![]() ![]() ![]() Stefano Bloch is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies for the University of Arizona School of Geography, Development and Environment in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, and faculty member in the Center for Latin American Studies and the Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory. ![]() īloch is the author of Going All City: Struggle and Survival in LA's Graffiti Subculture and appears in the documentaries Bomb It and Vigilante Vigilante: The Battle for Expression. Stefano Bloch is an American professor of cultural geography and critical criminology at the University of Arizona who focuses on graffiti, prisons, the policing of public space, and gang activity. Phillips, Daniel Ramos (graffiti artist) aka Chaka (tagger), Jeff Ferrell. I think you might spot a familiar name.Edward W. Next time you watch the video for Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, take a gander at Dave Grohl’s bass drum. Keep an eye out next time you’re headed down that stretch of the 605 freeway, just south of the 60 as you’re heading through Pico Rivera. His art still doesn’t do much for me but I think it’s a splendid example of self publicity of an anonymous persona. He’s had gallery shows and I’m sure he’s got something up in a museum somewhere. Now people pay him to paint their walls or, short of that, canvases to hang on their walls. As an interesting side note it is rumored he tagged the courthouse elevator during the course of his trial. When he emerged he was the new cause célèbre of the art world as were so many graffiti artists of the time. In 90s he was finally caught and Daniel “Chaka” Ramos was tried and convicted and did some jail time. Read Also How a Grad Student Uncovered the Largest Known Slave Auction in the U.S.Ĭhaka is thought to have committed over 20,000 acts of vandalism with everything from a Sharpie to a can of paint. It became more than a senseless and isolated act of vandalism and became something of a brand not entirely unlike the swoosh on your shoes, the horse on the hood of a fast car, the bunny profile on your dad’s magazine, or those four little window panes on the bottom left corner of your screen for 90% of you. This is not unlike what Chaka did but rather than using an established image he made his own and put it everywhere until it became meaningless and meaningful at the same time. Andy Warhol took familiar images and silk screened them over and over and over until they became art. This is not an unfamiliar concept to the art world. It becomes a cycle of different people doing the same thing over and over again. It has no style or sense of history, rather it is stylized but fails to really build on anything that has been done before. It is often very boring and predicated upon nothing. In all honesty, most graffiti art is not what I would call art at all. On the other side there is a sense that the artist behind it is looking to create rather than destroy. It is usually ugly and very simple in style with little to offer and is usually intended as a means of communication indicating a territorial marking or used to pass a message. There is much that is associated with gang culture and that type of graffiti requires little explanation. You never hear of someone in their 40s getting caught for tagging. Outside of the legality of tagging or graffiti there is the moral and ethical standpoint: if a community is composed almost entirely of one particular group of people and an outsider, an interloper, an invader (as they might be seen) from another group and another place decides to build something at the expense of the native group, who has the greater right to the visual representation of said location? It can be seen as petulant and juvenile, clinging to a sense of angst that one generally outgrows. Read Also Misinformation, hate and the Latino vote in 2022 ![]()
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