms of political practice and judgment freed from the tyranny of science or episteme’ (Villa 1992b: 716). These language games would have three key facets: 1) their rules would not ‘carry within themselves their own legitimation’, but be the ‘the object of a contract, explicit or not, between players’; 2) ‘if there are no rules, there is no game, that even an infinitesimal modification of one rule alters the nature of the game’; and 3) ‘every utterance should be thought of as a “move” in a game’ (Lyotard 1984: 10). No language game could thus supplant another, could force the other out of the dialogue. And only by agreeing on the rules of every individual interaction could the field come to any sense, could one recognize the basic alterity of every interaction, each contingent game coming to form a new mode of communication, exemplifying the novatio, the ‘increase of being and the jubilation which result from the invention of new rules of the game, be it pictorial, artistic, or any other’ (ibid.: 79). Consensuality was simply understood to come to regularize the ‘“moves” permitted’ (ibid.: 66), doing violence to both the heterogeneity of the agonic contest as well as the heterogeneity of the players. It was grasped, quite plainly, as a ‘flattening, antiagonistic, antiinitiatory’ model of political practice (Villa 1992b: 716), an abhorrent ideal that Lyotard’s postmodern philosophy sought to radically displace. Through the arts, the arts as understood as ‘a series of little narratives’ (Readings 1991: 73), we could then come to critically assess (and then expel) the deeply entrenched societal assurances of truth and meaning, come to oust the pervasive metanarratives that dominated contemporary Western thought. As the very ‘field of a resistance to metalanguages’ (ibid.: 72), the aesthetic could renegotiate our understanding of what cultural transformation might be, advancing the postmodern conception of culture as incomplete, disconnected, discontinuous. This appeal to a ‘pagan politics’ (Lyotard 1985: 75), the turn to the dominion of the Sophists (what he calls the ‘strength of the weak’ [Lyotard 1978, cited in White 1994: 482]), endeavoured to ‘break with all attempts to ground action and practical decision in a theoretical discourse of legitimacy’ (Johnson 2006: 143).

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3.4 Neko, Untitled, Madrid, Spain, 2009

To be pagan was to fully partake in these language games, ‘to play moves’, to ‘develop ruses, to set the imagination to work’ (Lyotard 1985: 61). And a ‘preeminently pagan’ aesthetic could emerge not when aiming ‘at mimetic fidelity’ (i.e. ‘telling the truth’), not when aiming at a ‘subjective will’ (‘creating a new truth of the imagination, a Utopia’), but simply when aiming at ‘producing effects’, at ‘provoking more art, more invention’ (Readings 1991: 54). Art was hence not merely ‘in the service of cultural transformation’ but was ‘cultural transformation’ (ibid.: 54), paganism an insistence on art against knowledge, on art as discovery rather than truth. Within it one could then ‘invent by instituting new rules’, one could seek ‘the move that will displace the rules of the game, the ‘impossible’ or unforeseeable move’ (ibid.: 55). And hence we can then come to find the distinction, as explicated so cogently once more by the late Bill Readings, between Lyotard’s conception of modernist and post-modernist forms of art, between the ‘innovative function of art’ espoused by modernism, and the true ‘paralogism’ of the postmodern: Innovation seeks to make a new move within the rules of the language game “art”, so as to revivify the truth of art. Paralogism seeks the move that will displace the rules of the game, the “impossible” or unforeseeable move. Innovation refines the efficiency of the system, whereas the paralogical move changes the rules in the pragmatics of knowledge. It may well be the fate of a paralogical move to be reduced to innovation as the system adapts itself (one can read Picasso this way), but this is not the necessary outcome. The invention may produce more inventions. Roughly speaking, the condition of art is postmodern or paralogical when it both is and is not art at the same time […] If early modern aesthetic innovation sought a new truth or a new way of telling the truth, if late modernist innovation sought a new truth to the experience of telling, postmodern art does not seek a truth at all but seeks to testify to an event to which no truth can be assigned, that cannot be made the object of a conceptual representation (ibid.: 55).

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3.5  La Mano and Zosen, Untitled, Barcelona, Spain, 1997

For Lyotard then, truly paralogical art would bear witness to the differends2 so present in society, the instants ‘wherein something which should be able to be put into phrases cannot be phrased in the accepted idioms’ (Lyotard 1988: 56), where one is forced to ‘find a way to phrase the silence that cannot be phrased’ (White 1994: 490). Yet not only should art ‘evoke or testify’ toward these differends, it must ‘exacerbate them so as to resist the injustice which silences those who cannot 2

Lyotard gives this visually forceful example of an archetypal differend: ‘Let’s accept now that you are beginning to play with the [aforementioned] tennis balls in someone’s company. You are surprised to observe that this other person does not seem to be playing tennis with these balls, as you thought, but is treating them more like chess pieces. One or the other of you complains that “that’s not how you play the game”. There is a differend’ (Lyotard 1993, cited in Grebowicz 2007: 20).

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speak the language of the master’ (Lyotard in Readings 1991: xxx). Through all these techniques, through petit-recits, through language-games, through paralogy, one could then become released from what Lyotard termed as the ‘American’ position,3 one could come to see consensus solely as ‘a particular state of discussion’ rather than ‘its end’ (Lyotard 1984: 65–6). Through the fluid space of the agon, through the disruption of all truth, all metanarratives, one could form a space which could battle the pernicious façade of harmony and consensus, which could refuse efficiency and embrace sensuality, refuse homogeneity and embrace multiplicity; one could create a wild, creative energy which could never become ‘bound to a single logic or discursive form’ (White 1994: 480–82), one could form a boundless contest in which it was not resolutions but utterances, not deductions but ‘moves’ which were of the utmost importance.

The Register of Legitimacy Emerging from this dissensual field, Chantal Mouffe represents probably the most overtly political theorist of the agon, the thinker who has most successfully rearticulated agonistically philosophical tracts by theorists such as Nietzsche and Lyotard into a more engaged, contemporary, social policy. For Mouffe (2005a), one of the principal errors made by Deliberative Democrats (specifically Habermas, but so too John Rawls) was their avoidance of the deep-seated tension between the ‘logic of democracy’ on the one hand and the ‘logic of liberalism’ on the other (ibid.: 93), a tension she discusses using the work of the German political theorist (and National Socialist) Carl Schmitt. Examining the conflict between ‘homogeneity’ on the one hand and the ‘eradication of heterogeneity’ on the other (Schmitt 1926, in Mouffe 2005a: 38) – a situation where the state needs a certain inequality to produce the very notion of equality (for equality to have any political meaning that is), where it needs to promote an inherent logic of inclusion/exclusion, of us/them – Mouffe argues that there is an ‘insuperable opposition between liberal individualism, with its moral discourse centered around the individual, and the democratic ideal, which is essentially political, and aims at creating an identity based on homogeneity’ (Mouffe 2005a: 39). Our modern conception of liberal democracy thus contains an inbuilt aporia between a liberal tradition dedicated to human rights, the rule of law and the concept of liberty, and a democratic tradition committed toward notions of popular sovereignty and equality. The promotion of consensuality, however, initially encouraged so as to manage the burgeoning plurality of society, had tipped the fine balance of these (conflicting) logics away from democracy and towards liberalism, the careful poise of the fields now surging away from the demos and toward the hegemony of (neo-)liberal forces, the hegemony of a market-based form of instrumentality. Whilst the two components of liberal democracy had 3

As Grebowicz (2007) notes, ‘“American” here includes Japan, as well as political thinkers like Jürgen Habermas, and refers generally to a formulation of democracy where dissent is to be negotiated away’ (ibid.: 28).

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previously stabilized through constant political tension between contending forces then, today, with the dominance of the ‘third way’ and middle-ground diplomacy, Mouffe argues that we have become entrenched in a state that, whilst being a quite arbitrary historical contingency, has led to the ‘very idea of a possible alternative to the existing order’ – to any alternative to the hegemony of neo-liberalism – being dangerously and totally discredited, the prevalent system becoming in fact ‘naturalized and made into the way “things really are”’ (ibid.: 5). As a result, not only does any alternative ‘to the existing configuration of power disappear’, but so too does ‘the very possibility of a legitimate form of expression for the resistances against the dominant power relations’ (ibid.: 5). Deliberative democracy thus means that groups existing outside of the notional consensus (and there will always be a ‘constitutive outside’ to any consensual process) have no place from which to even enter the debate, directly counteracting the true egalitarian nature of a representative democracy. And thus while the interconnection between liberalism and democracy was still seen to be pivotal, it was only through the embracement of the inherent tension within it (rather than its negation), through an embracement of its friction that we could then confront the basic impossibility of ‘establishing a consensus without exclusion’ (Mouffe 2005a: 105). For Mouffe, what was thus paramount was a method of intervention which ‘ferments dissensus, that makes visible what the dominant consensus tends to obscure and obliterate’, yet a dissensus which did not work through pure transgression or denial, one which would not simply form ‘a total break with the existing state of affairs in order to create something absolutely new’ (Mouffe 2008: 12–13). This was dissensus as improvisation rather than innovation (as we discuss further on pp. 217–19), a form of dissensus which attempted to eliminate the ‘us/them’ dichotomy (a modality following Schmitt’s concept of friend/ enemy) and instead convert the ‘them’ from an ‘enemy to be destroyed’ into an ‘adversary’, transform the ‘them’ from a social other into a social partner ‘whose ideas we combat but whose right to defend those ideas we do not put into question’ (ibid.: 102). Whilst Deliberative Democracy simply removes recalcitrant actors from the field of play, Agonistic Pluralism sees others as opponents not merely further ‘competitors’, as opponents with a ‘shared adhesion to the ethico-political principles of liberal democracy’ (ibid.: 102). They may disagree on the precise implications of liberty and equality, yet they accept that these differences cannot be determined by rational discourse. This all then leads to what for Mouffe (2002) is the crucial adaptation of antagonism into agonism, from a ‘struggle between enemies’ to a ‘struggle between adversaries’ (ibid.: 9), an adjustment creating space for a battle of ideas where ontological differences are in themselves incontrovertible. Unlike a purely antagonistic relationship, then, one where opponents ‘have no common symbolic space’ (Mouffe 2005a: 13), within an agonistic bond rivals share a common space of representation, a symbolic space that can lead to a vibrant instantiation of the public sphere, a dissensual arena filled with (affirmative) conflict and confrontation. As Mouffe (2001) maintains:

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If there is a vibrant, political public sphere where this kind of confrontation can take place, it is less likely that there will be confrontations about non-negotiable issues or essentialist identities. What I’m arguing is that this form of agonistic public sphere is not something that should be seen as negative or threatening for democracy. On the contrary, it is what can keep democracy alive and impede the danger of extreme right-wing movements that could mobilize passions in an antidemocratic way (ibid.: 124).

Whilst forcefully disregarding Carl Schmitt’s argument that liberal democracy is a doomed paradigm – that, as Mouffe paraphrases, liberalism wholly ‘negates democracy’ as ‘democracy negates liberalism’ (Mouffe 2005a: 9) – any ‘rational resolution’ to the paradox was understood as a vain attempt to insulate politics ‘from the effects of the pluralism of value’, of trying to ‘fix once and for all the meaning and hierarchy of the central liberal democratic values’ (ibid.: 93). Only by putting an emphasis on the ‘types of practices’ possible within a new model of democratic citizenship, rather than particular ‘forms of argumentation’, could the democratic deficit be truly tackled (ibid.: 96). Rational argumentation and ‘ideal’ discourse were strategies understood to simply ‘preclude the possibility of contestation’ (ibid.: 92), to preclude differing political practices, merely replacing ‘the dominant “means/ ends rationality” of the “aggregative model”’ (the pre-consensual paradigm of Anthony Downs4 et al.) with yet another rational form, this time a ‘“deliberative” and 4

Downs’s ‘rational choice theory’ was specifically critiqued in William E. Connolly’s Neuropolitics (2002).

3.6 Remio, Untitled, São Paulo, Brazil, 2012

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“communicative” one’ (ibid.: 95). The aim towards a universal consensus was thus seen as ‘the real threat to democracy’, one that could lead to ‘violence being unrecognized and hidden behind appeals to “rationality”’, one disguising the ‘necessary frontiers and forms of exclusion behind pretences of “neutrality”’ (ibid.: 22). By ‘privileging rationality’, as Mouffe continues to argue, ‘both the deliberative and the aggregative perspectives leave aside […] the crucial role, played by passions and emotions in securing allegiance to democratic values’ (ibid.: 95). And thus through focusing on ‘desire’, on ‘fantasies’, on the corporeal force of the everyday, Mouffe comes to find a notion of citizenship firmly opposed to mere interests, opposed to the notion of ‘rational’ economic man, ones returning the passion that had been eliminated from the private sphere by the magnitude of consensuality. The aim of an agonistic democracy must therefore be to ‘speak to people about their passions in order to mobilize them toward democratic designs’ (Mouffe 2001: 123), to advocate an ideal of the public sphere that rests upon the notion of a fervid agonistic confrontation. Only by separating the notion of politics – an ‘ensemble of practices, discourses and institutions’ seeking to establish ‘a certain order’ – and the notion of the political –the ‘dimension of antagonism that is inherent in human relations’ (ibid.: 101) – can we then can start to construct a democratic sphere able to place the notions of power and conflict at their centre, perceiving every act of power to ‘show the traces of exclusion’ (Mouffe 2005a: 99), every act of power to be an exclusion. Only then will we see how politics has always attempted to placate, to domesticate conflict, the exclusion predicated by consensuality being what Mouffe terms an ‘eradication of the political’ (ibid.: 101). The political hence becomes a space from which to elude the populist zeal engendered by the democratic deficit, to combat the perception (and often the actuality) that there is no contestational space from which to put forward one’s opinions, to curtail the natural movement toward extremisms, which we have seen steadily rising within Europe and the US (where this third-way consensual politics has grown so strong). Mouffe thus aims not to resist or oppose any specific institution, class or group, but simply any technique of power. Political struggle is seen as a movement toward the possibility of ‘self-overcoming’, of ‘self-creation’, the Nietzschean moment of genuine freedom fulfilled through the ability to declare one’s otherness (Villa 1992a: 290). And while agonism is thus ‘generally construed as a struggle against’, here it can more profitably be seen as ‘a struggle for’ (Hillier 2003: 43), a place where agonistic tension can act as both a barrier of protection against the totalitarian imperative and the first line of attack toward the establishment of new social formations. Foucault’s suggestion (1984) that just as one ‘must not be for consensuality’, one must ‘be against nonconsensuality’ (ibid.: 379) can thus be seen in a clearer light; contestation is about the transgression of power, the ‘affirmation of negation’ (Pickett 1996: 451); it is not simply conflict for conflicts sake, not dissensus as a wild instability, or anarchic nihilism. It means, as its Latin root dissentire would suggest, simply to differ in sentiment; a spirited opinion acting in non-conformance with the whole. It is a movement which can hence ‘undermine or at least weaken any given set of limits in order to attenuate their violence’ (ibid.: 451), a movement through which one can make both real changes to domineering societal powers while simultaneously creating new forms of progressive subjectivity.

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3.7 Katsu, Fuck You, New York, USA, 2011

The agonistic struggle must hence be conceived as never-ending, a struggle to confront truth and power at every level. It is an inexhaustible mode of commitment emerging through a continual strife, emerging through a continual contest over all meanings, all morals, all rights.

A Pressure and a Presence Following this agonistic analysis, I want to make two broad arguments. Firstly, I would like to suggest that Agonistic Ornamentation can be understood to function within the paralogic, pagan tradition as espoused by Lyotard, acting as a ‘technique of trouble’ (Bhabha 2005: 374) through which to combat the deadening vacuity of the ostensibly ‘public’ sphere. Invoking what Michael Warner (2002) has termed a ‘counterpublic’, a group ‘constituted through a conflictual relation to the dominant public’, a group ‘making different assumptions about what can be said or what goes without saying’ (ibid.: 423), it can be seen to summon a conflict that ‘extends not just to ideas or policy questions, but to the speech genres and modes of address that constitute the public’, a conflict which attempts to disrupt the deeply ingrained ‘hierarchy among media’ (ibid.: 424). Working through disputation not discourse, through contest not consensus, Agonistic Ornamentation can thus be understood through the modality of language games and petit récits that Lyotard examines, revealing local narratives, revealing the differend through every instance and exposition.

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3.8 Nov York, Untitled, New York, USA, 2010. Nov’s work here is a classic example of this movement over, rather than with the surface, the piece seamlessly moving from wall to glass to the wall again, then moving beyond even the edge of the building itself

And whilst like its Consensual partner, Agonistic Ornamentation sets out a statement in direct contrast to the manipulative, instrumental effects of the existent visual culture in the city, whilst it seeks to provide a direct contrast to the current media discourse, it functions not through a proposition but a battle, not discourse but utterances, through games intent on friction and tension as much through their very form as their reception. Secondly, I want to propose Agonistic Ornamentation as a discourse working through Mouffe’s concept of Agonistic Pluralism, a discourse aiming not to develop types of argumentation but types of practices, one working through agonism not antagonism, an ethos of contestation and engagement which reveres rather than reduces true multiplicity. Focusing on the passionate and fantastical over the rational and deliberate, Agonistic Ornamentation can then be linked to the constitutive outside of our current political system that Mouffe argues truly critical practices evoke, shirking politics and embracing the political through the creation of agonistic public spaces. Rather than the visually decipherable images we find in Consensual Ornamentation then, it is an intentionally narrow wide public Agonistic Ornamentation seeks to address, it is difference, fracture they seek to display. It is not simply a violence, a so often depicted anarchy that these cultural producers seek to ferment (an impulsion which in fact more often comes from the suppression of difference [Connolly 1995: xxi]) – but sooner a ‘pressure, and a presence, that acts constantly, if unevenly, along the entire boundary of authorization’(Bhabha 2004: 156).

3.9 Nov York, Nov York Needs Release, New York, USA, 2010

3.10 GPO, Doing Graffiti 4 The Crime, Athens, Greece, 2010

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Rather than the order of Consensual Ornamentation then, the working with as seen so clearly in Eltono’s work (as elucidated in his quote on p. 86), Agonistic Ornamentation is a practice that works against, working over surfaces not with them, working to resist our architecture not to enhance it, using the public sphere not simply as a canvas but as a more multidimensional site of practice. Both Lyotard’s theoretical and Mouffe’s applied frameworks will thus be argued to align with the firm belief in a vociferous, contestatory mode of social practice espoused by the practitioners of Agonistic Ornamentation, to complement its valorization of struggle and dissensus, of contest and dispute. Attempting to found not agreement, but a state of deep plurality, it will be seen as an aesthetic realm promoting notions of difference, disequilibrium and heterogeneity, a discourse intent not on replacing one order with another but instead on undermining, negating the notion of order itself. Just as in our previous chapter however, these broad arguments must now be more specifically and clearly delineated; I must show exactly how these theoretical and aesthetics discourses come to so unexpectedly converge.

Haunted by the Figure As a quintessential illustration of Lyotard’s petit recits, his little narratives, Agonistic Ornamentation will be understood to work through an always specific, localized presence, through a figural status, through a technique which functions both with and against normative discourse. As an aesthetic form (the archetypal state of the petit recits), which substantiates the incommensurability of postmodern existence through the revealing of localized narratives (via each individual, named, agentic act of writing, tagging, ornamenting), which makes no claim to universality (not attempting to be read, to be comprehended, received by a singular public but by disparate publics), which functions through discrete games relating solely to their fractional, and factional participants (to the closed fraternity of fellow calligraphers), Agonistic Ornamentation can be understood to reject overarching metanarratives and instead adopt the role of the instable, the poetic, the marginal. Acting as a cultural event through its status as performance (rather than simply acting as a representation of this event), as a very literal ‘site of transformation and dispute’ (Readings 1991: 47), it can be seen as a practice in which action is espoused over theory (an act that ‘certifies itself in the pragmatics of its own transmission without having recourse to argumentation and proof’ [Lyotard 1991: 2]), an act which is almost purely about utterance and action. Producing these works in the city is about the undertaking as much as the resultant image, it is about the doing, the execution, the act. And the illicit, contestatory epigraphical markings making up Agonistic Ornamentation come to act as a visual representation of this simultaneity, this plurality, becoming a visual representation of dissent. Just as little narratives in no way aim ‘to tell the story, to put an end to narrative’, but rather evoke ‘new stories by the manner in which in its turn it has displaced a preceding narrative in telling a story’ (ibid.: 51),

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so too each act of agonistic, ornamental cultural production can thus be seen to function as a steppingstone toward the completion of the next whilst also serving as a reference to the previous; each tag, each ornament, working to push the boundaries of the last, the intention simply being constant aesthetic exploration rather than culmination or conclusion. Agonistic Ornamentation can thus be seen as a quite literal example of what Lyotard (1989) termed an ‘imaged text’ (a calligraphic ornament, a figure working as text and non-text); an image that ‘surprises the eye and the ear and the mind by a perfectly improbable arrangement of the parts’ (one that instigates inconceivable relations between shapes and forms); an imaged text that, like poetic language, is ‘possessed’, is ‘haunted by the figure’ (ibid.: 29–30) (a text, a signature, a name, which is elevated beyond itself, beyond the literal and into metaphor). It is a dissident narrative enacted on the public surface of the city. Moreover, Agonistic Ornamentation can likewise be seen to converge quite directly with the procedural workings of Lyotard’s language games, the games, or perhaps utterances, defying the dominant discursive fields, the ‘phrase regimens’ which allude toward the innate diversity of potential meaning. Forming a knowledge which ‘is not simply a tool of the authorities’ – quite clearly working directly against law and ‘order’ – but instead a figure that can come to refine ‘our sensitivity to differences’ and our ‘ability to tolerate the incommensurable’ (Lyotard 1984: xxv) – its openly visible exhibition of the literal antithetic forcing its viewers into an encounter – these recalcitrant ornaments form a separation from the dominant language itself, they form ‘islands of language, each of them ruled by a different regime, untranslatable into the others’ (Lyotard 1993: 20).

3.11 Turbo, Untitled, Paris, France, 2008 3.12 Turbo, Untitled, Paris, France, 2007

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As prescribed by Lyotard then, like these language games Agonistic Ornamentation can first be seen to contain basic rules, ones internally decided upon by the community in question (to be the ‘the object of a contract, explicit or not, between players’ (Lyotard 1984: 10). Each act of ornamentation can hence be seen as subject to numerous regulations defined by other practitioners of kalligraphia (as seen in more detail in Chapter 4), to be working within the same regime of contest as his ornamental partners and thus aware of where one can write (on all public space), what one can write (ones name or ones community), how one can write (within the various genres of the aesthetic), who one can write upon (a fact dependent on the outcomes of previous contests). Following the second rule of language games, each ‘move’ within Agonistic Ornamentation obeys certain rules (‘if there are no rules, there is no game’), the game itself open to modification and alteration as the moves themselves progress (‘an infinitesimal modification of one rule alters the nature of the game’ [ibid.: 10]). Whilst the rules (as set out above) are vital, they are clearly not sacrosanct however; as the game changes (take the increasing erasure of graffiti on trains by anti-graffiti authorities for example) so do the techniques (the respondent use of tools such as paint-stripper and acid by the writers themselves, tools whose markings are even more difficult to erase), the game progressing and modifying as the utterances themselves change. And thirdly, ‘every utterance should be thought of as a “move” in a game’ (Lyotard 1984: 10), every act understood as a natural progression of the contest: each act of ornamentation can thus be seen as part of a wider network, functioning as a system that naturally reproduces itself – every inscription generating a further inscription, every invention producing more inventions (as Spok’s case study on pp. 117–20 clearly proves). The agonistic element of these language games thus emerges not only through pure confrontation with one’s agonic competitors, an attempt to defeat a competing challenger through the power of one’s design, but through a ‘fight’ with the very terms of the discourse itself, a fight to disorientate, to work against the accepted paradigmatic state. Agonistic Ornamentation is not undertaken simply ‘in order to win’ therefore, but more often ‘for the sheer pleasure of […] invention’ (ibid.: 10): Great joy is had in the endless invention of turns of phrase, of words and meanings, the process behind the evolution of language on the level of parole. But undoubtedly even this pleasure depends on a feeling of success won at the expense of an adversary – at least one adversary, and a formidable one: the accepted language, or connotation (ibid.: 10).

The vernacular aesthetic that Agonistic Ornamentation reveals can thus be understood to act as a proclamatory challenge to the state of language itself, subverting typology, unsettling the everyday use of writing, undermining the accepted language (the most ‘formidable’ adversary), through the joy, the delight taken in finding new ways of disfiguring and distorting the hegemonic language.

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Trying to find ‘new solutions’ to letter forms (as the artist Petro termed it), trying to find new ways of playing with the same 26 archetypes was understood as an illimitable, irrepressible task. The scripted enunciation of one’s chosen name, morphed, stretched, elided, repeated a thousand times through incessant invention (an innovation not refining the systems ‘efficiency’ but revivifying the ‘truth of art’, an invention producing ‘more inventions’, one changing ‘the pragmatics of knowledge’ [Readings 1991: 55]), thus comes to function through a dual mode of contestation, initially contestatory through its very ornamental state (as an illicit act at its core, fraught through its very placement), and latterly contestatory through its clash with the accepted language itself, a use of language that wrestles with its natural state, an artistic signature that is both means and ends in itself. As Baudrillard suggested, the very pseudonyms employed within this calligraphic framework meant that indeterminacy was set against the system itself, these scripts resisting ‘every interpretation and every connotation’ (Baudrillard 1993 [1976]: 30). Tags thus functioned to ‘derail the common system of designations’ (ibid.: 30), bursting ‘into reality like a scream, an interjection, an anti-discourse’ (ibid.: 30). And through the discovery of these new forms, these new subtexts to previously agreed upon texts, Agonistic Ornamentation can thus separate language from itself, shatter it from within in order to discover new rules, new possibilities. Yet aside from the disputes Agonistic Ornamentation enacts upon spatial surroundings, upon formal language, upon the fellow participants of the language game, there are further ones provoked with their very selves, an exterior struggle through a classic agonic contest (through a battle to invent new moves, new rules) and an interior struggle to simply produce more, to push one’s practice to the very edge. We can thus find an infinite cycle of repetition, modification, transformation, a search for the ‘perfect’ form which the practitioners themselves acknowledge will almost certainly never be reached; we can find a game functioning against the privacy of the wall, against the architecture of the city, against the use of language, one’s adversaries, one’s competitors, oneself. And every action, every marking can hence be grasped as an illustration of the novatio, where the ‘text he writes’ (the ‘postmodern artist or writer’ that is), where ‘the work he produces are not in principle governed by preestablished rules’, where ‘the artist and the writer [are] working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done’ (Lyotard 1984: 81). Agonistic Ornamentation can thus be understood as a ‘discursive intervention within language’, a disruption which takes root through ‘contesting rules, forms, principles and positions’ (Best and Kellner 1991: 163); it is an interruption of the metanarrative which takes root within the porous walls of the city itself. It is hence not only the basely dissensual positionality of the practitioners discussed here (their desire to work against the norms of the city), their explicit attempt to form an innately partial, divided text (one visually embracing alterity), but their deeply pagan movement, their attempt to radically transform the rules of the city, the rules of law, the rules of art, to form an energy unbound by instrumental logic, that places them directly within Lyotard’s understanding of agonism.

3.13 and 3.14 Mathieu Tremblin, Tag Clouds – Colombier Optique, Rennes, France, 2010. Whilst the ‘translation’ Tremblin here undertakes can provide an amazing insight into the scopic abilities of the agonistic artist, their capacity to so clearly decipher this ostensible pollution, Tremblin’s highly astute work is unable to account for a vast amount of information a seasoned agonistic practitioner would also perceive – information pertaining to issues such as style, technique, experience, mind state etc.

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3.15 Read More Books, Untitled, Brooklyn, New York, 2008

The basely ‘aneconomic’ condition of the artefacts produced then, their lack of a ‘bottom line’ (ibid.: 55), means that the artistic innovation which takes place produces nothing but a continuous displacement; it refuses to make the system more efficient (in fact attacking this instrumental efficiency through their inalienable status), refuses to supply it with new products (the products that the insatiable art market needs to survive5) exemplifying the continuous struggle over meaning within all language, the struggle emerging through the innate polyphony of our social body. Agonistic Ornamentation is thus an emblematic instance of an aesthetic practice that ‘both is and is not art at the same time’ (ibid.: 55), a practice whose very practitioners themselves often refuse this label, who aim at ‘producing effects’ rather than producing art, who aim always to find the move that will ‘displace the rules of the game, the “impossible” or unforeseeable move’ (ibid.: 54–5). And, as such, every example of this illicit ornament evokes a basic differend, testifying to the injustice of modern neo-liberal space, the impossibility of legally entering into the domain of representation without capital or power. As a confrontation of imagination and reason, Agonistic Ornamentation is thus suppressed, repressed due to this differend, it is marked as vandalism not art, as dirt, pollution, and the ‘purity’ of the increasingly privatized ‘public’ sphere retained.

5

Agonistic Ornamentation, unlike ‘spraycan-art’, unlike ‘street-art’, can thus never be co-opted by the museum nor made into a product as it can only ever take place in public space. Many practitioners thus see themselves as amateurs (as well as fully acting in this manner), undertaking these tasks solely for ‘fun’. They might make a living through sidelines such as graphic or commercial design, art-direction, graffiti workshops, etc., but their street-work will be a separate discourse, never merely bought or sold, implicitly inalienable.

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The Ever-Present Possibility of Antagonism In terms of Chantal Mouffe’s theoretical programme, Agonistic Ornamentation can be seen to coalesce with this contestatory model through its focus on the passionate and fantastical over the deliberative and rational. With dissensuality and dispute so clearly entrenched within these images – within the overt refusal to follow the rule of law (their demand to appear within the space of appearance at any cost), within their twisted, intentionally obfuscatory form (their demand to push typology and the letter-form to its edge) – they can be seen as ornaments who reveal an order outside of the everyday, who reject the consensual framework of the modern public sphere. It is these practitioners who focus on types of practices rather than types of argumentation however, their expansion of the possible field of action through founding an alternative framework of engagement (rather than merely working within the said framework), that pushes them within Mouffe’s framework of a critical art practice; Agonistic Ornamentation does not seek to enter into debate with the ‘public’, to enter into a discourse, a field of argumentation with those outside the language game it brings forth. Focussing on practices which lay on the exterior of these boundaries, practices which elude value, which elude the market and traditional circuits of exchange, these practices thus embed the outside within the inside (like ornament in itself ), they establish an alien, foreign presence within the very centre of the city. By situating itself within and upon the hallowed surface of private property, Agonistic Ornamentation can be understood as a place of ‘difference and otherness’, as the ‘space of the adversarial’, yet also, as Homi Bhabha has stressed (2004), as a system that is never ‘entirely on the outside or implacably oppositional’ (ibid.: 156). Whilst working to ‘ferments dissensus’ then – a dissensus quite clearly proven through the harsh reaction these ornaments generate – working to ‘makes visible what the dominant consensus tends to obscure and obliterate’ (ibid.: 12) – through its presentation of individuality, its rejection of prevailing notions of property rights – Agonistic Ornamentation presents a discourse which competes, rather than overturns that which already exists, competing with the advertisements, the ‘official graffiti of the everyday’ as Hermer and Hunt (1996) term it, the regnant visual culture of the city. Acting as a visible schismatic discourse, an ocular exemplar of a competing force within the city, an alternative to the existing social contract in terms of aesthetic values, in terms of spatial use, in terms of perceived ‘rationality’, Agonistic Ornamentation exposes and thereby reaffirms the innate heterogeneity of the public sphere, yet it does this through the shared, space of the city walls, through the ‘common symbolic space’ which can turn enemies into disputants. Working through agonism, not antagonism then, Agonistic Ornamentation’s status in the heart of the public sphere is crucial. As a practice functioning within a ‘multiplicity of discursive surfaces’ (Mouffe 2008: 10), surfaces such as the very loquacious walls of the city themselves, as a practice attempting to ‘widen the field of artistic intervention’ by intervening ‘directly in a multiplicity of social spaces’ (ibid.: 7), these ornaments engage directly with the city, even if functioning in a militantly combative

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way. Establishing the boundaries of the community from where they emerge, Agonistic Ornamentation thus expresses a plurality yet, through their innate visibility to those on the outside of this community, at the same time transforms a conflictual relation into a relation of exchange, even if that relation is a relation infused with tension. Refashioning the ‘common spaces’ of the city, reforming ‘everyday culture’ (ibid.: 7), eluding the ‘grasp of value’ and ‘market exchange’, Agonistic Ornamentation thus reveals alternatives to and discrepancies within the prevailing system, questioning the norms and nature of contemporary city life. Moreover, through providing a space for political dissent even while not working with any overtly political intent, Agonistic Ornamentation works directly against the apparent escalation of the democratic deficit through its demonstration of a passionate form of popular action, working not through the deadening space of politics but within the potentiality of the political. Shirking away from any superficial political posturing such as sloganeering or overt political imagery for example, the often quite antiestablishmentarian stance of their producers is reflected through the intensely political medium these ornaments utilize rather than any naïve ‘political’ message, the very materiality of their works bestowing a potent sectarian intensity upon them, a clear ideological framework. As Mouffe has indicated (2001), any attempt to make a ‘distinction between political art and non-political art’ becomes a fruitless venture when we recognize that ‘every form of artistic practice either contributes to the reproduction of the given common sense – and in that sense is political – or contributes to the deconstruction or critique of it’ (ibid.: 100). ‘Every form of art’, as Mouffe continues, thus ‘has a political dimension’ (ibid.: 100), not a ‘politics’ that solely ‘consists in domesticating hostility and in trying to defuse the potential antagonism that exists in human relations’ (Mouffe 2005a: 101), but ‘the ever present possibility of antagonism’ inherent within the political, a form of political inquiry involving ‘decisions which require us to make a choice between conflicting alternatives’ (Mouffe 2005b: 10). Agonistic Ornamentation can thus be seen to locate itself within a setting where the post-political consensus ‘celebrated as a great advance for democracy’ can be critiqued, where ‘artistic practices can disrupt the smooth image’ of contemporary neo-liberal urbanity (Mouffe 2008: 13). Through resisting the established patterns of city life, through setting up a visual alternative a visual disturbance , it promotes a notion of public space in which ‘conflict, division, and instability’ do not ‘ruin the democratic sphere’ but instead become part of the very ‘conditions of its existence’ (Deutsche 1998: 289), in which the refusal to follow the normative patterns of city life takes on an innate, rather than overt political status. Working in a quite obviously divergent way to Consensual Ornamentation then, Agonistic Ornamentation discourages any attempt to settle disagreement and disputation through a regression to a ‘balanced’ consensus, it spurns the aspiration toward openly discursive means of action. And rather than the reformation of the Habermasian public sphere as we saw recreated in the former chapter, Agonistic Ornamentation evokes a discourse constituted not merely through a

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3.16 and 3.17 Nano4814 at work, Untitled, Vigo, Spain, 2009

‘different or alternative idiom, but one that in other contexts would be regarded with hostility, or with a sense of indecorousness’ (Warner 2002: 424); working within the ‘space of the adversarial’, upon the ‘border-line between outside and inside’, upon the literal ‘surface of protection, reception and projection’ which mark the boundary zones of our cities (Bhabha 2004: 156), it thus treats artistic performance as a never-ending contest, as a site in which friction is not tolerated but advocated. We can thus see these patently ornamental, calligraphic practices to be functioning within the ‘tensions and ambivalences’ of a ‘counter-authority’ (ibid.: 33), we can see how these practices enacted through the ‘dynamics of writing – of ecriture’ (Bhabha 1988: 8), can come to reveal the ‘ambivalent and fantasmatic texts that make “the political” possible’ (ibid.: 10), to reveal the alterity confronted through the very witnessing of these illicit, fantasmatic images. Yet, and once again, after more of this dense textual description, I want now to return to the images which were suspended at the beginning of this chapter, to revisit these examples which will be seen as representative instances of Agonistic Ornamentation. Which of these, then, could we say works within Lyotard’s conception of language games, petit récits or the pagan? Which function within Mouffe’s conception of the political, of the movement from antagonism to agonism? Which embrace the counterpublic, the anti-discursive, the contest of the agon?

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Nano4814 By Nano 4814: Nano again, half way up a wall, caught in the process writing his name, or his pseudonym to be more exact. A star, an ‘n’, a conjoined ‘a’, another ‘n’, a large ‘o’, followed by his four eponymous numerals (interweaving in a downward motion from the position of his right hand), completed by an arrow merging into the final number and some flourishing stars overlaying the entire piece. An intricately lettered inscription situated amidst both a set of other, smaller looking agonistic efforts as well as an overtly lucid text situated beneath the piece – The Globe School of English – looking particularly stark as set against the explicit clarity of each letter produced within the ‘official’ text, the very basic, undemanding legibility it incorporates. I believe that the ornamental status of this work is now pretty much beyond doubt, suffice to bring up its adjunctive, decorative status, its agentic, parergonic essence, so too the reasons I want to examine this image away from the discourses of graffiti and street-art now quite clear. The ornamental artefact we can see here, then, this purportedly agonistic archetype, is one that I would suggest visibly emerges from an aesthetic ‘order’ quite clearly divergent with normative modes of urban visual culture, an aesthetic that alludes (in terms of it playing toward, alludere, rather than merely suggesting indirectly), to certain

3.18 and 3.19 Nano4814 at work, Untitled, Vigo, Spain, 2009

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spatial tensions present within modern urban life. Its passionate inscription – produced in defiance of instrumental reason, formed in lieu of any payment, in full understanding of the potential danger implicit in its performance – can thus appear as a practice in direct defiance to the staid homogeneity of the ‘rational’ public sphere, allied to emotions and sensations forged outside of the everyday. It is not only a clear language game then, a game played within certain modifiable rules, a contest with a set group of participants, a move or a ruse which works through the imagination and produces effects rather than ‘truth’; but its individuality, the stain of personhood which it elicits, places it as a distinctly localized, petit recit; it is a singular act speaking to a singular public, an imaged text which forces us to acknowledge a foreign body in the city. Set within an ideal of publicity ‘that offers opportunities of identification around democratic political alternatives’ (Mouffe 2002: 11), within an idea of publicness that creates an empathetic relation with the others who uphold a belief in disputative expression, Nano’s image not only signifies an alternative to the norm then, but works through a distinctly agonistic, rather than antagonistic frame. Being produced within the ‘common symbolic space’ of the city (Mouffe 2005a: 13), it challenges the other visual culture which it surrounds, engaging in a contest with their rational understanding of the city rather than refusing to participate in the city at all. And as what would appear to be a clear ‘agonistic intervention in public space’, we can thus see this image unveiling what is ‘repressed by the dominant consensus’ (Mouffe 2008: 12–13), unveiling a constitutive outside, an undercurrent, a minority set against the sterile, lifeless state of the public sphere. Playing with the city then, using the barred windows as a climbing frame, the blank walls as a place of communication, Nano acts politically not through any explicit political message, not through any institutional aesthetic, but through the reconstitution of the written form, through the re-appropriation of public space. And, much like Mouffe’s discussion of the contemporary ‘post-political’ attempt to ‘deal’ with the problem of political extremists (by placing them in what she terms a ‘cordon sanitaire’), a tactic that endeavours to deal with them solely on a moral, rather than political level, the attempt to ‘deal’ with the problem of these illegally produced images so too follow much the same pattern.6 Agonistic Ornamentation is hence placed outside of politics through its depiction as an ‘evil other’, an immoral sphere of activity, a discourse in need of banishment from the collective ‘moral register’. Yet in practice, ‘giving a voice to all those who are silenced within the framework of the existing hegemony’ (Mouffe 2007: 4–5),

6 As she continues, ‘frontiers between “Us” and “Them” are constantly being created; but, since the “Them” can no longer be defined in political terms, these frontiers are drawn in moral terms, between “us, the good” and “them, the evil ones”. My concern is that this type of politics – one played out in the moral register – is not conducive to the creation of the “agonistic public sphere” which, as I have argued, is necessary for a robust democratic life. When the opponent is defined not in political but in moral terms, he can be envisaged only as an enemy, not an adversary: no agonistic debate is possible with the “evil them”; they must be eradicated’ (Mouffe 2002: 15).

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giving a voice to those who desire to participate in the public sphere, images such as Nano’s in fact render their deep commitment to the city, forming a visual indication of the agon, a critique key to the maintenance of an emancipative polis. When I’m in the street, I see traces of all the people who pass by, tagging, stickering, postering, whatever, I see something there. But I also see all the hidden spots in Madrid, the places you have to really know the city to get to, places that are also being hit [utilized] by a lot of people. And I like that. Maybe the street is not always being used in the best way, but at least its being used, and that’s positive for me. It’s kind of like more hidden and endogamic, from me to my peers instead of for the general public. Compared to other cities especially, it’s not as in your face as Berlin, or how Barcelona used to be with tagging everywhere, but it’s a more pure essence of how the streets used to be. It’s like a conversation between the people that are actually using the streets, more than the public itself. Of course they see it, but they don’t really understand it. And I love the feeling that things are happening in the street but not for everybody. It’s our private world in the center of the city. We’re talking to each other, we have a real dialogue going on. And it makes me feel real active because I can feel the city […] Of course, at the bottom of everything there is some rebellion, with all of us I think. But it turns into something much more. Now it’s not really something I think about. All the things I do in the street are part of me, and I’m not gonna suddenly change. I just have to do it no matter what happens (28/7/9).

TBC by Spok TBC. Spok’s crew’s moniker emblazoned across a group of three shutters, an acronym whose meanings could fill the rest of the page (Típico Barrio Centro, The Best Choice, The Business Class being just three that first came to mind). A bold, rudimentary inscription covering an opaque palimpsest of further images, a palimpsest with three key stratums that I wish to unpack. The first (Layer I), the shutters themselves, imprinted with a legal ‘graffiti’ commission produced by Spok himself for the clothing store Sfera, a photorealistic production now only partially visible in the blue and black background to the edges of the shutters. The second (Layer II), a group of ‘throw-ups’ produced on top of this original production, Buse and Zoan from the FTS crew (Fuck The System) being the chief perpetrators (the ‘Bus’ of Buse visible on the far left of the shutter, ‘Zoan’ still partially evident to the far right). And the third (and here final) reclamation by Spok himself (Layer III): a brazen white splattering of paint formed over the entire façade, a production formed (and unmistakably so, to those for whom it was produced) with a paint-fuelled fire extinguisher, the most ‘violent’ form of graffiti tool available. We thus have Spok. Buse and Zoan on top of Spok. Spok on top of Buse and Zoan on top of Spok. And clear to all involved that this final layer had been produced by Spok and no one else (because the original layer had been produced by him), clear, that is, to the other participants of this language game in the city, to those who understood this dense jumble of coloured pigmentation as a multilayered surface of meaning, a surface of material communication.

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3.20 Spok, TBC, Madrid, Spain, 2009

We know from my previous reasoning my argument for seeing this work as an instance of Agonistic Ornamentation and not just graffiti, we can by now appreciate my arguments concerning its obviously ornamental quality; but what of the purely agonistic charge, how does this exemplar comply with this particular framework? Primarily, then, we evidently have a public contest taking place, an agonic contest occurring within a number of arenas. We have Spok in a personal test of his own strength (Layer I), struggling with his own capabilities in producing something in careful balance between classic graffiti and commercial art (using elaborate letter forms alongside photorealistic imagery to accomplish this), producing something that will be respected (and thus untouched) by other kalligraphos, which whilst a commercial undertaking will continue to uphold his reputation as a leading exponent of the aesthetic form.7 We have Buse and Zoan in direct competition with Spok (Layer II), critiquing him (through their very overdrawing) for his active participation in legally produced work, diverging with the conviction that being produced by a ‘classic’ writer, these pieces should be left untouched (and these works did, for the most part, remain unscathed by the tagging that enveloped the majority of these commercial premises). We have Spok reclaiming his status against Buse and Zoan (Layer III), displaying his thoughts on their critique in no uncertain terms, displaying his fundamental agonistic predisposition with his third-level overpainting. 7

This careful treading of the fine-line between commercialization and purity was most intelligently exposed by Spok in a piece produced on Gran Via (the central thoroughfare of Madrid) for the company Sephora. Whilst to non-participants of Agonistic Ornamentation the piece would simply seem to display the name of the store, for those indoctrinated into the form, it would quite clearly read SPOKONE. Whilst working for commercial companies then, Spok continued to embrace the duality within this very task.

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Finally we have both camps’ competition with the city itself, using their aesthetic tools in a dynamic substantiation of their citizenship, battling to take part in the public visual culture of the city at whatever cost. We thus have a contest being enacted upon the city in two quite differing modalities, the first, with the vast majority of the ‘public’ (in general, but of course not always) appreciating their ornaments only as a mass of pollution and dirt, a visuality functioning as a proclamation of difference but no more; and the second, between the agonistic participants themselves (to the almost total ignorance of the general population), appreciating the minutiae of challenges and interrogations, of responses and ripostes, a visuality functioning through an incessant aesthetic encounter. Using the public space of the city as an open stage for their physical performance, then, promoting open disputation and conflict as part of a committed, participatory relationship to the street itself, we can hence see this realm functioning in a way as far from the traditional gallery system as one could imagine; the conflation of finance and fine-art revoked in exchange for a presentation of a Foucauldian ‘permanent provocation’ (provocation in terms of its original Latin meaning provocare, to ‘challenge’ or ‘call forward’), the patterned markings being generated embracing competition as both means and end, embracing contest as an indispensable rudiment of social life. This image thus illustrates the local narratives, the moves, the ruses, the rules as seen in Lyotard’s discordant language games, the contest which comes to produce effects, to provoke more art, to provoke more ornament. It sets itself directly within Mouffe’s search for agonistic engagement, something outside the centre, something outside the sphere of ‘accepted’ politics, an insurgent practice which signifies plurality. It this signifies the remainder left behind by consensus, an agonic zone where difference is decorated and scratched onto the city. And it can be seen as a combination of both the discursive and figural which transforms a physical

3.21  Spok at work, TBC, Madrid, Spain, 2009

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battle into that of an aesthetic contest, an image with disputation and struggle embedded into its form. It was all about us. We were writers. And the only thing I wanted back then was to communicate with the other writers in the street. We knew everyone in the city would see it, we knew they wouldn’t understand it – my parents, your parents – but we were only doing it for those who knew. I would think about it every day. Painting, painting, painting, painting. You needed to paint more and better than the rest. To get known, because no-one knew you at first, you had to be known and then known as the best, the most dedicated and the most stylish. So it wasn’t only about vandalism. We wanted to evolve, ourselves, our style. Constantly. For me the best thing to do was to evolve your style, never to do the same thing again and again, because we wanted to do something bigger than graffiti, but at the same time it’s the biggest thing you could ever do! Just catching a tag for example, it’s the most perfect thing. You wouldn’t believe it. The flow, the style, and you show people that you’re still alive […] It’s like being fit. I really want to be fit because I want to show that I’m still in it, that I can still compete. I want to show that I’m still here. And graffiti is like that. You have to constantly push it to maintain […] You can’t imagine how good the feeling is. Illegally creating something. Can you imagine what an amazing concept that is! We went there, to the street, to the subway, to the yards, and we were young when we started, it’s a scary thing to do, the adrenalin is pushing to the limit. And it was something totally out of nothing. I remember everything. A thousand different stories. The pieces, the sensations. Like when we got into a chase, the world just completed stopped. There was nothing apart from that. And I would never enjoy a mission fully if it didn’t finish running! Like a game. Us and them. We want to paint, they’re trying to stop us, but we’re going do it whatever. So it was something to fight against things, but to create things at the same time. Creating something out of nothing. Nothing for me can be more important that that (27/7/9).

Pixo Gratis/The Attack at the Galeria Choque Cultural8 The final of our examples, a paired set of images, presents us with what I will argue to be a perfect contrast between Agonistic and Consensual Ornamentation. The first, an image of an Eltono street poster Pixo Gratis – I paint (or, more correctly, I pixação) for free, pasted on a wall on the streets of São Paolo, Brazil; the second, an image of a gallery being defaced (or perhaps refaced) by a black clad figure, the walls covered in posters of a similar format to Eltono’s original print as seen above. And the link? Um dos motivos da fúria – ‘The reasons for our fury’: an enigmatic riposte which needs a more thorough explanation.

8

Once again, please note that the images depicted here are of the Belas Artes Invasion, not the Choque Cultural invasion. See footnote 1 in this chapter for more details.

3.22 and 3.23  Eltono, Pixo Gratis, São Paulo, Brazil, 2008

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3.24 The Belas Artes Invasion. São Paulo, Brazil, 2008

On 6 September 2008, a group of 30 pixadores9 invaded the Galeria Choque Cultural10 in central São Paolo. Armed with an assortment of spraycans and markers, and protesting at what they described as the ‘commercialization, institutionalization, and domestication of street culture’ (Pixobomb/Djan 2008), the pixadores coated the entire building with their tags, messages and inscriptions (the flyer for the ‘attack’, depicted below, suggesting the use of the slogans ‘long live pixação’, ‘art as crime’ and ‘crime as art’), enveloping paintings, magazines, walls, prints – whatsoever lay in their path – with torrents of paint and ink. While the gallery termed the defacement a ‘neo-Nazi action’, arguing that the pixadores were both ‘calling people to destroy everything’ whilst harking back to an illusionary ‘nostalgia of the underground times’ (Ribeiro 2008), the assailants, as the flyer proclaimed, stated that it was a ‘total protest’, an ‘art attack’, a ‘path to revolution’ (Pixobomb/Djan 2008). It was a symbolic statement against what they considered the exploitation for profit of an ‘underground’ movement, a literal statement of intent on the walls of the gallery itself. 9

Pixadores are practitioners of pixação, a distinctively Brazilian form of illegal street inscription. It is a ‘tagging’ style which, in overly general terms, utilizes both highly elongated letter forms (said to be descendent of metal-band insignias from the 1980s), and highly impressive locations of practice (often at an extreme height and seemingly impossible to reach). It has become a renowned style of underground urban visual culture, working under the umbrella of what is generally termed graffiti. 10 The Galeria Choque Cultural (Culture Shock Gallery) is a small independent gallery which exhibits what they term as ‘pop, outsider and young art’, but what most pixadores or graffiti-artists would term ‘street-art’. The gallery, quite conspicuously, does not use this now loaded term.

3.25 Eltono, Pinto Gratis, Madrid, Spain, 2004

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Unwittingly, Eltono, who a few months prior to the attack had produced a poster in conjunction with the gallery – Pixo Gratis (I mark/I paint/I write for free) – soon became embroiled into the affair, his image the point of ignition, the final ‘indignity’, the ‘fury’ (as explained on the front of the pixadores webpage, before its subsequent removal by the host Flickr), that provoked the pixadores assault on the premises. For them, Eltono’s poster was another example of the co-option of pixação for what they deemed purely pecuniary purposes (it being for sale in the gallery itself, as well, quite crucially for Eltono, being widely and freely distributed in the street), another example of the appropriation of what they believed was their ‘pure’, inalienable aesthetic. Whilst Eltono had produced the print in total support of the pixadores, simply referencing (as much of his work did)11 the indigenous visual culture of the region where it was produced – using the original techniques of lambe lambe12 hand-set letterpress posters (in fact printed with some of the last remaining master craftsman of this form), being affixed, illegally, all over the city (referencing the non-merchantable nature of both pixação and illicit street images in general) – for the pixadores its open, communicative intentions was too much to bear. Even as he was attempting to describe the core graffiti or pixação ideology (the posters themselves intoning sem aviso … sem permissão, ‘without permission … without notice’), the tension emerged through the differing discursive intentionality of these forms, through the respectively inward and outward looking desires of Agonistic and Consensual Ornamentation coming into direct confrontation. The invasion of the Choque Gallery thus perfectly illustrates the differences between these two practices of insurgent ornamentation, a state of deep (but, as we will come to see, not irreconcilable) difference between a system seeking centrifugal motion on the one hand and centripetal movement on the other; between a system aiming to reach the entire demos through its ornamental practices and one aiming to confine itself to its own restricted fraternity; a system seeking a culture of harmony in the first case and a culture of opposition in the second.13 Whilst Eltono wanted to talk about pixação with the entire public, the pixadores desired only to talk about it amidst the privacy of the counterpublic. Whilst Eltono sought legibility and simplicity, the pixadores craved inscrutability and obfuscation. Whilst Eltono desired discursive communication, the pixadores 11

Eltono’s earlier project Pinto Gratis (‘I Paint for Free’) project – undertaken in Madrid and replicating the miniature household painter-and-decorators’ sticker advertisements placed all over the city – can be seen as a first stage of the Pixo Gratis project, one equally extolling the aneconomic nature of illegal street painting. See Figure 3.25 for an example. 12 Lambe lambe is an autochthonous print system used in Brazil (and in São Paolo especially), mostly utilized to publicize traditional local music performances. 13 These types of confrontations have occurred all over the world; in London (with Banksy’s work being ‘defaced’ by the graffiti artist 10Foot), in New York (with Faile’s defacement by the ‘Splasher’), as well as in sites from Madrid to Melbourne, Buenos Aires to Berlin.

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fought for figural sensation. Yet what frustrated Eltono the most, as we will see below, was the simple impossibility of discussing this issue with his opponents, the refusal of the pixadores to enter into a rational discourse with him. And whilst this may not have been the intractable differend we see emergent between the gallery and the pixadores, it was still a blockage to communication which Eltono was attempting to specifically counteract in his work, an obstruction to open communication which had led to his original movement away from agonism and towards consensuality (as he explained on p. 86). Both practices may have been attempting to negotiate and access the public sphere, then, to engage within the democratic process, yet they undertook this task through almost exactly contrary ways; one through disorder and disruption, the other accord and agreement. They were both insurgent ornaments, but ones with very different notions of order embedded within them. Yeah, I was suddenly kind of in the centre of this big trouble because of the pixação poster. Which was saying pixo gratis, “I paint for free”, or “I do graffiti for free”. It’s “I write”, it’s “I paint pixação”, “I paint graffiti”. So the idea of the poster was a project I’ve been doing for years,14 but they [this group of pixadores] didn’t understand, maybe they didn’t try to understand. So they were saying that I was using pixação to make money, but of course it wasn’t like that for me. It was totally the contrary to what they were thinking. I was actually apoyando, supporting the pixação, it’s something I love and respect. It’s an incredible movement. But there was no sense to what these guys were doing. If they went to a big gallery [to paint over it] and they did the same thing, it could have made sense, perhaps, I don’t know. If they went to a big commercial store like Nike, where they are using pixação to sell their product, I would definitely understand.15 But that gallery, made by people just like you and me, in their mind [the pixadores] they think it’s just people using graffiti to make money, but it’s just people that are helping young artists, people that want to live through painting. None of us want to work with the big commercial galleries. We don’t want to sell our work to big companies. This is a place for people like us, that just want to have a different life than the typical nine-to-five. And it doesn’t make sense to me to try hard to be a true and original pixador or graffiti writer and then work every day in a factory! We need places like Choque that help find projects so you can make a living with painting. It just doesn’t make any sense to fuck these guys [the Choque Gallery]. They are not like the big art rich guy, they’re not using pixação to make money […] I’ve been painting like this for years, in the street, for free, no money, painting graffiti, painting public art, all for free. Even when I work with the galleries I would never just paint my street work on a canvas and sell it, it makes no sense to me. I always change my work when it’s inside, and I always try to have that link with the outside. But with this [the pixadores issue] I couldn’t talk directly with anyone, I tried, they sent me

14

Such as the Pinto Gratis project discussed in footnote 9. This was in fact the third ‘attack’ by this group of pixadores, the first occurring at the São Paulo School of Fine Arts, the second at the São Paulo biennale. 15

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some messages on my website, but they were all anonymous, they left no emails. I was replying “okay, give me your email, let’s talk, I can explain to you what I’m doing, it looks like you don’t understand anything”, but they never replied, and that lack of dialogue was maybe the most difficult thing for me (12/07/09).

Dialogical and Antidiscursive/Interruptive and Assimilative Agonistic Ornamentation can thus be understood as an aesthetic working at the edge of discourse, an aesthetic alterity in which dissensus is paramount. Not a counterinstitution in the Habermasian mould, it is a counterpublic in the Warnerian one, a public which ‘structured by different dispositions or protocols’ to the rest of society, a public which ‘comes into being through an address to indefinite strangers’ (Warner 2002: 423–4). In all three of the examples presented above we can find the combative, polemical stance which Agonistic Ornamentation upholds, the games and the moves, the ruses and the politics which they nurture. And thus rather than seeing both these seemingly antithetical ornamental discourses through the lens of art and vandalism, rather than seeing them through the reductive filters of ‘street-art’ or ‘graffiti-art’, these insurgent practices can be more fruitfully understood through the political theories of Deliberative Democracy and Agonistic Pluralism that I have recounted, through the Habermasian and Lyotardian philosophical confrontation, through a modernist theory of democracy espousing communicative discourse on the one hand and a post-modernist theory encouraging confrontational dispute on the other. Whilst the consensualists continue to be critiqued by the agonists for their apparent belief in a transparent public sphere (an approach found only to confirm rather than resist the status quo), the agonists dismissed by the consensualists for their usage of critique without any standard of rationality to base it from (a theory which can be considered as irrational, dangerous and even ‘neoconservative’ [Habermas in Rorty 1984: 4]), social actors continue to produce material culture which can be seen to reflect these political theories, not only within the public realm as described and illustrated here but so too in a more institutional milieu. The debate between Agonistic and Consensual Ornamentation thus far outlined can hence be seen to echo the struggle between what Grant Kester (2004) has called ‘dialogical’ and ‘antidiscursive’ art practices (between practitioners such as Jay Koh and the Wochenklausur collective in the former case, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman in the latter); to reflect the collision of Nicolas Bourriaud’s (2002) Relational Aesthetics (most often represented by artist Rirkrit Tiravanija and Liam Gillick) and Claire Bishop’s (2004) Relational Antagonism (which she illustrates through the work of Santiago Sierra and Thomas Hirschhorn);16 to restate the confrontation between Miwon Kwon’s notion of ‘interruptive’ and assimilative sculpture (and artists such as Richard Serra in the former case and John Ahearn in the latter). 16

Whilst Bishop’s theory is by no means as fully developed in comparison to Bourriaud or Kester, it nonetheless serves as an acerbic critique of both their models.

3.26 Neko and Jaime, Untitled, Madrid, Spain, 2009

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Yet just as these models can serve as institutional reflections of Consensual and Agonistic Ornamentation (and their trenchant critiques of each other thus equally resonating back onto these insurgent discourses), the existence of the ornamental practices discussed here outside of the space of the white cube (in comparison to the models presented by Kester, Bourriaud and Bishop), their existence away from the institutionalized control of publicly funded site-specific art (in terms of the sitespecific art discussed by Kwon), can be seen to embed both of these ornamental practices more deeply within the public sphere as a whole,17 to embedded them within the quotidian space of the mudlevel. Thus, whilst acknowledging the critique of ‘public art’ that Miwon Kwon (2004) has famously outlined – a critique of a ‘site-specific’ art that has been ‘uncritically adopted’, that has been ‘embraced as an automatic signifier of “criticality” or “progressivity” by artists, architects, dealers, curators, critics’ (ibid.: 1), a public art that comes to be simply a ‘means to extract the social and historical dimensions out of places to variously serve the thematic drive of an artist, satisfy institutional demographic profiles, or fulfill the fiscal needs of a city’ (ibid.: 53) – I would suggest that through emerging under the radar of authorization, through eluding the power of the ‘arts administrators’ and ‘funding organizations’ Kwon discusses (ibid.: 1), these ornamental, insurgent practices here described can serve to similarly elude many of the key pitfalls of site-specificity she points out. The co-option and domestication of much publicart can thus be understood, as Kwon herself argues, to be more ‘often the result of institutional intervention and pressure’ than individual malpractice, the habitually ‘reductive and equalizing association drawn between an artist and a community group’ – a reductive association as epitomized by Foster’s ‘artist as ethnographer’ and an equalizing one exemplified by Kester’s community ‘delegate’ – hence ‘not always the work of a self-aggrandizing, pseudo-altruistic artist but rather a fashioning of the artist by institutional forces’ (ibid.: 140). It is thus a ‘curatorial and institutional delimitation’ which ‘often reduces’ and ‘sometimes stereotypes, the identities of the artist and the community group’ (ibid.: 141), an institutional delimitation that the inherently informal, deeply vernacular, non-institutional art discussed here can escape from. Agonistic and Consensual Ornamentation can thus be understood as practices which are set within a quite distinct opposition to one another, practices that may function through similar processes of application, that may function in similar sites and take similar risks, yet ones that emerge through quite varying politicoaesthetic frameworks. Yet now that these variances have been outlined, we need move from image to performance, from artefact to ritual, ornament to order. 17

Whilst Kwon argues (1998) that ‘all art, whether in a museum, a gallery, or a public street is art in the public realm’ the street must be seen as inherently more accessible than any institutional arena. I am not attempting to set in place a base dichotomy of street = good / museum = bad; of course, an interior space is merely another site to work within, another space from which to provoke, to question. I am merely suggesting that this innately public, insurgent visual form cannot be avoided or evaded as museum or gallery art can.

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We need move from an exploration of a politico to an ethico-aesthetic. Rather than the objects themselves then, it is the practice, the ephemeral action that will now be analysed, the immaterial residue of my informants’ spatial acts rather than their material remnants which we will encounter. And, in so doing, I hope to untangle the knot which has now been set up, to explain how it is that one particular collective, that one distinct group (the Nov Nueve collective with whom I completed my fieldwork),were able to remain so cohesive, so united, whilst having practitioners from both these distinct camps housed within the very same space. Exploring the various rituals and rites, the practices and performances these artefacts are submerged within, we will then be able to see how the group comes to be reconciled and reunited: We will come to understand the overriding balance between the agonistic and consensual, the particular order of these ornaments.

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PART II Order

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1  Eltono and Momo, Untitled, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2011. Image courtesy of the artists

2 Eltono, Untitled [Coriandoli Graffiti], Turin, Italy, 2009. Image courtesy of artist

3 Nano4814, Elijo Irme [I choose to go], Aranjuez, Spain, 2011. Image courtesy of artist

4 3TTMan, Untitled [Cement Graffiti], Madrid, Spain, 2010. Image courtesy of Alberto de Pedro

5 Remed, Untitled, Leon, Spain, 2012. Image courtesy of artist

6 Remed, Untitled, Marakkesh, Morocco, 2012. Image courtesy of the Wackybrothers

7 Spok, Untitled, Madrid, Spain, 2008. Image courtesy of artist

8  Spok [background by Yesk], Untitled, Turin, Italy, 2012. Image courtesy of artist

4 Order

The ritual act, this is to say, “does something”, it is an action that is meant to affect the world and it is likely to do so. To act in a drama, in contrast, is not to take an action affecting the world, but only to imitate doing so. Roy Rappaport

The contexts in which ritual practices unfold are not like the props of painted scenery on a theatrical stage. Ritual action involves an inextricable interaction with its immediate world, often drawing it into the very activity of the rite in multiple ways. Catherine Bell

Sacred, Yet Not Religious Having now demarcated the specific forms of cultural production that are being constructed within the aesthetic realm of Independent Public Art, it is the more practice-based elements related to these urban artefacts that I now wish to explore, the distinct processes through which this group of actors actually produce these ornamental forms which must be examined. To undertake this task I aim to work through the broad anthropological theme of ritual, a subject matter that, although often wrongly seen as the domain of ‘traditional’ or ‘spiritual’ societies, is one which acts as a dominant framework within my interlocutors ‘modern’, areligious social lives. Examining these specifically secular, although deeply ‘sacred’ practices,1 we will then 1

Moore and Myerhoff, in their edited text ‘Secular Ritual’ (1977), attempted to more thoroughly delineate these eponymous terms. As they argue, ‘if sacred is understood in the sense of “unquestionable” and traditionalizing, then something may be sacred, yet not religious’ (ibid.: 20). Bruce Kapferer similarly claimed (within the same volume) that the sacred/profane dichotomy is often so ‘fused in the manipulation of symbolic object[s] and symbolic action that they become confused and difficult to distinguish’ (Kapferer 1977: 116). Notions of sacrality will hence be seen to be not only implicitly contextual, but also

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find them to be infused with such notions as traditionalism, formality, performativity and liminality, instilled with such themes as commitment, transgression, play, risk, and uncertainty, all fields which I would suggest are key to the workings of what has been classically termed ‘ritual’ within anthropology. Rather than the semantic, communicative meaning of my informants’ practices as previously examined, it will be the affects and effects that these processes generate, the power of these corporeal processes to mould (rather than simply reflect) social experience, the base (dis)order that they evince (for their participants, spectators and environments) that I now wish to more thoroughly explore. And through highlighting the tangible systems that bring these various images, actions and events into existence, I will not only reveal a heightened performative process that suspends and surpasses everyday normativity, but one that facilitates a reconciliation between the potentially incongruous modes of aesthetic production arising from within the group. Explaining how this unified collective of actors can contain proponents of both consensual and agonistic types yet not simply implode through schismatic pressures, explaining how the group envelope is kept cohesive through my informants’ shared implication and imbrication within the ever-changing physicality of their immediate urban landscape, the focus on ritual will also uncover a practice which works not simply by subverting or inverting the dominant narrative of contemporary city-life, but which works by a more ambivalent mode of deconstruction. And it is thus through seeing these ornamental forms as both conventional signifiers (as so far discussed in Part I) and also embodied traces of an event (as now to be examined in Part II) that will enable us to find a more holistic understanding of the insurgent artefacts here discussed, an understanding of ritual, of order, which acts as the balance of the ornament itself.

An Initial Lexicon As this vignette, I hope, comes to intimate, the furtive performances that were so often undertaken in the production of these ornaments were highly ritualized undertakings, ones immersed in a strongly ceremonial, deeply prescribed, intensely sacred atmosphere. Whether consensual or agonistic (and whilst these different approaches did, as we will see, provide different types of events) I will argue in this chapter that all these acts, all these practices worked through the archetypal ritual fields of action as understood anthropologically. Yet if I am attempting to frame these various ornamental practices in this way, to place these singular and plural moments of painting, sculpting, scratching away at the body of the city within the realm of rites, I need first, of course, come to explain exactly what I understand as the term ‘ritual’ itself. As a word that has been employed by various different scholars in quite variable and differing ways, a term – much like the previously discussed ‘graffiti’ and ‘street-art’ – which is as over as it is underdetermined, I must clarify what this very label means before I start making such sweeping claims. not the exclusive site of the magico-religious; not only are ‘technology and magic, for us’, as Alfred Gell has argued (1988), ‘one and the same’ (ibid.: 9) but magico-religious actions, as Bourdieu suggested, more often simply ‘matters of practice’ (TMS Evens 2009: 119).

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4.1  Spok on the tracks. Madrid, Spain, 2008

Intersection I: Field Notes, 08/10/08 […] I pulled up on my bike and saw Spok stood there waiting (at a little after one in the morning), leaning against a wall at the side of the station, a small tote over his shoulder (sprays I guessed), dressed head to toe in black. Black t-shirt, black shorts, black trainers. I felt suddenly conspicuous in my bright white sweatshirt, which I took off and placed in my backpack. I went over to greet him, a cheeky smile emerging on his face as per usual, he joking and laughing at my obvious concern over the sweatshirt blunder … X arrived a few minutes later, an old friend of Spok’s from his crew TBC, likewise all in black, likewise with a backpack slung over his shoulder (again, I supposed, full of paint), looking a touch tense as he pulled on a cigarette. Low-key greetings were made and we started to walk, down past the station, along a quiet looking road by the side of the tracks. The two of them were talking almost inaudibly between themselves, catching up on the months since they had last met, yet seeming perhaps a touch preoccupied with other matters. They were sharing all the basics of information, the essential facts of what had been happening in their respective lives, but they appeared to me to be a touch disconnected, Spok most definitely not his normally effusive self. We arrived at a small plaza and wandered over to three further characters sat within it (two of them looking a little incongruous on a seesaw, the other resting on his bike), only one of whom I had met briefly before (a famed writer in the city). Again, all dressed in black bar one (there seemed to be a definite pattern emerging). The familiar greetings were again performed and once more we set off, leaving the plaza by way of a winding footbridge running adjacent to the railway lines. Coming back round towards a desolate-looking pathway, Spok abruptly hurdled the handrail without a word of warning, landing flawlessly maybe six feet down onto the narrow conduit adjacent the trackside fence. I looked down at him, watching him then scamper up and over the barbed-wire palisade, reaching the other side like a certified professional in about five seconds flat. I had previously thought we were going to be painting a wall around the back of the station, but, obviously, somewhere along the lines plans had changed. One of the guys from the plaza (the only one in the non-black top) said his goodbyes and then cycled off – leaving me a touch more uneasy – the remaining three then reproducing Spok’s silky smooth movement on to the tracks, pulling themselves up from the side of the fence, resting their foot on the wall by the bridge, then vaulting themselves up and over the top. By the time I reached them (the entrance for me being a touch more difficult – even with prior direction from Spok of an easier, but of course longer route) there were hushed discussions stirring on the topic of

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4.2  Spok at work. Madrid, Spain, 2008

placement, who would go-over whom and where. [They were painting the walls by the side of the tracks (‘track-sides’ as they were called in the not too difficult to gather vernacular), and, as was the case in Madrid, every trackside within miles of the centre (literally miles in any direction) was covered end-to-end in graffiti. Naturally, therefore, one would be forced to paint on top of another graffiti-writer’s previous work – a potentially precarious act for an inexperienced writer who was not yet respected, but a fairly habitual act for the writers whom I was with]. Once organized and the sites of practice preliminarily marked out (by a line incised with the edge of a can), the four took their positions and set to work almost immediately, placing down their bags, selecting their cans and then proceeding to outline their pieces. The first burst of noise from the normally innocuous sounding spraycans seemed incredibly loud, piercing the hushed air with its crisp, penetrating resonance. I had never before considered how shrill the sprays actually were (like white-noise exploding from a detuned radio-alarm clock), every shake of the can penetrating the stillness that otherwise enveloped us. I shuffled around behind them as they continued to paint, looking for a good shot, trying to find a makeshift tripod having foolishly failed to bring mine with. Without being able to use a flash and with the painting progressing in near total darkness (solely by the light of the bordering streetlamps), I crept over the ballast with care, not wanting to disturb the feeling of intensity exuding from the collective work. Each of them were now in full flow, the paint emanating from the flow of their bodies, smooth, swift movements followed by an occasional pause, squatting down by their collection of cans guessing at their colours, squinting to try and make them out, going with the instinct developed from a hundred other nights just like this. There seemed to be a fairly set routine they were all generally following, starting by outlining the core structure, the perspective, the ‘fill-in’, shadows, ‘key-lines’, the piece slowly building up, the assorted parts coming together to suddenly reveal the unexpected whole. While there was an intense communal concentration formed through the transfixion with one’s own piece, within the rhythm, the seams of the letter forms, there was also quite clearly a further preoccupation with the spatial surroundings as a whole, each of the practitioners alert, sensitive to the point of clairvoyance towards any unfamiliar, foreign sound, any indication of potential danger. And thus, at 10, maybe 15-minute intervals, an abrupt internal whistle1 would ring out, a hand in the air denoting silence, 30 seconds of total quietude, every sinew straining for sound … then the sharp hiss of the spraycans would again reignite, the air filling with their unmistakeable, saccharine aroma. 1



They all used this particularly marked whistle, made by sucking air into their mouths rather than

blowing out. It had a remarkable effect, able both to cut through the densest cacophony and to be used at

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4.3  Spok at work. Madrid, Spain, 2008

Around 40 minutes in (time, to be honest, being particularly hard to gauge), I managed, once again, to trip over an empty can at the side of the tracks, still searching in vain for the perfect image. Spok came over to me with a slightly pained expression on his face. Mira, he murmured. Three exits only [pointing at the steps crawling up the poles of the overhead wires at our left, our right and our centre], and five of us. He paused. Be ready. Because we’re ready to go at any time. This isn’t the city centre ok? They guard the tracks here. And we don’t wait around to chat to them como 3TT y Remed2 … Whether or not he was being a touch dramatic seemed irrelevant. Whether just trying to keep me vigilant, ready to run, or attempting to explain something more significant, the tension in the air was irrefutable. All of the guys were in a heightened, adrenalin-fuelled state, ready to move whenever necessary. [Undoubtedly, now thinking back, I think Spok was making a point, he was trying to make me not just see the differences between the afternoon evening events, but feel them, to make me embrace the uncertainty that was so palpable. At the time, however, he just made me nervous. But of course it was a form of anxiety which, as Spok had often emphasized, had its obvious pleasures]. He walked back to his piece, getting right up to the surface and then leaning his body back from it, cocking his head to take it all in, working with his customarily balanced, fluid movements; as he proceeded to execute the final highlights (his favourite part of the practice, ‘bringing the letters to life’ he used to say), his hand and the can seemed almost one and the same, a bodily technique so oft repeated that the vehicle seemed almost inseparable from the operator. Soon after the task was almost complete, each of the guys starting to settle back from their pieces, gather up their tools and converge together about 20 feet from the wall. A brief appraisal and they were ready to go, no lingering around for a moment more than necessary. Four classic ‘graffiti’ pieces had been produced, multi-coloured, multi-dimensional, multi-layered four or five letter monikers, all working within different styles and designs, each working within a set tradition yet attempting to constantly mould and shape that convention. Four artefacts working within a particular mode of rhythmic formality yet demanding, necessitating a mode of performative improvisation, four artefacts following the regulations of their discourse acutely muted levels. It was also a style used by many of the graffiti artists in the city. You could pick them out on the street from this single acoustic attribute, this single bodily act, a sound of imminent illicit activity. 2



Spok and I had earlier been with Louis and Remed as they’d been painting illegally in the city during

daylight hours and, customarily, had entered into a debate with the police over the acceptability of their actions.

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while, communicating innumerable things – the physical status of the artist, of their wider environment, the presence of ‘others’, a questioning of public space itself … I grabbed a couple of final snaps with the flash on my camera at last, all of us then climbing back up and over the fence (infinitely easier exiting than entering). As soon as we were on the other side I felt the mood manifestly alter, the guys now beginning to relax, to joke around, smiles I had never seen on the faces of these writers now starting to emerge; I had initially felt they were acting aloof (me being unknown to two of the four), but it now seemed this had nothing to do with it. It was the event itself that led to this perceived detachment, its basic protocols necessitating a total absorption in the moment, a total immersion, almost meditation within the ‘flow’. It was an utter contrast to just a few minutes earlier; the mission now complete they could lighten up, laugh, exit the frame. We walked back up to the station, Spok catching a few quick throw-ups on the walls as we went, the group of us finally entering a 24-hour café up by the station for a quick caña and a couple of bocatas to end the night. Drinks and food finished, emails were exchanged, promises of forwarding photos made. I shook hands with the new guys, hugs with Spok, arranging to meet him at the studio the next day […] [On reflection, this was the night that I really came to terms with the procedural formality of the ornamental process, the specific forms of clothing, language, bodily techniques, which were all crucial to the completion of these aesthetic acts. Not only was this moment a symptomatic example of a practice that nearly always took place within a group setting, within a specifically egalitarian setting, it was something that involved an overt commitment to risk, to a heightened sensation garnered through a test of one’s aesthetic/athletic abilities. It was thus a defined bodily practice in two senses, not only through the production of the image, but also through the awareness and spatial sensitivities which were required during the entire period, from meeting to departure. It was also a night that made me start to think more about the notion of creativity. While working within a set discourse, one whose boundaries were so highly regulated, what room for experiment was there, how much space lay within the margins?]

Of those who have attempted to pin down the precise meaning of the term ritual, the late Roy Rappaport possibly stands as the theorist who has most lucidly unpacked the entangled meanings set within it. For him, ritual was ‘humanity’s basic social act’ (Rappaport 1999: 107), a site within which ‘logic becomes enacted and embodied – is realised – in unique ways’ (ibid.: 3). Coming to define it through the underlying concepts of ‘performance, formality, invariance, inclusion of both acts and utterances, and encoding by other than the performers’ (ibid.: 24), Rappaport suggested that, when used collectively, a ‘ritual’ state could then give rise to a multitude of outcomes, engendering the possibility of an establishment of convention, the sealing of social contract, the construction of the integrated conventional orders […] the investment of whatever it encodes with morality, the construction of time and eternity; the representation of a paradigm of creation, the generation of the concept of the sacred and the sanctification of conventional order, the generation of theories of the occult, the evocation of numinous experience, the awareness of the divine, the grasp of the holy, and the construction of orders of meaning transcending the semantic (ibid.: 27).

Ritual was thus understood as something that could, ‘in a trivial sense’, have both ‘social and material consequences’, consequences that ‘may or may not be “functional”’ (ibid.: 27). It was something that contained a number of stipulated attributes, then, ‘sensible features common to rituals always and everywhere’,

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features that (crucial for this work), ‘may in fact, lead us to recognise events as rituals in the first place’ (ibid.: 26), yet these aspects could never be thought as inimitable to what he understood as ritual itself. What Rappaport was at pains to insist was that, more than anything, ritual was simply a category of action (ibid.: 26). People, objects and places could thus become sanctified or legitimated through various rites and ceremonies, yet in itself, ritual had no singular, distinctive trait. It was hence, and perhaps perplexingly, considered to be a ‘unique structure, although none of its elements – performance, invariance, formality and so on – belongs to it alone’ (ibid.: 26), a practice that was on the boundary, whose very definition could make it disappear as a conceptual category itself. This potentially vexing point, its innately overlapping, polythetic condition (Needham 1975), was taken up further by the theorist of religion Catherine Bell in her seminal text Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (1997), a text in which she critically examined the various changes and paradigms formulated within the study of rites over its (relatively) short intellectual history. In her estimation, however (seemingly following Jack Goody’s adage, ‘[r]ituals, more rituals, yet more rituals […] there is little to be gained either from the term itself or from further subdivision’ [Goody 1977: 26]), the very idiom had become an almost futile label, a marker that could ostensibly fluctuate in almost every feature; there could thus, in her mind, not only be no ‘intrinsic or universal understanding of what constitutes ritual’ (Bell 1997: 164), but very few cultures were even understood to have had a term for ritual ‘that means exactly what is meant by the English word’ (ibid.: 164). While still outlining what she argued to be the six prototypical archetypes of communal, ‘traditional’ rites (these being rites of passages, calendrical and commemorative rites, rites of exchange and communion, rites of affliction, rites of feasting, fasting and festivals, and finally political rituals [ibid.: 94]), Bell, in a similar move to that made by Rappaport, thus sought to move the terms of reference away from ‘ritual’ and towards ritualization, to what she saw as ‘flexible and strategic ways of acting’ rather than specific acts in themselves (ibid.: 138). This adaptation of idiom enabled her to explore ritual in terms of its concrete practice, as a ‘way of acting that distinguishes itself from other ways of acting’ (ibid.: 81), a practice that sets itself aside from the norm, detaching itself from the quotidian, rather than merely attempting to further demarcate a now seemingly nebulous term. It was thus a focus less on the ‘matter of clear and autonomous rites’ and more on the various ‘methods, traditions and strategies of “ritualization”’ that Bell wished to uphold, a focus on the ‘body moving about within a specially constructed space’, a body at the same time ‘defining (imposing) and experiencing (receiving) the values ordering the environment’ (ibid.: 81–2). Moving away from universal, overly generic themes, with ritual as an overall concept, and toward the specific, calculated modes of action that gained significance through the delineation of specific physical, spatial and temporal procedures, Bell thus also sketched some key modes of ‘ritual-like’ action, an ‘initial lexicon’ encompassing the themes of formalism, traditionalism, disciplined invariance, rule-governance, sacral symbolism and performance (ibid.: 138), a lexicon slightly modifying but in practice mainly concurring with Rappaport’s ‘ritual’ requisites (traditionalism acting as a simple alternate for ‘encoding by other than the performers’, sacral symbolism

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4.4 Formal, traditional, yet unique. Untitled collage by Momo, 2009

more-or-less approximating ‘acts and utterances’,2 and the sole addition of rulegovernance moulding into Rappaport’s ‘invariance’). Formalism, to start off with, one of the most ‘frequently cited characteristics of ritual’ (ibid.: 138), was understood by both Bell and Rappaport as a method of setting up a distinct contrast with unceremonious, quotidian, casual activities. Through a sliding scale of procedurally organized movement (from excessively technical to moderately so), it was believed to set up a division between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the usual and unusual, typical and atypical, formulating a mode of behaviour that had an implicit structure. Practices undertaken would thus often tender a more restricted mode of communication than normally observed in everyday interaction (a constraint examined in depth on pp. 203–6 through the work of Maurice Bloch), the limits or curbs placed upon ‘how something can be expressed’ understood to simultaneously influence ‘what can be expressed as well’ (ibid.: 139). Yet these apparent restrictions could also be argued to allow a more intense performative meaning to emerge, one where understated deviation, rather than radical innovation, was grasped in a more discriminating way by the sensitive ear of the participants. While often taken to simply denote ‘adherence to form’, then, for Rappaport, formalism must quite crucially not be taken to inevitably signify any notion of restraint or politesse; the ‘greeting behavior of teenagers’, he warns, ‘is formal in that it is stereotyped, but it is not particularly decorous’ (Rappaport 1999: 33). 2

Rappaport, unlike Bell, consciously shirked from the usage of the term ‘symbol’: ‘That ritual is not entirely symbolic is one of its most interesting and important characteristics, for through ritual some of the embarrassments of symbolic communication (notably the two vices of language, lie and the confusions of Babel) may be ameliorated’ (Rappaport 1999: 26).

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4.5 Invariant, rule governed, yet distinct. Untitled collage by Momo, 2009

Ritual formality could thus often ‘subsume or even specify, comic, violent, obscene or blasphemous behavior’ (ibid.: 33), behaviour of an apparently transgressive modality, all the while retaining a strictly ceremonious, expressive characteristic. Traditionalism, the ‘attempt to make a set of activities appear to be identical to or thoroughly consistent with older cultural precedents’ (Bell 1997: 145), functions through a bond to a set historical discourse, an apparently unbroken lineage making each ritual element part of a wider whole. Actions undertaken were thus understood to be not entirely encoded by the participants themselves, but to be part of an adhered-to set of passed-down messages or techniques, procedures of course liable, as we will see, to potential manipulation and modification. Any ‘deliberate’ or ‘calculated invention’ of ritual was hence seen to be a rarity (Rappaport 1999: 32). Even while the ‘invention of tradition’ was a trait understood, as Hobsbawm and Ranger famously explained (1983), to be widespread within the ‘modern’ era, these were sets of practices that sought to ‘inculcate certain values and norms’ implying a direct ‘continuity with the past’ (ibid.: 1), even if this was in fact a highly constructed, romanticized past. While often seen to be the preserve of ‘primitive’ societies, then, societies naturally ‘at odds with modernity’ (Bell 1987: 138), the manifestation of ‘traditional’ ritual (as detailed by Mary Douglas (1966) in her renowned grid/group schema), can be attributed more to the basic principles of social organization (the importance of group allegiance and hierarchical roles, for example), than to any ‘primordial’ belief system (ibid.: 99); movements away from ‘tradition’ can thus be understood to be prevalent as much in ‘primitive’ as in ‘modern’ societies, the Mbuti Pygmies as studied by Turnbull acting as the classic example of a seemingly ‘primitive’ group with a highly ‘modern’, aritual sensibility, a religion based on ‘internal feeling’, not ‘external sign’ (Douglas 1996 [1973]: 14).

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Invariance, somewhat like traditionalism, works through a meticulous concentration on repetition and control. It is hence a technique stressing the ‘careful choreography of actions’, a balance between the ‘self-control required by the actor’ and a distinct ‘rhythm of repetition in which the orchestrated activity is the most recent in an exact series that unites past and future’ (Bell 1997: 150). Rather than traditionalism’s attempt to protect a particular historical lineage, however, invariance is more concerned to efface temporality, a regimented system of action that can ‘close the distance between the doer and the deed’ through its perceived timelessness, through its unchanging procedural form (ibid.: 151). Nonetheless, and far from simply initiating a mechanistic replication, these ‘strategies of invariance’ can transform ‘the precise and deliberate gesture into one of perfect spontaneity and efficacy’ (ibid.: 151), a form of creativity that, rather than extinguishing personhood, works through anticipation and improvisation, a fluency that can in fact free the practitioner from the perceived constraint (Hughes-Freeland 2007). Moreover, as Rappaport highlights (1999), ritual must be understood as ‘more or less invariant’ rather than comprehensively so (ibid.: 24). There is thus always room for ‘logically necessary or deliberate variation’, different performers as well as different performances naturally varying (even if only minutely so) each specific occurrence of the rite (ibid.: 36). Whereas the ‘canonical’ element of ritual (the messages concerning the wider environment, society and cosmos) was hence understood by Rappaport to be highly invariant, the ‘self-referential’ aspect (the messages concerning the individual actors and their experiential existence) can be seen conversely (or correspondingly) as ‘necessarily variant’ (ibid.: 329). Rituals can thus adjust and transform within their very invariance, even as they may be understood (and perceived) to specifically attempt not to. Their ‘unique significance’, in fact, can be seen to emerge through the very relationship between ‘variations in representations indicating the current states of participants’ and the ‘constancy of the order in which they are participating and which they are thereby realizing’ (ibid.: 328). Rule governance, like invariance, can be detected through the distinct, regimented composition of each particular rite, most easily (and often) distinguished within the various ritualizations attached to sporting activities (events where ‘violent chaos is barely held in check by complex codes of orchestration’ [Bell 1997: 153]). Working within the wider realm of play, actors are restricted to various set patterns of interaction, patterns that are often seen to reinforce wider beliefs of approved, ‘proper’ behaviour. Regulated ‘engagements of violence and disorder’ or ‘ritualized combat’ (such as perceived in a wide-range of activities, from football to fox-hunting, boxing to bull-fighting), thus often contain distinctive modes of ‘dress, speech and gestures’ (ibid.: 153), features that in themselves permit the commencement of the particular activities. Adherence to these regulations thus connects ritual to the sphere of morality, a field where, through specific acts and utterances, order can be imposed upon a disorderly world, structure domineering chaos. Yet while games and ritual have sometimes been contrasted (by, as Levi-Strauss argued, separating participants out into winners and losers, rather than, as rituals ‘should’ do, establishing a unity

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[Rappaport 1999: 44]),3 play, as a distinct entity to gaming, can be considered to have strong link to festival rituals such as carnival, a clear attachment to both a specifically ordered chaos and rule-governed yet licentious play (as seen most clearly in rites of inversion, which we shall discuss in Chapter 5). Play is hence distinguished as a type of action marked out from the everyday, marked out as ritual through its highly directed yet non-instrumental objectives, its contests working within a framework of distinct and regulated parameters. The penultimate element, sacral symbolism incorporates various ‘symbols that embody values, feelings’ (Bell 1997: 156), objects whose sacrality is formed through their separation from the world of the everyday. As previously noted, however, this notion of sacrality does not simply connote activities with an explicitly supernatural context; objects such as national flags and historical monuments, ancient images and objects (with either mythical or authentic value), are often overtly understood to be ‘holy’, evoking both sentiments and taboos common to many ‘religious’ artefacts.4 These are forms understood to materially extend, to contain meanings beyond their constrained physical form, ‘evoking and expressing values and attitudes associated with larger, more abstract, and relatively transcendent ideas’ (ibid.: 157). And, as almost all rituals include ‘acts and objects as well as words’, they are then able, as Rappaport emphasizes (1999), to communicate in what he terms a digital rather than analogical mode, in a manner more expansive than bare, conventional linguistic disclosure5 (ibid.: 22). By working through physical display rather than mere text, these artefacts cannot be taken to be solely ‘symbolic’; as he continues, ‘when what is signified is incorporeal, like worthiness or influence, its representation may have to be material if it is to be taken seriously’, a materialization giving ‘visible substance to aspects of existence which are themselves impalpable, but of great importance in the ordering of social life’ (ibid.: 141).

3 Howe (2000) critiques this view, however, by noting the ‘unpredictability of some rituals’, their ability, like games, to ‘finish with winners and losers’ (ibid.: 76). 4 The recently reported incidents (and consequent furore) of the defamation of war monuments in the UK by drunken (and urinating) youths serve as an illustration of the evident sacrality bestowed upon these ostensibly secular sites. 5 ‘Speaking roughly’, Rappaport argues, the distinction between analogic and digital is that ‘between measuring and counting’, the former referring to ‘entities and processes in which values can change through continuous imperceptible graduations in, for instance, temperature, distance, velocity, influence, maturation, mood, prestige and worthiness’, the latter referring to ‘entities or processes whose values change not through continuous infinitesimal graduations but by discontinuous leaps’, such as the ‘beating of the heart and changes in the size of animal populations’ (Rappaport 1999: 87). Ritual is thus understood to work digitally through its ‘material representation’ (ibid.: 88). Prestige or influence, transmitted through such ritual indices as ‘pigs, coppers and blankets’, which help ‘to define – make definite – important but vague aspects about the world’ (ibid.: 87), are hence accounted for by material, not solely linguistic properties. Ritual can of course contain analogic processes as well, but these are often overridden or suppressed by their digital ones (ibid.: 140).

4.6  Remio at work, Los Angeles, USA, 2010

4.7  Remio at work, Los Angeles, USA, 2010

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The final, and perhaps most important of Bell and Rappaport’s ritual stipulates, performance, acts as the overall framework within which all the other categories of ritualization can ensue; it is hence the most evidential and vital of ritual’s features. Working on a multi-sensorial stage, it is understood to function through the ritual participant not simply ‘being told or shown something so much as’ being ‘led to experience’, a participatory, corporeal knowledge understood to shape one’s understanding of the world (Bell 1997: 160). Without performance, as Rappaport conclusively asserts, there simply ‘is no ritual’ (Rappaport 1999: 37). Whether of an ephemeral or enduring kind, elaborate or austere, whether it is conducted on an individual or communal basis, the rite must be performed. Descriptions of ritual, no matter how detailed, no matter how intricate, are not in themselves ritual acts. And any performance must therefore be grasped primarily, as Edward L. Schieffelin noted (2005), as ‘a living event’, an event that when over is forever gone (ibid.: 81); there ‘may be another similar performance tomorrow if it doesn’t rain, but that is another performance’ (ibid.: 81), each act, through its latent. 153), having the possibility of a multitude of meanings. Rituals are thus ‘realized – made into res – only by being performed’ (Rappaport 1999: 37), and the unique, active undertaking of each individual rite, the very ‘manner of “saying” or “doing”’ understood to be ‘intrinsic to what is being “said and done”’ (ibid.: 38). Whilst performance is links ritual to the world of theatrical presentation and classical drama, then, the deliberate ‘self-conscious “doing” of highly symbolic actions in public’ (Bell 1997: 160), for Rappaport (1999) this connection must be seen as familial rather than integral. Although both forms of exposition reflect upon a notion of wider order, ritual, unlike drama, not only represents action, but creates and fulfils it. It works directly within the Austinian realm of the illocutionary, of explicit doing, rather than solely communicating (ibid.: 86). Ritualized behaviour can thus be seen as a practice which works within a sliding scale of formalism (from unstructured to structured), yet one always marked out by a manner of differentiation; to refer to an enduring tradition, or, at least very least, appealing to discourse that goes beyond the lives of the ritual practitioners themselves; to function within a seemingly repetitive, invariant framework, within what could be described as a ‘mania’ for a non-instrumental precision; to operate amidst a system of rules and regulations, an arrangement of play as an inversion or potential subversion of everyday social life; to be produced in order to be seen, to work through both innately affective or expressive and intrinsically analytic or communicative symbols; and to employ a multidimensional, performative framework, one in which all members participate in the proceedings, whether through practice or spectatorship.

Multiple Sensory Modalities All of these ritual components described above are, as I mean now to outline, fundamental to the process of aesthetic production my informants undertook, fundamental to the procedural formation of what I have termed Consensual and Agonistic Ornamentation. They are aspects without which these artefacts could not

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be revealed, without which style, structure, order would be entirely absent. Both of the ornamental practices described in the previous chapters thus worked, first and foremost, through contrasting themselves to those of the everyday, creating a set of formal characteristics, a formality of ‘stereotyped elements’ (Rappaport 1999: 33), that designated them as something different, something unique, their performative routines separated from quotidian habits. Primarily, and quite unmistakably, one is not supposed to draw, write, paint, modify, install, or scratch upon public surfaces. There are not only implicit, but also clearly prescribed social contracts proscribing these acts – edicts working through all of our key social institutions, through the family,6 the education system,7 the judiciary8 – quite recent social contracts in fact (as shown through the work of Juliet Fleming [2001]), whose violation immediately sets the actions off in contrast to informal, commonplace ones (from commercial advertising to institutionally acceptable public-art). The very medium of production, the spatial location of these acts, thus places these acts as something ‘special’, something framed, something denoting ‘this is ritual’ (Bateson 2000 [1972]: 182). And just as ritual (and of course ritual transgression) has been shown to work within varying degrees of formality, so these ‘violent’, ‘obscene’ (Rappaport 1999: 33), taboo-breaking ornaments can be seen to function in the self-same variable way, levels of convention, detachment and heightened physical elaboration fluctuating between exceptional and moderate formality. At the furthest end of this scale, during a painting ‘mission’ for example (such as described in Intersection I), the practice would most often occur within a bounded location (outside the space of the everyday within a train yard or aside a train track, a building site, a rooftop, or simply any other ‘surplus’, ‘backstage’ locale [Goffman 1959]); conduct and deportment would be overtly discriminating (movements being highly measured in terms of both the precise medium being worked upon, but also the wider landscape, each ritual actor constantly on the look-out for potential danger, authoritarian or otherwise); activity would generally take place nocturnally (a ‘liminal time in which the world of work is seen to lose its hold’ [O’Connor and Wynne 1996: 162]); clothing would be regulated (muted colours the norm); verbal communication kept to a minimum unless otherwise necessary (silence thus reigning apart from various cautionary colloquialisms9). Tension was thus heightened, actions highly regulated, and there were thus innumerable indiscretions one could make, many things one (as an ethnographer in particular) could trip up on – literally, such as the disused can discussed previously, or metaphorically, 6

The proscriptions emerging through childhood: painting being regulated to specific media, with household walls being harshly prohibited. Colouring-in books, another common tool, can equally be considered as media restricting painting to highly proscribed boundaries. 7 The proscriptions emerging throughout the school system and centring on the prohibition against writing on school property. 8 The proscriptions against writing or drawing within ‘public’ spaces. 9 Such as the previously described internal whistle or other colloquial sayings such as su padre (your father), denoting approaching police or other institutional authority.

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through the accidental use of a camera-flash, through talking noisily, disturbing concentration, or simply being unconscious of one’s wider surroundings (especially of law enforcement). Yet even more significantly than all these potential indiscretions, one blundered simply by not painting. Everyone, even a ‘youth’, should have the ability to paint. At the other end of the spectrum however, within a generalized display of tagging for example, one would find an activity undertaken within the normalized spaces of the everyday (a site which one would not specifically go to but already be amongst), one where

4.8 Nano4814, Alone, and Brk at work. Vigo, Spain, 2009

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movements, conduct and deportment were interwoven with more habitual, unstructured activities. Action would hence occur rapidly, it would emerge out of more quotidian ones (such as just being on the street, or making a journey from one place to another); physical gestures, although highly measured while actually forming the images, being generally less considered; tension not exceptionally heightened. There would be an obvious frisson created through its basic formality, its separation from ‘normalized’ activity, its inherent illegality, but, being interlaced with everyday behaviour as it was, a more commonplace action occurring on innumerable occasions, it did not have the intensified procedural regulation of its more extreme relation. Thus, the practice was one within which improprieties were naturally harder to make (as one was not so explicitly obliged to participate), yet one that was still, crucially, understood to be in contrast with prevalent societal strictures. It hence contained a level of formality, a rituality derived in main through the explicit act of writing (and one linked to more classic calligraphic processes with their concern over the ‘freedom’ of the line, the appropriateness of the tools utilized), but a procedural constraint working in a highly different mode to the first described. It was a contrast, in fact, that perfectly replicated Spiro Kostof’s (1992) depiction of the street as the site of ‘solemn ceremony’ on the one hand – a nocturnal painting mission – and ‘improvised spectacle’ on the other – a diurnal practice of tagging (ibid.: 243). Both modalities (and all those working in between) could be seen to display a form of expressive simplicity however, the ornamental artefacts working within a ‘restricted code’, an aesthetic idiom prone to various rules and regulations: They can hence be understood to work within a set framework of tradition. The ornamental practices my informants undertook alluded quite clearly to a continuing historical convention, every work referencing (in some way at least) previously accomplished images, every work situated within an emplaced tradition; they thus inhabited a realm where each act manifestly exceeded the

4.9  Slave Cave Collective, Nazca Lines, New York, USA, 2012. The Slave Cave Collective piece depicted here not only has links to the traditions and history of the graffiti discourse (paying homage to a work which any true adherent to the discourse will instantly recognize) but also linking to the theme of sacrality, pointing quite overtly to something beyond itself

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sole ‘author’ or participant themselves, gaining authority from a folk-history of previous originators. Each of my informants were thus highly schooled in the history and customs of their relevant practices. Whether through the reading of the liturgical prayer book or ‘bible’ (as it was commonly known) – Subway Art by Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant10 – through the sharing of (badly photocopied) images via the postal system in the days of their youth to the contemporary distribution of images over the internet, through the untold hours spent talking about past and present images and image-makers, the nights discussing the merits or shortcomings of one aesthetic ‘school’ over another, all my informants were connoisseurs, specialists in the history of these insurgent ornaments. It was a crucial part of one’s (unrelenting) education, to know who had done what, where they had done it and when. And there were, of course, certain ‘ritual experts’ (such as Alone/Hear amongst my informants in Madrid), experts who would be turned to in times of debate, authorities who would pride themselves on being able to name every ‘king’ from every era, who could describe the subtle differences between the various intra-aesthetic movements occurring in countless distinct global locales. Customs were hence vindicated through the understanding that they were following an ancestral lineage, one provoked even further by the customary elder/neophyte, master/apprentice relationship which was fundamental to the process of learning. This turn to tradition did not simply mean that the forms, the images, were in themselves unchanging and predictable; while working within particular visual regimes, the ornaments produced were still clearly mutable and fluid artefacts, and one could break out (or perhaps work through) these paradigms to form new arrangements and styles. Any ‘break’ could then be placed as another point in an undeniable flow, one expressible through a teleological ‘family tree’ of practices. Any break, (as discussed further in the discussion of creativity on pp. 217–19), could only emerge through a form of critical improvisation rather than ‘pure’ innovation (unadulterated novelty often being deemed unacceptable even in the most avant-garde of circles, unacceptable because of its sheer incomprehensibility), a development naturally placed within the historical framework which already existed. Traditionality, then, seen as something that was ‘always already modern’ (Kapferer 2005: 47), can be considered as a factor that could facilitate creativity; it need not only be invented (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) but also exist in a state of continuous fluidity. 10

It is really hard to overestimate how important the books Subway Art and Spraycan Art have been to the progression of graffiti culture. On one occasion, Sixe, in reference to the almost ridiculously elevated veneration of Subway Art and the authors Chalfant and Cooper in particular (the lionized progenitors of the liturgy but not the practice), satirically stated Jesus, Cooper y Chalfant, rather than the customary Jesus, Maria, y José after someone sneezed. This was by no means a critique of these authors who were held in the upmost respect, but simply a commentary on the encompassing traditionalism that he and his fellow practitioners worked within, the sacred status not only of the individual pieces within these books (which were treated as hallowed) but so too the saintly status of the producers of the bible themselves.

4.10  Invariant yet idiosyncratic 1. Katsu, Untitled, New York, USA, 2012

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4.11 Invariant yet idiosyncratic 2. Eltono, Untitled 1, Untitled 2, Beijing, China, 2012

Through this obeisance to tradition, both Consensual and Agonistic Ornamentation can then be seen as incessant, cyclical, unremitting acts, to seem to function amidst an endlessly rhythmic, disciplined invariance. Image making occurred on an almost daily (or perhaps nightly basis), actors using both recurrent motifs recurrent designs as well as undertaking what could be deemed an excess of exactitude. Tagging, again, can here be taken as a prescient example, produced at a somewhat unbelievable rate, on an equally unbelievable scale, working in what is commonly (although, as we will soon see, incorrectly) perceived to be a monotonous, almost mechanical form of repetition. Inscribing only one’s chosen appellation, chosen icon, or one’s associated crew’s acronym (with an occasional addition of poetic phrases or overt messages to other writers, as well as the dedication of an associate’s name), writers could construct tens of tags in a night, hundreds in a week, thousands upon thousands in a year. Less obviously agonistic forms also worked within this reiterative framework. Images would work through their related geographical locations (using similar sites such

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as the doorframes often used by Eltono), through related techniques (such as the carteles or concrete method used by 3TTMan), through related modes of pattern (such as Remed’s focus on geometry), particular styles, particular modes of ‘neatness, boldness of contrast etc.’ (Bateson 2000 [1972]: 135) which would give the works their conspicuous, singular character. Invariance, in both consensual and agonistic modalities, does not therefore simply denote an unthinking, perfunctory action; it can be viewed simply as a restriction of one’s potential palette, rather than one’s potential possibilities, a restriction that can be seen to actually produce possibility (a contention explored further on p. 142). Even the apparent invariance of a tag – the most seemingly invariant of all the ornamental forms discussed – was fiercely repudiated by the practitioners themselves; Spok would maintain that the probability of even two tags being exactly the same was close to zero, each performance understood to be laden with possibility, each occurrence a chance to improvise from within the innate structure.11 Like the iterability of performance itself, each physical act was always bound by external factors, the physical medium, the existential state of the practitioner, the wider social milieu it was embedded within. And aspects of creativity, spontaneity and efficacy were thus all intertwined through a very specific form of cadenced bodily practice, a practice through which one would become fully integrated into the task at hand, inducted within the instinctive ‘flow’ of heightened action (Csikszentmihalyi 1992). All inscription, as we will examine below through Leo Howe’s work (2000), will thus be grasped as an innately indeterminate business, one re-performed (and thus re-directed) every time enacted. Its predictability is hence highly relative, an invariant action with unavoidably variant aesthetic outcomes – a ‘canonical’ element that retains the same message, that remains wholly invariant no matter its apparent variance, a ‘referential’ one that corresponds to the exact state of the practitioner at the time of its production, a wholly variant, idiosyncratic marking.12 The invariance which ritual ‘displays or even flaunts’ thus ‘manifests or represents a specific order to which individuals ipso facto conform in performing them’ (Rappaport 1999: 41); the incessant, rhythmical nature of painting, its physical practice, directly referencing an urge, a combined ethic, which each individual tacitly accepted through the very act itself. Whilst the act of production was seen to be both fixed and fluid then, all forms of work functioned within a quite set structure of rules and regulations.

11

‘I’ve done a thousand pieces, ten thousand tags’ he once told me, ‘and they might have a similar style but they’re never the same. It’s impossible for me to even catch two tags the same.’ Whilst to my eye they may have looked identical, the trained practitioner could see the infinitesimal differences that the hand must always make. 12 All of the ornamental forms discussed contained both self-referential and canonical information, aspects through which, in the former case, you could re-trace its physical production, analysing the particular ‘physical, psychic or social states of individual participants’ (Rappaport 1999: 53), while, in the latter, grasping its more general, universal meanings. The differing aspects were not merely ‘two sorts of information’, however, but part of a complex in which ‘the two classes of messages are dependent upon each other’ (ibid.: 58).

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This rule governance, a crucial element of my informants’ ornamental practices, could be detected in nearly every aspect of their work. Regulations over when, what and where one could paint – even as the works flouted other more authoritative conventions – created fixed aesthetic patterns within which one was obligated to proceed. For the most part then, both consensual and agonistic practices were completed at night; undertaking ornamentation during the day was considered to be foolhardy, possible, but generally imprudent. Only if you actively wanted to encounter authorities (as with 3TTMan’s practice) was working during the day a viable option. Whilst these ‘when’ regulations were prescriptive, advice set mainly for protective purposes, the regulations of ‘what’ were of a more clearly proscriptive nature. Agonistic Ornamentation, for example, with all its attempt to break external regulations, to break out of the status quo as discussed in Chapter 3, can hence be seen as a discourse whose internal regulations are bound to (comparatively) strict conventions.13 Whilst innovation did continually occur, it was only through these practitioners intricate knowledge of the regulations themselves that this improvisational form of creativity could transpire, a knowledge that would then allow one to bend and mould these regulations and found a new ground from which to proceed. Whilst aesthetic experts could then play with the form then, neophytes would often quite slavishly follow convention in order to develop both their techniques and knowledge base. And it was thus often acknowledged that aesthetic freedom only emerged for those at the very beginning of their practice (for those who had no concept of these regulations), and for the masters who had reached the point where all regulations were a framework rather than a mandate. Whilst some practitioners of the form were thoroughly conservative then – following the Subway Art, New York tradition of practice in an entirely subservient manner – the highest esteem was almost always bestowed upon those who formed the new wave, the avant-garde which then became part of the mainstream.14 Within the regulations over‘where’, we can find numerous distinctions between the types of surfaces that were deemed acceptable or unacceptable for ornamentation. Differentiating between what were considered ‘private’ spaces – religious sites, home residences, monuments, which would never be touched by committed practitioners15 – and what were recognized as ‘public’ spaces – shop front grills, street walls, ‘street-furniture’ and so forth, which were seen as clearly open, receptive targets – practitioners would follow these regulations to protect themselves both from ridicule from other followers of the practice as well as from direct targeting by authorities. 13

‘Wherever practiced, [ornamentation] is a highly conservative art, bound by a network of conventions […] Innovation is almost always a matter of reinterpreting or recombining them’ (Trilling 2003: 28–9). 14 This argument can also be quite easily mapped onto the sphere of Consensual Ornamentation. Just as conservative or neophyte practitioners in Agonistic Ornamentation will follow the regulations of the New York school, their consensual opposites will often become one of the hundreds of adherents of the school of Banksy, reproducing his satirical stencils in a similarly slavish fashion. 15 Espos’s ‘rules of graffiti’ puts it well: ‘Don’t write on houses of worship, people’s houses in general, other writers’ names, and tombstones. Writing on memorial walls and cars is beef beyond belief’ (Powers 1999: 154–5).

4.12  John Fekner, Self Portrait, New York, USA, 2012

4.13  Filippo Minelli, Democracy, Nouadhibou, Mauritania, 2008

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Ritual prohibitions, then, the ‘sanctified proscription of physically feasible activity’ as Rappaport terms it (1999), can hence be seen to be formed with the knowledge that they can (and will) be ritually broken, contraventions which come to dominate ‘relations between principal antagonists’ (ibid.: 206–8), between rival clans, adversarial classes and, in our current case, between artists and authorities. And not only linking my informants’ practices (in both their consensual and agonistic dimensions), back to the realm of the agon – the connection between regulations and games emerging, via the Olympics, to the realm of agonic battle and Greek ritual combat (Cornford 1912) – rule-governance can equally link the idea of competition, of ritual battle within set rules, together with the realm of the sacred. Sacral symbolism, the production of a valued, affective symbology, a sanctified imagery, was a further aspect of these ornamental practices. My informants clearly distinguished between sacred and profane sites, locales where one was obliged, or prohibited from practising; between sacred and profane artefacts, images which elicited respect due to their locations, their innate styles, as well, of course, as the status of the individual practitioner themselves (and artefacts thus being subject to vastly differing temporalities dependant on this overall reverence). Works were also habitually considered as ‘animate’, their locales ‘brought to life’ through utilization (both oft repeated metaphors, works being ‘alive’, places often ‘dead’ until ornamentation transpired). While not following any appeal to the supernatural, images were understood as physical manifestations of the producer, an attack on the image thus akin to an attack on the person, a violence that necessitated recompense with paint if not blood. Acting as distinct indexes of their artist’s agency, as ‘vehicles of personhood’ (Gell 1998: 81), each tag, each poster, mural or marking, was seen not only as a visible sign of the undercurrents of the city, a sign of the other, but also as a substantiation of an individual, a material personhood that could revivify a physical space. Yet the images were also understood to surpass the importance of the producers themselves, transcending the immediacy of the individual piece; they could denote a moral discourse, a virtuosity (in both senses of the term) through the very structure of the ritual itself, encoded through the breaking of taboo that this action constructs, through the illicit bodily action that formed it. The sacred could hence not only be found in the images agency but through their ability to point ‘to something beyond itself’, through its ‘evoking and expressing values and attitudes associated with larger, more abstract, and relatively transcendent ideas’ (Bell 1997: 157). Through internal substantiation and external transcendence, these ornamental expressions could thus link the ‘intimate and personal’ to the ‘cosmic and impersonal’ (ibid.: 159), existing as mediums of sacrality through their ‘quality of specialness’, their ‘meaningfulness’, their ability ‘to evoke emotion-filled images and experiences’ (ibid.: 157). As Rappaport continued to argue (1999), it was this very material rather than textual or semantic rendering that gave ritual the ability to signify these ‘incorporeal’ ideals, to signify ideals of value that cannot merely be ‘communicated by words’, but need to be visually experienced, physically known (ibid.: 141).

4.14  3TTMan, Remed, and Fefe Tavelera at work. Madrid, Spain, 2009

4.15  The arrival of the poli. Madrid, Spain, 2009

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But of course, this sacrality, as with all of the other five themes so far discussed, could only ever function through the all-pervading jurisdiction of performance, bringing these ornamental artefacts back to the world of exposition. Public performance was a fundamental constituent of my informants’ very outward, prominent, ornamental displays. They were acts which converged directly with Richard Bauman’s definition of performance (1992a), a display which is ‘aesthetically marked and heightened’ and also ‘framed in a special way’, a practice which acts both as a ‘mode of communicative behaviour and a type of communicative event’ (ibid.: 41). Not only literally marking their medium through aesthetic means, forming an event filled with colour, tension, movement, not only literally producing a frame, a parergon, an event attached yet separate to the everyday, these ornamental forms communicated in literal and performative modalities. Performances were thus not only distinct, individual productions, ones working within particular aesthetic genres, but also expressive, discursive procedures, public ritualizations that yearned for intersubjective responses. They were ones in which both actors and audience could be mutually affected, in which both had their specific tasks and roles, where both were vital to the final efficacy of the ritual. By simply viewing these forms (whether intentionally or not), recipients would be drawn into these traps. They would be forced to recall the genesis of the objects, to play out ‘their origin-stories mentally, reconstructing their histories as a sequence of actions performed by another agent (the artist)’ (Gell 1998: 67); their very witnessing (as I have previously suggested in Schacter 2008) was thus infused with a sense of corporeal illicitness, a visceral reaction provoked by the ‘congealed residue of performance and agency in object-form’ (Gell 1998: 68), their viewing a recreation of the action through which they came into existence: The performative process, functioning through ‘multiple media’, through ‘multiple sensory modalities’ – comprising specific smells (the unmistakable paint fumes), particular sounds (the shaking and hissing of the cans) and characteristic sights (the burst of colour onto the wall); comprising specific bodily actions (the balletic movements of hand to wall), particular risks (from both the precarity of the acts as well as their institutional illegality) and characteristic times and locales (nocturnal, liminal) – was thus fully embedded within the image itself, fastened to its later existence, ensuring not only that ‘the participants experience the event intensively and with heightened effect’(Tambiah 1996: 222) but a profusion of variables through which the work could then be understood within a wider, participatory, collective context. ‘Outsiders’, as Gerd Baumann has discussed (1992b), can thus become implicated in these ritual in a varying set of ways, the ‘bystanders, spectators, invited guests, competing participants, validating witnesses, or even beneficiaries’ of these very public acts considered as fully active members of the process, the viewer, the eraser, the neighbour, all having a role within the performative process, the practice moving beyond the individual applicant and enlisting a wealth of further claimants (ibid.: 110). In its movements, its presentations and its dramas, the practice of ornamentation here discussed must be understood to be ensconced within a performative framework realized in the moment of creation and yet still extant within its transient material state, a performative essence resonating from the moment of production to the moment of reception. It was an overarching

Order

159

performative context in which actions were not just illustrated but performed, where experience emerged through corporeal knowledge, where it was through deliberate, purposeful action that the ritual itself could emerge.

(Un)Civilizing Rituals The physical practice which brought these insurgent ornaments into the world, the material acts through which they became manifest, were thus ones which I would argue were unmistakably linked to the realm of ritual, to a framework of ritualization itself connected (as we will see in the upcoming chapters) to a distinct notion of order. Through the embracement of a performative formality, a set aesthetic tradition, a mode of performative invariance, an assemblage of aesthetic regulations, a group of affective and communicative symbols, and an allencompassing performative modality, my informants produced a mode of secular ritual (Moore and Myerhoff 1977), a set of what from the outside could appear to be uncivilized rituals (in a corruption of Carol Duncan’s expression [1995]), but rituals nonetheless. Rather than mindless vandalism, this was a practice enveloped in history and tradition, one which took a long-standing education to perfect, which contained ritual experts and neophytes, contained correct and incorrect modes of action.16 And together it thus formed a mode of ritual in which public acts of ornamentation – what Tambiah (1995) would term as ritual ‘saying’ – could act performatively in the Austinian sense – acting as ritual doing, a process whereby the structure of ritualization is ‘existentially or indexically related to [its] participants’, a practice ‘creating, affirming, or legitimating their social positions’ (ibid.: 156). Whilst Mary Douglas (1966) famously argued that ‘rituals of purity and impurity create unity in experience’ (ibid.: 2), social boundaries coming to be protected and preserved through the regulation of what was commonly considered as pollution, within the ethnographic context here described group boundaries were defined and group members unified through an avidity towards, not an avoidance of pollution, rites purposefully producing what was commonly considered as ‘dirt’, purposefully forming the famous ‘matter out of place’ (ibid.: 36). Social boundaries were hence regulated through the contravention, rather than protection of physical boundaries, through rituals of pollution, the network of adherents explicitly demarcated through the violation of the normative taboo

16

As noted on the website Hurt You Bad, one of the most witty and at the same time perspicuous graffiti related websites: ‘Some things that were/will be asked of you: Have style. Learn history. Be respectful. Paint subway trains. Bomb. Rack. Travel. Don’t snitch. Handle beef. Write for 10+ years’. If one wanted to become a (ritual) expert, these were the steps that had to be undertaken. One needed to embrace a unique technique (‘Have style’), to be steeped in tradition (‘Learn history’), to be mindful of all regulations (‘Be respectful’), to accept risk (‘Bomb. Rack’), to remain steadfast to the subculture (‘Don’t snitch. Handle Beef. Write for 10+ years), if one ever wanted to be accepted as a true member of the wider network of practitioners.

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system.17 It was thus a form of ‘ritual’, as Douglas continued, that ‘provides a frame’ (ibid.: 78), and yet at the same time a ritual that produced one, a ritual that in itself was the parergon. Coming to destabilize boundaries in a spatial sense (disrupting notions of public and private, inside and outside), in a material sense (disrupting notions of intrinsic and extrinsic, art and pollution), in a temporal sense (disrupting notions of ‘wasting’ or ‘losing’ time, of nocturnal and diurnal norms), in a symbolic sense (disrupting notions of centre and margin, subversion and docility), these ornamental forms also had an ability to destabilize boundaries in an overarching ritual sense: They contained embedded links (as we will see in the next two chapters) to the realm of carnival, to clowning, to tricksters, to the picaresque, fundamentally intermediate zones that were full of chance, of indeterminacy, full of the ‘controlled uncertainty that is found in certain public events’ (Handelman 1998: 66). It was thus not my informants’ working upon the threshold that I want now to go on to explore in the next chapters but their working experientially within it. These were practices that had an active effect on the world around them, an entangled, inescapable influence on their immediate environment. And it was thus a practice of ritualization which functioned in the interstices of their structures in both literal and metaphoric terms, between the inside and outside of their physical structures (as exemplified in Chapter 1) as much as between the inside and outside of their societal structures (between ‘human beings in the here-and-now and non-immediate sources of power, authority, and value’ [Bell 1997: xi]). It was a ritual which may have worked against normative societal codes but will in fact come to be seen to have emerged from a distinctly civic disposition, an insurgent ritual with a civil order at its core.

17

Eltono related this to me quite clearly, the true connection within the group being, in his opinion, instantiated through their joint adherence to working ‘in the street’, their joint commitment to these rituals of pollution.

5 Inversion, Subversion, Perversion

[M]asks, disguises and other fictions of some kinds of play are devices to make visible what has been hidden, even unconscious […] to let the mysteries revel in the streets, to invert the everyday order in such a way that it is the unconscious and primary processes that are visible, whereas the conscious ego is restricted to creating rules to keep their insurgence within bounds, to frame them or channel them. Victor Turner

Because of their obvious sensuous character and their strong element of play, carnival images closely resemble certain artistic forms, namely the spectacle. In turn, the medieval spectacles often tended toward carnival folk culture, the culture of the marketplace, and to a certain extent became one of its components. But the basic carnival nucleus of this culture is by no means a purely artistic form not a spectacle and does not, generally speaking, belong to the sphere of art. It belongs to the borderline between art and life. In reality, it is life itself, but shaped according to a certain pattern of play. Mikhail Bakhtin

Reaffirmation/Revolution: Now that my informants’ public aesthetic practices have been shown to function within the elements which together comprise what is generally understood as “ritual”, it is the overarching ritual framework, the specific ritual archetype these acts lay within which I wish to come to explore. This, I hope, will then help us understand why my informants pursue these often dangerous practices, it will help us to identify what their enacting truly comes to achieve. Following what Catherine Bell (1997) has termed rites of ‘feasting, fasting, and festivals’, and, in

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5.1 3TTMan, Fighting Peacefully, Tenerife, Spain, 2012

particular, the subcategory of carnival1 which lays within this ritual schemata, the ornamental rituals which have thus far been examined will now come to be explored as ones in which participants ‘are particularly concerned to express publicly – to themselves, each other, and sometimes outsiders – their commitment and adherence to basic religious [or any other binding] values’ (ibid.: 120), in which participants utilize what may appear to be forms of ‘social chaos and licentious play’ (ibid.: 126) in order to publicly express their beliefs. Surveying some of the classic examinations of the carnival rite then – a public ritual not only encompassing a myriad of aesthetic standards such as spectacle, transgression, humour, excess, play, risk and creativity, but also being one of what John Kelly and Martha Kaplan termed the three most ‘important anthropological images of ritual’2 (Kelly and Kaplan 1990: 121) – we will find a practice which functions through a disruptive modality yet which can simultaneously, in the terms of Edward Muir (2005), be considered as a distinctly ‘civic ritual’. Carnival will thus be understood as a space within which social actors could gain access to ‘forms of taboo breaking’, to spaces where one could turn ‘the usual values of normal life upside down’ (ibid.: 104–5), yet at the same time as a state that can ‘perpetuate certain values of the community’ (ibid.: 100), where one could challenge authority through creative experimentation and through the exertion of a particular moral conviction. Where ‘public authorities’ 1

Carnival, as understood here following Peter Stallybrass and Allon White (1986), will be seen as a discourse able to reveal itself as much within particular ‘symbolic practices, images and discourses’ as within the ‘specific calendrical ritual’ occurring ‘around February each year’ (ibid.: 15). It can be seen to function both as a public exhibition of licentiousness – a ‘ritual spectacle’ – and a lived-through, strategic, hybrid aesthetic practice (Bakhtin 1984a: 4). Carnival will here be recognized as a space not only where traditional hierarchies such as rich/poor or male/female can be set in confrontation, but one in which polarities such as inside/outside or public/private can similarly be provoked. 2 The other two being the ‘divine king’ and the ‘cargo cult’ (Kelly and Kaplan 1990: 121).

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may solely see ‘criminal behaviour’ then, for carnival participants actions may be an ‘expression of deeply held beliefs’ (ibid.: 100). They may be a performance of virtue, an act of probity, a public presentation which works through ‘liberating rather than destroying’ societal statutes (ibid.: 100). The upturning of normative systems can thus serve to instantiate, rather than simply reject, a form of embodied citizenship, a transgression which emerges from a will to order not a wilful chaos, from a desire to question rather than overturn. And carnival and order can thus be seen to be close companions rather than direct opponents, to be linked through their joint adherence to the cosmetic (in the original sense of the term), linked through the intertwined levels of cosmos.3 Just as carnival’s overtly liminal structure seems to have the innate capacity to disrupt everyday habitus however, many theorists have also ultimately come to see it as having a regulatory function, a dogmatism working to fortify rather than undermine social norms. Through working, as DaMatta writes (1991), in ‘direct opposition (as an inverted image) to daily life’, carnival can be seen as something which ‘merely reinforces the everyday world’ (ibid.: 62), something which follows the normative pattern of structure and thus simply upholds it. It can be seen as a discourse of antithesis which vindicates its contrary form, a practice creating a negative logic which functions through ‘reaffirmation’ rather than ‘revolution’ (Handelman 1998: 52).4 Whilst some theorists see carnival as a method of revivifying the social sphere, others thus argue that it merely reinforces social norms, the former group appreciating the carnival modality as a method of (subversive) rebellion, the latter seeing it as a discourse of (inversive) reflection. It is a debate, then, which not only contains many similarities to that previously analysed between Habermas and Lyotard (between a consensual modification of norms and an agonistic displacement of them), but which can similarly be analysed through the work of two other giants of social thought, through the work of the anthropologist Victor Turner and the literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin on carnival. Whilst for Turner, attempting to enhance Max Gluckman’s work on rituals of rebellion (1963), carnival was understood as something experimental, subjunctive, 3

Gottfried Semper in fact links carnival and cosmos through their etymological joining in the ‘cosmetic’, an embellishment with which the ‘Greek woman adorned herself to make her body appear’ (Mahall and Serbest 2009: 40). For Semper, the cosmetic provided ‘the haze of carnival candles’; it connected ‘cosmetics to carnival’s dressing and masking and both to a “method of inventing”’ (ibid.: 40). Whilst masks are thus often seen to conceal, here they more rightly re-order. 4 This argument is taken up even further by Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1993), suggesting that carnival in Brazil is indeed ‘as much a ritual of intensification as a ritual of reversal’ (ibid.: 482), a practice accentuating rather than contesting everyday social realities. For her, carnival was a time when people were only too aware of ‘their own exclusion, marginality, sickness, and debt’, the ‘play’ of carnival doing the ‘dirty work of class, gender, and sexual divisions, which by means of grotesque exaggeration are etched even more deeply into the individual and collective bodies’ (ibid.: 482). Rather than carnival transgressing social norms, rather than it simply reflecting them, ScheperHughes thus suggests it works to actually deepen them, these rituals of reversal being themselves reversed (and all the more powerfully for that).

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yet perhaps a not truly contestational realm, a Dionysian force acting as ‘the balance, not the challenge, to the Apollonian side of life’ (Kelly and Kaplan 1990: 137), for Bakhtin, whose outwardly historical work on carnival also functioned as a subversive critique of the Stalinist era he lived through, carnival was a ‘corrosive parody’ emblematic of radical social transformation, a discourse that acted as both the ‘limit and opponent of “official” structure’ (ibid.: 137). So does the carnivalesque play which we will find emerging from my informants’ practices simply give rise to a Turnerian critique, a ritual of inversion, or a stronger Bakhtinian notion of creation, a ritual of subversion? Do their aesthetic, seemingly transgressive practices stay within the realm of structure, merely experimenting with it, or break away from this self-same structure, attempting to eliminate it? And can, in the very first case, these acts be considered rituals of the carnivalesque at all, to be practices which function within the formerly mentioned rites of feasting, fasting, and festivals, within the ‘public display of religiocultural sentiments’ (Bell 1997: 120) that these rites instantiate. Intersection II: Field Notes, 12/06/07

[…]We were sat in the kitchen at the studio. Eltono, 3TTMan, Luciano, Manu,1 Tika2 and myself relaxing in el local3 after another blazing summer’s day, drinking, smoking, chatting, listening to music – just being together in the pleasing freshness of the night. It was nothing out of the ordinary, a group of friends just hanging out, joking around, and it seemed things were settling down for the evening. Yet at around midnight everyone suddenly arose from their chairs and started making for the door, motioning me to come with them. I hadn’t noticed any earlier talk of arrangements (it was just a Tuesday night after all), and although I initially thought that work on an impending show was due to start (a small exhibition taking place at an independent gallery managed by friends of theirs – a space, in fact, just round the corner from where we sat), now didn’t seem like an appropriate time to put that into action. We filed out the kitchen – Manu running back to quickly grab a couple of litros4 from the fridge before we left, Luciano laughing and pushing 3TTMan along the corridor – collectively rambling downstairs and on to the street. My eyes adjusting to the orange sheen of the Madrileño night, I saw Eltono walking a little way down the road, ending up outside la frutería, standing meditatively amidst the remnants of the day’s trade. He bent down, carefully shifting the black bags of rotting fruit, picking up a pile of 10 or so wooden fruit cartons (the typical stackable crates that you find in every city of the world), loading them up, high over his head. Still chatting, the rest of the team followed suit, picking up the boxes, carefully removing the detritus and then progressing up the street, seemingly knowledgeable as to where we were going.5 Moments after we were outside the gallery, Eltono, proceeding to lay his collection



1

Manu was Nano’s ‘primo’, an unofficial cousin through strong family ties in Vigo. As well as being a

photographer he was at that time working as a lighting director for a local theatre.



2

Tika was a friend of Eltono’s, an artist originally from Zurich but at that time living in São Paolo.

3

There’s something about the Spanish word local (meaning ‘premises’, ‘place’, ‘workshop’ and ‘local’)

that was perfectly apt. I think it’s just the fact that it quite clearly took all four meanings at once.



4

Litre bottles of beer.

5

The cartons were to be used as part of an installation Tono would later produce in the gallery

space. They were a common medium of his, always easy to find wherever he went, pretty cheap for what you got (something for nothing) and always carrying a sign of their locality on their form. It was not meant as a particular comment on recycling or environmental sustainability (although of course implicit in the material),

5.2  Carrying the cartons. Madrid, Spain, 2007

5.3 A litro to celebrate. Madrid, Spain, 2007

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of cartons down on the curb, fished a huge set of keys out of his pocket and opened up the doors. We all piled in, laying down the crates in the corner, taking a quick peek around and then swiftly returning outside. Mission one complete; time for the first break. A litro was opened to celebrate (woops from the crowd), a pass of the bottle about the circle, a customary swig for everyone and we were off.6 Tika was bouncing down the street ahead of us, tagging every other doorway with a thick black marker, Manu beside her cursively scanning the area for potential danger while simultaneously pestering her for a go. 3TTMan and Eltono were lingering at a nearby skip,7 searching within it then furtively grabbing some clear plastic sheeting from inside; stealthily coming up on Luciano from behind, they managed to then wrap him up totally within it, laughing and pointing at the newly mummified creature who lay within. The whole group was marching down the middle of the road, shouting, hooting, enjoying the moment to its utmost potential. 3TTMan was now leading the way, winding his way through Malasaña, navigating the narrow backstreets that formed this densely packed neighbourhood.8 We emerged at the next stage of action after a few minutes (and another swiftly consumed litro), a huge abandoned shopfront (maybe ten metres by three?) made up of literally hundreds of billposters, a densely packed palimpsest almost 40 or 50 thick in places. It was a prime example of one of the most pervasive forms of visual culture in the city, an illicit but seemingly hegemonically accepted form of commercial advertising.9 Here is perfect, 3TTMan said, seemingly to himself, then stood back, surveying the posters for a moment. Discarding his mangled roll-up he reached back and pulled a Stanley knife out from his pocket, leaned up to the wall and started cutting, selecting a fragment of text, an image, and swiftly detaching it from the surface in four or five sharp movements. I looked down at the posters now lying submissively on the floor, turning back to find 3TTMan really starting to get into it. Cutting soon became hacking, hacking turning into ripping, ripping into a full-frontal assault on the posters, a no-holds-barred attack on the felonious carteles. By the time I had reached for my camera the rest of the crew was helping – pulling, wrenching, tearing away at the posters, holding each other up high against them, clinging to the uppermost sheets, forcing them off the wall in an orgy of destruction, an ephemeral occurrence of (dis)order, a fleeting instance of (con)fusion in the city. Eltono and Manu were jumping up and down on the posters on the floor, diving on top of them, suddenly then dragging one another around the street while they lay prostrate like kings on these newly created forms of transportation. Out of nowhere a passer-by joined in the mêlée, rugby-tackling Eltono onto the posters and straight into 3TTMan and Manu (who were themselves now down there play-fighting on the ground), speedily disappearing laughing into the night (followed by both comical shouts and a theatrical waving of fists from the wounded soldiers). People were

more simply indicative of an approach to the utilization of the street by my informants in a more general way – finding things from the place you treasured, and simply reprocessing them within another context. It was a way of bringing the city into the gallery space without simply replicating one’s street production in what was a very different context.



6

Like all resources, drinks were always shared amongst the group. Whether an expensive seven-

euro copa at a bar or, more habitually, a one-euro ‘street-beer’, drinks would be immediately passed after a mouthful taken. This seemingly banal, quotidian act of group participation was something that undoubtedly shone a light on the rest of the collectives’ activities. Common engagement, cooperative contribution was simply a more effective way of being in the city.



7

Skips, which were plentiful in the city, were always given a quick once over. One never knew what

potential riches or resources lay within.



8

In fact, the entire area of Malasaña was made up of these ‘backstreets’, tiny roads with space

enough for one car and an almost redundant pavement on each side. This very redundancy meant that the streets were actively shared, vehicles and citizens in a constant dance of interaction.



9

Billposters were in fact a seemingly semi-legal form of advertising in Madrid, and thus consumed

nearly every single vacant or neglected structure.

5.4  Collecting the carteles. Madrid, Spain, 2007

5.5  The Pied Piper of Malasaña. Madrid, Spain, 2007

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walking past, smiling, laughing (perhaps a touch uncertainly), not truly understanding what was going on (much like myself in fact) but able to sense the intense joyfulness of the moment. After every last obtainable scrap of paper was prized off the wall, 3TTMan piled together the sheets and started leading the way back, dragging the posters along the road behind him with us following at the rear [for some reason I remember thinking he seemed somewhat like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, the posters a substitute for the pipe, us for the children of the town]. Mission two (nearly) complete; time for the second break. The posters were parked by the side of the road and we darted into a bar for a free chupito (3TTMan having been promised free drinks by the proprietor having recently painted the exterior facade of the venue). Down the hatch, a five-minute dance and we were gone. And within a moment we were back at the gallery, helping 3TTMan haul the posters inside. Someone grabbed a couple of chairs from the outer courtyard and hauled them out to the narrow street at the front of the gallery. We sat down, took a breath, and once more I thought the night was perhaps slowing back down, drawing to a close. Little did I know. A loud whistle cut through the air and Spok appeared from down the street, wandering down from his apartment on the opposite corner towing a small roller bag behind him. He broke into the circle, grabbing the litro, then knelt down and unzipped his bag, pouring out an assortment of cans onto the curb. So … what do you want me to paint? They laughed. He stood there thinking, draining the cerveza, then laid it on the floor and got to work, peeling off the old bits of paper and paint from the outside wall of the space, smoothing down its rough surface with his hand. He took a quick picture of Luciano and Eltono on his phone-camera and was set, ready to work, beginning to outline their portraits on the front of the building. I’ve been painting with sprays for eight years, said Ekta (who too had just arrived, direct from the airport with a rucksack, a small holdall and a big smile), and I have no idea how he’s doing that. It’s like we’re using totally different tools. They loved how he worked, the ease he could almost photographically reproduce an image with his cans, without light, without planning, but Spok was nonplussed. If you’d painted as many pieces as I have … he trailed off. Soon finished, he moved across to the other side of the street and threw up a couple of quick tags, seeming almost desperate to get them out, a tension released with their emanation on the wall. He loved the freedom of tagging. The photorealism was great, he knew it was impressive, but it was, as he said, just a ‘trick’. The joy of a tag, the immediacy. That was the best. Eltono and Tika had moved just around the corner by this point, set up directly in between the gallery and the studio. They had a nice spot (I’d noticed them checking it out earlier in the day), a building almost opposite Eltono’s window, an old bar which had been sitting empty for years, covered now in innumerable tags, stencils and throw-ups. They were sat at the edge of the street, mixing their colours, chatting quietly between themselves. Things were getting late, it must have been by now two, three in the morning, and everything felt calmer, quieter. This wasn’t the rabble-rousing excess of earlier but a more measured, more focussed approach. Eltono was down on his knees taping out his design, marking out the negative space of his image; Tika, having pulled herself up onto one of the ever-present dustbins (the always readily available stepladder), setting out her background in white. Spok and 3TTMan had by now come down from the gallery (having locked it up for the night) and were wandering back to the studio, standing with me on the corner, watching the process while finishing the final litro of the night. Quickly putting his knife and tape back into his back pocket, Eltono started walking quickly away from his piece (which he had yet to start filling in), whistling towards us while heading away from the studio and into the side-road. I stood their confused, while Spok and 3TTMan swiftly ushered Tika down from her spot, dashing the litro, a small bottle of rum, the paint and some contraband behind the bin as they did. I was totally perplexed until the two undercovers ordered us against the wall. I stood still, feeling taken aback. The possibility was of course always there but it was something I had simply not been expecting. Flashing blue lights then reflected off the wall and three vehicles pulled up, discharging 10 or so uniformed officers. Manu had by now come over, assertively confronting the police while 3TTMan pleaded with

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him to calm down. Empty your pockets and place them by your feet. ID cards face up. Manu continued to berate them: slow night? Nothing better to do? They looked irritated, but also a touch uncomfortable themselves, like they’d come to the wrong place at the right time [which, according to the guys later, was probably the case]. They checked the cards, the collection of materials on the floor, the quietude (apart from the still aggravated Manu) broken by the sound of the principal’s radio. It looked like they had more important business to attend to. A couple of stern sounding words (the meaning lost on me) and they departed, almost as quickly as they’d materialized. It seemed somewhat farcical. They’d neither taken the paints, the drink, nor the contraband. It was a result. Back to the studio for an hour and Tika and Eltono crawled out again. Never leave a job half-done […] [I think this was the night I first truly realized that the street was something that pervaded my informants’ entire lifeworlds, something not solely connected to what was considered to be their overtly ‘aesthetic’ production. It was an understanding of the street in which transgression of the norms of the city was a key aspect, a transgression not only pursued through a purely artistic process, however, but one concerned with undertaking tasks in a way opposed to habitual conceptions of public and private, dirt and pollution, order and disorder. And it was this particular disruption, this disturbance of the everyday, one undertaken as a whole, as a collective, that made me realize the importance of the realms of play, of risk, of a framework going far beyond the discourses of art and vandalism, the bounded dichotomy to which it was so often related].

Transformative Performance (Or a Turnerian Inversion) Turner’s understanding of the carnival dynamic, ‘the creative anti-structure of mechanized modernity’ as he termed it (Turner 1983: 124), held considerable space in his examination of contemporary ritual as a whole. Seeing it as the dominant mode of ritual for ‘proto-feudal’, ‘feudal’ and ‘early modern societies’ (Turner 1979a: 468), a mode of ritual ‘more flexibly responsive to social and even societal change’ than its traditional archetype (ibid.: 475), Turner understood carnival as a quintessential mode of ‘public liminality’ (ibid.: 474), as ‘the denizen of a place which is no place, and a time which is no time, even where that place is a city’s main plazas, and that time can be found on an ecclesiastical calendar’ (Turner 1983: 103). Exploring ritual as what he termed a ‘social drama’, a distinctive form of communal action that could reveal the ‘major classifications, categories, and contradictions of cultural processes’ (Turner 1977: 77), Turner argued that though often initially incomprehensible (to the outsider if not the participant themselves), rituals were forms of public reflexivity, performances of disclosure through which a ‘group or community’ sought to ‘portray, understand, and then act on itself’ (Turner 1979a: 465). They were moments where the very structure of society would become visible, where performance could enable the creative reproduction, rather than mere replication, of cultural processes. Moreover, through the liminal condition of almost all ritual, their status ‘betwixt-and-between the normal, day-to-day cultural and social states and processes of getting and spending, preserving law and order, and registering structural status’ (Turner 1979a: 465), rituals such as carnival were understood to grant a specific mode of intensified experience which could negate the life of the everyday. This encounter with the threshold not only enabled actors to experiment with social order however but also came to establish what Turner famously termed communitas. This was a notion that explored the particular mode

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of ‘comradeship’, the creation of a ‘community or comity of comrades and not a structure of hierarchically arrayed positions’ which emerged amidst the liminal state (Turner 1967: 100). Not simply a Durkheimian ‘solidarity’ shaped through confrontation with an outside force, communitas was a structure in which ‘free relationships between individuals become converted into norm-governed relationships between social personae’ (Turner 1995 [1969]: 132), a structure that was ‘not merely instinctual’ but that involved ‘consciousness and volition’ (ibid.: 188). It was a state provoking an effortless amity that could flood ‘across structural boundaries’ (ibid.: 188), a state of being whose maxim was ‘each for all, and all for each’ (Turner 1967: 101). Although often labelled structural functionalist in its leanings, Turner’s work on these liminal rites can thus be seen to have demonstrated a concern with themes of social experimentation and transformation, an understanding which saw the ritual of carnival as ‘society in its subjunctive mood’ (ibid.: 103). Within rites of the limen groups could thus work through a ‘deconstruction and recombination of familiar cultural configurations’ (ibid.: 10), they could but come to ‘cut out a piece of itself for inspection […] set up a frame within which images and symbols of what has been sectioned off can be scrutinized, assessed, and, if need be, remodeled and rearranged’ (Turner 1979a: 468, emphasis added). It was an understanding that thus stressed the capability of ritual to dynamically act upon society. Rather than simply being a passive, solely reactive model, a mechanism for reproduction or ‘prop for social conservatism’, boundary-transgressing performances such as rites of inversion (the archetypal structural base of carnival) contained the possibility not just of social aggregation but of social revolution, a space where, through a ‘transformative performance’, one could reveal the ‘major classifications, categories, and contradictions of cultural processes’ (Turner 1977: 77). This processual rather than representational understanding of ritual, one focusing on its potential for ‘becoming’ in preference to merely reflecting, thus aimed to dereify all collective representations (what were perceived to be the overarching shared understandings of a particular society or group); it meant to explore how groups could ‘maintain or retain, modify, or subvert social meanings’, the various ways ritual could, through its constant dynamism, ‘change the character and structure of common sense’ (ibid.: 63–4). Contemporary carnival could hence never be considered simply as a Gluckmanian safety valve then, a cathartic act of equilibrium working to ‘preserve and strengthen the established order’ (Gluckman 1965: 109). It was instead more profitably understood as a period of ‘communitas weighing structure, sometimes finding it wanting, and proposing in however extravagant a form, new paradigms and models which invert or subvert the old’ (Turner 1979b: 474). Rather than a mere ‘machine for social reproduction’ then, a mechanism for ‘maintaining the cosmological and cultural categories of meaning within which persons and their social relations were constituted’, these momentary periods of what he called anti-structure were capable of reforming ‘the very ground of being’, capable of generating new knowledge, new cosmological states (Kapferer 2005: 38). The carnivalesque was thus a form resting at the ‘potent points of transition, transformation, and creation’ (ibid.: 38), a field in which the experience of pure communitas had the potential to change the very structural bases of society.

5.6  Society in the subjunctive. Nano4814, Liqen, Pelucas and Brk at work

5.7  Nano4814, Liqen, Pelucas and Brk, Untitled [detail], Madrid, Spain, 2009

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Yet as something understood to be resolved eventually into what he termed societas – the fusion of ‘structure’ and ‘anti-structure’ within their potentially adjusting and variable proportions (Turner 1975: 238) – this key Turnerian duality (not merely a distinction of the secular and the sacred, of politics and religion, but, like figure/ ground, a ‘mutually determinative’ relationship between the two basic modalities of society [Turner 1995 (1969): 92–127]), has been suggested to be an alliance unable to ever truly dislocate itself from the inherent relationships of power it subsumed. Hence, while the legal, political state of the everyday (‘a differentiated segmented system of structural positions’ [Turner 1975: 237]) was understood by Turner to be tempered by the all-embracing fraternalism created through a moment of pure equity (‘society as a homogeneous, undifferentiated whole’ [ibid.: 237]), the placement of societas as the baseline of all social activity, the site where communitas would always and already eventually return (from ‘structure to antistructure and back again to transformed structure’ [Turner 1983: 110]), meant that liminal ritual could only seem able to stabilize, rather than truly subvert hegemonic discourse; it could only ever balance, rather than surpass the norm. The social (dis)order of communitas would thus inexorably return to the pre-existing structural order, the reaggregation coming to form an inevitable part of the whole. Thus even as Turner seemed to reject the common functionalist understanding of social structure, imagining it as one part of a dichotomous whole rather than society in-and-of-itself, the supposed freedom of the carnival moment, due to its intensely knotted, indivisible relationship with its base-line structure, can be seen to have compelled carnival ‘precisely to reinforce, and compensate on another plane, the particularism, hierarchy and inequality’ of ‘everyday life’ (DaMatta 1991: 43–4). For all its processual potentiality, then, as an innate requirement for the stable functioning of societas, the liminal world of communitas could be understood to simply retreat back to an almost purely functionalist state, to become merely a ‘function of the rigid social position of the participating groups and segments in the everyday world’ (ibid.: 43). As Zygmunt Bauman (1995) forcefully argued, ‘the commanding position of “structure” over “anti-structure”’ was simply reconfirmed (albeit ‘obliquely’), within the very ‘logic of explanation’, anti-structure (carnival at its very essence) making its appearance solely ‘as the handmaiden of “structure”’, not a ‘brute fact’ of social life or a truly distinct arena of existence, but a slave to its master form (ibid.: 118). Only by conceiving marginal ritual as a ‘phenomenon in its own right and of its own, autotelic significance’ (ibid.: 118) could it ever shake off its yoke, could it ever surpass its innately subservient status; only by working as a unique practice rather than one side of a bipartite state did Bauman believe it could gain the ability to reach beyond its purely dichotomous, innately deferential state. While carnival may thus ‘seem to be more flexibly responsive to social and even societal change’ (Turner 1979a: 102), while it may seem to attempt a form of ‘subversion’ that (in a paradoxically Habermasian manner) functioned through a ‘rational critique of the established order’, a sensibility exposing the ‘injustices, inefficiencies, immoralities [and] alienations’ generated by ‘mainstream modern economic and political structures and processes’ (Turner 1979b: 117), Turner’s overall project was argued to have been unsuccessful in allowing a space for a fully lived alternative to hegemonic ‘structure’.

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It failed, as Raymond Firth suggested, to take note of the true agency of the social actor, seeing action taking place through a ‘preordained mental pressure’, a force placed upon ‘individuals by codes of their society that they hold to be axiomatic’ (Firth 1974, in Bornstein 2006: 97). Even as Turner came to transcend Gluckman’s catharsis thesis, then, seeing within carnival a depiction of the underlying conflicts present within a group, there was, as Donald Weber has suggested (1995), an ‘ultimately ahistorical and apolitical’ lacuna within his work (ibid.: 530), a lacuna failing to contest the deep-seated relations of power endemic within society. While carnival was understood to enable the weak to ‘curse and criticize’ then, to ‘set limits on the power of the strong – to coerce and ordain (Turner 1979b: 105), its implicitly ‘consensual dimension’ suggested an inability of the weak to go beyond the limits of the strong, an inability to contend with the disputative, charged political reality of the everyday (Weber 1995: 530).5 And it was thus, ironically, the resistance towards communitas that Turner somewhat perplexedly noted within Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, a resistance displayed by the ‘marginals’ who ‘somehow refuse[d] to join the ritual consensus’, which Weber sees to mark out a true ‘encounter with identity politics and the border’, a ‘resistance to the dominant culture’ formed through a defiance towards the very framing of communitas itself (ibid.: 530). It was the actors that came to ‘resist incorporation’, that resisted the ‘darker, mechanistic ‘steering’ dimension residing in the processual model of incorporation’, that were

5

As Turner himself argued, ‘social drama’ was understood to convert ‘particular values and ends, distributed over a range of actors, into a system […] of shared or consensual meaning’ (Turner 1979: 92, emphasis added).

5.8 Lush, Untitled, Melbourne, 2011

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understood to demarcate a truly radical, truly liminal domain (ibid.: 531). Only, as Don Handelman continues (1998), through the construction of a ‘falsified’ inversion, then, an inversion going beyond its pre-established structural limits, could discourse ever come to be truly ‘invalidated’ (ibid.: 52); only then could it become ‘no longer an inversion’, but ‘another phenomenon in its own right’ (ibid.: 53), a potency established when the carnival trope ‘exceeds itself’, when it ‘breaks its connectivity to the phenomenon it inverts’ (ibid.: 53).

Corporeal Poetics (Or a Bakhtinian Subversion) Whilst Turner’s model of the carnivalesque can be seen to resemble the consensual archetype as previously discussed, aiming to reform, rather than replace the everyday, Bakhtin’s model is often placed as its agonistic foil, a framework which seems to have an orientation toward revolution and escape embedded within it. In Bakhtin’s belief, as Muir here explicates (2005), carnival was a fully selfdetermining, autogenous system, a genus possessing ‘a life and logic of its own’, one acting as ‘a kind of separate reality’, entirely ‘independent of the world of hierarchy and authority’ (ibid.: 99). It was the setting where a ‘new mode of man’s relation to man’ could be ‘elaborated’ (Bakhtin 1984a [1968]: x), a space of play within which a ‘world of ideals’ could take residence, a space beyond mere ‘theatre’ (and the separation between performers and spectators that the ‘footlights’ engendered), inhabiting a ‘peculiar mid-zone’, a world as ‘festive life’ (ibid.: 7–10). The key text from Bakhtin’s writings on carnival, Rabelais and his World (1984a [1965]), attempted to establish a connection between the Renaissance polymath François Rabelais’s literary production and the popular culture of his era in more general, seeing carnival in a twofold manner, as both a literary modality and an embodied way of life, as a construct set, in both these conceptions, in opposition to everyday norms. Carnival for Bakhtin was hence an embodied articulation of pure freedom – ‘not a spectacle seen by the people’ but one that was fully lived, one in which ‘everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people’ (ibid.: 7) – as well as a distinct linguistic construction – embracing a ‘special type of communication impossible in everyday life’ engendered through ‘special forms of marketplace speech and gesture, frank and free’, liberated from ‘norms of etiquette and decency’ (ibid.: 10). The extravagant and licentious texts Rabelais produced however (exemplified by the series Gargantua and Pantagruel) conjoined the two modes. It formed a ‘corporeal poetics’, an expressive stylistic working as a ‘counter-tradition to the “epic” (classical) line of European prose’ (Lachman 1989: 119), a style which was considered by Bakhtin to have been idiomatic of the centrifugal mode of discourse emerging from the folk culture of the Middle Ages in general, one transmitted to, and highly prevalent within Renaissance aesthetics (and thus as much present within Shakespeare’s and Cervantes’ work as Rabelais’s [Bakhtin 1984a: 52]). Yet the force of this tradition, one intent on ‘promoting ambivalence and allowing openness and transgression’ (Lachman 1989: 116), one aimed at subverting apparently rational viewpoints,

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was seen to have been undermined during the later Romantic period, joyful laughter turning into ‘cold humour, irony, sarcasm’, the ‘positive regenerating power’ of the carnivalesque reduced ‘to a minimum’, turning ‘fearlessness’ into ‘fear’ (Bakhtin 1984a: 38–9). The championing of impropriety that Bakhtin so eulogized, the embracement of a folk cultural practice exposing the ‘contradictory and double-faced fullness of life’, one acting as both a ‘negation and destruction […] inseparable from affirmation’ (ibid.: 62), came to be transformed from both a popular and literary practice to one solely occurrent in a textually mediated form, an auxiliary medium for the carnivalesque after its bodily form had been emasculated, usurped by a legislative license. While traditional carnival had thus become institutionalized, turned into mere parades, while its ‘utopian character oriented towards the future, was gradually transformed into a mere holiday mood’, its true spirit remained ‘indestructible’, continuing to ‘fertilize various areas of life and culture’ (ibid.: 33–4). This carnival spirit, this spirit attempting to reveal the possibilities that lay ‘beyond the visible horizon of official philosophy’, that attempted to dislocate meanings, superimpose new ideals, to ‘find a position permitting a look at the other side of established values’ (ibid.: 272), was hence understood to be found not only in the zone of riots and revelry, of the feast and the fair; for Bakhtin it could emerge in speech and images, the body and literature, within areas that attempted to relentlessly relativize ‘that which represented itself as absolute and complete’ (Hall 1996: 297). What was key for Bakhtin then was the conscious embracement of hybrid constructions, the embracement of ‘words or images’, as Stan Mumford (1989) explains in his rich, Bakhtinian analysis of the lamas and shamans of north central Nepal, that were ‘saturated with contested and unfinished meanings’, words and images left open to interpretation through their purposefully ambivalent nature (ibid.: 29). Within this ‘carnival underlayer’, one could then dissolve the ‘either/ or’ and assert ‘both/and’, one could erode ‘the artificial barriers between artistic styles and between self-enclosed systems of thought’ (ibid.: 21). The carnivalesque strategy of demasking ‘bifurcated and bounded images’ thus helped to keep ‘the potential for dialogue alive beneath the official monologue’ (ibid.: 21), a potential that could burst forth through an ‘explicit interillumination between cultural voices’ (ibid.: 158). The language of carnival was thus understood to be an intensely rich one, an idiom full of heteroglossia, parody, laughter, one able to shift experience from a mundane to profound context, one able to displace knowledge through the ‘carving-out of a living image of another language’ (Bakhtin 1981: 361). And, akin to the parallel between Turner’s work and Habermas’s, Bakhtin’s embracement of heteroglossia (or differentiated speech) can be seen to correlate to Lyotard’s embracement of language games and petit-recits, the carnival ideal being grasped to function as an instantiation of plurality which promotes a ‘narrative diversity’, an aesthetic with a ‘detotalizing’, ‘critical function’ (Carroll 1993: 73). While master-narratives (whatever their political frameworks), always attempted to ‘limit, control, and repress’ any notion of difference (ibid.: 74), both Lyotard and Bakhtin could be seen to focus upon a ‘plurality that no single genre, metadiscourse, or master-game [could] encompass’ (ibid.: 80).

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5.9 Pelucas, Serpiente escalera, Mexico City, Mexico, 2012

And like the Lyotardian figure, a realm surpassing, exceeding discourse, a form unable to be rendered or translated into conventional language, the carnival spirit was understood by Bakhtin (1984b) to induce a language that could not be translated in any full or adequate way into verbal language, and much less into a language of abstract concepts, but is amenable to a certain transposition into a language of artistic images that has something in common with its concretely sensuous nature; that is, it can be transposed into the language of literature. We are calling this transposition of carnival into the language of literature the carnivalization of literature (ibid.: 122).

This moment of excess, of contradiction, this public challenge to bureaucracy, was seen to function most clearly through the modality of laughter, the ur-theme not only of Rabelais, but an important constituent of another of Bakhtin’s great works, his Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1984b). Here, ‘ritual laughter’ was not only directed ‘toward a shift of authorities and truths, a shift of world orders’, but combined themes of ‘death and rebirth, negation (a smirk) and affirmation (rejoicing laughter)’ (ibid.: 127). It was an assertion of equivocation that could ‘grasp and comprehend a phenomenon in the process of change and transition’, that could ‘fix in a phenomenon both poles of its evolution’, all the while not permitting ‘a single one of these aspects of change to be absolutized or to congeal in one-sided seriousness’ (ibid.: 164). The laughter of the carnivalesque was hence considered to be not only ‘the laughter of the people’, not just ‘universal in scope’, but crucially

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‘ambivalent: it is gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies, buries and revives’ (Bakhtin 1984a: 12). The playful hilarity of the carnival modality could thus, as Carroll observed (1993), be considered more fundamental and subversive than dialogue, or perhaps more accurately, to be the most radical form of dialogue, for it is laughter that resists and even undermines the power of all political-religious-philosophical systems and institutions and thus makes dialogue possible, even within monolithic, authoritarian, totalitarian structures whose function it is to exclude or repress it. Laughter indicates that dialogic interaction is still possible even in the most repressive of situations; it is an indication of sociability, of community, of a nondetermined relation to the other, even at those moments when community is most threatened (ibid.: 79).

The ‘carnival rite’ (Bakhtin 1984a: 200) could hence refute the very jurisdiction of dominant institutions, acting not simply as catharsis, as satire (a ‘laughter that does not laugh’ [ibid.: 45]), but instigating a ‘complete exit from the present order’ (ibid.: 274); laughter not only revealed the unofficial, the clandestine and surreptitious, it reveals a truth that rejects all truth, a potential without limits.6 And carnival could therefore challenge norms through revealing laughter to be as important as truth, as a method of confronting all truth from the position of the everyday, from the realm of the marketplace, the low-culture displacing the power of the high. Just like the critiques placed against Turner’s inversive theory of the carnival however, Bakhtin’s focus on subversion has also been suggested to be one which functions in a more equivocal manner, working not ‘as a resistance to power, but rather as an instrument and also a sign of power itself’ (Bristol 1993: 636). The New Historicist theorist Stephen Greenblatt, in his celebrated essay Invisible Bullets (2004 [1985]), thus argued that the ‘production of subversion’ was the ‘very condition of power’ (ibid.: 455), ‘order’, as he continued, being neither ‘possible nor fully convincing without both the presence and perception of betrayal’ (ibid.: 450). Demonstrated through a reading of Shakespeare’s ‘Henry’ plays (Shakespeare, as previously noted, viewed by Bakhtin as a primary exponent of the carnivalesque), Greenblatt suggests that actions that one would have thought would have had ‘the effect of radically undermining authority’ turned out in fact to be the very ‘props of that authority’ (ibid.: 451). The inclusion of what were deemed to be destabilizing elements within the hegemonic system simply meant that any true challenge to prevalent power relations was precluded, made redundant through their already apparent existence, these works functioning through both the ‘production and containment of subversion and disorder’ (ibid.: 443, emphasis added). The ‘subversiveness which is genuine and radical’, which is ‘sufficiently disturbing so that to be suspected of such belief could lead to imprisonment or torture’, was thus ‘at the same time contained by the power it would appear to threaten’; in fact, it was the ‘very product of the power and furthers its ends’ (ibid.: 439). Social drama, like the theatre itself, therefore had the power to be seemingly ‘relentlessly subversive’, 6

Bakhtin’s focus on laughter was also a ‘subversive attack on the perverted concept of folk culture that prevailed in the Stalin era, a culture that was decreed from on high and that in reality offered no alternative to the official one’ (Lachman 1988: 118).

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because ‘the form itself, as a primary expression of Renaissance power, contains the radical doubts it continually provokes’ (ibid.: 455).The previously venerated possibility of subversion could thus be seen to contain an embedded reverence towards, not against authoritarian form, an insidious formation of resistance that sought to protect power through its apparent openness to dialogism; it prevented, through its simulation, or, perhaps more rightly, through its entrenched hegemonic license, any truly subversive practice. Whether one followed techniques of inversion or subversion then, both modalities could be understood to contain the potential to work toward the ‘reinvention of authority’ (albeit in ‘different guises’) (Newman 2001: 5). Both techniques could fall afoul of the same trap, the same ‘logic of place’ (ibid.: 5), failing to radically destabilize prevailing conditions in any comprehensive way. And it was thus simply an affirmation (inversion) or a rejection (subversion) founded – and hence always subject to – exactly that which they sought to exclude.

Rites not Wrongs Of course, it is only by examining the specific and individual processes of transgression, the moments when rituals, as Stanley Tambiah put it (1985), either move towards the left – when ‘there is a deliberate attempt to coin new doctrinal concepts and mold new rituals bursting with meaning’ – or towards the right – coming ‘to serve mainly the pragmatic interests of authority, privilege, and sheer conservatism’ (ibid.: 165–6) – that we can then come to uncover the true ‘dialectic of antagonism’ (Stallybrass and White 1986: 16), the precise nature of the frameworks that uphold these ritual, ornamental practices. As Stallybrass and White have argued, it thus ‘makes little sense to fight out the issue of whether carnivals are intrinsically radical or conservative’ for to do so automatically involves the false essentializing of carnivalesque transgression (White 1982: 60). The most that can be said in the abstract is that for long periods carnival may be a stable and cyclical ritual with no noticeable politically transformative effects but that, given the presence of sharpened political antagonism, it may often act as catalyst and site of actual and symbolic struggle (ibid.: 14).

As Muir continues to sustain (1999), carnival cannot be seen to ‘function in any single way, either reinforcing or subverting authority’, but can instead evoke ‘multiple meanings’, meanings that depend ‘on changing contexts and conditions’ (ibid.: 348). It can be understood to be ‘as much about contest and struggle as about power and order’, as much a powerful mode for reproducing the ‘reality effect of the natural’, as a ‘way to contest and even appropriate that reality itself’ (Dirks 1994: 501–2). Carnivals can hence start out as inversive practices and mould into subversive ones. They can move, as Lucia Folena (1989) has shown, from serving to ‘appropriate and neutralize’ disorder (as revealed within ‘the medieval and Renaissance language of inversion’ [ibid.: 226]), to become ‘synonymous with subversion’

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(as revealed within the ‘language of carnival’ in the Jacobean era [ibid.: 226]) – the elite-serving, legitimizing, ‘negative symmetrical’ rituals of rebellion which emerged within the Elizabethan period latterly coming to be ‘appropriated by the radical [and truly subversive] discourse of Puritan revolution’ (ibid.: 226). As highly contingent, idiosyncratic, conditional forms of social action then, rituals of the carnivalesque must be examined in all their specific glory, the ethnographic reality of each instance coming to define its potential turns to the ‘left’ or the ‘right’. Yet before we can even begin examining these peripatetic movements, to explore which way the rituals of ornamentation discussed in this book themselves turn, I must first advance the status of both Consensual and Agonistic Ornamentation within the rites of ‘Feasting, Fasting and Festivals’ that I previously mentioned (Bell 1997: 120), the ritual processes in which ‘there may be little overt testimony to the presence of deities but a great deal of emphasis on the public display of religiocultural sentiments’ (ibid.: 120), in which practices are intended to express publicly – to the ritual practitioner, to their social partners, to an amorphous public ‘other’ – an allegiance to the basic values of the group from whence they emerge. What I want to primarily make clear in this chapter then is that the production of these ornaments acted both as a physical illustration and bodily instantiation of the doctrines and creeds of the group with whom I was working. These were acts which thus functioned not only as a visual depiction of a moral code, as a reflection of morality, but were corporeal performances which underwrote these ethical principles. Each marking must therefore be understood to emphasize my informants’

5.10 Neko, Untitled [Los Veo y Subo – I See It and I Get Up], Madrid, Spain, 2009

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belief in the transgressive utilization of public space; each image making known, revealing their unremitting desire to play a part in the public sphere (to play in the public sphere); each addition presenting their existential need to communicate with the city (whether in its consensual or dissensual patterns). Performing in the public was thus an ethical principal which could only be upheld through concrete action. One’s dedication to the values of the group were made clear solely through one’s physical performances. Yet these were practices that acted transgressively – as all carnivalesque practices must – through disturbing the binaries of inside/outside (inciting the impassioned discourse around the ‘rightful’ place of these ornaments), of public/private (inflaming the disputes over the true location of these fields), of art/vandalism (provoking the intense debates over the very designations of these artefacts), rather than through solely confronting the base polarity of legal/illegal, licit/illicit. Functioning through the breaking of taboos rather than laws, through the innate contravention of prevalent socio-ethico conventions, these were public rituals formed with an explicit cognizance of the moral underpinnings of their ‘crimes’, an overt infringement of legal codes that was about justice not statutes, ‘rights’ (and rites) not wrongs. To act morally, one must thus act through the violation, or more correctly the appropriation of public space. And just as we can see in Muir’s description of carnival (2005), ostensibly ‘criminal behaviour’ could here be more correctly understood as the ‘expression of deeply held beliefs’ (ibid.: 100): This was an insurgent aesthetic practice linked to the strongly civic convictions of my informants, their pure need to utilize, play, inhabit, communicate with the public sphere. These were forms of the carnivalesque working as types of images rather than calendrical festivals, as forms of discourse, as lived-through practices (Stallybrass and White 1986). These were civic rites where space (rather than class or gender) was radically decentred, where norms (not just laws) were radically destabilized, where a corporeal entanglement with (rather than estrangement from) the city was instantiated. These were carnivalesque practices in which my informants could express to themselves, to other members of the city, to outsiders from their practice, their total commitment to the values of the group. Whilst clearly set within the Feasting/Fasting/Festivals archetype then, and, in particular, within the carnivalesque ritual framework, many of the practices of Consensual and Agonistic Ornamentation seem to quite clearly function within the purview of Turner’s work on carnival (or ritual anti-structure as he has termed it). The understanding of the contemporary ritual of carnival as a practice that aims to act upon the ‘injustices, inefficiencies, immoralities [and] alienations’ of the modern city (Turner 1979b: 117), as something not merely reflective but also reflexive, clearly combines with the civic desires of these insurgent actors; their search for new social relations in the city (whether centrifugal or centripetal), their rejection of the increasing instrumentality of our urban visual culture (to not replicate but exceed the mendacity of advertising), their search for a moral way of utilizing its surfaces (their agentic markings revivifying public space). Like the ‘public liminality’ of carnival then (Turner 1979a: 474), when these insurgent rites transpire the streets become a ‘place which is no place’ (‘even where that place is a city’s main plazas’), a ‘time which is no time’ (even when ‘that time can be found on an ecclesiastical calendar’) (Turner 1983: 103). It becomes a site in which normative rules of time and space are decentred,

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where one ‘wastes’ time through working for free, where one rejects the normative use of space through turning the private back into public, the public back into private. The liminal moment thus becomes one in which all normative functions of the city are upended – where its usage for mere ‘getting and spending’ is rejected in favour of giving and sacrifice, where its usage for ‘preserving law and order’ is rejected in favour of its usage for experience and flow (Turner 1979a: 475). And the city thus becomes a time and a space in which the meaning and potential, the use value of one’s surroundings became radically altered. It becomes a time and space where a dustbin became a ladder, where a wall becomes a canvas, where the city becomes a plaything, where law and order becomes a mere imposition to moral action. Furthermore, the deep egalitarianism, the comradeship and conscious bond of amity which was so present within my group of informants – a fellowship which was a constant source of amazement to me, in which it was not favours but responsibilities that were enacted7 – could be seen to have a direct link to Turner’s famous notion of communitas. The intensified experiences which they shared within these ritual acts enabled this comradeship. Painting together, painting as a group, painting with full comprehension of the risks that lay within the act (whether acting in a metasocial context and thus performed ‘in full view of everyone’, or in a more clandestine, covert site ‘set off from the routine world’ [Turner 1979a: 467]), created an experiential bond which could only ever be substantiated through this very act itself. It formed a conscious kinship which flowed back from these moments of liminality into the everyday, pervading their lifeworlds as a whole. It meant that one took on responsibility for one-another’s wellbeing (from working together as a group to entirely rebuild their studio, from being available for physical or mental exertion, from helping to undertake tasks whenever and wherever), a responsibility that was enacted without consultation and deliberation, that was crucial to the survival of the group as a whole. Turner’s contention that ritual ‘set[s] up a frame within which images and symbols of what has been sectioned off can be scrutinized, assessed, and, if need be, remodeled and rearranged’ (ibid.: 468) can thus appear to be especially prescient here. The production of the parergon, the disavowed, forbidden ornament, the generation of images which are constantly repositioned, reordered, reorganized by their producers, can thus be seen to act as the quintessential example of a liminal ritual, a ritual liminal within both its material and performative positions, a practice which sets up a ritual frame through the production of a physical frame itself. 7

This egality could be demonstrated in thousands of small ways; from the lending of a hammer to the breaking of bread; from the weeks spent away from one’s own projects (so as to help on another’s) to the refusal to ever refuse. There were no leaders within this collective. Each member was on equal ground with the other, each individual showing a responsibility to the group without which he could never have become a member in the very first place. If one needed help, it was granted without equivocation. It was never about who did this or did that (I never ever heard ‘but I did this or I did that’), this sort of individualism – rather than individuality – a challenge to the very existence of the group itself. Turner’s principle ‘each for all, and all for each’ (Turner 1967: 101) could thus almost seem to be the guiding principle of the group itself. Without this, everything would shatter.

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5.11  On the way to paint (plastic bags full of paint not groceries), Madrid, Spain, 2008

As for Bakhtin, his conception of carnival as a fully separate reality also appears to function in direct accordance with my informants’ ornamental practices. As autonomous, self-supporting, self-governing practices, they are primarily ‘independent’, as Muir explained (2005), from the ‘world of hierarchy and authority’ (ibid.: 99); they are practices which refuse the boundaries of the institution, which rest in the independence of the street. Equally, these are rites in which ‘everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people’ (Bakhtin 1984a [1965]: 7), in which participation is a prerequisite so as to belong to the group itself, the practice and the people in fact inseparable – they are Independent Public Artists, they practice Independent Public Art. And as prototypical examples of what is considered to be “low-culture”, a form of ‘marketplace speech’ which rejects prevalent societal ‘norms of etiquette and decency’ (ibid.: 10), both Consensual and Agonistic Ornamentation can in fact be seen as prototypical Bakhtinian acts. They are forms of outsider art which took joy in embracing the vernacular, which attempted to speak in the colloquial slang of the street rather than the obfuscatory dialect of the fine-arts. Moreover, the fusion of artistic techniques that these ornaments provoke – the intertwining of calligraphic, performative, site-specific, public, installational, and environmental-arts – their erosion of the very notion of a stable, timeless ‘art’ (an art which is left to decay rather than anxiously conserved) – can be seen to follow Bakhtin’s famous focus on hybridity. Distorting the set language from within language, eroding established barriers through working within the barriers, it can be seen to set up conflictual relations to art through the very language of art itself. These insurgent acts use one voice to critique that same voice, using the city to critique the city, using art to critique art, setting up various

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arguments (as most perfectly seen in 3TTMan’s eponymous character) within one unique position, different modes of understanding for something often thought of as fixed. And this intentional, rather than organic hybridity, this intentionally contestatory hybridity, can thus demask the normative mode of the city, demask its increasingly denatured status, keeping ‘the potential for dialogue alive beneath the official monologue’ (Mumford 1989: 21). Working as part of a wider process of erection, erasure, and erosion, an inexhaustible process in explicit discourse with city authorities as with the numerous other architects of the ornament, there was thus an open-endedness to these works which was overtly present within the image, a visual notion of the carnivalesque employed through a dislocation rather than concretization of meaning. It was an ocular ‘heteroglossia’, a dialogism always in the process of change, modification, metamorphosis, one that visibly attacked the notion of any authoritative language. It was a practice in which ‘words or images’ were ‘saturated with contested and unfinished meanings’ (Mumford 1989: 29), a practice which was always in the process of remaking and remodelling, not only due to its base ephemerality but so too as part of a perpetual, interminable game. The practice of ornamentation thus promoteed an ambivalence ‘allowing openness and transgression’ (Lachmann 1989: 116). Like the licentious of Rabelais it aimed to provide an instantiation of the carnivalesque through the means of the pen, a practice working not as a spectacle but as an embodied practice. And what these epigraphical inscriptions embodied was thus a carnival spirit which consciously and clearly dislocated stable meanings, inscriptions which promoted the ‘other side of established values’ (Bakhtin 1984a: 272). It was a modality that literally transgressed its concrete media (its concrete edifices), that materially transgressed space, that instrumentally transgressed time. It was a practice of ritual laughter that transgressed ‘both the concrete media in which it expresses itself and the historical space and time in which it is actualized’ (Lachmann 1989: 133), a laughter that could negate and affirm, that could renegotiate the understanding of the city itself.

An Interval between Two Marks (Or a Derridean Perversion) Of course, and as suggested above, the Turnerian focus on subjunctivity, liminality, and egality, and the Bakhtinian emphasis on hybridity, dialogism, and laughter could be seen to function with aspects of both Consensual and Agonistic Ornamentation as previously described. And it could naturally be argued that the former’s focus on rational critique (the desire for a relationship to society as a whole, the desire to reform rather than repeal order), as well as the latter’s desire for radical transformation (for a relationship to a minor realm, for a rejection of all norms), could place these understandings of carnival back within the Consensual (Turnerian/Habermasian) and Agonistic (Bakhtinian/Lyotardian) frameworks as previously analysed. Yet rather than strictly following these inversive and subversive strategies, rather than seeing Consensual Ornamentation as an inversive practice which preserves the binary structure it transposes, rather than seeing Agonistic

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Ornamentation as a subversive practice which serves to replace one form of hegemony with another, it is in fact a third-way which I want now to posit, a thirdway which I believe more accurately sets out my informant’s ritual positionality. And the theoretical method release from these seemingly irreconcilable positions will, once again, return us to the realm of the parergon as understood by Derrida, the parergon which holds such a critical place in both the practical and theoretical elements of my informants’ work. Derrida’s search for the radical outside of discourse – for the outside which is simultaneously embedded within the interior – sought not the inversion of discourse (to turn inside out, to function as a ‘simple change or reversal in the terms of any given hierarchy’); nor did it seek the subversion of this same discourse (to turn under, to act as a ‘suppression of all hierarchy’ which simply suppresses other subjectivities); rather, what Derrida aimed was the perversion of discourse (to turn it aside, to elicit a ‘transformation of the hierarchical structure itself’ (Derrida 1978, in Newman 2001: 5)). Tracing a line between inversive and subversive categories, what was foremost for Derrida (2004 [1981]) was the ability to unsettle, to destabilize both sides of the spectrum through what he famously termed a ‘double writing […] a writing that is in and of itself multiple’ (ibid.: 38), a writing which could come to ‘challenge metaphysics from within its own language’, a writing which could dismantle the ‘system from within the system itself’ (Holquist 1986: 141). Through ‘the play of this interval between two marks’, through a ‘double movement’ in which one first inverts the traditional hierarchy (where one operates ‘an overturning deconstruction’), before transcending the hierarchy itself through ‘a positively displacing, transgressive, deconstruction’ (ibid.: 56), one could then reject base oppositions, refusing the dichotomy of construction/destruction, inversion/ subversion, inciting an alteration that both ‘reverses an opposition and reworks the terms of that opposition so that what was formerly understood by them is no longer tenable’ (Johnson 1987: 13). This form of critique created by the limits of the inside itself could then enable us to find a space which did not simply ‘restore the place of power’, that did not come to ‘reaffirm’ exactly ‘what one resists’ (Newman 2001: 11). Rather than an absolute transgression or an ‘escape to an absolute outside’, a deceptive flight to an extramuros site that only serves to place it more ‘obstinately on the “inside”’, safe within the intramuros (ibid.: 12), deconstruction ‘neither affirms nor destroys the limit it “crosses”; rather, it re-evaluates it, reinscribing it as a problem, a question’ (ibid.: 12). It is thus a method which resides in the intermuros – not outside (extra), not inside (intra) but within (inter) the walls. It bisects the strategies of inversion and subversion, forming a periphery within the very centre, a constitutive outside that refuses to reinforce that which it opposes. Of course, this double movement, this move toward the perverse, is one which we have examined at length in terms of the ornament in itself, in terms of its status as the Derridean parergon, the indeterminate, the quasi-detached. And, following this same approach, what I want to contend within this chapter is that my informants’ ritual practices are ones which come to balance between these aforementioned Turnerian and Bakhtinian paths, balancing them through the perversive, betwixt-and-between status of the parergon itself.

5.12, 5.13 and 5.14  To unsettle, not destroy/To function in a different register. Three untitled posters by OX from Genevilliers, Paris and Arcueil (France), 2012

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Inhabiting the already presiding structures of our cities (rather than operating from a purported exterior), functioning through the outside that is, ‘paradoxically, on the inside’ (ibid.: 11), as something that is not a ‘tool that you apply to something from the outside’ but something that ‘happens inside’ (Derrida 1997: 9), these practices can be seen to have constructed a visual alterity that sought not to simply reaffirm that which it resisted, to merely destroy it, but rather to interrogate and unsettle it. These works did not simply efface what was already extant. They played with it. They questioned it through their mere existence. It was not simply that these images displayed the nature of the group as the archetypal constituent outside, a body in the heart of, yet separate to the centre, a group working upon the very liminal boundaries of the city itself; the production of these ornaments themselves aimed to present another ideal of the city, to work not from outside the discourse of the city itself but to remain deeply embedded within it, seeking neither to invert nor destroy the boundary but in fact to destabilize it. These works do not reverse order, nor do they supplant it. I argue that they transcend it through a positive displacement, they pervert the wall (again following the OED, they ‘interfere with or distort […] impede, thwart’) and thus pervert order itself. Wigley’s (1988) earlier discussion of an ornament in critique of order can thus here come back into focus. His suggestion that one must form a material aesthetic that refuses to succumb either ‘to the traditional definitions of art’ or the ‘traditional mechanisms of the discipline of architecture’ can be seen to echo my informants’ attempts to provoke a material deconstruction that works through an ‘internal’, rather than ‘external violence’ (ibid.: 55–6). It is an ornament that critiques structure from within structure, which exposes the cracks and fissures of structure through integrating within the cracks and fissures of that structure itself. All of my informants’ ornamental practices can be seen to have worked in this way. In both their medium and their message they place themselves between rather than for or against, they set themselves in opposition but not in reflection, discomposing, disturbing, agitating but not destroying. Like de Certeau’s (1984) description of the silent resistance of the colonized, the indigenous tactic of manipulating the coerced practices forced upon them neither by ‘rejecting or altering’ them but rather ‘using them with respect to ends and references foreign to the system they had no choice but to accept’ (ibid.: xiii), one can see these ritual, carnivalesque practices as a way of escaping power without ever leaving it, perverting not subverting or inverting them. One can see these practices transforming hegemonic impositions ‘from within – not by rejecting them or by transforming them’, but through procedures of consumption that ‘maintained their difference in the very space that the occupier was organizing’, an ability to metaphorize ‘the dominant order’ and thus make it ‘function in another register’ (ibid.: 32). These ritual practices must therefore be seen to have functioned not only as an ‘expression of paradigmatic values’ then (the communal aesthetic values, the importance of painting within the public sphere made visible through the existence of their ornaments), not only as a ‘mechanism for bringing the individual into the community and establishing a social entity’ (the group bond enforced and reinstated through the act of performing together), but as a ‘process for social

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transformation’, for ‘struggling over control of the sign’ (a remodelling of both the world and the image through the performative act) (Bell 1997: 89). The group were bound through these carnivalesque acts. They were bound ‘by virtue of a heightened intimacy and a sense of being a distinct […] community in opposition to so much around them’ (Bell 1997: 206), bound through a practice which could then work to structure ‘what the community is produced from, against, in spite of, and in relation to’ (Spyer 2000: 292); and yet these very same practices also reflected the beliefs of these members within the public sphere, they enabled these actors to act upon the public sphere, to construct as well as reveal order. Whilst in our previous chapter I thus argued that these ornamental practices are quintessentially ritual ones, what I hope to have underlined here is both the ritual archetype they subsume as well as the wider effect of these carnivalesque rituals, their effect on both the group and wider milieu, their ability to both bind their practitioners and to transform their physical and social realms in a specifically perversive manner. Yet in our next chapter, what I now want to focus upon is the ritual attributes which my informants themselves must assume. And it is thus the playful, ambiguous, risky characteristics that they must adopt to undertake these carnival rites that I will now turn to. It is the serious play, the trickster shift which I now seek to explore.

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6 Play, Risk and the Picaresque

In his “double nature” he appears at crossroads, in disguise and always as a force of disruption; an arch inverter who […] turns all Solomon’s turgid truths into turds. Michael Camille

That the trickster and the clown have become major metaphors for the artist in this century with its increasing selfconsciousness of the creative process is no accident. They have been artists for a long time. Barbara Babcock-Abraham

A State of Being Rather than a Threshold Like Freud’s repudiation of what was commonly perceived as the triviality of play, what must first be disclaimed in this chapter is the notion that ‘play is insignificant’, that it is, as Derrida (1988) discussed in relation to Freud’s grandson’s famous game of fort/da, ‘purely a game’ (ibid.: 67, emphasis added). Like ‘mere’ decoration or ‘mere’ craft, play’s perceived triviality often emerges from what seems to be its autotelic character (in opposition to the results driven focus of gaming, its defined winners and losers), its status, like art for art’s sake, as innately separated from reality, separated from structure and from order. Yet, and akin to Gell’s argument in terms of decoration (1998), play must be understood to in fact be inexplicable without function, and, again like the form of visual play Gell discusses, must be seen as an activity which can contain a ‘volatile, sometimes dangerously explosive essence’ (Turner 1986: 30–31). Often given a foundational role in anthropological analyses of ritual, the ludic is thus commonly considered as something which functions within a marginal, liminal site, something set apart from ‘“normal”, “ordinary”, “proper”, “real” life’ (Bauman 1995: 170). It considered as an act with a ‘distinctive disposition and meaningfulness – a meaningfulness

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often at odds with the order of the real world’ (Rapport 1997: 109). With a much vaunted capacity to ‘break out of determining logics’ then, to ‘cross registers’, to ‘generate novel meanings and understandings’ (Kapferer 2005: 46) – a factor which the excessively direct motives of gaming often elide – play can thus be understood as a space which can help to revive ‘creative energies’, to give rise to ‘a change of perspective’, a new ‘vantage point from which any present cultural order can be called into question and replaced’ (Rapport 1997: 109). ‘Playful’ and ‘serious’, as André Droogers (2005) notes, are hence ‘not necessarily opposites’ (ibid.: 138). The perceived sanctity, the solemnity of ritual, a practice often appearing to be ‘performed in a serious manner’, is itself understood to be in fact a decidedly ‘playful activity, just as play is an activity that is taken seriously as long as it lasts’ (ibid.: 138–9). Ritual can thus be viewed as ‘stylized, scripted, serious play’, as a communicative narrative set within a ludic ‘frame’ (Roger Keesing 1991: 65–7). And, like its ‘dialectical dancing partner of ritual’ (Turner 1986: 30– 31), play is not only linked to the protection of order but so too its disruption, a disordering of social norms, a base disorderliness seen through the clowns, jesters and pranksters who commonly inhabit these doubly liminal spaces. This tight connection between ritual, play, and clowning, quite naturally leads us to the archetypal anthropological notion of the trickster, these innately betwixtand-between creatures that inhabit the ground between the extraordinary and the everyday. For Barbara Babcock-Abrahams (1975), the trickster was a ‘“criminal” culture-hero’, a being at once embodying numerous ‘possibilities – the most positive and the most negative’ (ibid.: 148). He1 was thus both ‘socially peripheral’ yet ‘often symbolically central’ (Babcock-Abrahams 1978: 32), a liminal figure endowing his group with ‘vitality’, all the while carrying the ever-present ‘threat and the possibility of chaos’ (Babcock-Abrahams 1975: 148). The trickster, quite simply, was one who manifested ‘dirt’, one who constructed the now infamous matter out of place. Yet for Babcock-Abrahams, his inborn marginality was too often grasped in a ‘solely negative sense, being dangerous to or somehow below ‘normal’ boundaries’, a sense promoting an undeserved (or unproductive) ‘dichotomy between good and evil which persistently confounds the analysis of the essentially ambiguous character of most literary marginals’ (ibid.: 149–50). Working, once again, against this ‘either/or approach’, Babcock-Abrahams suggests that ‘we might better view this ambiguity as a necessary dualism’, as a notion of marginality that exists ‘whenever commonly held boundaries are violated, be they those of the social structure, of law and custom, of kinship, family structure and sexuality, of the human person, or of nature’ (ibid.: 150). We hence not only return, once more, to the space of the violation of boundaries, to the supplement, the space where even ‘either/or’ will not do, but we emerge within a space where we must revel in (or perhaps simply accept) a deeply entrenched uncertainty. 1 While Ricki Tannen, in The Female Trickster (2007), has attempted to shift the study of this type into an explicitly female domain, as has Julio Rodriguez-Luis (1979) in a study of the picara (the female version of the soon to be discussed picaro), the archetypal trickster in general remains heavily biased towards a male figure.

6.1 Nug, Territorial Pissings, Film Stills, Stockholm, Sweden, 2008. Image courtesy of artist

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6.2  Portrait of 3TTMan, Madrid, Spain, 2010

The trickster thus ‘stands in immediate relation to the center in all its ambiguity’ (ibid.: 168), he stands steadfast within the interior, ‘neither a plus nor a minus […] neither confusion or distinction […] neither a position nor a negation’ (Derrida 2004 [1981]: 40), a relationship underpinning his customary ‘negations and violations of custom’, a state through which ‘he condemns himself to contingency and unpredictability’ (Babcock-Abrahams 1975: 159). The ‘Trickster Shift’ as Allan J. Ryan (1999) terms it (following the Ojibway artist Carl Beam), an impulse key to both artistic and shamanic practices amongst First Nation groups – and one forming a ‘critical link between subversive practice, aesthetic production, spiritual truth, and cultural wisdom’ (ibid.: 3) – must therefore be understood to encompass a wealth of cultural strategies, practices working through ‘outrageous punning, constant wordplay, surprising association, extreme subtlety, layered and serious reference’ (ibid.: xii). Through this depiction, the trickster’s practices can hence be seen in themselves as ones of ‘serious play’, a play that has as its ‘ultimate goal’ a ‘radical shift in viewer perspective and even political positioning’ (ibid.: 5), a serious play (or ritual practice) intent on disturbing the everyday. This is the world of détournement, the world (in his European manifestation) of the trickster Guy Debord (2009 [1956]). It is the realm where a ‘sign or word is susceptible to being converted into something else’, where ‘we find the notion of disguise closely linked to play’, where one can ‘detourn entire situations by deliberately changing this or that determinant condition of them’ (ibid.: 39). This is the trickster who works through ‘metagraphic writings’, who works through ‘adroit perversion’ (ibid.: 36). This is the contemporary trickster who works to convert ‘any sign or word’ into ‘something else, even its opposite’ (ibid.: 39).

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This classical trickster archetype can also be shifted quite straightforwardly towards a more deep-seated Spanish milieu, however, a trickster modality that Babcock-Abrahams herself termed ‘picaresque’.2 This literary ‘countergenre’, as Giancarlo Maiorino termed it (1996), a genre emerging with the publication of Lazarillo de Tormes (believed to have surfaced between 1550 and 1559), was understood to have defied the ‘canonical standard of literary and materialist imperialism’ (ibid.: xii), to have defied the regulatory norms of both literary and social practice. It combined the ‘notion of trickery and roguish behavior’ with ‘the idea of the uncertain or hostile attitude of an individual to existing society’, working through a ‘narrative focussed on movement, within and beyond that society’ (Babcock-Adams 1975: 159). The very character of the picaro thus ‘live[d] at the center while remaining peripheral’ (Maiorino 1996: xiv), his very status as marginal defining ‘a state of being rather than a threshold’ (ibid.: xxii); he was, like Michel Serres’ depiction of the parasite, ‘the tactician of the quotidian’ (ibid.:: xiv), not simply attacking (subverting) but transforming (deconstructing) its host system. As a producer of ‘noise’ (background noise, in French, translated as bruit parasite), he was hence considered as a ‘joker’, ‘included and excluded’, containing both a ‘value of destruction and a value of construction’ (Serres 2007 [1982]: 67); he understands that to ‘play the position or to play the location is to dominate the relation’, it is to be ‘on the side, next to, shifted’ (ibid.: 38). His world, as Maiorino continues (1996), was thus the world of ‘picaresque quotidianity’, a world ‘parcelled out to urban residence in the city’s underside; its hovels, ghettoes, chabolas [probably now translated as slums or favelas], and barrios’, the world, ‘that is, of la mala vida’ (ibid.: xiv). Marginality was thus not only his innate state,3 but also his physical location within the city. And this marginal individual was thus, as Lévi-Strauss pronounced (1963), ‘a mediator’, one whose ‘mediating function’ placed him ‘half-way between two polar terms’ (ibid.: 226). He was one who always retained ‘something of that duality’, who always retained the ‘ambiguous and equivocal character’ fashioned by his betwixt-and-between state (ibid.: 226). He was, uniquely, the living embodiment of the boundary. The clown, the trickster, the social bandit (Hobsbawm 1969), the rebel (Cohen 1986), the malandro and the picaro thus all exist, as Don Handelman explains (1998), ‘to evoke that which must be suppressed’ (ibid.: 237), to ‘subsume a boundary within itself’, to suggest incompleteness, ‘inconsistencies of meaning, referential ambiguities’ (ibid.: 242). The ‘interior of the boundary’ was hence considered not 2

Franchot Ballinger (1991) sets out the divergences between the two in The EuroAmerican Picaro and the Native American Trickster, differences pertaining to their setting within social reality in the former case and myth in the latter, low social status in the first case and high in the second. The Trickster, furthermore, chooses to be marginal, while the picaro’s marginality ‘is the consequence of the Catch 22s of his society’s moral strictures and categories’ (ibid.: 24). In both, however, ‘we seem to experience what is generally termed ambiguity’ (ibid.: 26). 3 This marginality may have also, as Ingrid D. Rowland argues [2009: 83], been due to the supposedly Jewish ancestry of the picaro archetype – the aforementioned Lazarillo de Tormes, the first of the picaros, himself having a Hebraic forename, Lazarus.

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only to be ‘fluid, plastic, and in-transition’, but to perfectly match ‘the clown type’, to in fact act as an ‘ambulatory manifestation of boundariness’ (ibid.: 247). They produce an ‘alteration of borders’, working not simply to break ‘sacred precepts’, but to erase ‘the border between this domain and that of the mundane, thereby altering the order of relationship between them’ (ibid.: 248). And the ‘deep ideation of play’ they provoke, therefore, the ‘inter-play of elements of order that are in-play’, must be ‘understood as affinities of some more comprehensive notion of uncertainty’ (ibid.: 68). The very notion of play, as Handelman describes qua Bateson, can hence be understood to create a ‘paradox of which the boundary itself (or frame, in his usage) between serious reality and play was constituted’ (ibid.: 69). Bateson’s famous maxim ‘this is play’ hence becomes transmuted for Handelman into ‘this is uncertainty’ (ibid.: 71, my emphasis). The risk inherent to play, the danger begot through its energy, its instability, meant that uncertainty was deeply infused within it. And this very concept of insecurity, of ambiguity, risk, was thus ‘the recognition that [the] cosmos’ itself – both ornament and order – ‘exists as much through the deep flux of unpredictability, as it does through determination’ (ibid.: 68). It was the realization that, whether valorised as beneficial, harmful, or impartial, ritual uncertainty indexed ‘the ultimately uncontrollable nature of cosmos’ itself (ibid.: 68). Intersection III: Field Notes, 11/04/09 […] We were waiting for what seemed like hours, sat on a bench right beside the building-site, waiting not particularly patiently. We’d had some dinner, gone back to pick up some extra paint from the studio then returned for the second time. It was late, probably half-eleven by now, but this guy was still stood out on his balcony, still chatting loudly on his phone. He would have had a perfect view so we had to be patient. We had to wait. We went for another wander, chatting, smoking, waiting for our fly on the wall to leave the scene, returning after about another half hour. He was still talking. And seemingly even more loudly at that. We prayed he’d get off to bed … So we sat. We waited some more … And, after what seemed like an eternity of goodbyes, the baritone drone of our accidental spectator deceased, his terrace doors shut and he disappeared from sight and sound. 3TTMan immediately kicked into action. He went round to the edge of the site [a large corner block directly facing the town hall, a huge apartment building which had been almost totally gutted save for its frontage] and soon found an easy point of entry, a corner from which we could gain leverage to climb over the surrounding metal fence. He instantly knew where he wanted to paint, an exposed wall right in the centre of the site, the only multi-level structure left within the interior. It looked possibly like the remains of a veranda, a living room maybe, a small, third storey room whose outside walls had been destroyed to expose its inner realm. Quite why it had yet to be demolished was a mystery, yet there it stood, inviting 3TTMan to come and play. We went in through the front at first, navigating the deep trenches which had been cut out in the centre of the site, emerging into the eerie remnants of the house (if it could now even be called that). They were always slightly uncanny these dead spaces, the paint peeling off the walls, the multiple layers of wallpaper still present, the marks, the traces of its past life; but in the middle of the night, in the silence, the uncanniness was multiplied. We first tried a staircase within one of the still standing edifices, but they cut off abruptly half way up, leaving just a gaping drop down to the trench below; we had to circle back. We moved to the neighbouring structure, 3TTMan trying to shimmy up its slopping outside wall, intending after to navigate his way across onto the rooftop. It was possible, maybe, but it seemed too hazardous.

6.3 and 6.4  Getting in 1 and 2. 3TTMan in Action. La Palma, Spain, 2009

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6.5 Under the tarpaulin. 3TTMan in Action. La Palma, Spain, 2009

The room was just structural walls, almost no floor. And a gaping trench below for the impending foundations. He slid back down. Frustrated. Think, he said to himself. There’s got to be a way … He went round to the back this time, climbing up the side of the building like a cat. Using the still barred windows as support – an almost perfect ladder to enter onto the now open third floor – he pulled himself up from the ledge and was in. Easy as that. He signed down that he was okay, then disappeared from view, moving inside to try and find a way to the outside space he wanted. I moved round to the front to get a better view and Louis was already at his spot, thumbs up, starting to take off his backpack to get his paints. Yet before he’d even put his paints on the floor however, I saw him pause, crouch down, then slowly move back into the shadows. He motioned towards me and point towards the back of the building. I immediately went round the trench to meet him, unsure of what was happening but of course sensing the obvious danger. It was only then I noticed the low hum of a car engine, the low rumbling of voices. He lowered himself back down with care, landed silently on the ground beside me and grabbed my arm, pushing me toward one of the nearby trenches; he pulled up the tarpaulin sheet, and we dove under it, perhaps four feet into the dark earth below. We didn’t move, both of us intensely listening to the sounds outside. More voices, then the ominous crackle of a twoway. 3TTMan looked at me, fingers to lips. Yet just as silent as we were, we could have never hoped for more perfect camouflage. The tarp was genius. We were totally hidden from view from above but could – due to the illumination of the street-lamps – see everything above us. It was like a two-way mirror. Someone could have come right up to us, almost touched us, and still not been able to see a thing. So we stayed there. More waiting but this time an interlude fuelled with adrenalin, our bodies picking up every movement, every signal from around us. Ten, fifteen minutes must have come and gone (or perhaps it was just two). 3TTMan whispered over to me and I slowly crept out the cover, moving as quietly as possible to a gap in the corrugated fencing to take a look outside. There was nothing. Anyone who had been here had by now left the scene. I returned to 3TTMan and he was already halfway up the wall, assured by my obvious lack of concern that the all was clear. He slipped back into the room and moved to the front of the building, this time able to fully take off his rucksack, lay down his paints and get started, coating the wall in white before proceeding to start the piece proper.

6.6 and 6.7  3TTMan, Resurreccioname … Por Favor, La Palma, Spain, 2009

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[It was Semana Santa, the week building up to Easter Sunday. and, being in Mallorca, surrounded by huge festal processions every night of the week, 3TTMan had been utilizing Christian imagery in all his work. There was the piece about the bread and the wine (ceci est mon corps), a three headed, boxing nazareno (with their distinctive white habit and pointed hoods), and now Christ’s Holy Wounds (slightly phallic wounds perhaps)]. Finishing the work in maybe 15 or 20 minutes, the final flourish was the textual inscription itself. ‘Resurreccioname … Por favor’. A possibly contentious statement, yet one meant to engender a smile, one with a healthy dose of respect attached to it. But a message definitively meant for everyone to understand. And viewable in its entirety from the street, viewable from the very centre of the city. Done, 3TTMan climbed back down and we scampered back over the outer fence. Back to our bench. And a well-deserved cigarette. I checked my watch and realized we’d been in the site for nearly two hours, we could hardly believe it ourselves. The whole thing seemed to have gone in a moment. We stayed for a while, chatting, going through some of the photos I’d taken while inside, talking and laughing about how we’d been so well hidden under the tarp. Louis was trying to convey to me how much he’d loved the excitement of that moment, how he’d even wanted the police to come, knowing full well that we would be invisible from sight, hidden within the trench. It reminded me of being at my grandpa’s house, he was telling me. Playing tag with my cousins – I loved that moment in my life – I had five cousins my age, about 20 or more in total, and this was typical of that period of my life, hiding under the screen, climbing up the building, it totally reminded me of that time. Scrambling up trees, hiding, playing. I never want to stop doing that … It was child’s play for Louis. It was about returning some excitement to the city. And he simply refused to ever stop playing […] [There were three key things I kept thinking about when mulling over this night. The first was risk, the excitement engendered through the inherent danger of the act, not just the hazards presented by the police, but by the specific locale of practice too, an all-pervasive issue present until the entire performance was complete. The second was of course play. As Louis himself said, play was a crucial element, playing with the city, with his surroundings, with imagery, images. And this, then, pushed me towards the final of the three issues, the notion of creativity. For Louis it was all about improvising within the environment, not only the physical but cultural milieu. He loved having a relevance to the local ‘story’, utilizing but always upturning commonly held symbols and signs, always being the one trying to make you smile, using whatever was available at hand, whether this was the city itself or the stories that lay within it. More than anything else, however, he just loved what he did. And he would do anything to be able to keep on doing it].

A Struggle about Who Can Get What Inscribed Although often disregarded within the anthropological literature, uncertainty can be argued to play a prominent role within processes of ritualization. As Leo Howe suggests (2000), the provisional, contingent status of ritual gave it an ‘inherently risky’ status, an inherently ‘dangerous’ standing simply due to the ‘unavoidable contact with powerful and unpredictable forces’ it engendered (ibid.: 67). Moreover, and due to the fact that one could never truly know if the performance enacted would be a success or a failure, one could never truly predict the outcome of the ritual performance whether measuring ‘instrumentally, aesthetically, evocatively, [or] morally’ (ibid.: 67). It was always and already a speculative, hazardous act. And whilst rituals rule-governed status meant that many theorists believed that the actual risk was negligible, Howe argues that what was often regarded as a stringent, inflexible regulatory system could (as we have previously seen) be understood to be continuously up for negotiation, to be liable to disputation, disarticulation,

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repudiation; the practice of ritualization could in fact not only be understood to be in a continuous state of incompletion, but its constitutive rules, as Das has argued (1998), unable to ‘cover every conceivable circumstance’ (ibid.: 179). Real conscious commitment to the task at hand was needed if the rite were to become something of authentic value, to have any real substance. If there was nothing to lose, there could likewise be nothing to truly gain, and, as Howe concludes, if ritual were really ‘just about following rules’ it would only be a performance in a very ‘trivial sense’, the actors needing to ‘invest little of themselves’ within the act itself (ibid.: 69). For Howe, risk was thus understood as a key element to all ritual, yet it was an element which could be ‘either extrinsic or intrinsic’ to the action itself. Whilst some dangers could ‘accompany the enactment of a ceremony’ while not being ‘built into the structure’, others were ‘integral to the rite itself, part of its very essence’ (ibid.: 68–9). Extrinsic hazards could hence emerge through the ‘incorrect performance’ of complex processes, by ‘gambling one’s status’ (ibid.: 69), through outside forces intent to ‘disrupt the action’ (ibid.: 71); intrinsic ones coming through the ‘problematical and hazardous’ presence of ‘boisterous’ attendants (ibid.: 71), through rites that ‘place social order in jeopardy’, that are ‘difficult to contain’, that threaten ‘to overflow the boundaries that ritual procedures mark out to control it’ (ibid.: 72). These latter ritual performances were not only understood to have ‘risk built into the very structures’ however, but were in fact ‘efficacious only if the forces unleashed are potentially dangerous, and they are successful if these forces are ultimately managed’ (ibid.: 72). In these cases, success was ‘therefore never a foregone conclusion, and failure is always

6.8 Read More Books, ReadUp, Nashville, Tennessee, 2010

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a possibility’ (ibid.: 72), the risk of malfunction or collapse (the triumph over which gave the ritual practitioner their true power), understood not merely to be ‘represented as significant’, not simply to be an illusory possibility, but to have a real, ever present potentiality (ibid.: 75). Whether incurred through disruption or destruction, through incompletion or incertitude, risk was thus an element that could put ritual in extreme jeopardy, a factor that had to be ‘channeled and controlled by the ritual’s managers’ (ibid.: 75). These were practices that were thus considered to be deeply informed by a relationship to the unknown, to be ‘a gamble’ that the practitioners ‘must dare to conduct’ (ibid.: 76). And ritual was hence always seen to be a contest – even if ‘the opponent is oneself’ (ibid.: 77) – a contest in which possession of ritual power had to be continually ‘renewed and demonstrated’, where rites were considered ‘forms of competition’ wherein ‘prestige values’ came to be ‘re-distributed’ (ibid.: 76). Howe’s focus on risk serves not only to foreground a key (but much neglected) element of ritual’s constituent makeup however, but equally attempted to realign the entire conceptual paradigm of its study. While the formerly dominant textual approach to ritual (as epitomized by the work of Clifford Geertz, in particular his classic article Deep Play [1972]) was considered to be insufficiently nuanced toward both the agency of the participants and the particularity of the event itself – ritual’s status as an unrepeatable, singular occurrence produced by living, breathing social actors – the successive performative approach to its study (as exemplified by theorists such as Edward Schieffelin) attempted to surmount these quandaries both by seeing the ritual practitioners as fully imbricated actors, actors with ‘their own competencies, reputations and interests to a ceremony’ (Howe 2000: 63). It was a re-focus upon ritual doing rather than ritual meaning. Ritual as performance was meant, therefore, to capture the ‘elements of uniqueness, strategy, evanescence, presence and becoming’ that were lost by ‘a concentration on the meanings in fixed texts’ (ibid.: 64), texts that may have had, like performances, a ‘sequential pattern, an internal structure’, and thus be ‘self-referential’, but that could never fully subsume the innate ephemerality and tangibility of practice. Yet whilst the performative model opened up the study of ritual to these more practice-based elements, Howe argues that it neglected any wider political or social narrative due to its unswerving, unshakeable focus on practice occluding any sense of the longue durée. Moreover, it failed to mention what he considered ‘perhaps the most significant feature of the text metaphor, inscription’, an understanding which rejected the apprehension of text as something ‘already accomplished, a fixed and enduring entity which has a specific set of meanings’ (ibid.: 64, my emphasis). Rather than concentrating solely on text or performance then, ritual as inscription provided an intermediating mode of analysis, marrying the semiotic, structural mode of ritual analysis with the successive performative, dialogical one, all the while embedding the value of risk firmly within them. It moved to rehabilitate the notion of text from a method that sought to consider rituals as ‘“texts” which can be “read”’ and instead shifting towards the notion of text as process, a process that transferred the ‘saying into the said’, a technique of marking that sees its products as being ‘always provisional and always in the process of change as they are inscribed anew’ (ibid.: 64–5).

6.9  Text as a struggle over inscription. Madrid, Spain, 2007

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Text, then, becomes not merely ‘a fixed entity with definite meaning’, but a ‘struggle about who can get what inscribed’ (ibid.: 65); it becomes embroiled in issues of ‘risk, stake, claim, strategy and competition’, turning into an innately ‘political process’ (ibid.: 65). Lack of different texts or the hegemony of one thus simply affirms a system of power (whether economic, social or political), it confirms the exclusion of other forms of writing, creating an ‘appearance of textual stability’, a façade (of course) always ‘open to subversion and revision’ (ibid.: 65). Howe’s notion of text thus sees it as an innately processual form, a form that cannot be read without understanding the complexity of writing itself, that cannot be comprehended without acknowledging (akin to Gell’s art objects) its originary performative marking, its material natality. And the metaphor of inscription comes to terms both with the over-absorption on ‘meaning’ elicited within a more textually driven analysis and the fixation on ‘doing’ within a performatively driven one. It attempts to fully decode both concerns: meaning and action; exegesis and efficacy; semiotic and phenomenological inferences.4 ‘In this sense’, as Howe continues, ‘inscription is what is done’, it is the performative writing of ‘bodily movements, habits, memories and experiences of people at the moment it is being carried out’, and hence ‘just as applicable to acts, skills, abilities, operations and procedures, as it is to meanings’ (ibid.: 65–6). Ritual can thus be understood through the medium of text, a text, however, that is ‘re-written every time it is performed’ (ibid.: 66), one that always links to others that have come before it, to ritual text as genre; it can thus be understood as (literally) prescribed and fixed, yet open each time to rescription and variability.5 By linking performances not only to ones that have preceded it but also to others that will succeed it (rather than seeing each event as wholly unique), renowned or celebrated performances (whether ‘successful or otherwise’) can become a ‘bench-mark’ for both ‘evaluating subsequent ones’ as well as ‘influencing how they are actually conducted’ (ibid.: 67). They can be individual performances linked within a wide ranging historical framework. Issues of ‘creativity, spontaneity and uniqueness’, therefore, issues normally dismissed from a ritual context due to its formal, textually driven attributes, can now ‘become relative, not absolute’, they can become decipherable as either ‘compelling or routine’, rites appreciated as potentially ‘unique, creative and personalized’ (ibid.: 66). The inscription model thus not only gives weight to the key ritual attribute of risk, to both what rituals 4 Thomas Csordas has likewise noted the text/performance dichotomy within the study of ritual. As Strathern and Stewart write (1998), Csordas ‘sees the former [semiotic] approach as a function of textuality and meaning […] the latter [phenomenological/ performative model] as a function of embodiment and consciousness. Signs as they appear in the course of ritual actions therefore also have two aspects: “as a function of embodiment, they present an existential situation; as a function of textuality they represent a potential narrative” (1994: 81). Csordas concentrates on the phenomenological dimension because it has hitherto been neglected, but he does not deny that the semiotic element may also be present’ (ibid.: 241–2). 5 As Tsvetan Todorov has argued, ‘no text is the simple product of a pre-existing combination but is always the transformation of that combination … [a] doublemovement, from work to literature (or genre) and from literature to work’ (Todorov 1990, in Hughes-Freeland 2007: 209).

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mean and do, it in fact comes to reveal the notion of creativity inhabiting within it, an inherent creativity residing amidst the apparently ‘highly formalized’, highly ‘restricted codes’ that Maurice Bloch (1989 [1974]) famously saw present in its regulatory structure. And it can thus now lead us towards a crucial debate emerging from anthropological studies of ritual, the debate over creativity and sterility, between freedom and constraint, an intrinsic part of any investigation into both ritual and aesthetic practices.

A Boorish Blabbermouth For Bloch, as described in his 1974 paper Symbols, Song, Dance and Features of Articulation, ritual practice was thoroughly illocutionary (a use of the term working in diametric opposition to Habermas’s, and what he would in fact have termed perlocutionary6), making it inherently less open to discursive refutation than everyday techniques of communication. The limited ‘grammar’ employed within it (specifically, as the title of his paper suggested, within song, oratory, and dance) was seen to have reduced the possibility for any open form of communication, to narrow participants’ possible responses to the rite itself. With its stringent formalization, its restricted, formulaic structure, ‘syntactic and other linguistic freedoms’ were ‘reduced’, ‘propositional’ force decreased, individual freedom constrained (Bloch 1989 [1974]: 20). Ritual was hence understood as hierarchical, performative, cyclical, predictable, giving one no choice, simply being a set of acts to which participants were structurally forced to commit. Its semantic aspect, as Edward Schieffelin (1985) explained (in a critique of Bloch’s work), was grasped to be so ‘redundant that far from representing an enriched and emphatic 6

The term illocutionary as used by Bloch here may seem to have the almost exactly contrary meaning to that recognized by Habermas (1991a, 1991b). For Bloch, illocutionary force was understood not only as an action that was completed in-andof-itself, where one does something by saying something, but as something that falsely persuaded you through a communicative mystification. Yet while Bloch was right to see rituals as illocutionary due to their ability to transform a person from one state to another, to perform an act in the very act saying of it (‘you’re fired’, ‘I dub thee’, ‘I name you’, etc.), illocutionary perfomatives may be understood to have performative force but not inevitably, even not especially, to be about influence or persuasion. A perlocutionary act is quite distinctly about this negative notion of persuasion, about consequential effects. They can act parasitically on illocutionary acts, yet these latter effects are not necessarily predestined, nor necessarily desired by the speaker. For Habermas, illocutionary action thus simply means action bent on understanding rather than success, on apprehension not influence. It was about the free flow of communication, transparency, an action taken not to persuade but to state. Perlocutionary speech was that which was understood to be insincere, to be a hindrance to communicative action. And it is this perlocutionary effect that Bloch seems to have a problem with, a form of communication that interferes with the aforementioned free flow. Thus, while Bloch does not use the term perlocutionary in his discussion of ritual, his understanding of the illocutionary elides it as though its effects were perlocutionary, a form actively meant to confuse, to confound, to control.

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form of communication, it represent[ed] an informationally impoverished one’, an impoverishment not diminishing but in fact swelling its highly ‘persuasive’, highly ‘compelling force’ (ibid.: 708–9). In the process of performing, saying, or singing these ‘arthritic’, ‘frozen’, ‘impoverished’, ‘illocutionary’ things (Bloch 1989 [1974]: 25–40), ritual was thus understood by Bloch (1986) to simply serve a form of fixed political authority, creating an ‘ideological apparatus’ that one could not argue with (ibid.: 176), that permitted ‘no alternative’ (ibid.: 182). Genre of communication (its form, not content) was thus crucial, how something was said, rather than what was said, turning ritual into a ‘semi-hypnotic spell’ (ibid.: 84); its apparent ‘fixity of form’ was in fact so powerful that ritual was totally ‘unable to tolerate individual creativity’, unable to relate either to ‘individuals or to peculiarities in their life circumstances’ (Werbner 1989: 96). And the potential ‘richness’ of ritual, then, the possibility for a ‘creative use of counter-images’, as Werbner continued, was frankly dismissed within Bloch’s framework. His was one placing harsh limits both on the potential for ‘improvisation’ and on any ‘highly personal expression’ within ritual acts (ibid.: 96), one that deemed ritual as the truly obfuscatory space of traditional power. In contrast to this Blochian notion of the illocutionary stood what he termed ‘propositional’ language, this being the space of open debate and democracy enacted within the practicality of the everyday, the space of ‘semantic facts’ that could be clearly debated and argued (and a notion of propositionality that thus has a direct association with the communicative openness of the Habermasian illocutionary). Non-ritual language was thus understood as the true space of freedom, the space of possibility, of infinite originality, where the pure autonomy of syntax meant one could ‘articulate almost any argument’ (Bloch 1989 [1974]: 20). The ‘fantastic creativity’ of ‘natural language’ gave social actors a ‘very wide choice of acceptable answers’ to any given instance of speech, an articulation believed to have been entirely absent within ritual form (ibid.: 26, 28). Art especially, in Bloch’s view, was thus a particularly ‘inferior form of communication’ due to its lack of communicative dialogism, due to it not containing the infinite possibilities that semantic language contained (ibid.: 38); it merely produced an ‘illusion of creativity’ while being, in fact, the ‘sphere where it occurs least’ (ibid.: 38), ritual and art considered as the archetypal form of ‘cultural mystification’, ideological weapons coming to reinforce both hierarchy and hegemonic control (ibid.: 69).7

7

We can here note how Bloch’s argument works as the perfect mirror image of Lyotard’s previously discussed work in Discourse/Figure. Bloch thus sees art as the second-rate form of communication, while Lyotard, likewise, saw ‘discourse’ thus; Lyotard pronounced ‘figure’ as the field of unlimited possibility, of pure freedom, Bloch comprehending syntax along these exact lines. Yet whereas Bloch has seemingly remained steadfastly against the potential housed within either art or ritual, Lyotard did concede the possibility for accomplishments which lay in discourse. As David Carroll explains (1987), for Lyotard, ‘[as] long as critical discourse disrupts the established system of meaning and keeps open the possibility of unforeseen relations and connections, it is fulfilling its function of linking up with, without negating, the sensible. In this sense, the function of critical discourse is to be more than discursive’ (ibid.: 33).

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The innate ‘violence’ contained within many ritual acts then (whether of a physical or psychological nature), meant that they could in truth be seen as ‘orgies of conscious deference’ (Bloch 2005: 136), as the very antithesis of open communication. They were dissonant, reductive strategies functioning as ‘a kind of tunnel into which one plunges, and where, since there is no possibility of turning either to right or left, the only thing to do is follow’ (1989 [1974]: 41–2). They were a space in which ritual participants were simply blindfolded, fooled, and deceived. Nevertheless, and as Stanley Tambiah elucidated (1985), the rupture that Bloch constructed between ritual and everyday language could be argued to be a highly nebulous one; in fact, as Thomas J. Csordas has suggested (1997), Tambiah would have undoubtedly taken ‘issue with Bloch’s assertion that ritual communication is distinct because it combines properties of statements and actions, pointing out that all language does so’ (ibid.: 253). Csordas himself went on to claim that the ‘fundamental discontinuity’Bloch set up between these two forms of communication, between ‘propositional and metaphorical modes of thought, knowledge, and discourse’, unravels yet further when we grasp that metaphor, ‘the sine qua non of symbolism’, is in fact ‘an essential structure of all thought’ (ibid.: 252). Congruent with Christopher Tilley’s argument (see especially 1999) that ‘metaphors are a primary and irreducible aspect of language’, that ‘human thought is metaphorical thought (Tilley 2008: 50, emphasis added), and alongside Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) famous assertion that our entire ‘conceptual system is largely metaphorical’, that the ‘way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day’ being ‘very much a matter of metaphor’ (ibid.: 103), Csordas thus went on to suggest that the supposed differences between ‘“poetic” (symbolic, metaphoric)’, and ‘“speculative”

6.10 Nano4814, Eternal Present (An Endless Void), London, England, 2008

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(propositional, philosophical) modes of discourse’, could be transcended (or even made null) when acknowledging their basic, innate contiguity, by acknowledging that metaphor and symbol ‘create the conditions of possibility for knowledge that can subsequently be cast in propositional form’ (Csordas 1997: 252–3). The redundancy and repetitiveness that Bloch observed within ritual language, therefore, a restricted usage of communication that for him outlined its sterility, could be appreciated to have a key creative aspect, their ‘meaning’, as Csordas again notes following Tambiah, not only referring to elements of ‘pattern recognition and configurational awareness’, aspects of ‘unpredictability and low probability of occurrence that are criterial for meaning in information theory’, but through the simple ‘capacity of redundancy to heighten, intensify, and fuse the meaning of ritual communication’ (ibid.: 256). In this apparently barren wasteland of creativity one could thus detect ‘the subtle variation within redundant utterance rather than on the element of repetitiousness per se’ (ibid.: 256), a simplicity, a minimalism, that can often be the most difficult to achieve aspect of all creative tasks. Following Bloch’s argument to its logical conclusion, it would thus seem (as Csordas shrewdly notes), that a brilliant conversationalist would be considered less creative than a boorish blabbermouth because his speech is ‘impoverished’ by adherence to codes of wit and analogy. One can argue that a hammer is more constrained than a stone in the way it is shaped and the way it must be gripped but that it is still a better tool for building and pounding things. One can show that a sonnet bears more linguistic constraint than everyday speech but argue that in the work of a skillful poet its lines can be moving and creative because of processes that are not simply masked by everyday speech, but are unavailable to everyday speech. Likewise, one can argue that ritual language, precisely because of its formalization, can be a tool of creative persuasion. In short, Bloch’s conception of art [and/or ritual] comes from regarding formalization as an interdiction or removal of generative potential, missing the fact that creativity does not ‘suddenly become controllable’ [as Bloch termed it], but is a result of skill in a performance that may or may not be consciously controlled (ibid.: 255–6).

Fundamentally, Bloch’s argument, though innovative in exploring how rituals work (rather than undertaking a purely symbolic analysis), innovative in its thorough explication of the potential of some ritual practices to function as a form of social control, can be argued to fail to empirically define ‘the conditions under which particular genres might serve traditional authority or liberation, exist as static or creative cultural forms, and constitute impoverished forms of ordinary language or collective mobilizations of the imagination’ (ibid.: 260). He fails to acknowledge the possibility of peripatetic movement (as first considered regarding carnival in Chapter 5), the ability to move towards the ‘left’ and renewal or the ‘right’ and conformity, he fails to explain when or why either may occur. Moreover, and as Edward Schieffelin has noted (1985), the very rites described, rites working within a ‘highly formalized language and rigidly prescribed behavior’, may in fact be ones more characteristic ‘of hierarchical societies such as the Merina [of Madagascar, whom Bloch conducted his fieldwork with] rather than egalitarian societies […] where ritual language and behavior is more loosely determined and negotiable’ (ibid.: 709). Creativity, and its relation to ritual, thus becomes a matter of context, rather than a matter of semantics.

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It comes to be found as much within the seemingly restricted figure as the apparently complex discourse. And creativity can hence be seen to be the ‘improvisation of structural variation’, an improvisational divergence working through ‘implicit attributions of meaning’, through the products of ‘shared experience’ (Friedman 2001: 59), rather than the radically new. It is hence a movement intelligible only ‘to those who participate in the social world in question’, to be neither ‘about freedom’ nor about ‘the liberation from constraint’ – neither about randomness nor chaos – the implied corollaries of any ‘pure’ creativity, of any ‘individual idiosyncrasy’ – but to be ‘negentropic’, a form of increasing order not chaos (ibid.: 59–60). As Margaret Boden continues (1988), ‘far from being opposed to creativity’, regulatory conventions permit the direct opposite; they ‘make creativity possible’ (ibid.: 17). Creative practice can hence not be seen to be about ‘liberation’ but to be about ‘spontaneity, intimacy, and control’ (Csordas 1997: 263), an interplay through which repetition and formality (contrary to their popular perception) can demonstrate an innately productive dimension: In fact, these creative conventions can be seen as to create a diverse set of repercussions, from ‘new obligations’, to ‘new community’, from ‘form for inchoate experience’, to ‘changes in traditional customs’ from ‘new meaning for events’ to ‘new perspectives’ (ibid.: 249). They form a modality of improvisatory creativity which is critical to my informants’ ornamental aesthetics, critical to the ritual, public, insurgent practices.

Heighten, Intensify and Fuse All of the underlying theoretical ideals discussed within this chapter thus far, the themes running from play to the picaresque, from risk to inscription, from sterility

6.11 3TTMan and Remed at Play. London, England, 2010

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to creativity, are ones which I am of course arguing are dominant motifs in my informants’ practices of ornamental ritualization. They are aspects entirely crucial to the processes which brought these artefacts into existence, to the aesthetic practices these individuals undertake. What I would first like to suggest here therefore is that these demonstrably ritualized, carnivalesque acts were fully enmeshed within the realm of the ludic, that they were, in Derrida’s terms, working not only through the aforementioned play of supplementarity (the material surplus revealing the inbuilt double-bind, the tension between ergon and parergon), through the play of language (disturbing the relationship between writing and speech, between normative notions of epigraphy), through the play of traces (a physical residue marking a previous performance, an absence denoting an anterior attendance), but through a total embracement of play which seeped into every part of the practice. Painting was play, a play involving oneself, one’s friends, the wider public, the hegemonic authorities. It was the term always used in relation to the street (jugar, jugando), to be ‘playing’ with the city, to ‘play’ with one’s surroundings. And whether it was playing with the design of their works or playing with the physical form of the city, playing with symbols or with the street, each act in the process of production contained elements of skill, strategy, and chance, each act placing my informants both as prime examples of Huizinga’s homo ludens (2003 [1944]), each set within Roger Caillois’ ludic typology (1961). We can thus see, following Huizinga, how play is here both ‘voluntary or freely adopted’ (ornamentation being undertaken without any coercive enforcement); how it is ‘distinct or sequestered from ordinary life’ (occurring within a ritual framework, a distinct zone to the everyday); how it ‘creates and demands and adherence to order’ (an order formed through the practice’s distinct rules and regulations, its dense moral codes); how it ‘operates under temporal and spatial limits’ (taking place in specific zones at specific times); how it ‘is either representational or competitive in some respect’ (clearly both overtly figurative and overtly contestational in its set frameworks) (Schirato 2007: 7). We can note how these ornamental practices work within all four of Caillois’ modalities of play; within the realm of the ‘agon: competition’ (where claims to esteem or simply acceptance are made through one’s visual productions); of ‘alea: chance’ (where the outcome is always uncertain due not only to its illegality but its contextual particularity); of ‘mimicry: simulation’ (where a ritual world with rules that necessitate maintenance and commitment is physically created and performed); and finally, of ‘ilinx: vertigo’ (the pursuit of bodily pleasure, the intoxication and addiction to the act of production, the thrill of the practice and satisfaction of completion that my informants would encounter) (Ehrmann 1968: 31). Unlike Huizinga and Caillois’ analyses, however, where play is understood to be enclosed, delimited from the space of the everyday (‘caught, like limbo, between the hell of “reality” subject to instincts and the paradise of the sacred, of the divine’ [ibid.: 36]), where it is deemed ‘frivolous’, ‘essentially sterile’ (Caillois cited in Ehrmann 1968: 46) due to its connection with leisure – a separation between work and play that can be argued to be a tenuous one, especially in relation to this group of actors – play in this scenario must be seen to be inherently intertwined with the quotidian. It must, in fact, be seen to be ‘synonymous and changeable’ with the everyday, a text that ‘contains in itself its own reality’ (Ehrmann 1968: 56). Like Debord and the Situationist’s famous use of play within their politico-aesthetic tactics (most notably,

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of course, their notions of the dérive and détournement), there was a ‘passion for play’ within my informants’ practice (Debord 1955, in Andreotti 2000: 38), a collective play working through the production of an ‘antiwork’ (Andreotti 2000: 42). It was a play abolishing ‘any distinction between play and seriousness, or between art and everyday life’ (ibid.: 38), a notion of the ludic that acted as a ‘critique of human geography through which individuals and communities could create places and events commensurate with the appropriation no longer just of their work, but of their entire history’ (Debord 1983 [1967]: 99). And through, as Debord continued, the ‘ever-changing playing field of this new world’, through the ‘freely chosen variations in the rules of the game’, actors could ‘regenerate a diversity of local scenes that are independent without being insular’ (ibid.: 99). They could create networks of players – the matrix of ritual partners, of fellow painter – who were spread around the world and at the same time tightly connected to each other; they could create idiosyncratic geographic styles which all worked toward the same insurgent end; they could undertake a ludic attack on the city, producing the metagraphic writings Debord so fondly speaks of – the hypergaphy which merges poetic and visual aesthetics, textual and graphic discourses. As we have seen Droogers point out then (2004), the significance of this play, its gravity, its weight, does not come to conflict with, but to actually concur with this notion of ritual. These ornamental practices were thus the archetypal, manifestly visible example of ‘stylized, scripted, serious play’ (Keesing 1991: 65). They were overtly stylized (working with specific aesthetic techniques and systems), intrinsically scripted (working within a set of rules and regulations and, more literally, often visibly enacted through lettering), fiercely serious (liable for harsh punishment, containing gravity and consequence), innately

6.12 Petro, Untitled, Newcastle, England, 2012

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playful (working with all of Huizinga and Caillois’ prescriptions); they contained all of Keesing’s prerequisites of ritual action which meant that ‘we can recognize it by its frame’ if ‘not by its content’ (ibid.: 65), which meant we could recognize it by the frame that it both exists within and simultaneously manifests. What was also key to all aspects of play however, its inherent ambiguity (as much present, as Brian Sutton-Smith claims [1997], within its scholarship as its practice), its basic indeterminacy – as outlined by Gregory Batesons’ famous nip/bite [2000 (1972)], ‘the playful nip’ that ‘denotes the bite’ but ‘does not denote what would be denoted by the bite’ [ibid.: 180]) – can so too be determined within this highly betwixt-andbetween form of practice. As ‘uncertainty’ ‘permeates this meta-message of play’ (Handelman 1998: 69), a ‘play of forces’, never ‘more exhilarating nor frightening than when boundaries are breached and identities blurred’ (ibid.: 67), these ritual, ornamental actions are always and already subject to chance and the alea; they are unpredictable acts, not only ones left unresolved and thus necessitating completion by their attendant viewers, but acts in which the status of both producer and medium is left intentionally equivocal; they are full of chance, the risk taken every time the works are produced. Yet, and quite crucially here, these boundary-breaching actions, these uncertain, ambiguous, hazardous acts, are also ones customarily fashioned by boundary-breaching characters. And what I want now to claim is that my informants can so too be understood to exemplify these innately indeterminate figures, these ambiguous characters who are both ‘socially peripheral’ – working outside of societal norms – yet implicitly and ‘symbolically central’ – found, like their images, at the very heart of our modern urban conurbations (Babcock-Abrahams 1978: 32). Like the archetypal trickster then, these individuals combine ‘subversive practice’ with ‘aesthetic production’ (Ryan 1999: 3), they seek to create shifts of perspective, to transgress moral and societal strictures through their ornamental practice. They transgress, like we have seen with Louis, through the upturning of classical, often religious imagery; like we have seen with Eltono, through the contravention of property laws in public space; like with Remed, through the non-instrumental use of the street; with Nano, through the creation of dirt; or with Spok, through the violation of language, the upturning of script. Like to the famous trickster, too, my informants did not merely act like monsters, they literally (and habitually) dressed as such; they donned absurd (homemade) disguises and fancy-dress, they ‘played the fool’, performing in maniacal, low-fi psychedelic short films produced in the public space of the city. Created for the weekly ‘happening’ Montaña Sagrada – an event overseen by Nano, Luciano Suarez and Rafa Suñen (extremely close friends of all at the studio) yet always involving all of Nov Nueve (in both the production of the films as well as in the set design for each night) – trickster-type figures would play a central role here, each of the members producing their own masks and costumes, commandeered by Nano’s unforgettable Montaña Monster. 8 8

See the following for some examples of these Montaña films: http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=R7TT01RmCMA, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOrABYyi bec&playnext=1&list=PL7514500AC02B9874, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSZ8 LMGNg6k&feature=related, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4mXbaA8mws&featu re=related, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gAVnm3N3Ss&feature=related, http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcNIcXZ27NI&feature=related, http://www.youtube.com/ watch?feature=player_profilepage&v=P5DE5G3vv-w.

6.13  The Montaña Monster, Madrid, Spain, 2009

6.14  The Montaña Monster, Madrid, Spain, 2009

6.15 and 6.16  Monsters and Mayhem, Madrid, Spain, 2009

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As Handelman argued (1998), the ‘clown type is an embodiment of uncertainty, and so a device for the dissolution of boundaries’, a typology highlighting not only the link between play and uncertainty but also the ability of these marginal characters to turn ‘clearcut precepts into ambiguous and problematic ones’, their power located in the very ‘dirt’ they produce (ibid.: 247–8). If ‘boundaries are altered’, he continues (and clowns are individuals who are understood to both inhabit and disturb these sites), ‘then so is the relationship between those parts that these borders order’ (ibid.: 247), my informants’ taboo breaking practices, their boundary-marking performances, their marginal characteristics, altering and affecting their physical sites, their inherent meanings as much as their wider social order. Our contermporary trickster, our modern-day picaro, can thus be understood to not only produce within the boundary, in the cracks and fractures of the city walls, but to live through this very periphery, to be marginal in their site of practice as much as their innate state, the ‘joker’ operating as much through destruction as construction (working in a constant cycle of both erasure and erection), the picaro located within the slums, favelas, and barrios of the city (the ‘popular’ locations in which this work most commonly appears). As what I argue to be modern instantiations of the archetypal picaro figure then,9 my informants were considered to be ‘culture-heroes’ by some (providing ‘the most positive’ elements of the city – with signs of vibrancy, of life) and yet for others considered as the city’s ‘most negative’, undeniably ‘criminal’ constituent (embodying the ‘possibility of chaos’, physically manifesting dirt [Babcock-Abrahams 1975: 148]). Whilst being mindful of this artist (hero) / vandal (criminal) dichotomy (being a binary that, as Stallybrass and White (1986) have taught us, often tells us more about the system of authority than the actual practices themselves), the picaresque attribute they all contained clearly placed my informants in the role of the ‘half-outsider’, the ambiguous artist operating at the boundary between ‘work and theft’ (Maiorino 2003: 134), producing their so-called art or their apparent vandalism. Moreover, these were figures (following the prominent literary conception of the picaro as underdog), who were seen to function through the cunning of David against the callous city as Goliath, a bandit cheating, scamming10 his way through society’s codes and restrictions, navigating his way ‘by hook or crook’, as Frank Wadleigh Chandler (1899) suggested (in Sieber 1977: 2). Providing us with examples both ‘of trickery and roguish behaviour’ while at the same time working both ‘within and beyond society’ (BabcockAbrahams 1975: 159), the characters discussed within this book can hence be seen, like Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull, to be both artist and picaro all at once. They were not merely the con-artist as so habitually depicted, a mere confidence-trickster (although perhaps, as Heilman argues [1991], as with both artist and picaro figures, being figures attempting to elicit a ‘confidence’ in their character), but one who ‘works through the concrete’, who clings to the ‘felt surfaces of life’, who acts both as a ‘recorder of sensory surfaces’ and an ‘embodiment of visual and olfactory and tactile passions’ (ibid.: 17). 9

The status of Banksy in the wider popular imagination I believe further attests to this fact. 10 This in fact reminds me of a fantastic book produced by Momo entitled My Scam, a thoroughly picaresque account of how he spent five years travelling around the US supporting himself solely through the production of unsolicited ‘House Portraits’. Please see http://momoshowpalace.com/MY-SCAM.html for more.

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6.17 (Con)-Artist Zone. Madrid, Spain, 2009

Their status as both loved and loathed, as artists and criminals, as underdogs and outsiders thus places my informants directly within this dichotomous, ambiguous role. It places them, like the trickster – an oft employed metaphor for the 20thcentury artist, if often due to their aesthetic innovations being depicted (by so-called defenders of tradition) as fraudulent artifice rather than fine art – in the position of what Lewis Hyde (2008) has termed ‘trickster-artists’, ‘artus-workers’, or ‘joint-workers’ (ibid.: 257), individuals who work to articulate and re-articulate joints, to make flexible what is taught and arthritic, to attack the boundary which the joint manifests. The picaro/artist’s life must therefore be understood as a deeply risky one. Their practices are always on the edge of uncertainty (on the edge of the city, on the edge of the law), ones which intentionally confuse proscribed social notions of morality (in terms of propriety and property in equal measure). And it was my informants’ undertaking of such picaresque behaviour, acts that induced so much unease, so much angst, that thus connects them to Howe’s examination of danger and ritual (2000), their hazardous rites gaining power through risk, their perilous rites indexing commitment through the basic hazards of production. Danger, therefore, meant contact with power. Risk, potential gain. Efficacy understood to increase in direct correlation with stake. This was quite clear for all my informants, for the producers of both Consensual and Agonistic Ornaments; every performance engaged the unforeseeable, the capricious; every performance was a potential failure as much as a success, non-fulfillment a constant peril. These extrinsic dangers could of course be provoked through the inherent complexity of completing a practice (the difficulty of accomplishing one’s work, of marking out an elaborate figure without indecision, without inconsistency, all the whilst remaining cognizant of the various environmental dangers that their medium furnished), through the danger to one’s social position (through inexpertly or inadequately completing this same task), through the will of outside agents

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(agents intent on prohibiting these acts, disrupting performances). Intrinsic hazards emerged through the very form of these taboo-breaking, polluting rituals themselves, through these ornamental rites which so literally overflowed their boundaries, which attacked order, which were contained in a zone of ambiguity. The successful completion of a rite was always up for contest, it was never guaranteed until one was securely away from the ritual zone. Each encounter was full of risk from the moment they begun, full of danger the moment one entered the ritual frame. Or course, this was a factor which an expert ritual actor would naturally be able to control with more skill, the awareness of one’s surroundings, the mastery of one’s implements, being an aptitude which could emerge through practice alone. Yet without this element of risk the power of these rituals would dissipate: if they were easy to accomplish (both in terms of their formal and performative aspects), what would one truly gain? The management of this risk, this placement of financial, temporal and coroporeal investments directly into the ritual arena, meant that there could be no contestation over the commitment to practice. It was the very encounter with risk, rather than its overcoming, which demonstrated my informants’ fidelity. Not only rituals of inscription however – the rituals emerging through a physical engraving upon our city walls, through a contemporary form of parietal writing – these practices were also rituals as inscription, ritual acts mediating textual and performative approaches, mediating textual and performative practices. They were thus the very epitome of performed texts, of text as process, texts literally ‘re-written’ every time they were performed, texts enmeshed within the issues of ‘risk, claim, strategy and competition’ that Howe’s (2000) move toward the theoretical centrality of inscription invoked (ibid.: 65–6). They were texts which were precisely exploring the ‘struggle about who can get what inscribed’, which were all about competition and the agon, texts entangled within issues of ‘risk, stake, claim, strategy and competition’ (ibid.: 65). Even in their recurrent, often repetitive states, these ritual inscriptions were subject to a highly contextual mode of performativity, an iterative mode of etching. And the adherence to set patterns of action can hence be understood to define and control production rather than disable the possibility of creativity. The setting of certain material restrictions (such as with Eltono’s tuning fork design or Spok’s eponymous tag) forced one to improvise within a set structural arrangement, to establish new concepts from one base form, a mode of creativity my informants valued higher than the mere production of novelty. Rather than comprehending the rule-bound nature of ritual action to orchestrate every step, to simply define the ‘outer limits of what is acceptable’ (Bell 1997: 155), these very regulations, such as those implicit within natural languages (or, as Veena Das suggests [1998], those implicit within ethnographies), can be understood to be always incomplete, always incorporating an excess, a surplus (ibid.: 179). Following predefined rules was thus clearly understood by these agents as necessary to keep their aesthetic (or ritual) production cohesive (to keep it within the same genre), but these rules were guidelines not limits. The supposedly arthritic status of ritual and of art can hence be understood to triumph against rigidity through its very constrictions, the ‘subtle variation within redundant utterance’

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– the variations perhaps only ever interpretable and visible to initiates – being a structural variation able to ‘heighten, intensify and fuse’ the ritual process (Csordas 1997: 256). This was insurgent ornamentation as the ‘constrained’ hammer not allpurpose stone, the ‘restricted’ sonnet not everyday speech, ‘impoverished’ with not boorish blabbermouth (ibid.: 255–6). This was ornament as a form undermining the distinction between poetic and propositional modes of discourse, ornament emerging from a deeply egalitarian social grouping, ornament as a ritualized practice of a highly negotiable nature. Rather than creativity being about novelty, uniqueness, about pure innovation (a mode stressing individuation, separation from the whole, and a focus on product), the creativity emerging from my informants’ actions can hence be seen as one focussed on adaptation, interpretation, improvisation (a mode stressing sociality, connection to a wider framework, and a focus on process). It was a form, akin to Reading’s previously examined reading of Lyotard (1991), that rejected the innovative nature of modernist art (compared to the paralogical form of its postmodern incarnation), that rejected innovations function in simply refining the ‘efficiency of the system’ (ibid.: 55). As unmitigated ‘bricoleurs’, ‘Jack-of all trades or a kind of professional do-it-yourself man’ (Lévi-Strauss [1989 (1966)]: 17), my informants created with what surrounded them (using the city space as their medium), they used every available tool (using the city as a tool), learning through doing, refusing to follow the brute urge of the market. It was an improvisational creativity that meant they all knew how to do anything and everything (to sculpt, to print, to design, to paint, to build), without every needing to take on the role of ‘Artist’ . These were thus the very craftsmen of ‘devious means’ LéviStrauss depicted (ibid.: 17), furtive craftsmen working through conventions not inventions, improvising with what was at hand to create new outcomes, outcomes that were deeply negentropic, not entropic. They were the bricoleurs who create from ‘whatever is at hand’, from a ‘heterogenous’ set of tools, rather than the engineer who creates solely from ‘concepts’, who creates ex nihilo (ibid.: 17). It was a model of creativity stressing social processes over material products – the ephemeral artefact and the ephemeral performance of equal import – one attempting to extricate itself from the ‘cult of creativity’, the overwhelming obsession of our times. Like the creativity of Michael Camille’s medieval artists then, a creativity that was appreciated to function through the amalgamation and integration of our material world rather than its transcendence, this was a form of practice that was ‘measured not in terms of invention, as today, but in the capacity to combine traditional motifs in new and challenging ways’ (Camille in Ingold and Hallam 2007: 17). Creativity, as Ingold and Hallam claim in a précis of Camille’s work, could thus here be seen to emerge through illuminative inscriptions that would newly gloss, undermine, or mock written texts with drawings, often taken from pattern-books, or already familiar figures […] Novelty in these manuscripts therefore worked through supplementation as well as through the juxtaposition of elements. It also operated through extensions and flows wherein the flourishes of letters would merge with creatures and other motifs (ibid.: 17).

6.18 Remio, Untitled, San Francisco, USA, 2012

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Of course this very passage, apart from being one that embraces creativity as improvisation rather than innovation, takes on very different resonances when transferred into our contemporary context. Transferred to the contemporary timeframe, the authors could quite easily be commenting on the creativity inherent within the insurgent ornamental productions that have been discussed throughout this work itself. These were supplementary aesthetic products working through improvisation rather than explicit innovation, products which could gloss, undermine, mock their border zones, which would juxtapose and decorate them, extend and merge their flourished letters with popular visual imagery. It thus not only reiterates the relationship between my informants’ aesthetic productions and the genre of ornamentation within which it exists – providing an almost exactly parallel mode of epigraphy to that found within medieval marginalia – but provides a tighter focus on the form of improvisational creativity ornament often displays, one that could be witnessed in all of my informants’ creations, from the simplest tag to the most complex installation. The ‘conscious usurpations’ of written forms that Camille explores (1992), the ‘irreverent explosion of marginal mayhem’ that these gothic images created (ibid.: 22), is thus echoed almost exactly within the uproar provoked by my informants practices, the (dis)order they are seen to invoke, the ‘critical debates over centre and periphery’ that their marginal acts uncover (ibid.: 10). They form an equivalently tricksteresque narrative, an ornament produced by craftsmen working on the edge of the city, on the edge of the institutional realm, craftsman who both worked upon the boundary and upended their very sites. They form an equivalently carnivalesque space, a marginal aesthetic formed by artisans placed on an occupational par with jongleurs and prostitutes, artisans roaming between the intra and extramuros, ones effacing the distinction between centre and periphery, between secular and sacred, between saints and sinners. And the area which they inhabited was thus ‘not only the site for representing “the other”’, but so too a ‘place of self-inscription’ (ibid.: 150). It was a space, like the margins of Gothic ornamental design (the space of gargoyles and chimeras, misericords and posteriors), like the margins of the contemporary city (the place of our consensual and agonistic ornaments) where both ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ impulses could come together to form a very particular ‘architectural order’, where they could come together to form order through a unique style of ‘ludic ritual’ (ibid.: 93).

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Conclusion

I comprehend it now in a much larger sense, as the space in which things become public, as the space in which one lives and which must look presentable. In which art appears, of course. In which all kinds of things appear. Hannah Arendt

Everything that is, must appear, and nothing can appear without a shape of its own; hence there is in fact no thing that does not in some way transcend its functional use, and its transcendence, its beauty or ugliness, is identical with appearing publicly and being seen. Hannah Arendt

The Permeability of Boundaries In the course of this book I have attempted to outline a number of things: I have reformulated the images produced in the street by my informants as ones functioning through a modality of ornamentation, artefacts working as both accessories and adornments, as adjuncts and embellishments, all the while existing within the anxious realm of both the decorative and the supplement. I have revealed two distinct forms of ornamentation emerging from my informants work in the public sphere, one consensual, the other agonistic, one working centrifugally, the other centripetally, both of which can be related to discourses emerging from the contemporary art-world yet which contain a quite crucial and critical autonomy. I have disclosed the distinctly ritual quality of the productive process from which these artefacts emerge, the formal, traditional, rule-governed, sacred, and performative frameworks they reside within, their status within the binding, very public rites of the festival, within the inherently (dis)ordered rites of the carnivalesque, within a deeply playful yet innately risky arena. In Part I, Ornament, I thus argued that my informants’

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practices not only took place upon a boundary, within the in-between zones of the city, but manifested themselves through the ultimate aesthetic of quasidetachment, through an artefact which was in itself a creature of the boundary. And what I now want to contend is that the arguments I presented within Part II, within our examination of Order, can in fact also be seen to work upon similar lines. It is not only play that functions on the edge, that works within a liminal site, separate yet conjoined to the everyday; it is not only tricksters and picaros that act as the living embodiment of the marginal, as the half-outsiders, as boundary breaching characters with boundary breaching practices; it is not only carnival perversion that works through ambiguity and disturbance, between inversion and subversion, that is set directly within the constitutive outside; it is the overarching modality of ritual itself that can so too be understood as the epitome of the quasi-detached, it is the overarching ritual order that also inhabits the space between the ordinary and extraordinary, that exists on the borderline of art and life. Following Csordas then (1997), I want to stress the evident ‘permeability of boundaries between ritual events and everyday life’ (ibid.: 68), a permeability which echoes that of the very walls that these ornaments pervade, a permeability which inhabits ornament and order in equal measure. Like the artefacts examined in Part I, all of the ritual elements discussed in Part II will hence be considered as parerga, to be on the edge between two poles yet to exist so as to disrupt each of these poles, to disturb them rather than merely to set them in distinction. Both the production of the artefact and the artefact itself can hence be seen to be caught within the parergonal logic, both ornament and order, both material residue and performative trace containing a ‘transcendent exteriority [which] touches, plays with, brushes, rubs, or presses against the limit’ (Derrida 1979: 21), a constitutive threat able to transform the theory it is set within. And now, I hope, the very title of this book will become more comprehensible. Parerga do not merely signify literal ornaments, the drapery (or the graffiti) which disrupts the notion of internal and external, the frames, the hors d’oeuvre which have no beginning and no end; they must be understood to signify the ‘exceptional, the peculiar, the extraordinary’ (ibid.: 22), to signify play, carnival, ritual, the acts which both are and are not, which augment and disconcert yet which are related to their ergon through an inseparable bond. The boundaries that are set between ritual and the everyday, between work and play, between ornament and wall, the boundaries meant to function through a process of exclusion, can thus more profitably be seen as borders, as sites of ‘exchange as well as of separation’, as an ‘active edge’, as a ‘site of resistance’ (Sennett 2008: 227–31). And the ornament and order which we have explored here, the artefact and the performance, the relic and ritual, can thus be understood to embrace all the elements that this anxious realm provides, embracing the heightened sensitivities, the heightened tensions that these borderlands provoke. It is an ornament and order enveloped within the marginal, the quasi-detached, an ornament and order which is parergon.

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The Epigraphic Habit Whilst the core arguments of this text have now been made, what still remains crucially unresolved is the critical question of balance, the factor that enabled my informants to remain unified within a single collective while containing members from both consensual and agonistic camps. How is it that the seemingly distinct politico-aesthetics which existed within the group did not draw them apart? How did their differing gravitational pulls not smash the group to pieces? And what I will now move to argue is that here, order comes not to balance but to in fact trump ornament, practice eclipsing product, performance transcending art. It was the common ethico-aesthetic the group possessed, the base moral requirement to be active within the public sphere that came to surpass the distinct politicoaesthetics each individual employed. It was the common belief in practice, in activity, in action that kept the group envelope secure, the belief in the purity and veracity of action in the street, the ritual commitment enacted by each practitioner that enabled their coherence. As a factor which Caroline Humphrey and James Laidlaw (1994) argue is ‘constitutive of ritualization itself’ (ibid.: 154), this notion of ritual commitment is crucial to my argument here. It was a commitment to certain prescribed (and, in my informants’ case, proscribed) actions, to certain constitutive (rather than regulative)1 1

This differentiation between regulative and constitutive rules was taken from the work of John Searle, who argued that while constitutive rules ‘create or define new forms of behavior’, regulative ones simply order ‘antecedently or independently existing forms of

C.1 Sam3, Untitled, Madrid, Spain, 2010

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rules, that enabled these social actors to indicate both to themselves and the wider community that they were prepared to adhere to the conventions which were determined by the practice, committing and at the same time communicating that commitment through concrete action. For my informants, what was of principal importance was simply that this clear allegiance to the city was made, an unwavering devotion to ritualized practice in the street, to insurgent production within the public sphere proven. And their actions were thus dominated by what Howard Becker (1960) termed the ‘side bet’, a state where the ‘committed person has acted in such a way as to involve other interests of his, originally extraneous to the action he is engaged in, directly in that action’ (ibid.: 35), a side bet which proved that one’s actions were beyond reproach. This was not a part-time hobby then (although perhaps it was a full-time one, in that it was done for pleasure, not gain). It was a practice that took time (at the very least, Malcolm Gladwell’s [2008] magical 10,000 hours); that took money (the opportunity cost incurred through choosing to work without payment); that involved a huge amount of risk (to one’s body in dual terms, risking one’s health through its inherent danger, risking ones liberty through its illegality). It was an overarching dedication that was impossible to simulate, fidelity revealed through the consistent endangering of one’s liberty, through the consistent renouncement of instrumentality, through consistently consuming one’s time. Working in the public sphere was the only virtuous, moral way to act for my informants; it was the sign of a true citizen, the sign of one who dwelled in the street. And only by producing these ornaments could one thus prove his acceptance to the wider order, only then could he indicate to both ‘himself and to others that he accept[s], whatever is encoded in the canons of the liturgical order in which he is participating’ (Rappaport 1979: 193). It was by action, by subjective involvement (with all the affective qualities these engendered) that one gained embodied knowledge, a knowledge more important than any purely cognitive understanding. The specific reasons why one acted the way one did were thus rarely discussed within the group, not due to any explicit taboo but simply due to its status as tautologous: One could see beliefs. One did not need to hear them. The only thing of true import was action in itself. This was belief as something lived, practiced, performed, on a daily level. And my informants did not simply commit to the practice of what is often termed ‘graffiti’ then, commit to an aesthetic modality known as ‘street-art’. They committed to public performance, to exposition, to the fulfilment of specific, corporeal tasks. They committed to the transgression of norms and laws which were ethically untenable, a commitment to the city that enabled the rapprochement within the group as a whole. behaviour’ (Searle 1969: 33). Regulative rules were thus most overtly recognized through habitus, the rules of etiquette that police social relationships ‘independently’ of stated rules, constitutive ones identified through games (football and chess most notably), and thus crucially non-imperative, simply explaining the meaning of particular expressions. Humphrey and Laidlaw thus place ritual clearly within the realm of the constitutive; it is ‘stipulation, as distinct from mere regulation which is constitutive of ritual. Only ritual acts (like valid moves in chess) count as having happened, so the celebrant moves from act to act, completing each in turn and then moving on to the next. This is unaffected by delays, false moves, extraneous happenings, or mishaps’ (Humphrey and Laidlaw 1994: 117).

C.2 Nano4814, Untitled, Vigo, Spain, 2008

C.3 Eltono, Untitled, Bogotá, Columbia, 2008

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This dedication to the polis then, this duty to action within the public sphere meant that my informants actions can be understood to function in a manner almost directly opposed to that of the Baudelairean flâneur so famously described by Walter Benjamin (2003 [1938]), the flâneur ‘who goes botanizing on the asphalt’, the ‘harmless’, ‘perfectly affable’ flâneur (ibid.: 19). These social actors were landscapists, not botanists, horticulturalists not phytologists, their actions in the city saturated with bodily engagement, devoid of the detachment and social disconnection which the flâneur’s purely visual, voyeuristic, gaze can be understood to sustain. Analogous to the Baudelairean archetype, to the de Certeauian ‘homme ordinaire’ whose peregrinations lent a ‘political dimension to everyday practices’ (de Certeau 1984: xvii), they did aspire to ‘lose themselves’ in the city, to be fully ‘attuned to the ephemera and contingencies of the urban matrix’, to recognize ‘that it exceeded reason’, experiencing it in a way that ‘escaped the structures and statuettes of bourgeois authority’ (Clark 2000: 17). So too they followed (almost exactly) the Benjaminian (2003 [1938]) description of the flâneur’s attempt to convert the street into a ‘dwelling place’, his ‘transformation of the boulevard into an intérieur’, the café terraces surrogate ‘balconies from which he looks down on his household after his work is done’, the ‘shiny enameled shop sign’ thus being appreciated to be ‘as good a wall ornament as an oil painting is to a bourgeois in his living room’ (ibid.: 19).2 Yet rather than the detachment inherent to flânerie, my informants’ were immersed within a daily enaction of reconstruction and renewal, a physical engagement which directly challenged the passivity and submissiveness which Zygmunt Bauman (1994) has argued is the contemporary flâneur’s predicament. They directly challenged the docility which Bauman believes the contemporary city engenders, the submissiveness that has emerged through the increasing schism between public and private space in our metropolitan landscapes, through the ‘iron cloak’ of consumerism which now lays heavily on the shoulders of the modern urban dweller (ibid.: 150–53). For my informants, the street was about action not consumption, inscription not instrumentation, a place of active, physical praxis where one could publicly reflect upon, act upon the world so as to transform it (Friere 2000 [1967]). They directly attacked the schism between public and private through their insurgent ornamentation, they directly attacked the iron cloak of consumerism through their inalienable actions. The street was thus a site of disclosure and transmission, it was a ‘communal register’ to use the evocative words of Spiro Kostof (1992), a stage of ‘solemn ceremony and improvised spectacle’ (ibid.: 243). It was the hallowed place where my informants wrote, where they painted, where they daubed, smeared, sprayed, scratched, installed and displayed their decorative forms. It was the site where they imprinted their social relationships, where they communicated with

2 Startlingly, this Benjaminian observation concerning the veneration of ‘shop signs’ was a habitual occurrence amongst my informants. More time was spent observing and discussing these objects, examples of an artisanal, calligraphic beauty, than spent analysing any traditional, museum-based art with a more distinctly capital ‘A’.

C.4 and C.5  Goldpeg, Untitled, Vigo, Spain, 2008

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each other, where they formed and shaped a collective commitment.3 And it was this material entanglement with the street, this corporeal commitment that contradicts the pleasure Bauman (1995) has suggested has come to be drawn from the ‘mutual estrangement’ and ‘absence of responsibility’ embedded within the ‘modern’ street, a way of being which he argued ‘alleviated’ people from any form of ‘lasting obligations’ (ibid.: 132). The street was not seen by my informants merely as a passageway from one place to another, a location for brute transfer or movement. It was the place where every problem could be solved or resolved, where a deep civic commitment was enacted. It was a site in which obligations were enacted through its ornamentation, in which engagement not estrangement was found. It was a site in which a societal responsibility was performed. As much as being a mode of self-expression then, a release from societal strictures, painting was pledging, painting was confirming. And this, I would argue, is the key reason why my informants were still so active in the street, still so insistent upon working within the public sphere. It is why they were still so active even whilst they nothing left to ‘gain’, whilst their status in both institutional and subcultural arenas was already assured. It was a commitment to present action, not latter effect, that their ornamentation instantiated, a commitment to religion in the sense of its Latin root ligare, an act which could ‘bind’, which could ‘connect’.4 Commitment thus affixed you to others, it fused you to a community of like-minded, civic-minded, public-minded kin. It brought you into what Susanne Küchler (1994) has termed a ‘ritual confederation’ (ibid.: 96). It brought you into an alliance which was ‘governed’ – in a further coherence between the insurgent 3

It is hard to overstate the importance of this locale for my informants. The street was not only the source of everything, it was the always abundant natural resource. Need a medium with which to produce your work? Vamos a la calle. Need material for your exhibition? Vamos a la calle. Wood to refurbish your studio? Vamos a la calle. A location to record a short-film? Vamos a la calle. A place to rest, to relax, to play? Vamos a la calle. The street was always and already the answer. 4 This connectivity through commitment was made most clear to me one day when spending time with Sixe and Goldpeg in Vigo. Sixe had just closed a sold-out gallery show in Barcelona, another in Madrid, and was getting recognition both for his contemporary and independent public work on a global scale. He had no intrinsic need to paint illegally: His name in commercial terms could not at that point have got any bigger; his status within the non-institutional realm already garnered through years of illegal practice. Yet in a one-hour spree (in the middle of the day), Goldpeg and he had gone from the very top of the city to the port, incessantly (and joyfully) tagging the entire way. Later recounting this story to an acquaintance, he could not understand why someone in Sixe’s position would make the effort, could be ‘bothered’ to still work in this illegal setting. The answer was quite simple: This commitment fastened practitioners to one another. It instantiated your moral code. It ensured the boundaries of the group remained cohesive. Quite possibly no images of the ornamental forms produced by Sixe and Goldpeg that day have ever been published until now (either in electronic or physical form). Quite possibly only a handful of people in Vigo (a handful who Sixe and Goldpeg probably already knew personally) would ever have even known who produced the epigraphical inscriptions. Yet for them that was of zero importance. They were there and knew what occurred. And they were bound by it.

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ornaments here discussed and the famous malangan sculptures of New Ireland – ‘by the right to reproduce a particular image’, an image that was then ‘shattered into innumerable variations in the course of its repeated reproduction’, an image that was scattered and expanded through ‘regional networks’ of these confederations (ibid.: 96). This community of practice thus formed social bonds through the production of their illicit ornaments, bonds which were formed not through ‘a common history of intermarriage, but in terms of the memory of imagery and of the knowledge of how to reembody this imagery’ (Küchler 1988: 629); they formed an entity of ‘one skin’ (ibid.: 632) through their knowledge and re-enaction of this imagery (through both ‘imagining and imaging alternative viewpoints’ [Ryan 1999: 5]), an entity of ritual practitioners forming a tightly encased, enclosed group envelope. Like Rappaport’s (1999) discussion of the ritual efficacy of ‘planting rumbim’, an act which ‘joins a man to the group with whom he plants’ (ibid.: 114), here it was painting rather than planting that functioned to consolidate the group, here it was painting, rather than dancing (see p. 72) which embodied pledging, which came to ‘indicate […] membership’ rather than merely ‘symbolize it’ (ibid.: 76). By publicly committing, by producing together, one implicitly and openly pledged allegiance to the same moral codes and values as the other, one accepted ‘the dangers of membership’, one accepted its ‘economic and ritual responsibilities’, and one could thus receive their full ‘rights of membership’ (ibid.: 77). Each individual that I conducted my fieldwork with thus became ‘members of one another’, became ‘co-present in each other’ through the ‘mutuality of being’ that was formed through partaking in these crucial acts, through ‘sharing one another’s experiences’ (Sahlins 2011: 11), through taking ‘responsibility for and feel[ing] the effects of each other’s acts’ (ibid.: 14). It was a kinship, a confederation, an ornamental society constructed through an unrelenting commitment to ritual action. As Sennett has described examining the workshops of medieval craftsmen (2008), it was ritual in and of itself that ‘forged a strong sense of community’, that created a network that could provide ‘contacts for workers on the move’ (the ever-present couch, for my informants, available in every city in the world5), a bond that ‘emphasized the migrant’s obligations to newly encountered’ craft members (the instant responsibility felt to other street practitioners6), which formed ‘associated fraternities’ (global collectives) who would provide for you in times of need (ibid.: 60). 5

And which, of course, must also be available in your own house or your own studio. 6 One evening after just leaving the studio, Spok and I bumped into two lost American brothers, both looking slightly dishevelled and searching in vain for a youth hostel. They were street performers, one of whom would play the harmonica, the other in control of a dancing, homemade marionette, classical picaresque figures travelling across Europe with empty pockets. Within moments of meeting them Spok had decided that they would be staying at the studio. It was the sort of good will that he had been a recipient of countless times in far-off destinations, and, as such, a benevolence that he need return.

C.6 and C.7  Sixe, Untitled, Vigo, Spain, 2008

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Rather than these rituals simply defining a Durkheimian pre-existing social collectivity then, the ‘bizarre’, often ‘grotesque’ ‘collective demonstrations’ my informants undertook came to create the very social collectivity itself, forming a ‘bond of artificial kinship’ (ibid.: 337), forming a ‘moral community’ through the physical actuality of these processes (ibid.: 358). It was the all-pervasive and highly ‘elaborate’ forms of ritual these individuals enacted that ‘did the work of binding the guild members’, and likewise our insurgent craftsmen, ‘to one another’, it was the enacting of rituals that provided ‘a frame to establish their probity’ (Sennett 2008: 60), the production of a literal frame which proved their morality. The ornamentation which my informants undertook can thus be seen to have been one that championed orthopraxy over orthodoxy, that emphasized correct action over correct belief. Their shared ‘political convictions’ – their pure belief in the sanctity of the street, in the city as a site for play, for action, for both access and excess, was thus able to ‘render aesthetical judgement partially or completely irrelevant’ (Groys 2010: 49). And it was hence a practice, such as found within Zaidman and Pantel’s explication of the religious codes of Ancient Greece (1992), that was ‘ritualistic in the sense that it was the opposite of dogmatic: it was not constructed around a unified corpus of doctrines, and it was above all the observance of rituals rather than fidelity to a dogma or belief that ensured the permanence of tradition and communal cohesiveness’ (ibid.: 27). Like the ‘sacred laws’ of the Greeks then, the laws regulated by ‘written enactments’, by parietal writings ‘inscribed on stone or bronze pillars and displayed at the entrance of temples and in other public places’ (ibid.: 28), fidelity to the city in our contemporary case was proven through these acts of inscription, the compulsion, the stipulation to practice in the city not doctrinated but instead illocutionarily undertaken. The particular ‘regime of display and regulation’ that my informants undertook, the ornament and the order they enacted, can hence be understood as an ‘exercise of citizenship’ (Goldhill 1999: 1) which functioned through a practice of ‘visual and verbal display’ (ibid.: 8), an enactment of citizenship proven through an insurgent ornamentation. And just like that which is emergent in James Holston’s (1990) ‘spaces of insurgent citizenship’ (ibid.: 157), his spaces which have the potential to create ‘new metropolitan forms of the social not yet liquidated by or absorbed into the old’, spaces that can ‘parody, derail, or subvert state agendas’, these practices can exemplify the struggle ‘over what it means to be a member of the modern state’ (ibid.: 167). They can act as the archetypal constitutive outside, the quintessential parergon, utilizing ‘central civic space’ yet always and already acting as a ‘manifestation […] of peripheries’ (ibid.: 246). The ‘city of images’, the ‘city of words’ which Simon Goldhill discusses (1999), the ‘epigraphic habit’ of which he alludes, can thus be seen not only to have played a key role in the ‘formation of the ideals of citizenship’ within ancient Athena (ibid.: 26–8), but to be reflected, replicated within our contemporary example. The parietal writings enacted by my informants must hence be seen to directly relate to the model of embodied citizenship which they all upheld, to an ethico-aesthetic in which practice was paramount. It was one in which written enactments, in which the observance of ritual, directly led to the communal cohesiveness which was so readily displayed.

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C.8 3TTMan, Untitled, Tarifa, Spain, 2012

Francis Terry’s neo-classical reformation of Leake Street, his revolutionary trompe l’oeil that we first saw in our introduction, can now, I hope, be seen in all its paradoxical, unwittingly ironic glory, in its disordered, discordant, dissonant state. It is not simply that I mean to demean classical Greek ornament itself, nor castigate the relationship between the decorative arts and democracy as concretized by them. It is merely that I believe that we must, as Peter Weibel has argued (2005), guard against the imposition of an aesthetic ideal from a detached scaffold – an imposition such as the infamous incorporation of ‘the ideals of Greek Classicism, the cult of the ideal body’ within our ‘twentieth-century totalitarian systems (national socialism, fascism, Stalinism)’ – that we must protect against the ‘doctrinaire of art, the imitatio of the free art, of the ideals of the Greek culture’ being utilized to ‘disguise the barbaric state of an unfree society, of social disorder’ (ibid.: 1009). Like the ‘decontextualized’ ornaments discussed by Rosalyn Deutsche (1986), the ‘Parisian copies of Greek and Roman’ monuments placed within Union Square within the late 19th and early 20th century (ibid.: 78), Terry’s ornament can be seen as one functioning through an ‘illusion’ of order, through an illusion of ‘moral perfection that neoclassicism was supposed to represent’ (ibid.: 77). The images and artefacts produced by my informants and explored within this book however, the images countering instrumental pressures, countering the market, the artefacts initiating new forums, initiating new forms, can thus (perhaps paradoxically) be seen to more closely follow the classical Greek mode of ornamentation as Goldhill, Zaidman and Pantel discuss, to follow it in its methods not materials, in its approaches not artefacts.

C.9  The Leake Street Classicist, London, England, 2011

C.10 GPO, Untitled, Athens, Greece, 2010

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Rather than the chaos and pollution which Terry sees them represent, they can be seen to enact a model of citizenship which has the polis at its heart, a model of citizenship able ‘to counter the authoritarian management of will and opinion formation by the market or the state’, able to initiate ‘new conditions’, ‘new opportunities’ (ibid.: 1026) for the contemporary public sphere. While the practices of Agonistic and Consensual Ornamentation may be so idiosyncratic on their superficial levels then, they will here be seen to come to reconciliation through their equivalent valorization of the ‘beautiful’, through their equivalent valorization of a life ‘devoted to public-political matters’ (Arendt 1958: 12–13). They will be seen to reconcile through their joint adherence to the vita activa over the vita contemplativa, to an ‘active engagement in the things of this world’ (ibid.: 17). Both forms, whether following a politics of agonism or consensuality, were not simply beholden to but consumed by an active relationship with the city, consumed by display, by exposition, by revelation in the street at any cost. And the authentic polis, what Arendt has called ‘the most talkative of all bodies politic’ (ibid.: 26), could hence be understood to lie not in any particular physical location, but in the ‘organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together’ (ibid.: 198). It can be seen as a space which can elicit a power actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities (ibid.: 200).

These words, these deeds, are ones which I would suggest follow both modes of ornamental practice delineated in this work, words and deeds which come to in fact conciliate many of their inherent differences. These words and deeds, images and actions, ornaments and orders, were ones which were both based on innately illocutionary frameworks, ones which both aimed to ‘establish relations and create new realities’ (ibid.: 200). The agonistic belief in dissensus and the consensual approach to reason can thus simply be seen as variant means of engaging fellow citizens, variant methods of action. They can be understood simply to contain ‘differences of tone and emphasis; differences that generate fruitful and talkative tensions rather than the silence of total otherness’, differences which never come to ‘render them utterly incompatible’ (Markell 1997: 394). These ornaments, these artefacts which are both ‘in need of some public space where they can appear and be seen’, in need of a space through which they could exhibit themselves ‘in a world which is common to all’ (Arendt 2001 [1968]: 18), thus come to fold back into each other through the fundamentality of action, of action as embodying the very basis of human freedom, embodying the very basics of civic life. They act not merely to encode an understanding of the street, an understanding of contemporary democracy, but to instantiate a form of insurgent civility. They act as a mode of action that is not merely discursive, not merely performative, but one that is parergonically anchored between the two.

Postscript

Corpothetics Ornament and order, art and ritual have of course oft been conjoined to one another. Famously connected by the classicist scholar Jane Ellen Harrison (a key member of the Cambridge Ritualists group), in particular within her text Ancient Art and Ritual (1913), the two spheres’ intimate connection, their ‘common root’, has oft been seen to be the joint ‘impulse’ towards collective emotion they share, their analogous status in which ‘neither can be understood without the other’ (ibid.: 2). Centring her study on Ancient Greek theatre, Harrison believed that the etymological linkage between the Greek word for rite – dromenon – and for theatrical representation – drama – was as an issue of ‘cardinal importance’, a linkage establishing the fact ‘that art and ritual are near relations’ (ibid.: 35). Translating both terms as ‘a thing done’ (ibid.: 35), both ritual and art were hence seen to ‘give out a strongly felt emotion or desire by representing, by making or doing or enriching the object or act desired’ (ibid.: 26); both aimed to work through ‘a re-presentation or a pre-presentation, a re-doing or pre-doing, a copy or imitation of life’ (ibid.: 135); both were social practices intent on defining a collective morality or spirit (ibid.: 217–18). Much in debt to Sir James Frazer’s Golden Bough however, particularly his emphasis on the fracture between magic and science, for Harrison so too there remained a vital schism between art and ritual. Whereas art was understood as ‘a thing in itself, done for its own sake’, ritual was seen to ‘always looks beyond to some end outside itself’, to always have ‘some magical intent behind it’ (Ward 1979: 19). Art was thus understood to be secular, rational, modern, a form of imitation solely for the sake of material representations; ritual to be something sacred, irrational, primitive, a form of imitation for the sake of practical repercussions. Whilst great art may have arisen ‘from ritual’ then, contemporary manifestations of ritual were believed to be in ‘essence a faded action’ (Harrison 1913: 230–31). Ritual was thus not only believed to be an archaic antecedent to what was a seemingly

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enlightened art – an antecedent form that must ‘wane, that art may wax’ (ibid.: 228) – but art was considered a ‘more sublimated, more detached form of ritual’ (ibid.: 228). From this perspective, ritual is thus understood to always be of the subjunctive mood – a modality in which actors form a ‘sculptured prayer’, a zone where ‘the desire was to recreate an emotion, not to reproduce an object’ (Harrison 1913: 25–6) – art conversely seen to be crucially indicative – an arena where ‘the copy becomes an end in itself, a mere mimicry’, a space now devoid of all passion and fervour (ibid.: 27). Moreover, it was a relationship with a set dominant partner, a set evolutionary teleology leading directly from ‘primitive’ ritual to ‘modern’ art, an ideal which whilst perhaps able to tell us more about the ‘humanist, evolutionary mental climate of her day’ (Ward 1979: 18) – an approach that in itself could now appear to be quite ‘primitive’1 – is also one still quite widely entertained today. In a more recent account of the connections between ritual and art however, the classicist Jas Elsner (2007) has come to destabilize Harrison’s Social Darwinian timeline – the apparent unstoppable surge toward a more dispassionate, detached, anaesthetic state of art, one where aesthetic appreciation was ‘cut loose from immediate action’ (Harrison 1913: 135) – suggesting instead that ‘sacredly charged images’, what he terms a ‘sacred phenomenology’, fully permeated both the Ancient Greek and Byzantine modality of ‘visual representation’ (Elsner 2007: 42). Arguing that explicitly ritualized or ‘religious ways of viewing images’ came in fact to ‘predominate over what may be described as more aesthetic (or even secular) responses to art in the culture of late antiquity’ (ibid.: 30), Elsner thus suggests that the importance of these aspects has been conspicuously ignored by contemporary research on Ancient art while simultaneously functioning as a vacuous ‘truism’ – classical art practices appreciated to be ‘religious’, yet scarcely analysed as such. Art historical issues such as ‘style and form’, ‘patronage and production’, ‘mimesis and aesthetics’, were thus seen to have insulated the study of Greek and Roman art from these vital ‘ritual concerns’ (ibid.: 29), overwhelming them through a shackled fixation upon historical evolution’ (ibid.: 37). Employing the traveller and (proto-)geographer Pausanias’s famous essay The Description of Greece from the 2nd century AD, Elsner utilizes Pausanias’s key distinction between a ‘religious’, ‘ritual-centered’ discourse and a ‘connoisseurial’, ‘art-historical’ one, building a case around the ‘simultaneity and co-existence’ of these discourses within the ‘Second Sophistic’s writing on art’, a concurrency that would, ‘by the fifth and sixth centuries A.D. – become mutually exclusive’ (ibid.: 33). Analysing the description of a bronze offering made by the Orneatai at Delphi (after defeating the Sicyonians in a battle), an offering or imitation considered ‘not so much a static object as a dynamic set of relations, not just something material but a performance’, Elsner contends that these images acted not only to ‘represent the sacrifice and procession they had vowed’, but to in fact be ‘that sacrifice and procession’ (ibid.: 43). These innately 1

As Wittgenstein has famously argued (1993 [1967]), Frazer himself (Harrison’s theoretical lynchpin), could be argued to be ‘much more savage than most of his savages, for they are not as far removed from the understanding of a spiritual matter as a twentieth-century Englishman. His explanations of primitive observances are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves’ (ibid.: 131).

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performative artefacts were thus ‘not simply works of art, gifts, or tokens of exchange with the gods’ (ibid.: 43): They carried ‘dynamic religious properties’, acting as ‘charged ritual objects in their own right’ (ibid.: 43). Rather than the typical assumption that classical ancient art (‘the art of naturalism and ekphrasis’ [ibid.: 48]) was innately linked to its (normatively allied) Renaissance form, linked through a detached, mutually secular discourse, it was the art of the middle-ages to which, Elsner argues, it in fact bore more resemblance. The ‘sacred images of Byzantium and the medieval west’ were thus understood to have been ‘closer to the arts of ancient polytheism than either the Church Fathers or the Renaissance antiquarians would have wished or acknowledged’ (ibid.: 48), a convergence between images and ritual that the ‘moderns’ simply chose not to recognize. The power of this highly ritualized visual culture was hence understood to have gone hand-in-hand with the ‘practice of iconoclasm’ and the ‘damnatio memoriae’, which were so ubiquitous within the history of the Byzantine, a form of destruction that ‘asserts’ (rather than denies), ‘the actual presence of its prototype’ (ibid.: 44), which, through the images’ intrinsic power to portray the supernatural, gave rise to the very fear of these artefacts. The ‘cult images’ discussed by Pausanias would thus later come to be dismissed from the prevalent discourse, coming to be ‘feared, as Elsner continues, and even destroyed, as demonic idols’ (ibid.: 33). Yet of course, the destruction of images during the history of Byzantine Iconoclasm came simply to allude to their overwhelming ritual presence, to prove (as I have discussed in Schacter [2008]) that the images succeeded in their charge. The seemingly endless cycle of production and destruction simply illustrated (and continues to illustrate) the true power of these images to physically touch their viewers, to call them into action, their destruction inevitably calling forth ‘a fabulous population of new images, fresh icons, rejuvenated mediators: greater flows of media, more powerful ideas, stronger idols’ (Latour 2002: 16–17). Whereas the ‘damnatio memoriae’ discussed by Elsner were believed to form an ‘elimination of memory through the demolition of images and inscription’ – the ‘destruction of the image’ working akin to the very ‘destruction of the person condemned’ (ibid.: 44) – Küchler’s (1988) study of the Malangan funerary carvings produced in New Ireland sees the ritual destruction of artefactual forms to in fact aid memorialization, explicitly turning ‘visual representation into memory’ (ibid.: 632). These highly ornate sculptures, revealed from their screened surrounds during the mortuary ceremonies of social partners and later ‘sacrificed’ either by being taken into the forest to decompose of their own volition or sold to (evereager) foreigners and anthropologists, were produced explicitly so as to be destroyed, a ‘visual mnemonic system’ whose ephemerality generated rather than impaired memorialization (ibid.: 626). As what we can see as a ‘Melanesian counterpart’ to the Western monument (the monument whose existence causes ‘amnesia’ but whose destruction causes immortalization), the Malangan enabled, through its very ‘erasure, the creation of an inherently recallable image’, instigating a ‘process of remembering that is not directed to any particular vision of past or future, but which repeats itself many times over in point-like, momentary and thus “animatorical” awakening of the past in the present’ (Küchler 2001: 63).

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PS.1  Gone but not forgotten. Destruction and reappearance. Madrid, Spain, 2007

It can hence be understood to have engendered a similar form of active aesthetic participation to that which ‘appears to have governed medieval church art’ (ibid.: 62), a dynamic mode of visualization seeming to efface our stringent divisions between what we habitually term ritual and art. ‘Complex visual objects such as Malangan sculptures’, Küchler continues, are thus ‘problematic for anthropologists [as well, I would add, for art historians], who regard them with a sense of distance that appears appropriate for all things falling within our category of art’, a Kantian form of dispassionate aesthetic appreciation running contrary both ‘to the assumptions under which the sculptures were produced’, as well as the relations of exchange within the ‘Malangan system’ (Küchler 1988: 628). While eliciting a ‘visual and conceptual complexity’ (ibid.: 626) akin to any ‘Western’ artwork and yet functioning within a highly-ritualized modality – in its production (the carver being ‘stripped of all the temporal aspects of his being during the period of carving’ [ibid.: 631]), its integral artefactual status (the sculpture being understood as ‘coming to life’ with the fitting of its ‘eyes’ [ibid.: 631]), as well as its performative and social usage (participants becoming what was termed a ‘nonpartible entity’ through their participation in the mortuary event itself [ibid.: 632]) – Malangan art can hence come to radically disconcert its common Western partner. It can radically disconcert the binary of ritual-artefact/secular-artwork through its fleeting lifespan (contradicting the notion of art as something stable, solid, impenetrable, as something that must be preserved for future posterity), through its animate status (contradicting the notion of art in the subject/object dichotomy), through its densely, highly ritualized mode of practice. These examples from Elsner and Küchler start to show the certain ‘technologies of enchantment’ (as Alfred Gell termed them) that both art and ritual seem to share, the certain ‘technical procedures’ that elicit a drawn breath, an incomprehension of how they came into existence; they can be seen to form a domain in which

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the seemingly separate spheres of ‘magic’ and ‘technology’ cannot be so easily detached (Gell 1988: 6–9). Efficacy can thus be understood to emerge through the bending of everyday sensations, something that for Gell (1998), in discussing visual artefacts, appeared through what he termed ‘animation’ (ibid.: 77), through the ‘pleasurable frustration’ of being trapped within a rhythmic surface (ibid.: 80), the ‘mazy dance’, as explicated in Chapter 1, ‘in which our eyes become readily lost’ (ibid.: 76). From this perspective, then, the ‘cognitive resistance’ of art, its traplike quality, was produced through its tantalizing, arresting form, its labyrinth-like materiality, the topological teasing it produced – by blocking our process of pattern reconstruction, by making us physically spin (ibid.: 82–5). It was produced through an act that could catch the complexity and captivation of movement in a purely visual display, one ethnographically elucidated by Gell through the example of Malakulan sand-art. Within this form of ritual art emerging from the New Hebrides (and, like the Malangan, another distinctly ephemeral form of art), the emphasis was placed not as much upon the ‘artefact produced, but the “performance” aspect of the procedure, the way in which an expert could delineate a complex figure […] without hesitation of deviation, in a single continuous movement from start to finish’ (ibid.: 93). The highly complex patterns produced were thus not thought of ‘as independent visual objects at all, but as performances, like dances, in which men could reveal their capability’, an aesthetic that was ‘about efficacy, the capacity to accomplish tasks, not “beauty”’ (ibid.: 94). It was a form of animation brought on through the literal dance of the image, an aesthetic process form fully interlacing ritual performance and artistic product. For Gell, then, the transformation of seemingly ordinary ‘artifacts’ into ‘art’ came through three key factors: that they

PS.2 Jurne, Untitled, California, USA, 2012

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were made ‘in order that they should be seen by a public’, an audience forcibly placed into a social relationship with them (ibid.: 24); that they worked, through ‘abduction’, as indexes of social agents or social agency, the ‘outcome’ and the ‘instrument’ of this agency’ (ibid.: 15); and that they were ‘difficult to make, difficult to “think”, difficult to transact’, they come to ‘fascinate, compel, and entrap as well as delight the spectator’ (ibid.: 23).2 The famous trap he discusses in his paper Vogel’s Net (1996) is hence considered to be an art object not only due to it being a physical manifestation of the mind of its producer or, as Arthur Danto would have it, due to it being deemed an art object by its producer, but due to it being embroiled within all the ‘specific rituals’ related to hunting in Africa, intertwined within the complex of social relations that these rituals elicit (ibid.: 24); unlike a common ‘tool’ such as a ‘cheese-grater’, then, a tool used in an implicitly routinized fashion, the net was used in a highly ritualized one, marking out its status as an art object, marking out its indexical abduction, its cognitive attraction, its social reception (ibid.: 24). All these aesthetic processes, whether of a ‘ritualistic’ or ‘artistic’ nature, can thus be understood to point towards both wider sociological as well as more contracted individualistic issues, to be the physical embodiment of an individual mind – an artefact functioning as a form of extended personhood – yet to work equally within an intricate network of social relations – to be unable to exist (like ‘culture’) without ‘its manifestations in social interactions’ (ibid.: 4). Like Rappaport’s (1999) notion of canonical and self-referential ritual then, the messages of a cosmological versus an existential nature (ibid.: 329), or, as Bruce Kapferer similarly argued (2005), the latent capacity possessed by both ritual and art ‘for communicating simultaneously the immediately concrete and the abstract’ (ibid.: 39), both forms can be seen to function through the ‘universalizing of the particular and the particularizing of the universal’, bipartite facets that were both ‘actualized and revealed in art and ritual as performance’ (ibid.: 191). The ‘common recognition that much ritual is art, and vice versa’, Kapferer continued, is thus upheld through their equivalently ‘complex compositional form’, the fact that they both manifest ‘varying possibilities for the constitution and ordering of experience, as well as the reflection on and communication of experience’ (ibid.: 191). Both art and ritual can hence both be understood to contain elements of symbolism and drama, composition and framing, work and play, to be practices which function directly through sensory experience, performance and affect. They can both be seen to operate through the realm of what Christopher Pinney (2001) has termed ‘corpothetics’, a sensual, bodily way of encountering the material aesthetic world (as opposed to the more conventional Kantian ‘asensual, anaesthetics’ that Susan Buck-Morss has warned of ), a mode of aesthetic engagement encompassing ‘ritual images’, as well as what were more commonly appreciated as ‘artworks’ (ibid.: 158), encompassing ornament and order in all its forms. Ritual and art, as Ellen Dissanayake concludes for us (1995), must therefore both be understood to be ‘compelling’, to use ‘various effective means to arouse, capture, and hold attention’, both ‘fashioned with the intent to affect individuals emotionally’, both exaggerated, stylized, ‘formalized’, 2

These three ‘diagnostic features’ are pointed out by Layton (2003) in his critique of Gell’s work (ibid.: 448).

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both ‘bracketed, set off from real or ordinary life’ (ibid.: 46–8). And art, from this outlook, cannot simply be considered simply as ‘a variety of play or ritual’ but in fact to be considered ritual’s equal, to be likewise ‘concerned with a special order’, likewise concerned with a ‘realm, mood [or] state of being’ (ibid.: 49). Ritual and art must therefore both be judged as equivalent discourses, as ones that can neither subsume nor dominate the other, ones caught in a boundless embrace. They must be seen as two parts of a whole, each incomplete without its other, the parergon and ergon in concord.

Frame and Content Whilst I initially claimed in the introduction to this book that ornament and order were conjoined through the Greek word kosmos, the resultant division of this manuscript served to almost totally bisect these two elements, treating ornament and order, art and ritual, as two quite distinct categories. And what I thus now want to emphasize is the true inseparability of these forms, their integrally conjoined status. It is not merely that art (and ornament) is the artefact, that ritual (and order) is the practice; they are both entirely fused into one another, they are Kosmos. The separation undertaken within this book has thus been made for conceptual clarity and rigor, as a way of defining their communicative and performative bases, not to try and argue that all art is merely meaning, all ritual merely practice. These ornaments thus come to mediate their figural and performative aspects, to function through their productive processes as well as innate material state, through conduct as well as connotation, through the perspicacity of communal action as the profundity of symbolic meaning. Like Richard Vinograd’s (1988) exploration of 15th- and 16th-century Chinese scholar paintings – and in direct contrast to the focus ‘on the work of art as imagistic object’ so prevalent within Western aesthetic discourse since the Renaissance – our ornament must therefore be understood to function ‘as an event rather than an object’ (ibid.: 366), as ‘an occasion for contact’ between ‘between artist and viewer’ (ibid.: 369); it is not just an art object, nor solely a ritual performance, but an interweaving of practice and product, of text and process. And just as ‘hunting is not those heads on the wall’ – as Herbert M. Cole argued (1969) citing a famous article by Leroi Jones (ibid.: 34) – so too art is not merely the image on the wall. It is the intertwining of mask and masking, of process and product; it is both the ornament and the order. Rather than ritual slowly ebbing away with the evolution of art, as Jane Harrison argued, the two discourses remaining separate in accordance with their respectively ‘primitive’ and ‘modern’ modalities, the insurgent ornamentation I have analysed within this text can so too be understood to be fully integrated within both of these realms, to be ornament and order all at once. These were practices which both focussed on ‘a thing done’, an action performed, which invoked elements of a high emotional charge; these were acts which, like the equally charged, phenomenological Byzantine images that Elsner discusses, served ritual as much as aesthetic ends, served irrevocably mutually constituting ends.

PS.3 Remed, Untitled, Madrid, Spain, 2011

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A focus on purely art-historical notions such as style or form thus only gives us one part of the story, insulating the images from their vital ritual concerns, their traditional, invariant, rule-governed, sacred, performative, liminal, committed states, their embrace of uncertainty, embedded risk, emergent creativity. Their equivalent subjection to iconoclasm, or, as Latour terms it (2002), their existence within the realm of an iconoclash (the destruction we are so unsure about), thus comes to allude in both cases to their ritual power, their ability to touch, harm, physically affect their viewer, to allude to their status as the ‘cult images’ he describes, allude to their irresistible ritual presence. It hints at the ‘fabulous population of new images’ (ibid.: 16) that these ornaments incite, every erased image leading to the creation of two new ones, every destruction acting as an incentive for continued production. The ornamental forms constructed by my informants, much like the Orneatai’s bronzes, can thus be seen not simply as ‘static’ objects but as ‘dynamic’ sets of relations, images of distributed personhood, of a shared network; they become both material and performance, the become ornaments totally infused with rituality – like the Malangan a ritual infused through their heightened production, their latent impermanence, their social functionality – yet are equally complex visual entities in and of themselves. They thus elide their status as either/or ritual, either/or art, and claim neither/nor, both/and. They elicit their distinct technologies of enchantment, functioning through an incredulity shaped by their stylistic and mediumistic impenetrability, through their animation, their agency, through violating perceptual expectations through their taboo-breaking, law-breaking ingenuity. And so too like Malakulan sand-art, theses ornaments act as a material residuum of a physical dance, a congealed residue of performance, a physical choreography visually outlined; they can provide witness to an aesthetics of efficacy, of ability, not a contrived ‘beauty’ but something that is at the same time both a ritual act and material artefact, a decoration endowed with its ‘necessary accidents’. They are forms linking both individual and collective themes, canonical and self-referential notions, concrete and abstract conceptions. It is at once an art pervaded with ritual intent and a ritual pervaded with an artistic one. As Gell himself argued (1998), the great difficulty, almost impossibility, of differentiating between ‘religious and aesthetic exaltation’ – and hence his suggestion that ‘art-lovers’ actually do ‘worship images in most of the relevant senses’, refuting ‘their de facto idolatry by rationalizing it as aesthetic awe’ (ibid.: 97) – can then help to clarify the thin line between the two fields, the equivalency and interchangeability of art and ritual, of ornament and order.3 The separation between the two sides, between the aesthetic and the ritual, thus becomes null. It becomes an entirely moot point. And just as art is a trap, so too ritual can act in the same way. ‘To enter within such forms’, as Handelman argues (1998), 3

Indeed, as Gell continues (1998), ‘to write about art at all is, in fact, to write about either religion, or the substitute for religion which those who have abandoned the outward forms of received religions content themselves with’ (ibid.: 97).

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PS.4 Alone [Hear], Untitled, Vigo, Spain, 2012

‘is to be captured by, and caught up within, the logic of their design – and so to be operated on by the event, regardless of why it came into being, or for whatever motives it is enacted. Such designs are […] snares of the mind and sense, snares of Being’ (ibid.: 16–17). Rituals, as Robert Innis (2005) continues, just ‘like works of art’, must hence be understood not simply as ‘instruments for clarifying our life’ by ‘imposing a set of canonical meanings on it’, but as mechanisms that have the ability to move us, to transform us, to affect us by ‘influencing the lived quality of our very existence’ (ibid.: 209–10). They must be understood as social frameworks that provide us not with a desiccated, purely intellectual knowledge, but with a fully participatory one, a knowledge ‘that fuses our consciousness in all its dimensions (somatic-motoric, perceptual, imaginative, conceptual, aesthetic)’ (ibid.: 209–10). And this, then, comes to explain ‘the deep affinity’ we find between ritual and art, an embedded kinship functioning through both doing and meaning, through symbolic and literal action, through, as Innis concludes,

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the production of ‘a frame and a content that mutually define one another’ (Innis 2005: 208). This is a frame and content, an ornament and order, that ‘embody each other, rather than merely bearing on the other or externally pointing to the other’ (ibid.: 208). This is a frame and content that we give ourselves over to ‘because in the deepest existential sense we find ourselves embodied in them’ (ibid.: 208). This is their similitude, their interchangeability, their equivalent framing. That they are both adjunctive and decorative. Both frame and content. Both embedded within and themselves the parerga. Both ornament and order.

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Acknowledgements

From the very first moment, the very first second I accidentally encountered my ‘informants’ in downtown Madrid during the beautiful, unforgettable Summer of 2007, they showed me more kindness, support and goodwill than I could have ever imagined or have ever hoped. Feli, Guillo, Louis, Nanito and Xavier, not only would this book have been impossible without you, but I feel that my life has been immeasurably improved through simply knowing you. I can’t wait to see you all in July. Thanks also to the rest of my Madrileño family, to all those who made me feel so welcome; to Sierra and Sara, Léon and Bambam, Rafa and Lupe, Paz and Belen, Tomas and Fede, Suso and San, Neko and Noas, Andres and Laura, Fernando and Chus, Okuda and Fli, Manu and Marina. Thanks to Dems and Fefe, Momo and Lucas, Pelucas and Tiñas, Ekta and Duncan, Isauro and Maf. A huge thanks to Sixe, to Nuri, and to Margarita Skeeta. Y si se me olvida alguien, mil perdones. My immense thanks go to my supervisor and mentor Professor Christopher Pinney, without whom I would have never passed my Master’s thesis, let alone been accepted on my doctoral programme or completed this book. Since our first meeting he has been a source of intense intellectual stimulation, of relentless encouragement and support; I have been blessed by his presence during my academic career to date and I hope our conversations will long continue. Alongside his supervision have been a number of other important figures: Dr Paolo Favero, Professor Susanne Küchler and Professor Michael Rowlands all gave me their time and their thoughts during different stages of my PhD, all motivating me toward a more insightful theoretical analysis. Thanks must also go to two omnipresent figures during my time at UCL, the Postgraduate Coordinator Diana Goforth, and the departmental technician Chris Hagisavva. Thanks to David for solving my which/that issue (along with a hell of a lot more) and Els for generally helping me to survive. Thanks to all my other amazing comrades from our time at UCL. A million thanks to Nov York, aka Dumar Brown, aka Nov (aka Dumaar Freemaninov), for his arresting, thoughtful foreword as well as the continual inspiration he gives me. Thanks to El Mac for the opening epigraph.

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Finally, I wish to thank my family (although just to ‘thank’ seems almost ridiculous). To my parents Marilyn and Leon, to whom this book is dedicated. To Diana and Kaelen, Rachel and Steven, Josie and Julius, Rocks and Zips. And of course to all my chosen kin; you know who you are and you know what you mean. The research on which this book was based was made possible by a studentship from the ESRC, to which I am entirely indebted.

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Index

10Foot 124 3TTMan (Louis) xxii, 18–21, 42, 44, 50, 54–5, 65, 67, 73–5, 77, 80–82, 137, 153–4, 157, 162, 164, 166, 168, 183, 192, 194–9, 207, 210, 232, 247 Abarca, Javier 19 acid etching 21–2, 48, 108 acropolis 8, 10 Adams, John 26 adbusting 19 addiction 26–7, 208 adjunctive xxv, xxvii, 20–21, 25–6, 29, 36, 39, 40, 42, 51, 53, 78, 81, 84, 115, 155, 245 Adorno 70 aesthetic v, xxi, xxiv, xxvii–xxviii, 3–5, 11–12, 16, 21, 26, 28, 30–32, 42, 48, 64, 70, 72, 88, 92, 96, 106–8, 112, 115–16, 118, 120, 124, 126, 128–9, 133–4, 138, 146, 149–50, 153–4, 158–9, 161–2, 164, 169, 174, 180, 186, 192, 198, 207–8, 210, 126, 219, 222–4, 231–2, 236, 238, 240–41, 243–4 agency xxvi, 16, 32–4, 39, 40, 44, 47, 81, 106, 115, 156, 158, 173, 180, 200, 240, 243 agon 91–2, 95, 99, 108–9, 114, 117–18, 156, 208, 216 agonism xvii, 51, 92, 100, 102, 104, 109, 112, 114, 125, 234 agonistic xvi, xvii, xxii, xxvii, 47–51, 61, 68, 75, 77, 88, 91–2, 95–7, 99–104, 106–20, 124–6, 128–9, 134, 146, 152–6, 163, 174, 179–80, 182–219, 221, 223–4, 234 Agonistic Pluralism 48, 100, 104, 126

agora 7–8, 10, 92 Ahearn, John 126 Akay 11–12 Akim 11, 49 Alberti 3, 30 Alone/Hear 33, 148, 150, 244 Ancient Greek xvi, 7–8, 10, 30, 91, 235–6 Ancient Mexican 7 Andreotti, Libero 209 antiwork 209 aneconomic 111, 124 animation 33–4, 44, 239, 243 antagonism 100, 102, 104, 112–14, 126, 178 antiestablishmentarian 87, 113 architectonic 5, 7–8, 10, 27, 73, 85, 88 architecture xvi, xxvii, 3, 4, 7–8, 10–12, 20–21, 25, 27–32, 34–5, 40–42, 73, 84, 88, 106, 109, 186, 219 Arcueil (France) 185 Arendt, Hannah 221 vita activa 234 vita contemplativa 234 Art Below 1, 3 artefactual agency 16, 32 Athens 26, 105, 233 Austin, Joe 21 Austin, John Langshaw 59–60, 87, 146, 159 Babcock-Abraham, Barbara 189–90, 192–3, 210 contingency and unpredictability 192 dirt 190 dualism 190 picaresque 193 socially peripheral 210 symbolically central 210

268 Ornament and Order

Bakhtin, Mikhail 161–4, 174–7, 182–4 carnival 163–4, 174, 177 dialogism 178, 183 heteroglossia 175 hybridity 182 laughter 176 spectacle 162 subversion 164, 174, 177 Bal, Mieke 63, 70, 72, 79, 85, apo-deictic 72 graffito 70 pastness 72 publicly demonstrating 70 speech acts 72 text-image 79 Ballinger, Franchot 193 Banksy xxvi, 1, 124, 154, 214 Barcelona (Spain) xxii, 50, 98, 117, 228 Barthes, Roland xviiii, 39 Baudrillard, Jean xviiii, 34, 36, 109 Bauman, Richard 158 Bauman, Zygmunt 172, 189, 226, 228 Baumann, Gerd 158 Baxter, Hugh 76 Beam, Carl 192 Becker, Howard 224 side bet 224 Beijing (China) 6, 152 Belas Artes Invasion 92, 94, 122 Bell, Catherine 133, 139, 140–43, 146, 156, 160–61, 164, 179, 187, 216 disciplined invariance 142–3 formalism 140–41 lexicon 139 performance 146 ritualization 139 rule-governance 142 sacral symbolism 143 traditionalism 141 Belting, Hans 21 Belvés (France) xxiv Benhabib, Seyla 95 Benjamin, Walter 226 Bentham, Jeremy 10 panoptican 10 Berlin (Germany) 16, 49, 117, 124 Besançon (France) 44–6 Bhabha, Homi 92, 95, 103–4, 112, 114 agon 92 ecriture 114 space of the adversarial 112 technique of trouble 103 truth 95

Bill posters 39 Bishop, Claire Relational Antagonism 126 Bloch, Maurice 60, 140, 203–6 communicative dialogism 204 illocutionary 203 restricted codes 203 ritual 203–4 Boden, Margaret 207 Bogotá (Columbia) 225 bombing xxii, 15 Bornstein, Erica 173 Bourdieu 134 Bourriaud, Nicolas 19, 126, 128 postproduction 19 Boyte, Harry C. 56 Brett, David 4, 21–2, 26–7, 32 applied decoration 4 visual pleasure 21 Bristol, Michael D. 177 Brk 148, 171 Brown, Donald 27 Brown, Denise Scott 3, 31 Buck-Morss, Susan 4, 28, 240 asensual anaesthetics 240 orderliness 4 Buenos Aires (Argentina) xviiii–xxii buffing 29, 38 Buni 33 Burke, Donald 70 Buse 117–18 Byzantine 236–7, 241 Caillois, Roger 208, 210 alea 208 ilinx 208 ludic typology 208 mimicry 208 Cairo (Egypt) 10 California (USA) 239 calligraphy 21–2, 25–6 Cambridge Ritualists 235 Camille, Michael 189, 217, 219 architectural order 219 conscious usurpations 219 ludic ritual 219 self inscription 219 Canales, Jimena 36 Cap 22 carnival 143, 160–64, 169–83, 186–7, 206, 208, 219, 221–2 anti-structure 169–70, 172, 180 criminal behaviour 163, 180

index

inversive 163, 177–8, 183–4 language 175–6, 178–179, 182–4, 204, 206, 208, 210, 216 laughter 175–7, 183 liminal structure 163 ludic 189–90, 208–9, 219 method of inventing 163 perversion 184, 192, 222 public liminality 169, 180 ritual of intensification 163 spirit 183, 192 subjunctive 163, 170, 236 subversive 163–4, 177–9, 183–4, 192, 210 taboo breaking 162 transformative performance 170 Carroll, David 175, 177, 204 Carruthers, Mary 5 carteles 15, 18–21, 42, 67, 153, 163, 167 Caryaen women 30 Castleman, Craig 21 Catania (Italy) 9 CCTV xxv cenophobia 38 centrifugal 124, 174, 180, 221 centripetal 124, 180, 221 Chalfant, Henry 150 chaos xxvii, 1, 5, 42, 142–3, 162–3, 190, 207, 214, 234 ordered 143 perceived 42 social and moral xxvi, 162 violent 142 choquitos 15–16, 19–21, 42 Chu xxi Chytry, Josef 7, 10 citizenship 57, 95, 101–2, 119, 163, 231, 234 civic 7, 11, 55, 67, 69, 82, 160, 162, 180, 228, 231, 234 arena 69 commitment 228 concern 67 desires 180 dialog 55 disposition 160 justice 7 life 234 minded 228 practice 11 rites 180 ritual 162 space 7, 231

269

union 7 civility 7, 41, 234 Clifford, James 25, 200 clowning 160, 190 co-option 124, 128 Cohen, Stanley 193 Cole, Herbert M. 241 Collins, Peter 33 colonization 61 commitment xxiii, xxiv, xxv, xxvii, 55, 60, 75, 103, 117, 138, 160, 162, 180, 199, 208, 215–16, 223–4, 228–9 common concern 64–9, 77, 86, 116 communication xxviii, 4, 19, 48, 55–9, 61, 65–6, 69, 73, 80, 82, 86–7, 95–6, 116–17, 124–5, 140, 147, 174, 203–6, 240 authentic 61, 95 discursive 124 mass 57 perlocutionary 59 open 205 rational 55, 87 ritual 205–6 symbolic 140 verbal 147 visual 65 Communicative Action 55, 58–61, 77, 80, 90 competitive 51, 92, 95, 208 confundere 35 Connelly, Joan B. 8 Connolly, William E. 101, 104 consensual xvi, xvii, xxii, xxvii, 47–51, 53, 55, 61–9, 72–3, 75–9, 82–3, 85–8, 90–92, 95–6, 99–102, 104, 106, 112–13, 120, 124–6, 128–9, 134, 146, 152–4,156, 163, 173–4, 179–80, 182–3, 190, 215, 219, 221, 223–4, 234 conservative 1, 126, 154, 178 constructive 26, 29 containment 67, 177 contestation 87, 95, 101–2, 104, 109, 164, 208, 216 Cooke, Maeve 59, 63, 73, 76–7 communicative action 77 conversation 73 subjective truthfulness 76 validity claim 63, 73, 76–7 Coomaraswamy, Ananda 3, 47 Cooper, Martha 150 Corijn, Eric 11 Cornford, Francis Macdonald 156

270 Ornament and Order

corporeal 88, 102, 134, 143, 146, 156, 158–9, 174, 179–80, 224, 228 cosmological 29, 170, 240 creativity 4, 15, 138, 142, 150, 153–4, 162, 198, 202–4, 206–8, 216–17, 219, 243 criminality xxi Cripta Djan xx, 20, 92, 122 Crowther, Paul 27 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly 153 Csordas, Thomas J. 202, 205–7, 217, 222 boorish blabbermouth 206 fundamental discontinuity 205 modes of discourse 205 propositional form 206 culture-jamming 19 DaMatta, Roberto 163, 172 Danto, Arthur 240 Das, Veena 199, 216 de Certeau, Michel 1, 186, 226 de Meuron, Pierre 28, 41 Debord, Guy 192, 208–9 dérive 209 détournement 192, 209 hypergaphy 209 decoration xxv, xxvii, 3–4, 7–8, 20–22, 26–35, 38–42, 44, 46, 48, 51, 53, 75, 78–9, 81, 84, 88, 115,189, 221, 226, 232, 343, 245 Delta 41 democracy 8, 48, 99–102, 113, 126, 155, 204, 232, 234 Dems33 xxii, 247 demos 8, 99, 124 Derrida, Jacques 1, 3, 35–6, 38–9, 42, 46, 146, 183–4, 186, 189, 192, 208, 222 deconstruction 184 double writing 184 ergon 36, 38, 42, 46, 208 iterability 146 parergon 3, 36–7, 39, 46 184, 222, 241, 245 perversion 183–4 pharmakon 36, 38 destructive xv, 26, 29, 58 detourn 19, 192, 209 Deutsche, Rosalyn 113, 232 di Giorgio, Francesco 8 dialogical 21, 86, 126, 200 dialogism 178, 183, 204 Dier 33 Dirks, Nicholas B. 178

dirt xxv, 16, 20, 31, 49, 111, 119, 159, 163, 169, 190, 210, 214 displacement 96, 111, 163, 186 Dissanayake, Ellen 240 dissensus 88, 96, 100, 102, 106, 112, 126, 234 ferments 100, 112 Doma 22 domestication 122, 128 Douglas, Mary 31, 34, 141, 159–60 primordial 141 rituals of purity and impurity 159 traditional ritual 141 Downs, Anthony 101 Drexler, Jane M. 59 Droogers, André 190, 209 duality 118, 172, 193 Duchamp, Marcel 32 Duncan, Carol 159 Durkheimian 170, 231 E.B.Itso 12 egality 64, 181, 183 Ehrman, Jacques 208 Eindhoven (Netherlands) 89 Ekta 168, 247 El Mac 68, 247 Elche (Spain) xxii Elkins, James 50 Elsner, Jaś 28, 236–8, 241 damnatio memoriae 236–7 Second Sophistic 236 truism 236 visual representation 236 Eltono ix, x, xi, xii, xiii, xxii, 6, 16, 20, 21, 55, 64–6, 73, 77, 83–6, 106, 120, 122–5, 152–3, 160, 164, 166, 168–9, 210, 216, 225 embellishing x, 5, 7–8, 25–26, 28, 38–41, 79, 163, 221 enlightenment xvii, 95, 258 Ephratt, Michal 85, 254 epigraph xxi, 11, 106, 183, 208, 219, 223, 228, 231, 247 ergon 3, 35–6, 38–9, 42, 44, 46, 115, 158, 160, 181, 184, 208, 222, 231, 234, 241 Erosie xi, 89 Escif x, 72, 73 Escobar, Jesus 5, 7, 254 ESPO 50 etching ix, 21, 22, 48, 216 Evens, Terry M.S. 134, 255

index

existential 59, 70, 76, 86, 153, 159, 180, 202, 240, 245 exploration 12, 27, 107, 129, 241, 254, 255, 264 extramuros 184, 219 Faile xxvi, 124 Fase xxii Fasting 139, 161, 164, 179–80 Feasting 139, 161, 164, 179–80 Fefe Tavelera xxii, 157 Fekner, John xii, 155 Fernández-Galiano, Luis 41, 255 Ferrell, Jeff xxi, 255 festivals 139, 161, 164, 179–80 Fetish 31, 36, 38, 69, 73, 75, 264, 266 feudal xvi, 57, 169 Filippo Minelli x, xii, 71, 73, 155 fill-in 21,136 Firth, Raymond 173 flâneur 226, 250 Fleming, David 10 Fleming, Juliet 36, 147 Folena, Lucia 178 folk-art 27 formalism 139, 140, 146 formality xxvii, 72, 134, 137–9, 141, 147, 149, 159, 207 Foster, Hal 28, 31, 34, 138 Foucault, Michel 72, 92, 95, 102, 119, frame x, xvii, 3, 35, 37, 39, 47, 116, 134, 138, 158, 160–61, 170, 181, 190, 194, 210, 216, 231, 241, 245 fraternities xxii, 229 Frazer, Sir James 235–6 friction 38, 94, 100, 104, 114 Friedman, Jonathan 207 Friedman, Yona 10 FTS crew 117 Fultner, Barbara 58 Galeria Choque Cultural (Culture Shock Gallery) 120, 122 gangs xxi, xxvii, 50, 78 Garr (Garrulo-Koas) xi, 33 Geertz, Clifford 200 Gell, Alfred 32–4, 41–2, 44, 134, 156, 158, 189, 202, 238–40, 243 abduction 240 agency 32–4, 44, 156, 158, 240, 243 animation 44 apotropaic art 34 artefactual agency 32

271

Malakulan 239, 243 personhood 32, 34, 44, 156, 240, 243 technologies of enchantment 238, 243 Gentrification xxvi, 50, 78 Gielen, Pascal xxvi Gillick, Liam 126 Gladwell, Malcolm 224 Gluckman, Max 163, 170, 173, 356 Gluckmanian 170 Goffman, Erving 147 Goldhill, Simon 223, 231–2 epigraphic-habit 223 GoldPeg 227–8 Gombrich, Ernst 5, 28, 46, 256 Goodnight, G. Thomas 47, 61 Goody, Jack 139 Goodyear, William 30 GPO 105, 233 Grabar, Oleg 21, 25–6, 34 calligraphy 25–26 graffiare 44 grassroots 11 Grebowicz, Margret 98–9 Greece 7–8, 29, 105, 231, 233, 236 Greenblatt, Stephen 177 Groth, Jacqueline 11 Grottaglie 72 Groys, Boris xxvi, 31, 38, 231 Habermas, Jürgen x, xvi, 48, 53, 55–61, 63–70, 72–3, 75–7, 79, 82–3, 87, 90, 95, 97, 99, 113, 126, 163, 172, 175, 183, 203–4 coffeehouse culture 56, 61 common concern 64–9, 77, 80, 82, 86 common humanity 64–9, 77, 80, 82, 85 communicative action 55, 58–61, 64, 69–70, 77, 79–80, 87, 90, 203 conceptual triad 55 Deliberative Democracy 48, 100, 126 illocutionary aims 59 inclusive public 64, 67–9, 77, 80, 82, 86 refeudalization xvi, 57 Structural Transformation 55–7, 61, 64 subjective truthfulness 59, 64, 70, 75–7, 80, 82, 86 validity claims 59, 60, 64, 69–70, 72–3, 76 Hall, Stuart 175 Hallam, Elizabeth 217 Hames-Garcia, M.R. 59 Handelman, Don 160, 163, 174, 193, 194, 210, 214, 244

272 Ornament and Order

Hapsburg 7 Harrison, Jane Ellen 235, 236, 241 Harvey, David 12, 31 Havana (Cuba) 68 Heilman, Robert Bechtold 214 Hellenic 4, 30 Hermer, Joe 112 Hermogenes 30 Herscher, Andrew 36 Hersey, George 8, 10, 30, 47 quattrocento 30 sylography 10 Herzog, Jacques 28, 40, 41 heteroglossia 175, 183 Hill, Jonathan xxvii, 11, 26, 28 Hillier, Jean 102 Hirschhorn, Thomas 126 Hobsbawm, E.J. 141, 150, 193 Holquist, Michael 184, 250 Holston, James 51, 231 Homer (Sasha Kurmaz) 38, 44, 88 Homeric 92 Howard, Ebenezer 10 Howe, Leo 75, 143, 153, 198–200, 202, 215–16 Hughes-Freeland, Elizabeth 142, 202 Huizinga, Johan 208, 210 homo ludens 208 Humphrey, Caroline 223–4 Hunt, Alan 112 hybridity 182–183 Hyde, Lewis 215 iconoclash 3, 29, 32, 38–40, 47, 243 illocutionary 59–60, 63, 72, 77, 79, 81–2, 84, 87, 146, 203–4, 234 imaged text 107, 116 Ingold, Tim 217 Ingram, David 61, 70, Innis, Robert 244–5 innovative 49, 97, 206, 217 inscription 27, 39, 88, 108, 115–17, 122, 153, 183, 198, 200–202, 207, 216–17, 219, 226, 228, 231, 237 insurgent xxvi, 3, 12, 29, 46, 51, 90, 119, 124–6, 128, 134, 150, 159–60, 180, 182, 207, 209, 217, 219, 224, 226, 228, 231, 234, 241 intermuros 184 interruptive 126 intramuros 184 invariance xii, 138–42, 151–3, 159, 243

invention 97, 108–9, 217 inversion 143, 146, 161, 163–4, 169–70, 173–5, 177, 179, 181, 183–184, 187, 222, 249 inversive 163, 177–8, 183–4 Islamic 7, 26 Andalusia 7 letter-based art mediaeval 26 —— illumination 26, 175, 196 Izenour, Steven 31 Jaime 21, 127 Jerez de la Frontera (Spain) 41 Johnson, Barbara 184, 205 Johnson, Pauline 96 Jones, Leroi 241 Jurne 239 Kaïka, Maria 10 kalligraphia 108 Kant, Emmanuel 35, 46, 238, 240 Kapferer, Bruce 133, 150, 170, 190, 240 Katsu 24, 103, 151 Keesing, Roger M. 190, 209–10 Kelling, George 40 Kellner, Douglas 56–7, 59, 69, 109 Kester, Grant 126, 128 dialogical and antidiscursive 126 key-lines 136 keyed insignia 21 Kiev (Ukraine) 38, 88 kinship 181, 190, 229, 231, 244 Koh, Jay 126 kosmos 3, 10, 241 Kostof, Spiro 149, 226 Krull, Felix 214 Küchler, Susan 228–9, 237–8, 247, 259 animatorical 237 Malangan 229, 237–9, 243 memorialization 237 ritual confederation 228 Kunstwollen 27–8, 47 Kwon, Miwon 126, 128 assimilative sculpture 126 La Mano 98 La Palma (Spain) 65, 195–7 Lachman, Renate 174, 177, 183 Laidlaw, James 223–4 Lakoff, George 205 lambe lambe 124 Latour, Bruno 3, 29, 47, 75, 237, 243

index

iconoclash 3, 29, 32, 38–40, 47, 243 laughter 175–7, 183 Layton, Robert 240 Leach, Edmund 15 Leake Street (England) 1–3, 232–3 learning 47, 150, 217 Leinkauf, Mischa 27 Leon (Spain) 43 Lévi-Strauss, Claude-Bricoleurs 193, 217, 260 bricoleurs 217 duality 193 mediator 193 lexicon 134, 139 liberalism 99–101 lifeworld 55, 61, 169, 181 ligare 228 liminality 134, 147, 158, 163, 169–70, 172, 174, 180–81, 183, 186, 189–90, 222, 243 Liqen 171 London (England) xxi–xxii, xxv–xxvi, 1–2, 23, 50, 62, 124, 205, 207, 233 Longworth, Guy 87 Loos, Adolf 15, 28, 30, 32, 34, 46, 48 excrement 28 waste 31 Los Angeles (USA) 35, 144–5 Los Contratistas xxii Los del rodillo 33 Luciano 164, 166, 168, 210 ludic 189, 190, 208–9, 219 Lush 173 Lyotard, Jean-François 48, 84, 91–2, 95–9, 103, 106–9, 114, 119, 126, 163, 175–6, 183, 204, 217 Agonistic Pluralism 48, 100, 104, 126 American position 99 differends 98 discursive intervention within language 109 displacement 96, 11, 163, 186 horizon of dissensus 96 imaged text 107 innovation 97, 100 language games 92, 96–7, 99, 103, 107–8, 114, 119, 175 pagan 91, 96–7, 103, 109, 114 paralogic 96–8, 103, 217 permanent provocation 95, 119 petits recits (little narratives) 96, 99, 103, 106, 114, 175

273

Macdonald, Nancy xxi Madrid (Spain) xxi–xxii, xxiv–xxv, xxvii, 5, 7, 10, 15–18, 20, 22, 25, 29, 33, 54, 58, 66, 74, 78–9, 81, 84–5, 94, 97, 117–19, 123–4, 127, 135–7, 150, 157, 165–7, 171, 179, 182, 192, 201, 211, 212–13, 215, 223, 228, 238, 242, 247 Mahall, Mona 4, 163 Maiorino, Giancarlo 193, 214 countergenre 193 malandro 193 Mallorca (Spain) xxv 198 Mann, Thomas 214 Manu 164, 166, 168–9, 247 marginalia 219 Markell, Patchen 60, 92, 234 Maurer, Marc 41 Mauss, Marcel 32 McCarthy, Thomas 56 Melbourne (Australia) 124, 173 Merrifield, Andy 8 metalanguage 96 metanarrative 95–6, 99, 106, 109 metaphor 4, 7–8, 16, 27, 34, 36, 67, 70, 84, 107, 147, 156, 160, 173, 186, 189, 200, 202, 205–6, 215 metasocial 181 Mexico City (Mexico) 176 Miller, Daniel 28 Modernist 28, 30–32, 34, 97, 126, 217 Momo xxii, 20, 23, 140–41, 214, 247 Montaña Sagrada 210 Monterrey (Mexico) xxv Moore, Ben 1 Moore, Sally Falk 133, 159 moral code 138, 179, 208, 228–9 Mouffe, Chantal xvii, 92, 99–102, 104, 106, 112–14, 116, 119 agon 92, 95, 99, 114, 117, 156, 208, 216 cordon sanitaire 116 dissensus 96, 100, 102, 106, 112 heterogeneity 96, 99, 106, 112 homogeneity 99, 116 politics 101–2, 104, 113, 116, 119 Moughtin, Cliff 21, 42, 79 mud-level 11, 128 Muir, Edward 162, 174, 178, 180, 182 Mulvey, Laura 21 Mumford, Stan 175, 183 Muñoz, Daniel ‘San’ xxii–xxiii, 9, 19, 44–6, 247 mura rasa 78

274 Ornament and Order

murals xxii, xxv–xxvi, 16, 20–21, 47 Murphy, Peter 10 Myerhoff, Barbara G. 133, 159 uncivilized rituals 159 Nano 4814 xxii–xxiii, 15–17, 19–21, 33, 42, 50, 92–3, 114–17, 148, 164, 171, 205, 210, 225 Nashville (USA) 199 Nazca Lines 149 Needham, Rodney 139 negentropic 207, 217 Neko 21–2, 33, 97, 127, 179, 247 New Ireland (Papua New Guinea) 229, 237 New York (USA) xv, xvii, xxi, xxv, 10, 24, 26, 50, 103–5, 111, 124, 149, 151, 154–5 Newcastle (England) 209 Newman, Barnett 126 Newman, Saul 178, 184 Nietzsche, Friedrich 92, 95, 99, 102 Norris, Christopher 38 Nouadhibou (Mauritania) 155 Nov York xv–xviii, 104, 247 Noviciado Nueve xxi, xxiv, xxvii Nuevo Leon xxii Nug 191 Nuria Mora xxii, 65–6 O’Connor, Justin 147 Oc, Taner 21, 42, 79 Odessa (Ukrainem) 11 order xxi, xxvii–xxviii, 1, 3–5, 7–8, 10–12, 21, 26, 29–32, 36, 38–43, 44, 73, 85–7, 90, 92, 96, 100, 102, 106–15, 125, 128–9, 134, 136, 138–9, 142–7, 154, 159–63, 170, 172–3, 176–8, 181, 183–4, 186–90, 199, 207–8, 214, 216, 219, 222–4, 231–45 architectural xvi, xxvii, 3, 7–8, 10–12, 20–21, 28, 30–32, 40, 42, 84, 88, 219 construction of xxi, 3, 10, 12, 30–31, 56, 84, 88, 134, 138, 174, 184, 186, 214, 226 practice based xxi, xxvii, 50, 56, 60, 92, 95, 133, 141, 200, 226, 234 social and moral chaos xxvii, 3, 56, 76, 138, 162, 172, 180–81, 210, 224, 231–2, 235 visual 3–5, 7–8, 21, 31, 39, 41, 48, 50, 70, 72, 80, 82, 85, 87, 92, 98, 104, 106, 109, 112, 115–16, 122, 124, 128, 150, 156, 180, 183, 186, 189, 208, 214, 219, 226, 231, 243

ornamentation xxii, xxv, xxvi, 4–5, 7–8, 10–12, 26–31, 34, 38, 41, 46–51, 53, 55, 57, 59, 61–69, 72–3, 75–8, 83, 86–8, 90, 92, 103–4, 106–9, 111–20, 124–9, 146, 152, 154, 156, 158–9, 179–80, 182–4, 208, 217, 219, 221, 226, 231–4, 241 architectural xxvii, 7–8, 10–12, 27–8, 30, 31, 88, 219 decorative xxv, xxvii, 8, 26–7, 29–31, 34, 41, 46, 51, 53, 75, 78–9, 81, 88, 115, 221, 226, 232 illicit 26, 38, 63, 73, 85–7, 106, 109, 111–14, 124, 156, 158, 180 insurgent xxvi, 12, 46, 51, 90, 119, 124–6, 128, 159, 180, 182, 217, 219, 226, 228, 231, 234, 241 parergonic 47, 115, 234 urban xxv, xxvi, 5, 7, 10–11, 27, 41, 47, 67, 113, 115–16, 180, 226 ornaphobia 27 ornatto 5, 7 orthography 8, 26 Ostrow, Saul 27 outmoded 91–2 OX 185 pagan 91, 96–7, 103, 109, 114 Palma (Spain) 65, 195–7 Panofsky, Erwin 27 Pantel, Pauline Schmitt 231–2 paralogical 96–8, 103, 217 parergon xvii, 3, 35–6, 38–9, 42, 46–7, 115, 158, 160, 181, 184, 208, 222, 231, 234, 241 Paris (France) 10, 107, 185, 232 Parthenon frieze 8 pattern 31, 33–4, 41–2, 44, 46, 113, 119, 135, 142, 153–4, 161, 163, 180, 200, 206, 216–17, 239 Pausanias 236–7 Pelucas xxii, 171, 176, 247 performance xviii, xxi, 27, 33–4, 42, 44, 47, 51, 72, 76, 79–80, 85–8, 106, 114, 116, 119, 124, 128–9, 134, 138–9, 142, 146, 153, 158, 163, 169–70, 179–80, 198–200, 202, 206, 208, 214–17, 222–36, 239–41, 243 art 27, 33–4, 42, 44, 47, 51, 72, 76, 79–80, 85–8, 106, 114, 116, 119, 124, 128, 129, 134, 138, 142, 146, 153, 158, 163, 169–70, 179–80, 198–200, 202, 206, 208, 214–17, 222–4, 236, 239, 240–41, 243

index

ethical 79, 207–8, 252 illicit 108, 113–15, 134, 142, 152, 186, 208 music 152 physical xxv, 27, 34, 119, 134, 138–9, 153, 179–80, 198, 208, 214, 216, 239–40, 243 process 33, 51, 88, 128, 134, 138, 146, 158, 169–70, 179, 198–200, 202, 206, 208, 216–17, 222, 236, 239–41 public 158, 224 ritual 198, 239, 241 transformative 169, 170 performative xxvii, 66, 72, 80, 82, 87, 134, 137, 140, 146–7, 158–159, 181–2, 187, 200, 202, 216, 221–2, 234, 238, 241, 243 perlocutionary 59, 60, 62, 87, 203 personhood 15, 32, 34, 35, 38, 44, 46, 79, 116, 142, 156, 240, 243, perversion 161, 163, 169, 173, 175, 177,179,181,183–4, 187, 192, 222 petits recits (little narratives) 96, 99, 103, 106, 114, 175 Petro xxii, 109, 209 phalérophobie 34, 40 Pharmakon 36, 38 Phillips, Susan A. xxi Phillips, Tom 26 picaresque 160, 193, 207, 214, 215, 222, 229 Pickett, Brent L. 130 Picon, Antoine 4 Pinney, Christopher 10, 240 pixação xviiii, 120, 122, 124–5 pixadores 122, 124–5 Pixobomb 92, 122 Plato 36, 38 play xxvii, 5, 31, 34, 44, 76, 86, 92, 96, 98, 100, 102, 104, 108–9, 115–16, 118, 134, 142–3, 146, 148–9, 153–4, 158, 161–4, 166, 169, 173–4, 177, 180–81, 184, 186–7, 189, 190, 192, 194, 198–200, 207–10, 214, 219, 221–2, 226, 228, 231, 234, 240–41 plurality 63, 192, 99, 106, 113, 119, 175 policia 5, 7 polis 11, 69, 117, 226, 234 political xvii, xviii, 5, 7, 8, 48, 53, 56, 57, 58, 61, 92, 95, 96, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104, 113, 114, 116, 126, 139, 172, 173, 175, 177, 178, 192, 200, 202, 204, 226, 231, 234

275

politics xviii, xxi, 11, 96, 101, 102, 104, 113, 116, 119, 126, 172, 173, 234 pollution xxvii, 22, 46, 110–11, 119, 159–60, 169, 234 postproduction 19 Powers, Stephen 50, 154 prescribed actions 134, 147, 202, 223 production xix, xxvi–xxvii, 10, 16, 19, 21–7, 32, 42, 48, 50–51, 53, 63, 66, 70, 75, 77, 80, 87–88, 107, 113, 117, 133–4, 138, 146–7, 153, 156, 158, 166, 169–70, 174, 177, 179, 181, 186, 192, 208–10, 214–16, 219, 222, 224, 229, 231, 236–8, 243, 245 aesthetic xix, xxiv, 16, 21, 27, 32, 42, 28, 51, 53, 63, 70, 75, 77, 88, 107, 133–8, 146, 153, 158, 169, 174, 186, 192, 208–10, 215–16, 219, 222, 224, 231, 236, 238, 243 cultural xxvii, 21, 48, 50–51, 107, 133 medium of 51, 147 profane 133, 156 proposition xxviii, 26, 59, 62–4, 70, 72–3, 76–7, 79–86, 104, 203–6, 217 language 59, 70, 72, 204–6 proscribed actions 223 public authority 56, 65, 69, 80 public liminality 169, 180 public sphere xix, xxiv, xxci, 26, 47–8, 55–8, 61, 63–4, 66–9, 75, 80, 82, 87–8, 90, 92, 95, 100–102, 106, 112–13, 116–17, 125–6, 128, 180, 186–7, 221, 223–4, 226, 228, 234 quasidetachment 35–6 quattrocento 30 Rabelais, François 174, 176, 183 radical xvi, 48, 50, 96, 109, 140, 164, 174, 178–181, 183–4, 192, 207, 238 Radtke, Fred 44 Rafael Pixobomb 92 Rappaport, Roy 72, 133, 138–43, 146–7, 153, 156, 224, 229, 240 rationality 55, 59, 61, 61, 69, 77, 79, 95, 101–2, 112, 126 Rawls, John 99 Read More Books 111, 199 Readings, Bill 96–7, 99, 106, 109 reaffirmation 161, 163 refeudalization xvi, 57 reflective 4, 180 reflexive 180

276 Ornament and Order

Remed xxii, 20–21, 27, 33, 36, 42–4, 54–5, 62, 65, 77–81, 137, 153, 157, 207, 210, 242, 247 Remio 101, 144–5, 218 renaissance 1, 7–8, 30, 174, 178, 237, 241 Rennes 110 resistance 10, 92, 95–6, 100, 173, 177–8, 186, 222, 239 Revok 35, 68, 119 revolution xviii, 1, 3, 71, 83, 122, 161, 163, 170, 174, 179, 232 Riegl, Alois 27–8, 36, 47 Ring 33 risk xviii, 26, 47, 75, 80, 128, 134, 138, 158–9, 162, 169, 181, 187, 194, 198–200, 202, 207, 210, 215–16, 221, 224, 243 rites xvi, 7, 109, 129, 134, 129, 143, 159, 161, 163–4, 170, 178–80, 182, 187, 199–200, 202, 206, 215–16, 221 ritual xv, xvii–xviii, xxi, xxiv, xxvii, 5, 8, 30, 72, 128–9, 133–4, 138–143, 146–7, 149–50, 153, 156, 158–64, 169–70, 172–3, 176, 178–81, 183–4, 186–7, 189–90, 192, 194, 198–200, 202–10, 215–17, 219, 221–4, 228–9, 231, 235–41, 243–4 Rodriguez-Luis, Julio 190 Rorty, Richard 126 Rothko, Mark 126 Rowland, Ingrid D. 193 rule-governance 139, 142, 156 rules and regulations 108, 116, 146, 149, 153–4, 156, 199, 208, 216, 223–4 Ruskin, John 4–5, 28, 48 Ryan, Allan J. 192, 210, 229 sacral symbolism 139, 143, 156 sacred 4, 133–4, 138, 150, 156, 172, 194, 208, 219, 221, 231, 235–7, 243 Salvajismo xix Sam3 223 San Daniel Muñoz xxii–xxiii, 9, 44–6, 218, 247 San Francisco (USA) 218 sanctified 139, 156 Sanskrit 4 São Paulo (Brazil) xx, 94, 101, 121–2, 125 Schacter, Rafael xv, xxi, 16, 34, 158, 237 artefactual agency 16, 32 corporeal illicitness 158 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy 163 Schieffelin, Edward L. 146, 200, 203, 206

Schirato, Tony 208 Schmitt, Carl 99–101 Searle, John R. 59–60, 223–4 selfhood 34 Semper, Gottfried 3–4, 33, 163 ancient stucco 3 Sennett, Richard xxii, 7–8, 38, 222, 229, 231 Serbest, Asli 4, 163 Serra, Richard 126 Serres, Michel 193 sgraffito xxvii, 20–21, 28, 34, 38 Shakespeare 174, 177 Shandy, Tristam 85 Shit 33 Sieber, Chandler 214 Sierra, Santiago 126 silence 85, 98, 116, 136, 147, 194, 234 Situationist 208 Sixe Paredes xxii, 150, 228, 230, 247 Slave Cave Collective 149 societas 172 Sophists 96 Spanish Renaissance 7 spatial xxvii, 7, 10, 16, 20, 51, 56, 69, 91, 109, 112, 116, 129, 136, 138–9, 147, 160, 208 speech acts 5, 59–61, 64, 70, 72–3, 76, 81, 85, 92, 95, 103, 142, 182, 203–4, 208, 217 Splasher 124 Spok xxii, 20–21, 25, 33, 51, 92, 94, 108, 117–19, 135–8, 153, 168, 210, 216, 229, 247 spraycan art xix, 150 Spyer, Patricia 11–12, 36, 187 Stallybrass, Peter 162, 178, 180, 214 state power 56 steering media 61, 87 sterility 203, 206–7 Sterne, Laurence 85 Stewart, Pamela J. 31, 202 Stockholm (Sweden) 66, 191 strategic 59–61, 63, 67, 69, 76, 80, 86, 139, 162 Strathern, Andrew J. 28, 202 street xxiv, xxv–xxvi, 1–3, 7, 10, 11–12, 15–16, 19–20, 34, 39, 47–51, 64, 66–7, 75–8, 80–83, 85–6, 111, 115, 117, 119–20, 122, 124–6, 128, 134, 136–7, 149, 154, 160–61, 164, 166, 168–9, 180, 182, 196, 198, 208, 210, 221, 223–4, 226, 228–9, 231–4

index

structural transformation 55–7, 61, 64, 69, 170 structure xv–xvii, 5, 7–8, 21, 26, 30, 32, 35–6, 38–42, 46, 51, 58, 88, 126, 136, 139–40, 142, 146–7, 149, 153, 156, 159–60, 163–4, 169–70, 172, 177, 180, 183–4, 186–7, 189–90, 194, 199–200, 203, 205, 226 stylography 10 subculture xvii–xviii, xxi, 159 Suber, Peter 67 subjunctivity 183 subversion 36, 163–4, 172, 177–9, 183–4, 192, 202, 210, 222 Sullivan 3 superficial 8, 28, 30, 113, 224 Suso33 xxii Swyngedouw, Erik 10 symbolic xxviii, 8, 26, 31–2, 41, 47, 59, 100, 112, 116, 122, 133, 140, 143, 146, 159–60, 162, 170, 178, 181, 190, 198, 205–6, 208, 210, 241, 244 synoikismos 7 taboo 143, 147, 156, 159, 162, 180, 214, 216, 224, 243 tabula rasa 20 tag xvii, 21–2, 24–6, 34, 41–2, 44, 48, 51, 80, 83, 106–7, 110, 118, 120, 122, 148–9, 152–3, 156, 166, 168, 198, 216, 219, 228 Tambiah, Stanley 158–9, 178, 205–6 Tannen, Ricki 190 Tarifa (Spain) 232 tattoo 34, 36, 38, 41, 44 technicizing 61 temporal 75, 139, 142, 156, 160, 208, 216, 238 Tenerife (Spain) 162 tension 40–41, 44, 84, 91, 95, 99–100, 102, 104, 113–14, 116, 124, 137, 149, 158, 168, 208, 217, 222, 234, Terry, Francis 1, 3, 11, 40, 232, 234 Terry, Quinlan 1, 3, 11, 40, 232, 234 textual modality 48, 75, 77 throw-up 21, 48, 117, 138, 168 Tiesdell, Steven 21, 42, 79 Tika 164, 166, 168–9 Til 33 Tilley, Christopher 205 Tiravanija, Rirkrit 126 Todorov, Tsvetan 202 Tonk 33

277

track-sides 136 tradition xix, xxii, xxvii, 3, 16, 21, 26–7, 30, 40–41, 49–50, 69, 72, 76, 78, 80–81, 83, 85, 87, 99, 103, 112, 119, 124, 133–4, 137, 139–42, 146, 149–50, 152, 154, 159, 162, 169, 174–5, 184, 186, 204, 206–7, 215, 217, 221, 226, 231, 243 transformation 48, 55–7, 61, 64–5, 69, 96–7, 106, 109, 164, 170, 183–4, 187, 202, 226, 239 transformative 10, 92, 169–70, 178 transgression 100, 112, 134, 147, 162–3, 169, 174, 178, 183–4, 224 transgressive 11, 141, 164, 180, 184 Tremblin, Mathieu 110 trickster 160, 187, 189–90, 192–3, 210, 214–15, 219, 222 Trilling, James 4, 31, 154 trompe l’oeil 3, 232 Tunis (Tunisia) 10 Turbo 107 Turnbull, Colin 141 Turner, Victor Witter 161, 163–4, 169–70, 172–5, 177, 180–81, 183–4, 189, 190 communitas 169–70, 172–3, 181 duality 172 structure and antistructure 172 Union Square 232 unity xvii–xviii, xxv, 21–2, 31, 36, 42, 50, 63–4, 66–7, 77, 79, 86, 88, 108, 113, 128, 142, 159, 162, 169–70, 177, 186–7, 207, 224, 228–9, 231 urban xv, xvii, xix, xxi, xxv, 5, 7, 10–11, 27, 36, 39, 41, 47, 67, 113, 115–16, 122, 133–4, 169, 180, 193, 210, 222, 226 utterances 63, 87, 96, 99, 104, 107–8, 138, 140, 142 validity 59–60, 63–4, 69–70, 72–3, 75–7, 80, 82, 95 vandalism xxii, xxvii, 21, 50, 67, 69, 78, 111, 120, 126, 159, 169, 180, 214 Venturi, Robert 3, 26, 31–2 Vigo (Spain) xxii–xxiii, 93, 114–15, 148, 225, 227–8, 230, 244 Villa, Dana R. 95–6, 102 Vinograd, Richard 241 violence 41, 69, 85, 92, 96, 102, 104, 143, 156, 186, 205, Vitruvius 3, 30 Vorotniov, Vova 37

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Wadleigh, Frank 214 Ward, Barbara E. 235–6 Warner, Michael 61, 103, 114, 126 counterpublic 61, 103, 114, 126 Warnke, Georgina 70 Warsaw (Poland) 37 Weber, Donald 173 Weibel, Peter 232 Wellmer, Albrecht 70 Werbner, Richard P. 204 Wermke, Matthias 27 wheat-pasting 47 White, Allon 162 Wigley, Mark 31, 34, 36, 40, 46, 186

white-out 34 Wilson, James 40 Wilson, Woodrow 26 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 236 Wochenklausur Collective 126 Wright, Frank Lloyd 27 Wynne, Derek 147 Zaidman, Louise Bruit 231–2 Zedz 41 Zoan 117–18 Zosen 98 Zukin, Sharon xxvi Zurich (Switzerland) 164