zizek

Zizek’s dabblings in pop-culture always constitute a blush-worthy read.

Here, he provides commentary on the visual aesthetic of Children of Men – one of my favorites of the last decade.  Highly recommended.

Flusser interview

Greetings.

I enjoyed this thoroughly interesting interview with Vilem Flusser.  In it, he expands on many of the topics discussed in TAPOP.

The Writing on the Stall

Perhaps not so obviously, latrinalia is quite different in comparison to most other graffiti.  Most noticeable, the space that can be graphitized is much smaller.  Gone is the boundless blank brick, stucco and siding of the urban canvas. Here, it is replaced by the restrictions of stall partitions, mirrors, push/pull doors and ceiling tiles.  Clearly, the restroom offers a much smaller canvas to the would be graffitist.  Although tags are certainly present in the public restroom, we also find messages of all sorts, poetry (as its traditionally thought of), drawings, patterns, quotations, designs, symbols, hand-written Myspace URLs, and indefinable illustrations that defy explanation.  Each individual graffito (singular instance) beckons an additional graffito until the confined space of the restroom fails to contain the graffiti (plural).  Sometimes it seems as if an unmarred restroom has an invisible dam holding back a deluge of graffiti.  As soon as a single graffito is inscribed upon its walls, the graphic flood is sure to follow.  It spills onto the surrounding markings until an amalgamate graphic ‘conversation’ occurs, each anonymous response summoning further anonymous responses.  It is removed, painted over, and edited without hesitation.  Above all, its evanescence defines the medium.  In older restrooms, layer upon layer build up over decades concealing the graffiti of days long past. Some restrooms, for the sake of graffiti removal cover all surfaces in easily cleaned bathroom tile.  The sponge is restroom graffiti’s erasure, and where the sponge fails, the paintbrush can easily succeed.  Inevitably, latrinalia returns with renewed vigor, once again covering that which has been covered – a kind of flux where blank space gives way to graffiti and graffiti beckons erasure.  In certain cases, it seems as if the amalgamate is far greater than the sum of its parts – each graffito placed (or erased) by anonymous editors and adding to a canvas that yields individual authorship to collective catharsis.  Visual cacophony blankets every surface of the restroom until it can hardly be said that what greets the eye is still a restroom – more like a mysterious art gallery, strangely lacking artist statement or curator.  Still, we can only know that someone, at sometime created each graffito.  We can be sure of little more than this fact.