By Scott Anthony

They finally got me. The would-be artists who favor krylon spray paint and late working hours tagged my fence last night. If I were an art critic, I would say that the composition is reasonable, showing balance between two individual fence sections, with a minimalist use of flat white, and with the indecipherable text perhaps indicating lack of language skills. As near as I can tell, the author/artist is named either ‘Tom5’ or simply, ‘Abe’ and that he may belong (or wish to belong) to some club called ‘GMK’.

That’s the extent of my white-bread street-cred knowledge of this sort of late night, one-handed sign of self congratulation. Unless the small, motion sensing game camera I fished out of my hunting gear and installed above the fence line happens to catch the fun loving quick-painter if he or she should happen to return. For fun, I will send the photo on to ‘Seattlegraffitti.blogspot.com’ where it can reside with the other 200 or so posts by other free bad-art sufferers like myself.

The sheer number of punkified scribblings around our city, as featured on that website made me wonder about the history of graffiti, so I looked it up. Turns out that some folks see graffiti as ‘free art’ while others call it vandalism. In most countries, if it’s sprayed or scribbled onto private property without the owners consent, it’s illegal. But if it happens to be finely crafted or particularly intricate and colorful, it may become valued enough to protect. And like any and all art, the final judgement is purely subjective. Graffiti comes from the italian word, ‘graffiato’ which means ‘scratched’ and originally, graffiti was the stuff found in tombs and other ruins like the Catacombs of Rome and included inscriptions and figure drawings. But the very first examples are said to be the pictographs that date back to 30,000 BCE as drawn on the walls of caves using plant pigments and animal bones. Some historic forms of graffiti closely resembled the sort of thing we might find on public bathroom walls today. Stone workers in ancient Rome are said to have left graffiti at local brothels, including one particularly egotistical comment from a gladiator named Celedrus, which read thusly: Suspirium puellarum Celadus thraex or ‘Celedrus the Thracian makes the girls sigh.’

More modern examples include the paintwork found in subways and on railcars, as well as the wartime pictograph ‘Kilroy Was Here’ and the sixties London revelation that ‘Clapton is God’. Rap and Hiphop music revitalized the use of tagging when it became vogue-ish to let other gang members know that your territory was now marked. (Note: Salesman used to use business cards for this, but the practice apparently became outmoded.)

And lest we locals begin to feel special, it is understood that graffiti is a global phenomenon, with taggers tagging walls, buildings, fences and cars from Alaska to Zamibia. While the vast majority of spray painted and scribbled graffiti is simple vandalism, there is some stuff that is quite good, including a distinctive stencilling techique pioneered by a british aerosolist name of ‘Banksy’. (look him up…quite interesting.)

All of this is fine and good if you like art, but if the writing on the wall is on your wall, and you don’t particularly care for it, you can contact the City of Seattle by going online, or by visiting city hall and requesting a Code Action Request Form. In this city it is illegal to create graffiti, but interestingly, if your property has been tagged, it is your responsibility to remove the markings and according to King County/Seattle City Code, ‘enforcement action can be taken if graffiti is not removed in a timely manner.’

As I was painting over the tag, I thought to myself; What sort of mischief did I get into when I was a recalcitrant, night-roaming lad?

When I answered myself, I realized that I probably deserved a bit of payback, and so if this is the worst of it, I’m in pretty good shape.

I wondered too, if the person who stole the spray can from their Dad’s garage might see this column and wish to reprise their work over the freshly repainted fence. I decided that there is little chance of this, since judging by the poor execution, the poor little individual likely cannot read.