Graffiti in hiding

Sometimes graffiti is hidden in secret places, sometimes it is in plain sight but its meaning is hidden.

Not so long ago a Sydney builder was surprised when he pulled up an old carpet and found two large messages painted on the floorboards underneath – so surprised that he posted photos of them on his Facebook page.

It’s not all that unusual for renovators and demolishers to find hidden graffiti left by tradespeople at some earlier date in a building’s life. But these personal statements composed by two young sisters in 1983 are extraordinary both for their size and for the detail of their content. They are like secret/not secret teenage diary entries concealed by floor covering.  Those girls wanted someone in the future to read all about them, but they could never have anticipated the mediatisation of their words via digital photography and social media.

Hidden graffiti can be revealed not only by accident but by determined sleuthing. Researcher Susan A. Phillips, for example, photographed pencil, charcoal, and scratched graffiti hidden under the bridges and in the drains and culverts of Los Angeles. Written mostly by people who were “transient, ethnic minorities, or queer” these marks were up to a century old. Phillips spent over twenty-five years collecting images and stories for her remarkable book The City Beneath.

Phillips remarks on graffiti’s versatility as a clandestine form of expression. The condensed messages she found in hidden places were most often related to the name of someone or something, or were sexual words or drawings. But there was also enigmatic writing and what she called “odd hieroglyphics”.

Odd kinds of graffiti whose meaning is hidden are sometimes referred to as cryptic graffiti. These might be written in secret places, as Phillips’ examples were, but it are just as likely to be easily visible in public places. One practitioner of cryptic graffiti is the Hawaiian artist who rather unimaginatively calls himself Cryptik. This person hand-paints Eastern philosophy iconography on Western walls. His Cryptik Movement “is dedicated to helping humanity evolve towards greater awareness and understanding through public art”. While his walls are aesthetically pleasing they do not represent his philosophy in any obvious way.

A few years ago The Age journalist Tom Cowie wrote about some “cryptic drawings appearing on Melbourne footpaths”. When interviewed, the artist, Astral Nadir, explained that philosophy was his inspiration and that the theme of space and forests was a recurring motif.  Nadir called his marks ‘glyphs’ but, curiously, he maintained that his work was not graffiti. I would disagree – of course it is graffiti. But I do agree with the journalist that ‘cryptic’ is an appropriate term to describe Nadir’s work.

The origins of the word ‘cryptic’ ultimately lead back to the Greek kryptós, meaning hidden or secret. But since its first known usage in the English language in the 17th century, the term seems to have always carried connotations of ‘hidden meaning’ rather than ‘physically hidden’. Common synonyms offered by the Merriam-Webster Thesaurus are: ambiguous, dark, enigmatic, equivocal, obscure, and vague. But the thesaurus cautions that, while all these words mean ‘not clearly understandable’, ‘cryptic’ implies a purposely concealed meaning.

A common type of graffiti seen on roads and footpaths everywhere is made by surveyors who, aided by remote sensing devices, draw maps of the underground with fluoro spray-cans. I am tempted to use the word ‘cryptic’ for this writing because for most passersby like me it is meaningless. But for the government agencies and utility companies who need to know where tunnels, pipes and cables are buried, the survey marks impart important advice. They do not purposely conceal information but deliberately reveal it. They are not cryptic.

There is one more type of graffiti I want to mention that is cryptic. How could I not? The history of the worldwide phenomenon of ‘name’ graffiti that began as New York subway-style ‘writing’ in the 1960s is a history of encryption. Graffiti forms – including the ubiquitous ‘tag’ and the wall-sized ‘pieces’ that use highly stylised calligraphy – encode a graffiti artist’s street name or their ‘crew’ affiliation and make territorial statements. Their meanings are understood only by the cognoscenti.

Libraries of books have been written about these forms of graffiti, but I still like to quote Robert Reisner, an academic graffiti historian from the 1970s. Reisner was not interested in what graffiti looked like. His books were basically compendiums of old-fashioned graffiti transcribed by him and given some sort of sociological or linguistic explanation.   He dismissed the “recent phenomenon of the spray-can artist” because its content was “relatively unimportant”.

Reisner had no inkling that ‘name’ graffiti would become international, dominating worldwide public places for decades.  He complained that the spray-can art itself had become the message. He was right about that. But he did not understand that the message was meaningful, with the meaning intentionally hidden in the aesthetic possibilities of invented lettering and unconventional spelling.

Images and references

‘After pulling up some old carpet, Camperdown [Sydney, NSW]’, two photos by Vince Righi on VSR Construction Facebook page, 2020. 

Phillips, S. A. (2019) The city beneath: a century of Los Angeles graffiti, New Haven and London, Yale University Press.

POW!WOW!HAWAII 10 Year Anniversary, photo on Cryptik web page, 22 February 2020.

Peace on the streets, Vandalog – A Street Art Blog, 16 August 2012   

Cowie, T. (2018) The story behind the cryptic drawings appearing on Melbourne footpaths, The Age, Melbourne, 3 December 2018. 

Photo Instagram @astral_nadir

Merriam-Webster Thesaurus, ‘cryptic’ synonyms.  

Survey marks, Surry Hills, NSW, 2009, photo Megan Hicks.

Reisner, R. (1971) Graffiti: two thousand years of wall writing, New York, Cowles Book Co., Inc.

Reisner, R. & Wechsler, L. (1980) Encyclopedia of graffiti, New York, Galahad Books.                               

Hicks, M. (2013) Pavement graffiti: an exploration of roads and footways in words and pictures, PhD Thesis, Macquarie University, NSW.

Juxtaposition of carefully explicit and extravagantly cryptic graffiti, Enmore, NSW, 2008, photo Megan Hicks.

WATERSHED MOMENTS. EXCURSION 4. FOREBODING.

11 July 2021

I am back at the magnificent Stanmore Sewer Vent. It is going to rain, but I have started out on this episode of my walk around the rim of the Johnstons Creek catchment because I want to photograph the vent under an overcast sky. Last time I was here the dappled shade from street trees obscured the details of its flaking sandstone plaque which, it turns out, reads METROPOLITAN BOARD OF WATER SUPPLY & SEWERAGE 1900.

As I stand back to get a full-height shot of the vent and its accompanying house, a man runs across the road, angrily kicking a piece of wood as he goes, and enters the cottage’s front gate. I call out, ‘I hope you don’t mind’ and he growls, ‘You can take photos of a sewer vent any time’.

Our route takes us round into Percival Road, the main street of Stanmore, flanked by more neat turn-of-the-20th-century houses and leading down to a park, the railway station and a small cluster of shops. The sky to the south is looking ominous.

The rim line runs between houses and emerges in the lane behind, where I find a garage roller-door tribute to the composer Philip Glass complete with sketch portrait.

In an adjacent lane a man is taking his kids and dog for their permitted outdoor exercise in their local government area.  Apart from the cranky sewer vent resident we have, as usual, seen practically no-one on our walk. People are all inside as the Covid situation worsens. In the state of New South Wales there have been 77 new cases today and one death.

(The previous paragraph now seems ridiculous. I need to point out here that, although I took this walk on 11 July 2021, I have not got round to transcribing my notes until six months later. The Covid comparison is staggering.

I am composing this blog post on 1 January 2022, when 22,577 new infections have been recorded in New South Wales and four deaths. The reasons for the differing case number statistics (but reasonably similar death rate) between July and January include the intervening advent of the Delta and Omicron variants of the virus, the lifting of lockdowns and restrictions on movement, and a very high proportion of the adult population fully vaccinated.)

It is spitting now and we have not brought umbrellas, so we loop back around to the car, passing a cute domestic wall decoration on the way. Safely ensconced at home I think I might listen to some favourite music – Philip Glass perhaps.

Bill posters won’t be prosecuted

Despite galloping gentrification, the Newtown-Enmore ‘destination precinct’ of Sydney’s inner west retains remnants of its former underground student activism, most notably in the form of fly-posters promoting leftist and anarchist causes.

Bill posting is illegal, with the local Inner West Council defining posters as ‘visual pollution’, along with other forms of ‘unwanted graffiti’. However, unlike the City of Sydney, which administers the north-eastern end of Newtown, the Inner West Council does not carry out an aggressive program of graffiti and poster removal. This might mean the Inner West has a smaller budget for street beautification, but over the years I have come to realise that it also indicates an uneasy tolerance on the part of Council, and that this tolerance is based on ambivalence. 

Inner West Council trades on the image of Newtown-Enmore as a ‘vibrant’ and edgy area where there is always something to see and do. Its arts program, tellingly named EDGE, seeks to reinforce the area’s position as ‘the cultural engine of global Sydney’. It is noteworthy that the 2019 EDGE program was themed Art and Activism and that it included works of pseudo-graffiti, such as a series of giant paste-up illustrations celebrating the Reclaim the Streets activist movement, and trails of animal stencils on footpaths described as a ‘guerrilla pavement art project bearing witness to The Sixth Mass Extinction’.

With this kind of endorsement of graffiti and paste-ups it’s not surprising that unauthorised fly-posters have become an intrinsic element of Newtown-Enmore’s cultural capital. Political posters draw attention to the locality’s history as a seat of activism and this history is encouraged by Council’s arts programs to be regarded as an element of cultural ‘heritage’.

This blog post is an edited excerpt from:

HICKS, M. (2021) Flyposter graffiti and the change in a Sydney streetscape during the time of COVID-19. Visual Studies, 36, 141-146.

Concrete Creeks. Excursion 7. The tip.

Sunday 19 April 2020

It’s over three weeks since we visited this light industrial triangle between Johnstons Creek and Pyrmont Bridge Road. There have been other excursions in between but now I’m back to find out what happens to the creek beyond the forbidding metal fence where it drops into an open canal behind Water Street.  Just a few neatly kept little houses remain here, tucked between hulking factories and warehouses, and we have come on a Sunday hoping to avoid large trucks squeezing into delivery bays. I walk down a driveway between two houses in Water Street and find that it opens onto a gravelled space bounded on three sides by buildings and on the fourth by a thick jungle of banana trees, castor oil plants, convolvulus and asthma weed. With no machete available I can only peer down the steep slope for glimpses of the canal wall, recognisable by its symbiotic graffiti.

Frustrated by the banana jungle we move east to a wider industrial street that leads directly down to the canal. I have never been on Chester Street before but later I will read that there was once a household garbage tip amongst the houses on this side of Johnstons Creek. It was the source of much friction between the adjoining boroughs of Camperdown and Annandale in the late 1800s. For fifteen years countless  newspaper column inches were taken up with reports of council meetings and letters to the editor on the subject of the Camperdown tip, whose ‘deadly effluvia’ made the creek filthy and ‘endangered the lives of the residents of North Annandale’. There are no houses here now and no tip. Instead there is a motor repair business with a wild piece of wall art.

We walk down the hill to a newly-built footbridge over the canal. On the other side of the dip the street climbs up between the Federation houses of re-gentrified Annandale.

Everything here looks new, but the two playgrounds  are roped off to prevent children from disobeying social distancing rules. This tiny canalside reserve is called ‘Douglas Grant Memorial Park’ in honour of an Aboriginal man whose original name was Ng:tja. The survivor of a massacre, in 1887 he was taken as a toddler from his North Queensland home thousands of kilometres away and brought up in Annandale as a member of his captor’s family. His story is told on two plaques.  It does not end well.

By taking a short walk along where this narrow park skirts a series of backyard fences, I can look across to the place where I had earlier tried bush-bashing.  The clear band of water that I couldn’t see from the other side reflects the sky, but the graffiti is old and dilapidated, as if the renovation of the area has made the canal too public for spray painters.

This nook in Annandale is a revelation to me. But not to locals of course. Not the cyclists and joggers intermittently crossing the bridge. The two young men casually shooting a basketball. The squealing children doing wheelies on their scooters. Nor the three teenagers sitting at a picnic table and idly chatting not quite 1.5 metres apart.

Concrete Creeks. Excursion 6. The source.

Friday 10 April 2020

It is raining lightly and the urban currawongs are going joyously berserk as we set off. Having visited the mouth of Johnstons Creek we are now looking closer to home for its source, guided by an 1887 map of Sydney suburbs. We begin at the railway underpass in Liberty Street, Enmore, with its shredded posters. The Man Who Walks Ahead watches two bill posters posting on the opposite wall.

Crossing to the nearby roundabout I can see the spot that the map indicates as the beginning of the creek. It’s in a dip of what must have been a soggy paddock but is now Railway Avenue.

Tracing the creek from its source now becomes a matter of following the lie of the land and peering down grates in the roads to deep stormwater drains with yellow ladder rungs and sky glinting off water at the bottom.

We come to a corner where we can look down Salisbury Road. In the dip there is the paling fence that screens off Johnstons Creek where it modestly emerges from underground and continues its journey cosseted by an open air canal. But we have been there before so instead turn up the hill to imagine how rainwater runs above and below ground down towards the concrete creek.  In a back lane a piece of wall-and-pavement graffiti helpfully depicts this process for us.

We get suspicious glances from people sipping at paper cups while accompanying their raincoated children out for a scooter ride. At the end of the lane is a little café where customers queue obediently for their permitted take-way coffee. 

Our long walk has taken us through corner country where four suburbs meet. As we circle back to our starting point we find that those bill posters have renovated both sides of the underpass.

Concrete Creeks. Excursion 4. Deep water.

Friday 27 March 2020

For the fourth of our piecemeal visits to Johnstons Creek we return to Parramatta Road and plunge into the narrow streets on the northern side where a light industrial triangle is squeezed between the creek and Pyrmont Bridge Road. The streets slope down to a concrete pathway that covers this section of the canal. We turn left and find ourselves at the sandstone bridge on Parramatta Road, where thousands of cars pass Stanmore McDonald’s every day. The creek traces a silvery line through the shadows under the road.

Turning around to follow the flow of the creek we walk between the backs of properties, respectable Victorian houses on one side, factories and derelict houses on the other. The path comes to an abrupt end at a metal grate and fence. Beyond is a deep channel of coolness where we can hear the creek falling. A bird calls from somewhere in the overhanging shrubbery.

We scramble up into a grassy area at the foot of Water Street. I will later read a lengthy real estate advertisement from 1850, when the farm here was subdivided into housing allotments. This grassy area is described as “a RESERVED WATERING PLACE at deep water on Johnstone’s Creek [that] will add materially to the comfort of the occupants”. There are still some residences in Water Street as well as warehouses and the last house before the reserve has a small but unusual garden.

Walking back to the car I spot an abandoned shopping trolley and for a moment think I have come upon a cache of toilet paper.  But no, the cartload only consists of styrofoam packaging cylinders.

Concrete Creeks. Excursion 2. Where waters meet.

Saturday 21 March 2020

I have moved a short way upstream for today’s visit to Johnstons Creek. After inspecting the canal where it passes deep under Parramatta Road I am tracing it backwards and find that the next available viewing point is in a Stanmore street cut in half by the canal. A pedestrian bridge joins the two halves. The concrete waterway is flanked by factory walls on one side and backyard gardens on the other, whose overhanging trees hide shady secrets. ‘Call Your Mum’, urges a graffiti message. We set off to find what’s around the corner further upstream.

The streets in this commercial/industrial area are hot and lonely as if it were a Sunday afternoon but we are distracted by a café, open perhaps for one last day. Cautiously practising our new social distancing skills we order then sit out in a courtyard surrounded by closed studios and workshops that barricade us from the canal.

One last push on to Salisbury Road and I find what I’m looking for. This is where Johnstons Creek emerges from beneath its permanent suburban cover.  Surprisingly there’s another large drain that joins it. It’s time to go home and study old maps to find the sources of the creek and this underground tributary. They don’t always form such a lazy trickle. I’m later told that trainee volunteers with the local SES are brought here on ‘flooding hot spot tours’.

This week I was reminded that Sydney’s supreme suburban explorer, Vanessa Berry, has already tracked Johnstons Creek on her Mirror Sydney blog. Different eyes. We will compare notes next time we meet, whenever that might be. ‘Happy New Year Mate’ wishes another graffiti message in blue paint. Anxious strange year is more like it.

Concrete Creeks. Excursion 1. The sandstone bridge.

Thursday 12 March 2020

It is the beginning of social isolation and I have devised a plan that involves, not staying in, but getting out into the customarily deserted streets of suburbia. To keep me exercised and interested, but distanced, I will try tracing the paths of local waterways, most of them now hidden underground or confined to canals that lurk around back lanes. My Journal of the Plague Year will document a watery wander.

I start with Johnstons Creek, a notable watercourse on the inner western fringe of central Sydney.  It is named after Lieutenant George Johnston, who arrived as a marine on the First Fleet in 1788. Within a few years of the colony being established Johnston was granted a parcel of land and this creek formed the eastern boundary of his property.

My first excursion takes me to Parramatta Road, which crosses Johnstons Creek part the way along its course. Peering over a railing I can see the creek still flowing way down in the bottom of its ovoid stormwater canal. Before writing up this journal entry I learn from someone close to me that her graffiti crew used to spray here. But that was many years ago. I doubt there’s anything of hers visible now.

A Bicentennial plaque set into the concrete footpath tells me that a wooden bridge was built here in 1839. There are remnants of a subsequent sandstone bridge on the other side of Parramatta Road. More graffiti, including the name of a well known street artist who’s just recently been charged with sexual assault.

Banksy, Newtown and ephemerality

ADDENDUM. This blog post was the seed for a more detailed article in Nuart Journal, published in September 2019. You can find it at ‘Wall story: an 11-year visual record of a street art site in Sydney’.

Eleven years ago I photographed a fading piece of Banksy graffiti in Newtown, an inner west suburb of Sydney. It’s a version of the UK artist’s ‘Diver’ stencil and would have been done in 2003 when he made a secretive visit to Sydney. Back then I was concentrating on pavement graffiti and was not much interested in Banksy. I’m still not that interested, but anyone who writes about graffiti of any sort must eventually pay attention to the Banksy Phenomenon.

By 2008 Banksy was notorious enough for me to decide that I should photograph the Diver. It helped that there were two other types of graffiti nearby – a tile with hand-painted lettering fixed to the pavement (of course) and a mosaic of broken china stuck to the wall. All of these were along the side of Alfalfa House, an organic food cooperative that had been set up in 1981 at the corner of Enmore Road and Philip Street.

Only a few people knew about Banksy’s brief visit to Australia in 2003 and while the whereabouts of some of his stencils in Melbourne were known, I found it curious that so little attention had been paid to this one in a fairly busy street in Newtown, especially as one of his works on a wall in London had sold for some thousands of pounds early in 2008. But by the end of 2008 the Diver had finally received attention. The name ‘Vice Quid’ had been sprayed over it, whether out of ignorance or defiance I don’t know.

It’s possible an article in the Sydney Morning Herald had stirred up interest in the work. Even though the reporter had acknowledged that “Graffiti artists keep the whereabouts [of Banksy’s Sydney works] secret because there are fears the rocketing price of Banksy’s work means they might be broken out of the walls on which they are painted”,  nevertheless he had been quite specific about the location of the Diver.

When I privately expressed some dismay I was firmly told by a close acquaintance that it’s what should be expected. “It’s only graffiti. Graffiti’s not meant to last”. Not even Banksy’s. And it’s true. As I said in an earlier blog post – ‘Overpainting: order vs chaos’ – when taggers and spray-can artists paint over each other’s work, sometimes this is a display of disrespect and an assertion of territory, sometimes it’s a political act, and sometimes it is simply a natural progression in the world of informal street art, where the art is necessarily ephemeral.

Within a few months the wall was covered with tags, stencils, paste-ups and notices. The Diver, which had remained untouched for five years, was now barely visible.

A year later I couldn’t even be sure where the Banksy stencil was.

In 2011 Alfalfa House must have decided a makeover was in order. An artist was presumably organised to paint a mural on the side wall and it’s possible that someone, other than the artist themselves, thought this pattern was attractive. But, aesthetic qualities aside, in covering over what went before, the line had been crossed, from informal graffiti to commissioned art.

Notice, however, that the old wall mosaic and the pavement tile had escaped unscathed.

Fast forward to the present where the wall of Alfalfa House is now covered by a magnificent pastel-coloured work by well-known local street artist Phibs.  A remnant of the mosaic remains but the rest has been painted over. The pavement tile is gone, its lowly place now taken by a horizontal tag on the concrete.

But not even Phibs is above being scribbled on. So far the attempts at defacement have only been tentative.

Banksy’s latest notorious stunt was the semi-self-destruction of one of his works seconds after it was sold at a London auction for more than one million pounds in October 2018. Originally titled ‘Girl with a Balloon’ the work was renamed ‘Love is in the Bin’ by Banksy. It does not take much imagination to see the metaphorical connection between the shredding of a graffiti-stencil-turned-framed-artwork and the ephemerality of art on the street.

References:

Jinman, Richard, ‘Details emerge of Banksy’s Sydney visit’, Sydney Morning Herald, 17 January 2008.

Wikipedia, ‘Banksy’.

‘Banksy’s Girl with a Balloon artwork self destructs after selling for almost $1.9 million at auction’, ABC News, 6 October 2018.

All photographs by meganix.

Graffiti tricks

 

This is going to take a lengthy search. I am looking for images and mentions of graffiti that pre-date the explosion of informal public writing in the 1970s and 1980s. I’m concentrating on Sydney, but even within that narrow scope it won’t be easy.


Before the mid-1900s the term ‘graffiti’ was used for writing that had survived on walls found at ancient archaeological sites. It hardly ever referred to contemporary inscriptions in public places. So there’s not going to be much point in using Trove to scan the newspapers for references to ‘graffiti’.

Nor will it be much use searching through the catalogues of digitized photograph collections. When cataloguers are annotating images of buildings and streetscapes they note all sorts of things that might be used as search terms, but they hardly ever notice graffiti.

So I will have to look at images one by one in the collections at, for example, the Mitchell Library and the City of Sydney Archives. In the meantime I scrutinize the blow-ups of historical photographs that are currently being used to decorate building-site hoardings around town.

These blow-ups are not quite as they seem. Each of them is an element of an artwork called Double Take. Artist Rachel Harris has doctored the photographs by adding “unusual details”. There is a pair of them in King Street, Newtown. Look carefully and you’ll see that, alongside the shabby building and the stepload of kids, there is a modern bicycle, a basketball hoop, and … (no I’m not going to give away any more of the “hidden treasures”).

But what about the scribbles on the house and the paling fence? I am right to be excited because I’ve spotted historical examples of childish graffiti, or is this just another of Rachel Harris’s interventions?

Nevertheless, I’m on pretty solid ground regarding the graffiti on the accompanying photograph of the Hero of Waterloo Hotel. I’d say that pink scribble is definitely an early 21st century tag. And it post-dates Rachel’s digital trickery.

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