Category Archives: Books

Read Palestine, Read Graffiti

Seeing as today marks the start of Read Palestine Week I thought I’d see if I could find something about Palestinian graffiti to review. Almost everything I’ve seen about graffiti, or more precisely street art, from Palestine has been related to the West Bank Wall. In some ways the art that has been painted on the wall has drawn attention to it in a similar way to that which was put on the Berlin Wall. Various high profile street artists have travelled to the West Bank to make their statement on the wall, some largely with their western audience in mind, others more in earnest, before flying back home. So I was quite pleased when I came across Mia Gröndahl’s Gaza Graffiti: Messages of Love and Politics.

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A Fond Farewell

It’s not too often that publications focusing on a single artist are featured on the Graffiti Review. In this case Schnellbahn is a photographic monograph presenting the work of Astro Polygon over a two and a half year period. More specifically the book focuses on the body of work produced by Astro on the ET4020 model of electric multiple units that operate on the Vienna S-bahn. Spread over nearly three hundred pages, short essays by various contributors narrate the pieces documented within. The 4020 is currently in the closing stages of being withdrawn by Austria’s national rail operator and so this project serves as something of a nostalgic farewell. 

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Graffiti Discourse

Graffiti is a new collection put together by Friederike Häuser which, as its German subtitle suggests, seeks to provide a range of contemporary and interdisciplinary perspectives on the topic. In his forward to the book Jeffrey Ian Ross explains that the publication is one of an ever increasing body of contributions there are on the subject. Containing fifteen chapters, ranging across diverse topics, I’ll just focus on those written in English.  

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Nationalist muralism in contemporary Poland

Having reviewed Wojciech Wilczyk’s work in the past the Graffiti Review were pleased to catch up and ask the photographer about his newest release Słownik polsko-polski, which translates as the ‘Polish-Polish Dictionary’. This evolved out of his previous book, named after the notorious ‘Holy War’ derby between the two major Kraków football clubs, which documented the graffiti of Polish fans. His latest publication focuses on the nationalist murals that have come to dominate the country’s walls under the PiS government. 

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How B****y didn’t conquer the Middle East

When the new book by Sabrina DeTurk plonked through the letter box and I saw the title I admit I wasn’t too enthused. Firstly street art ain’t particularly my cup-of-tea and secondly the topic of Street Art in the Middle East isn’t exactly uncovered ground since the Arab Spring. I hold some vague theory that the street art that accompanied the uprisings was seized on by Western spectators as an easy visualisation of events in an otherwise politically alien landscape. It was perhaps proof this ‘backward’ region was yearning for Western values and culture. The attention on street art was another simplification of events that fed into, what David Wearing calls, “a deeply ingrained set of basically racist assumptions that frame many people’s understanding of our relationship with this part of the world.”

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Wildlife Style

Trees might seem an odd topic for the average reviewer of graffiti publications to discuss but here I find myself with not one but two graff related books about trees! The first is a large format zine called The_ Forest _Man which collects together tags scratched into tree trunks. The second is the Urban Jungle: Eindhoven which, as the title alludes to, is a graffers-eye-view on the flora of a Dutch city.

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Objects in a Glass Case

I recently got sent a copy of Scribbling Through History which was released just last year and is one of a whole slew of academic books on graffiti that have been published recently. The cover promises the long view on graffiti stretching back from antiquity to the present. Predictably enough, of twelve chapters, the two that cover modernity focus on the Middle-East and the internet. The rest of the content delves deeper into history where the modern idea of what constitutes graffiti becomes blurred with a greater variety of interpretation.

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Écrivez partout !

Delete Elite by Ben Brohanszky is my new favourite book! Published just last year the title, taken from off the street, is intended as a statement. The book is pitched as a study of ‘conceptual graffiti’ and contains the stuff that doesn’t neatly fit within the street-art/graffiti binary. Instead it is an esoteric meander that takes the reader from the earliest roots of modern graffiti to its contemporary manifestations. From the Provo movement through to Néma this is a tour of wall writing on the boundaries of the conventional graffiti movement. The whole book is meticulously referenced, and footnoted throughout, but also has a casual style which includes line drawings done by the author with his eyes closed.

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Framing A Counter-Narrative

When I first picked up Graffiti Grrlz I thought the book might contain an argument along the lines of how women are excluded from the masculine graffiti subculture. Actually the book’s author, Jessica Pabón-Colón, has written a positive account of female involvement in graffiti. That’s not to say the book paints a completely rosy picture but that it concentrates on how women practice and contribute to graffiti in an empowering way. Pabón-Colón wants her book to weave the “individual stories (of female participation) into a narrative about how they navigate their experiences as a collective within the subculture”. Through this narrative Graffiti Grrlz provides new and original insights into graffiti. The book explores the activities of female writers, based on interviews with the author, and how they ‘perform’ feminism through the graffiti subculture. From Africa to South America, graffiti jams to graffiti collectives, digital social networks and the internet archive there’s a broad range of experiences covered.

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(Un)Titled//Titled

Before I begin this review I have to admit to being the type of ‘non-specialised sceptic’ who Andrea Baldini criticises in the recent Un(Authorized)//Commissioned book. The publication he writes in can be regarded as a curators guide to exhibiting graffiti. This is not a topic that would usually appeal to me so, not being a particular expert nor a lover of art-galleries, I approached the book with mild cynicism. However the book brings up some interesting ideas that are worth discussing and has changed my opinion to some extent.

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