A guest blog post from Yohn!
Lascaux is remembered because it was something new for humanity; an evolution in our brains that started off this whole thing called art and culture. While we in the 21st century may impose ‘timeless’ narratives and themes of human nature onto these works, what is actually depicted is deeply rooted in the ‘pre-history’ huntergatherer world. When the artists set their hands to cavewall they did not paint spaceships, or computers, or molatov cocktails. They are Paleolithic images. The artists painted what they knew, believed, and what was generally of importance to them. Thus their graffiti is for us a window into their minds. It says something about them and their world.
The only piece of graffiti in my town is pictured above. It similalrly ‘says’ some things about the people living in this place, and about some art in general.
It is a picture of a man with a goatee and mullet, chewing a piece of grass, giving the middle finger, with a speech-bubble caption reading, though faded, “Ya can’t beat Beeton.” In the background is the command, typical of small-town conservatism, NO GRAFFITI ALLOWED.
Granting all the wonders of a small town, they can nonetheless be incubators of isolated and narrow-minded people. There is no better archetype that i know of than ‘the hick’ which captures this idea. The hick’s mantra is “My view of the world is the only correct one, and, if yours is different, it is wrong. You can’t beat me.” Of course, the joke is that the hick is always uneducated and out of fashion; two signs that their steadfast claim to what is right is decidedly behind the times. It is a parody of stupid, unfashionable rural people who somehow manage to still be assertive.
This one piece of summarizing graffiti is a message of caution to the inhabitants of Beeton; be aware, there is a lot more out there. The very act of art lets us know this: There are rules, NO GRAFFITI ALLOWED, but they can be broken. There is the world we know, but others to explore.
This is why i think most, if not all, “great art” is mind-expanding. It offers an insight, or new perspective, draws our attention to something we didnt see. True, we may turn to some art as history merely. But the art that we remember, that inspires, is taking us somewhere- somewhere we hadnt thought of before. It is an evolution or mutation. This is why art generally, and graffiti specifically, is ahead of, or critical of, its time, and why non-progressive small towns do not like it.
It is why my town choose to paint over its one piece of graffiti.
