DEVENIR NOMADA

   the magus dee dreams of a stone island in force, dying
in poverty, drunk on angelspeech, which paradoxically, he has not
actually heard,the scales of music tripping upward to evade him in
perpetual deferral to create open outward the place of definition.

RICHARD MAKIN

The notion was to cut a crude V into the sprawl of the
city, to vandalise dormant energies by an act of
ambulant signmaking. To walk out from Hackney to
Greenwich Hill, and back along the River Lea to
Chingford Mount, recording and retrieving the messages
on walls, lampposts, doorjambs: the spites and spasms
of an increasingly deranged populace. (I had developed
this curious conceit while working on my novel Radon
Daughters: that the physical movements of the
characters across their territory might spell out the
letters of a secret alphabet. Dynamic shapes, with
ambitions to achieve a life of their own, quite
independent of their supposed author. Railway to pub
to hospital: trace the line on the map. These botched
runes, burnt into the script in the heat of creation,
offer an alternative reading — a subterranean,
preconscious text capable of divination and prophecy.
A sorcerer's grimoire that would function as a curse
or a blessing.)

Armed with a cheap notebook, and accompanied by
the photographer Marc Atkins, I would transcribe all
the pictographs of venom that decorated our
near-arbitrary route. The messages were, in truth,
unimportant. Urban graffiti is all too often a
signature without a document, an anonymous autograph.
The tag is everything, as jealously defended as the
Coke or Disney decals. Tags are the marginalia of
corporate tribalism. Their offence is to parody the
most visible aspect of high capitalist black magic.
Spraycan bandits, like monks labouring on a Book of
Hours, hold to their own patch, refining their art by
infinite acts of repetition. The name, unnoticed
except by fellow taggers, is a gesture, an assertion:
it stands in place of the individual artist who, in
giving up his freedom, becomes free. The public
autograph is an announcement of nothingness,
abdication, the swift erasure of the envelope of
identity. It's like Salvador Dali in his twilight
years putting his mark on hundreds of blank sheets of
paper, authenticating chaos.

Serial composition: the city is the subject, a
fiction that anyone can lay claim to. "We are all
artists," they used to cry in the Sixties. Now, for
the price of an aerosol, it's true. Pick your view and
sign it. Sign events that have not yet happened. (Take
a stroll down somewhere like Catherine Wheel Alley,
off Bishopsgate, and see the future revealed on a wall
of white tiles. Superimposed fantasies. Scarlet
swastikas swimming back to the surface. The Tourette's
syndrome ravings of an outwardly reformed city. A
private place, a narrow passage, in which to let out
all the overtly disguised racist bile. The madness has
to find somewhere to run wild. Obscene formulae
incubating terrorist bombs. Runnels and enclosed
ditches where unwaged scribes are at last free of the
surveillance cameras.) Remember postal art, Fluxus?
All that European and transatlantic bumf now consigned
to a bunker beneath the Tate Gallery? Graffiti is the
Year Zero version.
THE FIRST WALK 
http://www.socialfiction.org/sinclair.htm

# posted by alvaro @ 12:45 p. m.