OK NSA filters, here’s the innocuous headline translation: marking-up modernist architecture. Strange how artistic expression could be interpreted as terrorism. Imagine how in the post-9/11 world a band like Einstürzende Neubauten (”Collapsing New Buildings”) would be misconstrued. It wouldn’t surprising me if certain government elements in their enthusiasm to define everything under the murky rubric of terrorism would classify the destruction of private property as an act of terror. Maybe they have and it was slipped in at the dead of night in the most recent intelligence oversight bill. One can never be sure.
Anyhow, this little side rant was inspired by the great article that I stumbled upon by Amos Klausner snipped below. It has nothing to do with terrorism, but with the curious way that graffiti dialogues with modernism. After the riots in Paris last year there was some grumbling that one of the primary causes of youth discontent was the design of the suburban projects. The architecture had a way of imposing an alienating social structure that made it easy for gangs to control the communities that inhabited the buildings.
I’m in love with the idea that the street remains one of the last pubic free-for-all zones where media and social control can be contested by an anonymous swarm.
Core77 - Bombing Modernism: Graffiti and its relationship to the (built) environment:
It’s easy to see how a generation of restless teenagers growing up in high-rise and low-rise ghettos doubted and eventually rejected modernism and its oppressive reality. For them, modernism represented systemic irrationality, negativity, half truths, poor education, and limited access to economic empowerment. However, when a self-aware subculture rose out of the urban core to embrace plurality, fragmentation, and indeterminacy, something clicked. In retaliation they shaped an honest reflection of their lives from a fundamentally post-modern lens that pitted them against larger forces that had denied them individual value and cultural identity. Adventurous teens did this with no capital and no organizational power. They fought back with one of the few things they could control, words.
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