L.A. is a city under attack. Taggers are hated and feared. Out of control at night, now they are brazen enough to assault property in broad daylight. The blankness of walls is like Whiteness in the order. The absence of illicit marks like that of "color" signifies propriety, the center, the norm (for the dominant culture). The apparent blankness of the walls, their anonymity, only means that they are claimed and their ownership is guaranteed by a power which requires no name. Public property. Government property. Private property. These monumental pillars, these vast roadways, and the small wooden houses underneath, are the embodiment of the empire and its law. They write over the earth a system of property that they will not let you deface or mess with. The tag is the small strip of fabric with their name that school kids attach to their clothing to identify it. By tagging them you claim the blank pages of the city as your own property. Metaphorically, you steal territories. You are a colonizer. With your mysterious signs, you steal again the rights to name and to claim places that were stolen for the foundation of this law and this nation. Taggers are known to keep notebooks of the places they have written. They collect places, and landgrab them from other "writers" by crossing out their tags and replacing them with their own. If you play with the laws of private property, it's not for the sake of sharing. If you make a claim on the city--built, drywalled, painted, fixed, dug, mowed, cleaned and serviced by your mother and father--it's still a game of individual enterprise, individual fame. L.A. The sound of car alarms and helicopters circling in the night. Inside L.A., the freeway allows for the physical segregation of the city; it's a concrete bridge by which we travel from one place to another without touching the places in between. There are territories in the city that you never go to or even drive through. There are people in the city that--you don't need to know their names. Taggers throw their names in front of your eyes. Climbing into the most dangerous places, they hang there to write a word, where thousands of cars will crawl past it every day. But your word does not give itself up easily, it has style. For those who don't read, it's a provocation. And it's a gesture towards a kind of mass communication. But the tag requires the writer to touch the place in which s/he writes, the same place the reader touches as I pass. Tag, the game of tag, also means to touch. A signature authorizes a check, a document, a painting. But this signature belongs to a person whose signature has no weight. S/he does not own property and his name means nothing. Desiring "fame," s/he gives himself a writer's pseudonym which is unknown to the legal system, the school system, and all the systems that you have been delivered to as a child in order to be monitored and judged. The writing of the tag produces the existence of a tagger. You invent a writing subject in the place where there was only a teenager that worked putting up fences with his dad. You pause at the edge of meaning and say no more than: "I exist." Your name written on the freeway column must be the minimum witness to your existence. And then, for "Insta" to exist, you have to write it again, because it will always be buffed by the authorities. His killer , a self styled "writer" of (rejected) Hollywood scripts and "marine" (also rejected) , was not prosecuted for shooting an unarmed teenager in the back. He achieved a kind of fame in circles sympathetic to vigilantism and was described by some upright members of the community as a"hero." Your tag no longer exists at the place you died. As soon as you stop writing, your alias, "Insta," the writer is crossed out, and painted out of existence. Athina Kanaris |
