Graffiti Discourse of Madness: a cartography of knowledge/power relations through the situatedness of the graff writer at the nexus of graffiti black book and paradox of live-painting/live-streaming practices

Abstract

Acknowledging the crucial part of intentions in the ‘story of artistic creation’ is one thing. Responding to demands for a literary document from the first experience of being a graff writer is another more complex undertaking. Since Livingston’s responses (2005) to the “debate over the relevance of artistic intentions In the interpretations of work (s) of art”, that: “rival assumptions about intentions indicate the importance of investigating our reason for preferring any of them and especially those reasons that do not amount to the question-begging contention that a given assumption is best because it supports one’s favored view of interpretation or more some topic in aesthetics” (Livingston:2005). Attempted here, is a fragmentary process describing an imaginative journey of constructing an individual identity through the graff name, Maseveni. The graff name carefully selected among other possibilities to designate one as the graff writer around the idea being that we need experiences from those ‘immersed in intemperate weather... whose timetables depended, hourly by hour, on the state of the sky and season...’ (Serres: 1992) to situating the graffiti manifestation within the visual research. The questions regarding art as a thinking process provides a site for reimagining ways in which the like graffitilike, “visual arts must be considered a field of knowledge and that an (graffiti) artwork should be considered, first and foremost, a thinking process” (Vettese).The paper responds to questions regarding academic and institutional debates in the artist research field noted by Slager (2009) that: “...it is highly pressing for us to approach research practices from the perspective of the artistic profession, implying entirely different, and also more intrinsic views” suggesting ways to resist the authorization of a simple anti-essentialism. Utilizing concepts embedded in graffiti inscriptions and literary notes in Maseveni manifestations which provide ways in which graffiti forms transcends lines of sacred arts/science, magic/religion, art/science etc. guides the dissertation in constituting graffiti within art history and to suggest ways of assimilating knowledges about graffiti across time and geography towards ‘thinking through graffiti’ as a constituted field of knowledge. Drawing vocabularies from visual arts permits ways to explore graffiti’s “mode of experiencing the world itself” to engage with questions of how graffiti practices inform visual art pedagogy, and towards a phenomenological analyses which “situates the search for definitions of art within a reflection on the horizon in which art shows ‘itself’, and how, therefore, art can ‘disclose’ why we care about it” as noted by Parry (ed. 2011)