Literature on the Environment; the city as text - graffiti as writing - Thesis Example

An analysis of graffiti as a form of communication will reveal the language of the art as it speaks for the youth of a city in both pictorial and symbolic forms. Graffiti is most often associated with the emergence of artistic expressions that were applied to public surfaces. The growth of its popularity since the 1960’s was associated with counterculture activities, but by the 1980’s graffiti artists began to find prominence in art galleries with their work reproduced on canvas and sold as graffiti art.

Artists such as Keith Hring and Jean-Michel Basquiat became important artists in the period from their artworks that were defined by the graffiti movement and its defining elements. Graffiti becomes an aesthetic that has definition according to theorists such as Phase2 and Rammellzee and is expanded to include work that is not defined by the location of the work on public surfaces (Chang 153). Graffiti can be termed as a type of writing that is based on signatures and styles and those who go out into the city and communicate using this form of writing call themselves writers.

The linguistics are created through a focus on the use of the city as a blank page on which their story is told through symbols and images. This essay will explore the origins of graffiti and the reactions by the public to the evolution of this form of communication, its exclusive nature as it speaks directly to those who know the language and its inclusive nature as it speaks to anyone near enough to see the message, whether it is understood for its actual intent or interpreted through a lens without street knowledge.

This essay will focus on the notion of graffiti writing as literature, part of a vital need by city dwellers to write their name and story on the space that surrounds them, recreating the visual construction of the city as a huge text, ever changing and often undecipherable to the uninitiated. In order to explore the idea of graffiti as literature, an