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One of the most curious, and perhaps revealing, phenomena of recent years is that of urban (and even rural) graffiti or tagging. Whole acres, square miles, of man-made surfaces are disfigured in Europe by a strange and inelegant calligraphy, in which some people, ever on the lookout for something counter-intuitive to say, claim to have found art. This seems to me the tribute that money pays to poverty without having to part with anything.
The vogue for tagging started in America, but the Europeans have, alas, far outdone the American originators of this horrible genre. It sometimes seems as if the worst spreads far quicker than the best; at any rate, the epidemiology of the phenomenon is worth the study.
From a certain point of view, the determination of taggers is admirable, or would be admirable if it were in pursuit of a better object. Taggers reach inaccessible surfaces at the cost of what must have been some danger to themselves, though I have not heard of anyone dying in an attempt to mark a wall as a dog marks a tree. But it may have happened.
Why do they do it? First there is a pleasure in the illicit that we have surely all experienced: We like to do something precisely because it is forbidden. Perhaps one way to tackle the epidemic would be by paradoxical intention: by making tagging compulsory for hours on end for pupils at junior school. The grammar of a foreign language would then come as a relief to them and they would never touch spray paint again.
A fashion often starts as rebellion and ends as convention, even if only in a small part of society. Convention is like death and taxes, an inescapable aspect of human existence. He who tries to escape it is as Canute who commanded the waves to cease. And, sure enough, tagging as an activity is now governed by various conventions (for example, no over-writing) that are accepted precisely because they seem to emerge from no authority, though on occasion they may be enforced by violence against those who attempt to ignore or break them.
The need to make their mark on something is no doubt part of the attraction of tagging for taggers. Apart from a few famous graffiti artists (Banksy being the most famous, his activity often partaking of a mordant wit), the overwhelming majority of taggers are almost certainly from the lower reaches of society. Such lower reaches have always existed, of course, but in a society in which we are all called upon to be unique individuals, in which celebrity has an exaggerated importance in the mental economy of so many people, in which employment is often precarious and in any case felt to be without dignity, and in which powerlessness is obvious (in a sense, powerlessness in a democracy is more humiliating than powerlessness in a tyranny), the need to assert oneself in some way or other, no matter how pointless, becomes all the more imperative. Thus tagging has several attractions at once: adventure, the conferral of membership of an oppositional group and self-assertion (not expression).
Whatever its motives, tagging conveys a sense of insecurity on areas in which it is prevalent. Because any tagger would be stopped by authority if caught in the act, the very fact that tagging is prevalent indicates that authority is absent from the area, that there is a kind of power vacuum that anybody ruthless may fill. Everybody understands this, even if he cannot articulate it.
But there is one other aspect of tagging that I have noticed in England and France: that is that taggers rarely deface good (which in Europe, alas, usually means old) buildings. Rather, they deface ugly surfaces, often of inhuman size, in which, again alas, modern urban spaces are so richly, or impoverishingly, supplied. It is true that tagging never improves those surfaces, but they are often in themselves of degrading hideousness.
Of course it is also true that taggers inhabit the very areas of cities in which such surfaces particularly abound. They are their natural habitat, as it were. But the mere proximity of such surfaces cannot explain the epidemiology of graffiti in England and France, because the daring that taggers exhibit in reaching inaccessible places could easily be employed by them in reaching more elegant places – not that I want to encourage them to do so.
In other words, the epidemiology of graffiti in England and France suggests a subliminal aesthetic criticism. It is a commentary on the kind of building and concrete surface that the fascist modernist architect, Le Corbusier[1], extolled and desired, with the enthusiasm of a revivalist evangelical, to spread throughout the whole world. In a sense, then, taggers in England and France are endowed with taste. The same is not true everywhere, unfortunately; it is not true in Italy or Portugal, where eighteenth century buildings are not exempted from the attentions of bruised and inflamed young egos.
[1] Xavier de Jarcy, Le Corbusier, un fascisme français, Albin Michel, 2015, or François Chaslin, Un Corbusier, Seuil, 2015
